THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS

By Bernard Shaw




CONTENTS

     Preface
     How the Play came to be Written
     Thomas Tyler
     Frank Harris
     Harris "durch Mitleid wissend"
     "Sidney's Sister:  Pembroke's Mother"
     Shakespear's Social Standing
     This Side Idolatry
     Shakespear's Pessimism
     Gaiety of Genius
     Jupiter and Semele
     The Idol of the Bardolaters
     Shakespear's alleged Sycophancy and Perversion
     Shakespear and Democracy
     Shakespear and the British Public
     The Dark Lady of the Sonnets





THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS

1910




PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS




How the Play came to be Written

I had better explain why, in this little _piece d'occasion_, written
for a performance in aid of the funds of the project for establishing
a National Theatre as a memorial to Shakespear, I have identified the
Dark Lady with Mistress Mary Fitton.  First, let me say that I do not
contend that the Dark Lady was Mary Fitton, because when the case in
Mary's favor (or against her, if you please to consider that the Dark
Lady was no better than she ought to have been) was complete, a
portrait of Mary came to light and turned out to be that of a fair
lady, not of a dark one.  That settles the question, if the portrait
is authentic, which I see no reason to doubt, and the lady's hair
undyed, which is perhaps less certain.  Shakespear rubbed in the
lady's complexion in his sonnets mercilessly; for in his day black
hair was as unpopular as red hair was in the early days of Queen
Victoria.  Any tinge lighter than raven black must be held fatal to
the strongest claim to be the Dark Lady.  And so, unless it can be
shewn that Shakespear's sonnets exasperated Mary Fitton into dyeing
her hair and getting painted in false colors, I must give up all
pretence that my play is historical.  The later suggestion of Mr
Acheson that the Dark Lady, far from being a maid of honor, kept a
tavern in Oxford and was the mother of Davenant the poet, is the one I
should have adopted had I wished to be up to date.  Why, then, did I
introduce the Dark Lady as Mistress Fitton?

Well, I had two reasons.  The play was not to have been written by me
at all, but by Mrs Alfred Lyttelton; and it was she who suggested a
scene of jealousy between Queen Elizabeth and the Dark Lady at the
expense of the unfortunate Bard.  Now this, if the Dark Lady was a
maid of honor, was quite easy.  If she were a tavern landlady, it
would have strained all probability.  So I stuck to Mary Fitton.  But
I had another and more personal reason.  I was, in a manner, present
at the birth of the Fitton theory.  Its parent and I had become
acquainted; and he used to consult me on obscure passages in the
sonnets, on which, as far as I can remember, I never succeeded in
throwing the faintest light, at a time when nobody else thought my
opinion, on that or any other subject, of the slightest importance.  I
thought it would be friendly to immortalize him, as the silly literary
saying is, much as Shakespear immortalized Mr W. H., as he said he
would, simply by writing about him.

Let me tell the story formally.




Thomas Tyler

Throughout the eighties at least, and probably for some years before,
the British Museum reading room was used daily by a gentleman of such
astonishing and crushing ugliness that no one who had once seen him
could ever thereafter forget him.  He was of fair complexion, rather
golden red than sandy; aged between forty-five and sixty; and dressed
in frock coat and tall hat of presentable but never new appearance.
His figure was rectangular, waistless, neckless, ankleless, of middle
height, looking shortish because, though he was not particularly
stout, there was nothing slender about him.  His ugliness was not
unamiable; it was accidental, external, excrescential.  Attached to
his face from the left ear to the point of his chin was a monstrous
goitre, which hung down to his collar bone, and was very inadequately
balanced by a smaller one on his right eyelid.  Nature's malice was so
overdone in his case that it somehow failed to produce the effect of
repulsion it seemed to have aimed at.  When you first met Thomas Tyler
you could think of nothing else but whether surgery could really do
nothing for him.  But after a very brief acquaintance you never
thought of his disfigurements at all, and talked to him as you might
to Romeo or Lovelace; only, so many people, especially women, would
not risk the preliminary ordeal, that he remained a man apart and a
bachelor all his days.  I am not to be frightened or prejudiced by a
tumor; and I struck up a cordial acquaintance with him, in the course
of which he kept me pretty closely on the track of his work at the
Museum, in which I was then, like himself, a daily reader.

He was by profession a man of letters of an uncommercial kind.  He was
a specialist in pessimism; had made a translation of Ecclesiastes of
which eight copies a year were sold; and followed up the pessimism of
Shakespear and Swift with keen interest.  He delighted in a hideous
conception which he called the theory of the cycles, according to
which the history of mankind and the universe keeps eternally
repeating itself without the slightest variation throughout all
eternity; so that he had lived and died and had his goitre before and
would live and die and have it again and again and again.  He liked to
believe that nothing that happened to him was completely novel:  he
was persuaded that he often had some recollection of its previous
occurrence in the last cycle.  He hunted out allusions to this
favorite theory in his three favorite pessimists.  He tried his hand
occasionally at deciphering ancient inscriptions, reading them as
people seem to read the stars, by discovering bears and bulls and
swords and goats where, as it seems to me, no sane human being can see
anything but stars higgledy-piggledy.  Next to the translation of
Ecclesiastes, his _magnum opus_ was his work on Shakespear's Sonnets,
in which he accepted a previous identification of Mr W. H., the "onlie
begetter" of the sonnets, with the Earl of Pembroke (William Herbert),
and promulgated his own identification of Mistress Mary Fitton with
the Dark Lady.  Whether he was right or wrong about the Dark Lady did
not matter urgently to me:  she might have been Maria Tompkins for all
I cared.  But Tyler would have it that she was Mary Fitton; and he
tracked Mary down from the first of her marriages in her teens to her
tomb in Cheshire, whither he made a pilgrimage and whence returned in
triumph with a picture of her statue, and the news that he was
convinced she was a dark lady by traces of paint still discernible.

