The Mind of Shakspere

Part 1 of "The Mind of Shakspere" from *The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, and Other Essays* by John Erskine.

In a re guide-book to Shakspere occur certain questions intended to promote critical faculty in the student. "What amount of time," asks the writer, examining A Midsummer Night's Dream, "is covered by the entire action, according to the direction given at the beginning of the play? Show by references the time-scheme which seems to you to be actually followed." The student is here expected to perceive a discrepancy. Then, continues the questioner, "Why did Shakspere allow this discrepancy to remain in the play?" Again, "Note cases of stichomythia, or dialogue in which each speech consists of a single line. Is it effective in each case, or does it seem artificial?" And finally, "For what different purposes, in this play, does Shakspere seem to use blank verse, five-accent rimed lines, four-accent rime, and prose?"

As we read these questions and others like them, beyond a doubt helpful toward a serious weighing of Shakspere's genius, they suggest perhaps a larger question which from time to time has troubled us all, and for which some of us have not heard the sufficient answer. They suggest the question of Shakspere's mind. They bid us ask once more, is his art the result of intention, or is there another explanation of it; and if there is another explanation, does this sort of catechism make allowance for it? In these familiar phases,—"why did Shakspere allow," "for what purpose does Shakspere seem to use,"—in this echo of the formulas most teachers unconsciously lean to, there is an implication which not a few lovers of poetry may care to challenge. Admitting that all the manifestations of genius are proper subjects for minute study, we may yet be fearful of the missteps of scholarship in the uncertain field of art; we may doubt whether any phrase which even slightly emphasizes the design and intention of the great poet's craft, does not follow as an unrecorded premise the critic's knowledge of his own rather than of Shakspere's mind.

For we cannot too often recall that this man's fame, moving up through heavens of misty or pedantic adoration, has obligingly modified itself to the scope of the beholding eye. Whatever rest his curse procured for his bones, we have made chameleon work of his reputation. We have thought of him with Ben Jonson as an improviser, or with Milton as fancy's child, or with Arnold as a solitary peak, lifting above us inscrutable, unscanned. Nothing in this tradition would prohibit one more guess at Shakspere's mind. Yet in the newest explanation there will be a few things in common with those that went before. From the beginning the world has felt the naturalness of this well-poised genius; he never dwelt apart, starlike. No explanation will satisfy us which does not make Shakspere's mind a thing of nature—even a normal thing, in kind if not in degree. From the beginning the world has acknowledged the comprehensiveness of his imagination; at times so slight a barrier of visible art divides the life he saw from his representation of it, that life itself appears the medium of his thought. No explanation of his mind will satisfy us which does not make reasonable this godlike grasp upon experience. From the beginning also there has been an adverse opinion of Shakspere's craft; if we are to believe the extreme criticism of him, he never revised his work, he was sometimes careless of his grammar, he was sometimes all but indifferent to dramatic structure. Though the volume of his fame has more or less overwhelmed all fault-finding, no sincere attempt to explain his mind will neglect to bring even the rumor of his defects to a final account.

The desirable explanation, therefore, will answer the question of his naturalness, the question of his comprehensiveness, the question of his imperfections. The well-known attempts to understand this elusive intellect have, however, usually busied themselves with only one or two of these aspects. Such a partial solution is in Hartley Coleridge's beautiful sonnet:

"Like that Ark,
Which in its sacred hold uplifted high,
O'er the drowned hills, the human family,
And stock reserved of every living kind,
So in the compass of the single mind
The seeds and pregnant forms in essence lie
That make all worlds. Great Poet, 'twas thy art
To know thyself, and in thyself to be
Whate'er love, hate, ambition, destiny,
Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart
Can make of man."

Helpful as the simile is, it illuminates only the comprehensiveness of Shakspere's mind; it ignores the shortcomings of his workmanship and the limitations of his thought; it is inconsistent with perhaps any theory of his apparently natural inspiration. True, all men observe, not the world outside, but themselves—since what they see is at best only their conception of what they see; with this interpretation Shakspere's art may be said to consist solely in his observation of himself. Yet this would be to spin too fine Coleridge's already subtle thought. His meaning is clear enough; he would stress Shakspere's independence