In due course he published his edition of the Sonnets, with the
evidence he had collected.  He lent me a copy of the book, which I
never returned.  But I reviewed it in the Pall Mall Gazette on the 7th
of January 1886, and thereby let loose the Fitton theory in a wider
circle of readers than the book could reach.  Then Tyler died, sinking
unnoted like a stone in the sea.  I observed that Mr Acheson, Mrs
Davenant's champion, calls him Reverend.  It may very well be that he
got his knowledge of Hebrew in reading for the Church; and there was
always something of the clergyman or the schoolmaster in his dress and
air.  Possibly he may actually have been ordained.  But he never told
me that or anything else about his affairs; and his black pessimism
would have shot him violently out of any church at present established
in the West.  We never talked about affairs:  we talked about
Shakespear, and the Dark Lady, and Swift, and Koheleth, and the
cycles, and the mysterious moments when a feeling came over us that
this had happened to us before, and about the forgeries of the
Pentateuch which were offered for sale to the British Museum, and
about literature and things of the spirit generally.  He always came
to my desk at the Museum and spoke to me about something or other, no
doubt finding that people who were keen on this sort of conversation
were rather scarce.  He remains a vivid spot of memory in the void of
my forgetfulness, a quite considerable and dignified soul in a
grotesquely disfigured body.




Frank Harris

To the review in the Pall Mall Gazette I attribute, rightly or
wrongly, the introduction of Mary Fitton to Mr Frank Harris.  My
reason for this is that Mr Harris wrote a play about Shakespear and
Mary Fitton; and when I, as a pious duty to Tyler's ghost, reminded
the world that it was to Tyler we owed the Fitton theory, Frank
Harris, who clearly had not a notion of what had first put Mary into
his head, believed, I think, that I had invented Tyler expressly for
his discomfiture; for the stress I laid on Tyler's claims must have
seemed unaccountable and perhaps malicious on the assumption that he
was to me a mere name among the thousands of names in the British
Museum catalogue.  Therefore I make it clear that I had and have
personal reasons for remembering Tyler, and for regarding myself as in
some sort charged with the duty of reminding the world of his work.  I
am sorry for his sake that Mary's portrait is fair, and that Mr W. H.
has veered round again from Pembroke to Southampton; but even so his
work was not wasted:  it is by exhausting all the hypotheses that we
reach the verifiable one; and after all, the wrong road always leads
somewhere.

Frank Harris's play was written long before mine.  I read it in
manuscript before the Shakespear Memorial National Theatre was mooted;
and if there is anything except the Fitton theory (which is Tyler's
property) in my play which is also in Mr Harris's it was I who annexed
it from him and not he from me.  It does not matter anyhow, because
this play of mine is a brief trifle, and full of manifest
impossibilities at that; whilst Mr Harris's play is serious both in
size, intention, and quality.  But there could not in the nature of
things be much resemblance, because Frank conceives Shakespear to have
been a broken-hearted, melancholy, enormously sentimental person,
whereas I am convinced that he was very like myself:  in fact, if I
had been born in 1556 instead of in 1856, I should have taken to blank
verse and given Shakespear a harder run for his money than all the
other Elizabethans put together.  Yet the success of Frank Harris's
book on Shakespear gave me great delight.

To those who know the literary world of London there was a sharp
stroke of ironic comedy in the irresistible verdict in its favor.  In
critical literature there is one prize that is always open to
competition, one blue ribbon that always carries the highest critical
rank with it.  To win, you must write the best book of your generation
on Shakespear.  It is felt on all sides that to do this a certain
fastidious refinement, a delicacy of taste, a correctness of manner
and tone, and high academic distinction in addition to the
indispensable scholarship and literary reputation, are needed; and men
who pretend to these qualifications are constantly looked to with a
gentle expectation that presently they will achieve the great feat.
Now if there is a man on earth who is the utter contrary of everything
that this description implies; whose very existence is an insult to
the ideal it realizes; whose eye disparages, whose resonant voice
denounces, whose cold shoulder jostles every decency, every delicacy,
every amenity, every dignity, every sweet usage of that quiet life of
mutual admiration in which perfect Shakespearian appreciation is
expected to arise, that man is Frank Harris.  Here is one who is
extraordinarily qualified, by a range of sympathy and understanding
that extends from the ribaldry of a buccaneer to the shyest
tendernesses of the most sensitive poetry, to be all things to all
men, yet whose proud humor it is to be to every man, provided the man
is eminent and pretentious, the champion of his enemies.  To the
Archbishop he is an atheist, to the atheist a Catholic mystic, to the
Bismarckian Imperialist an Anacharsis Klootz, to Anacharsis Klootz a
Washington, to Mrs Proudie a Don Juan, to Aspasia a John Knox:  in
short, to everyone his complement rather than his counterpart, his
antagonist rather than his fellow-creature.  Always provided, however,
that the persons thus confronted are respectable persons.  Sophie
Perovskaia, who perished on the scaffold for blowing Alexander II to
fragments, may perhaps have echoed Hamlet's

     Oh God, Horatio, what a wounded name--
     Things standing thus unknown--I leave behind!

but Frank Harris, in his Sonia, has rescued her from that injustice,
and enshrined her among the saints.  He has lifted the Chicago
anarchists out of their infamy, and shewn that, compared with the
Capitalism that killed them, they were heroes and martyrs.  He has
done this with the most unusual power of conviction.  The story, as he
tells it, inevitably and irresistibly displaces all the vulgar, mean,
purblind, spiteful versions.  There is a precise realism and an
unsmiling, measured, determined sincerity which gives a strange
dignity to the work of one whose fixed practice and ungovernable
impulse it is to kick conventional dignity whenever he sees it.




Harris "durch Mitleid wissend"

Frank Harris is everything except a humorist, not, apparently, from
stupidity, but because scorn overcomes humor in him.  Nobody ever
dreamt of reproaching Milton's Lucifer for not seeing the comic side
of his fall; and nobody who has read Mr Harris's stories desires to
have them lightened by chapters from the hand of Artemus Ward.  Yet he
knows the taste and the value of humor.  He was one of the few men of
letters who really appreciated Oscar Wilde, though he did not rally
fiercely to Wilde's side until the world deserted Oscar in his ruin.
I myself was present at a curious meeting between the two, when
Harris, on the eve of the Queensberry trial, prophesied to Wilde with
miraculous precision exactly what immediately afterwards happened to
him, and warned him to leave the country.  It was the first time
within my knowledge that such a forecast proved true.  Wilde, though
under no illusion as to the folly of the quite unselfish suit-at-law
he had been persuaded to begin, nevertheless so miscalculated the
force of the social vengeance he was unloosing on himself that he
fancied it could be stayed by putting up the editor of The Saturday
Review (as Mr Harris then was) to declare that he considered Dorian
Grey a highly moral book, which it certainly is.  When Harris foretold
him the truth, Wilde denounced him as a fainthearted friend who was
failing him in his hour of need, and left the room in anger.  Harris's
idiosyncratic power of pity saved him from feeling or shewing the
smallest resentment; and events presently proved to Wilde how insanely
he had been advised in taking the action, and how accurately Harris
had gauged the situation.

The same capacity for pity governs Harris's study of Shakespear, whom,
as I have said, he pities too much; but that he is not insensible to
humor is shewn not only by his appreciation of Wilde, but by the fact
that the group of contributors who made his editorship of The Saturday
Review so remarkable, and of whom I speak none the less highly because
I happened to be one of them myself, were all, in their various ways,
humorists.




"Sidney's Sister:  Pembroke's Mother"

And now to return to Shakespear.  Though Mr Harris followed Tyler in
identifying Mary Fitton as the Dark Lady, and the Earl of Pembroke as
the addressee of the other sonnets and the man who made love
successfully to Shakespear's mistress, he very characteristically
refuses to follow Tyler on one point, though for the life of me I
cannot remember whether it was one of the surmises which Tyler
published, or only one which he submitted to me to see what I would
say about it, just as he used to submit difficult lines from the
sonnets.

This surmise was that "Sidney's sister:  Pembroke's mother" set
Shakespear on to persuade Pembroke to marry, and that this was the
explanation of those earlier sonnets which so persistently and
unnaturally urged matrimony on Mr W. H.  I take this to be one of the
brightest of Tyler's ideas, because the persuasions in the sonnets are
unaccountable and out of character unless they were offered to please
somebody whom Shakespear desired to please, and who took a motherly
interest in Pembroke.  There is a further temptation in the theory for
me.  The most charming of all Shakespear's old women, indeed the most
charming of all his women, young or old, is the Countess of Rousillon
in All's Well That Ends Well.  It has a certain individuality among
them which suggests a portrait.  Mr Harris will have it that all
Shakespear's nice old women are drawn from his beloved mother; but I
see no evidence whatever that Shakespear's mother was a particularly
nice woman or that he was particularly fond of her.  That she was a
simple incarnation of extravagant maternal pride like the mother of
Coriolanus in Plutarch, as Mr Harris asserts, I cannot believe:  she
is quite as likely to have borne her son a grudge for becoming "one of
these harlotry players" and disgracing the Ardens.  Anyhow, as a
conjectural model for the Countess of Rousillon, I prefer that one of
whom Jonson wrote

     Sidney's sister:  Pembroke's mother:
     Death:  ere thou has slain another,
     Learnd and fair and good as she,
     Time shall throw a dart at thee.

But Frank will not have her at any price, because his ideal Shakespear
is rather like a sailor in a melodrama; and a sailor in a melodrama
must adore his mother.  I do not at all belittle such sailors.  They
are the emblems of human generosity; but Shakespear was not an emblem:
he was a man and the author of Hamlet, who had no illusions about his
mother.  In weak moments one almost wishes he had.




Shakespear's Social Standing

On the vexed question of Shakespear's social standing Mr Harris says
that Shakespear "had not had the advantage of a middle-class
training."  I suggest that Shakespear missed this questionable
advantage, not because he was socially too low to have attained to it,
but because he conceived himself as belonging to the upper class from
which our public school boys are now drawn.  Let Mr Harris survey for
a moment the field of contemporary journalism.  He will see there some
men who have the very characteristics from which he infers that
Shakespear was at a social disadvantage through his lack of
middle-class training.  They are rowdy, ill-mannered, abusive,
mischievous, fond of quoting obscene schoolboy anecdotes, adepts in
that sort of blackmail which consists in mercilessly libelling and
insulting every writer whose opinions are sufficiently heterodox to
make it almost impossible for him to risk perhaps five years of a
slender income by an appeal to a prejudiced orthodox jury; and they
see nothing in all this cruel blackguardism but an uproariously jolly
rag, although they are by no means without genuine literary ability, a
love of letters, and even some artistic conscience.  But he will find
not one of the models of his type (I say nothing of mere imitators of
it) below the rank that looks at the middle class, not humbly and
enviously from below, but insolently from above.  Mr Harris himself
notes Shakespear's contempt for the tradesman and mechanic, and his
incorrigible addiction to smutty jokes.  He does us the public service
of sweeping away the familiar plea of the Bardolatrous ignoramus, that
Shakespear's coarseness was part of the manners of his time, putting
his pen with precision on the one name, Spenser, that is necessary to
expose such a libel on Elizabethan decency.  There was nothing
whatever to prevent Shakespear from being as decent as More was before
him, or Bunyan after him, and as self-respecting as Raleigh or Sidney,
except the tradition of his class, in which education or statesmanship
may no doubt be acquired by those who have a turn for them, but in
which insolence, derision, profligacy, obscene jesting, debt
contracting, and rowdy mischievousness, give continual scandal to the
pious, serious, industrious, solvent bourgeois.  No other class is
infatuated enough to believe that gentlemen are born and not made by a
very elaborate process of culture.  Even kings are taught and coached
and drilled from their earliest boyhood to play their part.  But the
man of family (I am convinced that Shakespear took that view of
himself) will plunge into society without a lesson in table manners,
into politics without a lesson in history, into the city without a
lesson in business, and into the army without a lesson in honor.

It has been said, with the object of proving Shakespear a laborer,
that he could hardly write his name.  Why?  Because he "had not the
advantage of a middle-class training."  Shakespear himself tells us,
through Hamlet, that gentlemen purposely wrote badly lest they should
be mistaken for scriveners; but most of them, then as now, wrote badly
because they could not write any better.  In short, the whole range of
Shakespear's foibles:  the snobbishness, the naughtiness, the contempt
for tradesmen and mechanics, the assumption that witty conversation
can only mean smutty conversation, the flunkeyism towards social
superiors and insolence towards social inferiors, the easy ways with
servants which is seen not only between The Two Gentlemen of Verona
and their valets, but in the affection and respect inspired by a great
servant like Adam:  all these are the characteristics of Eton and
Harrow, not of the public elementary or private adventure school.
They prove, as everything we know about Shakespear suggests, that he
thought of the Shakespears and Ardens as families of consequence, and
regarded himself as a gentleman under a cloud through his father's ill
luck in business, and never for a moment as a man of the people.  This
is at once the explanation of and excuse for his snobbery.  He was not
a parvenu trying to cover his humble origin with a purchased coat of
arms:  he was a gentleman resuming what he conceived to be his natural
position as soon as he gained the means to keep it up.




This Side Idolatry

There is another matter which I think Mr Harris should ponder.  He
says that Shakespear was but "little esteemed by his own generation."
He even describes Jonson's description of his "little Latin and less
Greek" as a sneer, whereas it occurs in an unmistakably sincere eulogy
of Shakespear, written after his death, and is clearly meant to
heighten the impression of Shakespear's prodigious natural endowments
by pointing out that they were not due to scholastic acquirements.
Now there is a sense in which it is true enough that Shakespear was
too little esteemed by his own generation, or, for the matter of that,
by any subsequent generation.  The bargees on the Regent's Canal do
not chant Shakespear's verses as the gondoliers in Venice are said to
chant the verses of Tasso (a practice which was suspended for some
reason during my stay in Venice:  at least no gondolier ever did it in
my hearing).  Shakespear is no more a popular author than Rodin is a
popular sculptor or Richard Strauss a popular composer.  But
Shakespear was certainly not such a fool as to expect the Toms, Dicks,
and Harrys of his time to be any more interested in dramatic poetry
than Newton, later on, expected them to be interested in fluxions.
And when we come to the question whether Shakespear missed that
assurance which all great men have had from the more capable and
susceptible members of their generation that they were great men, Ben
Jonson's evidence disposes of so improbable a notion at once and for
ever.  "I loved the man," says Ben, "this side idolatry, as well as
any."  Now why in the name of common sense should he have made that
qualification unless there had been, not only idolatry, but idolatry
fulsome enough to irritate Jonson into an express disavowal of it?
Jonson, the bricklayer, must have felt sore sometimes when Shakespear
spoke and wrote of bricklayers as his inferiors.  He must have felt it
a little hard that being a better scholar, and perhaps a braver and
tougher man physically than Shakespear, he was not so successful or so
well liked.  But in spite of this he praised Shakespear to the utmost
stretch of his powers of eulogy:  in fact, notwithstanding his
disclaimer, he did not stop "this side idolatry."  If, therefore, even
Jonson felt himself forced to clear himself of extravagance and
absurdity in his appreciation of Shakespear, there must have been many
people about who idolized Shakespear as American ladies idolize
Paderewski, and who carried Bardolatry, even in the Bard's own time,
to an extent that threatened to make his reasonable admirers
ridiculous.




Shakespear's Pessimism

I submit to Mr Harris that by ruling out this idolatry, and its
possible effect in making Shakespear think that his public would stand
anything from him, he has ruled out a far more plausible explanation
of the faults of such a play as Timon of Athens than his theory that
Shakespear's passion for the Dark Lady "cankered and took on proud
flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and madness."  In
Timon the intellectual bankruptcy is obvious enough:  Shakespear tried
once too often to make a play out of the cheap pessimism which is
thrown into despair by a comparison of actual human nature with
theoretical morality, actual law and administration with abstract
justice, and so forth.  But Shakespear's perception of the fact that
all men, judged by the moral standard which they apply to others and
by which they justify their punishment of others, are fools and
scoundrels, does not date from the Dark Lady complication:  he seems
to have been born with it.  If in The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer
Night's Dream the persons of the drama are not quite so ready for
treachery and murder as Laertes and even Hamlet himself (not to
mention the procession of ruffians who pass through the latest plays)
it is certainly not because they have any more regard for law or
religion.  There is only one place in Shakespear's plays where the
sense of shame is used as a human attribute; and that is where Hamlet
is ashamed, not of anything he himself has done, but of his mother's
relations with his uncle.  This scene is an unnatural one:  the son's
reproaches to his mother, even the fact of his being able to discuss
the subject with her, is more repulsive than her relations with her
deceased husband's brother.

Here, too, Shakespear betrays for once his religious sense by making
Hamlet, in his agony of shame, declare that his mother's conduct makes
"sweet religion a rhapsody of words."  But for that passage we might
almost suppose that the feeling of Sunday morning in the country which
Orlando describes so perfectly in As You Like It was the beginning and
end of Shakespear's notion of religion.  I say almost, because
Isabella in Measure for Measure has religious charm, in spite of the
conventional theatrical assumption that female religion means an
inhumanly ferocious chastity.  But for the most part Shakespear
differentiates his heroes from his villains much more by what they do
than by what they are.  Don John in Much Ado is a true villain:  a man
with a malicious will; but he is too dull a duffer to be of any use in
a leading part; and when we come to the great villains like Macbeth,
we find, as Mr Harris points out, that they are precisely identical
with the heroes:  Macbeth is only Hamlet incongruously committing
murders and engaging in hand-to-hand combats.  And Hamlet, who does
not dream of apologizing for the three murders he commits, is always
apologizing because he has not yet committed a fourth, and finds, to
his great bewilderment, that he does not want to commit it.  "It
cannot be," he says, "but I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall to make
oppression bitter; else, ere this, I should have fatted all the region
kites with this slave's offal."  Really one is tempted to suspect that
when Shylock asks "Hates any man the thing he would not kill?" he is
expressing the natural and proper sentiments of the human race as
Shakespear understood them, and not the vindictiveness of a stage Jew.




Gaiety of Genius

In view of these facts, it is dangerous to cite Shakespear's pessimism
as evidence of the despair of a heart broken by the Dark Lady.  There
is an irrepressible gaiety of genius which enables it to bear the
whole weight of the world's misery without blenching.  There is a
laugh always ready to avenge its tears of discouragement.  In the
lines which Mr Harris quotes only to declare that he can make nothing
of them, and to condemn them as out of character, Richard III,
immediately after pitying himself because

     There is no creature loves me
     And if I die no soul will pity me,

adds, with a grin,

     Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
     Find in myself no pity for myself?

Let me again remind Mr Harris of Oscar Wilde.  We all dreaded to read
De Profundis:  our instinct was to stop our ears, or run away from the
wail of a broken, though by no means contrite, heart.  But we were
throwing away our pity.  De Profundis was de profundis indeed:  Wilde
was too good a dramatist to throw away so powerful an effect; but none
the less it was de profundis in excelsis.  There was more laughter
between the lines of that book than in a thousand farces by men of no
genius.  Wilde, like Richard and Shakespear, found in himself no pity
for himself.  There is nothing that marks the born dramatist more
unmistakably than this discovery of comedy in his own misfortunes
almost in proportion to the pathos with which the ordinary man
announces their tragedy.  I cannot for the life of me see the broken
heart in Shakespear's latest works.  "Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's
gate sings" is not the lyric of a broken man; nor is Cloten's comment
that if Imogen does not appreciate it, "it is a vice in her ears which
horse hairs, and cats' guts, and the voice of unpaved eunuch to boot,
can never amend," the sally of a saddened one.  Is it not clear that
to the last there was in Shakespear an incorrigible divine levity, an
inexhaustible joy that derided sorrow?  Think of the poor Dark Lady
having to stand up to this unbearable power of extracting a grim fun
from everything.  Mr Harris writes as if Shakespear did all the
suffering and the Dark Lady all the cruelty.  But why does he not put
himself in the Dark Lady's place for a moment as he has put himself so
successfully in Shakespear's?  Imagine her reading the hundred and
thirtieth sonnet!

     My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
     Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
     If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
     If hairs be wire, black wires grow on her head;
     I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
     But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
     And in some perfumes is there more delight
     Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
     I love to hear her speak; yet well I know
     That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
     I grant I never saw a goddess go:
     My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
          And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
          As any she belied with false compare.

Take this as a sample of the sort of compliment from which she was
never for a moment safe with Shakespear.  Bear in mind that she was
not a comedian; that the Elizabethan fashion of treating brunettes as
ugly woman must have made her rather sore on the subject of her
complexion; that no human being, male or female, can conceivably enjoy
being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes;
that Shakespear's revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding
shews, were as violent as his ardors, and were expressed with the
realistic power and horror that makes Hamlet say that the heavens got
sick when they saw the queen's conduct; and then ask Mr Harris whether
any woman could have stood it for long, or have thought the "sugred"
compliment worth the cruel wounds, the cleaving of the heart in twain,
that seemed to Shakespear as natural and amusing a reaction as the
burlesquing of his heroics by Pistol, his sermons by Falstaff, and his
poems by Cloten and Touchstone.




Jupiter and Semele

This does not mean that Shakespear was cruel:  evidently he was not;
but it was not cruelty that made Jupiter reduce Semele to ashes:  it
was the fact that he could not help being a god nor she help being a
mortal.  The one thing Shakespear's passion for the Dark Lady was not,
was what Mr Harris in one passage calls it:  idolatrous.  If it had
been, she might have been able to stand it.  The man who "dotes yet
doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves," is tolerable even by a spoilt
and tyrannical mistress; but what woman could possibly endure a man
who dotes without doubting; who _knows_, and who is hugely amused at
the absurdity of his infatuation for a woman of whose mortal
imperfections not one escapes him:  a man always exchanging grins with
Yorick's skull, and inviting "my lady" to laugh at the sepulchral
humor of the fact that though she paint an inch thick (which the Dark
Lady may have done), to Yorick's favor she must come at last.  To the
Dark Lady he must sometimes have seemed cruel beyond description:  an
intellectual Caliban.  True, a Caliban who could say

     Be not afeard:  the isle is full of noises
     Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
     Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
     Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
     That, if I then had waked after long sleep
     Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
     The clouds, methought, would open and shew riches
     Ready to drop on me:  that when I wak'd
     I cried to dream again.

which is very lovely; but the Dark Lady may have had that vice in her
ears which Cloten dreaded:  she may not have seen the beauty of it,
whereas there can be no doubt at all that of "My mistress' eyes are
nothing like the sun," &c., not a word was lost on her.

And is it to be supposed that Shakespear was too stupid or too modest
not to see at last that it was a case of Jupiter and Semele?
Shakespear was most certainly not modest in that sense.  The timid
cough of the minor poet was never heard from him.

     Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
     Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme

is only one out of a dozen passages in which he (possibly with a keen
sense of the fun of scandalizing the modest coughers) proclaimed his
place and his power in "the wide world dreaming of things to come."
The Dark Lady most likely thought this side of him insufferably
conceited; for there is no reason to suppose that she liked his plays
any better than Minna Wagner liked Richard's music dramas:  as likely
as not, she thought The Spanish Tragedy worth six Hamlets.  He was not
stupid either:  if his class limitations and a profession that cut him
off from actual participation in great affairs of State had not
confined his opportunities of intellectual and political training to
private conversation and to the Mermaid Tavern, he would probably have
become one of the ablest men of his time instead of being merely its
ablest playwright.  One might surmise that Shakespear found out that
the Dark Lady's brains could no more keep pace with his than Anne
Hathaway's, if there were any evidence that their friendship ceased
when he stopped writing sonnets to her.  As a matter of fact the
consolidation of a passion into an enduring intimacy generally puts an
end to sonnets.

That the Dark Lady broke Shakespear's heart, as Mr Harris will have it
she did, is an extremely unShakespearian hypothesis.  "Men have died
from time to time, and worms have eaten them; but not for love," says
Rosalind.  Richard of Gloster, into whom Shakespear put all his own
impish superiority to vulgar sentiment, exclaims

     And this word "love," which greybeards call divine,
     Be resident in men like one another
     And not in me:  I am myself alone.

Hamlet has not a tear for Ophelia:  her death moves him to fierce
disgust for the sentimentality of Laertes by her grave; and when he
discusses the scene with Horatio immediately after, he utterly forgets
her, though he is sorry he forgot himself, and jumps at the proposal
of a fencing match to finish the day with.  As against this view Mr
Harris pleads Romeo, Orsino, and even Antonio; and he does it so
penetratingly that he convinces you that Shakespear did betray himself
again and again in these characters; but self-betrayal is one thing;
and self-portrayal, as in Hamlet and Mercutio, is another.  Shakespear
never "saw himself," as actors say, in Romeo or Orsino or Antonio.  In
Mr Harris's own play Shakespear is presented with the most pathetic
tenderness.  He is tragic, bitter, pitiable, wretched and broken among
a robust crowd of Jonsons and Elizabeths; but to me he is not
Shakespear because I miss the Shakespearian irony and the
Shakespearian gaiety.  Take these away and Shakespear is no longer
Shakespear:  all the bite, the impetus, the strength, the grim delight
in his own power of looking terrible facts in the face with a chuckle,
is gone; and you have nothing left but that most depressing of all
things:  a victim.  Now who can think of Shakespear as a man with a
grievance?  Even in that most thoroughgoing and inspired of all
Shakespear's loves:  his love of music (which Mr Harris has been the
first to appreciate at anything like its value), there is a dash of
mockery.  "Spit in the hole, man; and tune again."  "Divine air!  Now
is his soul ravished.  Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale
the souls out of men's bodies?"  "An he had been a dog that should
have howled thus, they would have hanged him."  There is just as much
Shakespear here as in the inevitable quotation about the sweet south
and the bank of violets.

I lay stress on this irony of Shakespear's, this impish rejoicing in
pessimism, this exultation in what breaks the hearts of common men,
not only because it is diagnostic of that immense energy of life which
we call genius, but because its omission is the one glaring defect in
Mr Harris's otherwise extraordinarily penetrating book.  Fortunately,
it is an omission that does not disable the book as (in my judgment)
it disabled the hero of the play, because Mr Harris left himself out
of his play, whereas he pervades his book, mordant, deep-voiced, and
with an unconquerable style which is the man.




The Idol of the Bardolaters

There is even an advantage in having a book on Shakespear with the
Shakespearian irony left out of account.  I do not say that the
missing chapter should not be added in the next edition:  the hiatus
is too great:  it leaves the reader too uneasy before this touching
picture of a writhing worm substituted for the invulnerable giant.
But it is none the less probable that in no other way could Mr Harris
have got at his man as he has.  For, after all, what is the secret of
the hopeless failure of the academic Bardolaters to give us a credible
or even interesting Shakespear, and the easy triumph of Mr Harris in
giving us both?  Simply that Mr Harris has assumed that he was dealing
with a man, whilst the others have assumed that they were writing
about a god, and have therefore rejected every consideration of fact,
tradition, or interpretation, that pointed to any human imperfection
in their hero.  They thus leave themselves with so little material
that they are forced to begin by saying that we know very little about
Shakespear.  As a matter of fact, with the plays and sonnets in our
hands, we know much more about Shakespear than we know about Dickens
or Thackeray:  the only difficulty is that we deliberately suppress it
because it proves that Shakespear was not only very unlike the
conception of a god current in Clapham, but was not, according to the
same reckoning, even a respectable man.  The academic view starts with
a Shakespear who was not scurrilous; therefore the verses about "lousy
Lucy" cannot have been written by him, and the cognate passages in the
plays are either strokes of character-drawing or gags interpolated by
the actors.  This ideal Shakespear was too well behaved to get drunk;
therefore the tradition that his death was hastened by a drinking bout
with Jonson and Drayton must be rejected, and the remorse of Cassio
treated as a thing observed, not experienced:  nay, the disgust of
Hamlet at the drinking customs of Denmark is taken to establish
Shakespear as the superior of Alexander in self-control, and the
greatest of teetotallers.

Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then
rejecting all the materials that do not fit him, with the ridiculous
result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all
(with your waste-paper basket full of them), ends in leaving
Shakespear with a much worse character than he deserves.  For though
it does not greatly matter whether he wrote the lousy Lucy lines or
not, and does not really matter at all whether he got drunk when he
made a night of it with Jonson and Drayton, the sonnets raise an
unpleasant question which does matter a good deal; and the refusal of
the academic Bardolaters to discuss or even mention this question has
had the effect of producing a silent verdict against Shakespear.  Mr
Harris tackles the question openly, and has no difficulty whatever in
convincing us that Shakespear was a man of normal constitution
sexually, and was not the victim of that most cruel and pitiable of
all the freaks of nature:  the freak which transposes the normal aim
of the affections.  Silence on this point means condemnation; and the
condemnation has been general throughout the present generation,
though it only needed Mr Harris's fearless handling of the matter to
sweep away what is nothing but a morbid and very disagreeable modern
fashion.  There is always some stock accusation brought against
eminent persons.  When I was a boy every well-known man was accused of
beating his wife.  Later on, for some unexplained reason, he was
accused of psychopathic derangement.  And this fashion is
retrospective.  The cases of Shakespear and Michel Angelo are cited as
proving that every genius of the first magnitude was a sufferer; and
both here and in Germany there are circles in which such derangement
is grotesquely reverenced as part of the stigmata of heroic powers.
All of which is gross nonsense.  Unfortunately, in Shakespear's case,
prudery, which cannot prevent the accusation from being whispered,
does prevent the refutation from being shouted.  Mr Harris, the
deep-voiced, refuses to be silenced.  He dismisses with proper
contempt the stupidity which places an outrageous construction on
Shakespear's apologies in the sonnets for neglecting that "perfect
ceremony" of love which consists in returning calls and making
protestations and giving presents and paying the trumpery attentions
which men of genius always refuse to bother about, and to which touchy
people who have no genius attach so much importance.  No leader who
had not been tampered with by the psychopathic monomaniacs could ever
put any construction but the obvious and innocent one on these
passages.  But the general vocabulary of the sonnets to Pembroke (or
whoever "Mr W. H." really was) is so overcharged according to modern
ideas that a reply on the general case is necessary.




Shakespear's alleged Sycophancy and Perversion

That reply, which Mr Harris does not hesitate to give, is twofold:
first, that Shakespear was, in his attitude towards earls, a
sycophant; and, second, that the normality of Shakespear's sexual
constitution is only too well attested by the excessive susceptibility
to the normal impulse shewn in the whole mass of his writings.  This
latter is the really conclusive reply.  In the case of Michel Angelo,
for instance, one must admit that if his works are set beside those of
Titian or Paul Veronese, it is impossible not to be struck by the
absence in the Florentine of that susceptibility to feminine charm
which pervades the pictures of the Venetians.  But, as Mr Harris
points out (though he does not use this particular illustration) Paul
Veronese is an anchorite compared to Shakespear.  The language of the
sonnets addressed to Pembroke, extravagant as it now seems, is the
language of compliment and fashion, transfigured no doubt by
Shakespear's verbal magic, and hyperbolical, as Shakespear always
seems to people who cannot conceive so vividly as he, but still
unmistakable for anything else than the expression of a friendship
delicate enough to be wounded, and a manly loyalty deep enough to be
outraged.  But the language of the sonnets to the Dark Lady is the
language of passion:  their cruelty shews it.  There is no evidence
that Shakespear was capable of being unkind in cold blood.  But in his
revulsions from love, he was bitter, wounding, even ferocious; sparing
neither himself nor the unfortunate woman whose only offence was that
she had reduced the great man to the common human denominator.

In seizing on these two points Mr Harris has made so sure a stroke,
and placed his evidence so featly that there is nothing left for me to
do but to plead that the second is sounder than the first, which is, I
think, marked by the prevalent mistake as to Shakespear's social
position, or, if you prefer it, the confusion between his actual
social position as a penniless tradesman's son taking to the theatre
for a livelihood, and his own conception of himself as a gentleman of
good family.  I am prepared to contend that though Shakespear was
undoubtedly sentimental in his expressions of devotion to Mr W. H.
even to a point which nowadays makes both ridiculous, he was not
sycophantic if Mr W. H. was really attractive and promising, and
Shakespear deeply attached to him.  A sycophant does not tell his
patron that his fame will survive, not in the renown of his own
actions, but in the sonnets of his sycophant.  A sycophant, when his
patron cuts him out in a love affair, does not tell his patron exactly
what he thinks of him.  Above all, a sycophant does not write to his
patron precisely as he feels on all occasions; and this rare kind of
sincerity is all over the sonnets.  Shakespear, we are told, was "a
very civil gentleman."  This must mean that his desire to please
people and be liked by them, and his reluctance to hurt their
feelings, led him into amiable flattery even when his feelings were
not strongly stirred.  If this be taken into account along with the
fact that Shakespear conceived and expressed all his emotions with a
vehemence that sometimes carried him into ludicrous extravagance,
making Richard offer his kingdom for a horse and Othello declare of
Cassio that

     Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge
     Had stomach for them all,

we shall see more civility and hyperbole than sycophancy even in the
earlier and more coldblooded sonnets.




Shakespear and Democracy

Now take the general case pled against Shakespear as an enemy of
democracy by Tolstoy, the late Ernest Crosbie and others, and endorsed
by Mr Harris.  Will it really stand fire?  Mr Harris emphasizes the
passages in which Shakespear spoke of mechanics and even of small
master tradesmen as base persons whose clothes were greasy, whose
breath was rank, and whose political imbecility and caprice moved
Coriolanus to say to the Roman Radical who demanded at least "good
words" from him

     He that will give good words to thee will flatter
     Beneath abhorring.

But let us be honest.  As political sentiments these lines are an
abomination to every democrat.  But suppose they are not political
sentiments!  Suppose they are merely a record of observed fact.  John
Stuart Mill told our British workmen that they were mostly liars.
Carlyle told us all that we are mostly fools.  Matthew Arnold and
Ruskin were more circumstantial and more abusive.  Everybody,
including the workers themselves, know that they are dirty, drunken,
foul-mouthed, ignorant, gluttonous, prejudiced:  in short, heirs to
the peculiar ills of poverty and slavery, as well as co-heirs with the
plutocracy to all the failings of human nature.  Even Shelley
admitted, 200 years after Shakespear wrote Coriolanus, that universal
suffrage was out of the question.  Surely the real test, not of
Democracy, which was not a live political issue in Shakespear's time,
but of impartiality in judging classes, which is what one demands from
a great human poet, is not that he should flatter the poor and
denounce the rich, but that he should weigh them both in the same
balance.  Now whoever will read Lear and Measure for Measure will find
stamped on his mind such an appalled sense of the danger of dressing
man in a little brief authority, such a merciless stripping of the
purple from the "poor, bare, forked animal" that calls itself a king
and fancies itself a god, that one wonders what was the real nature of
the mysterious restraint that kept "Eliza and our James" from teaching
Shakespear to be civil to crowned heads, just as one wonders why
Tolstoy was allowed to go free when so many less terrible levellers
went to the galleys or Siberia.  From the mature Shakespear we get no
such scenes of village snobbery as that between the stage country
gentleman Alexander Iden and the stage Radical Jack Cade.  We get the
shepherd in As You Like It, and many honest, brave, human, and loyal
servants, beside the inevitable comic ones.  Even in the Jingo play,
Henry V, we get Bates and Williams drawn with all respect and honor as
normal rank and file men.  In Julius Caesar, Shakespear went to work
with a will when he took his cue from Plutarch in glorifying regicide
and transfiguring the republicans.  Indeed hero-worshippers have never
forgiven him for belittling Caesar and failing to see that side of his
assassination which made Goethe denounce it as the most senseless of
crimes.  Put the play beside the Charles I of Wills, in which Cromwell
is written down to a point at which the Jack Cade of Henry VI becomes
a hero in comparison; and then believe, if you can, that Shakespear
was one of them that "crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where
thrift may follow fawning."  Think of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern,
Osric, the fop who annoyed Hotspur, and a dozen passages concerning
such people!  If such evidence can prove anything (and Mr Harris
relies throughout on such evidence) Shakespear loathed courtiers.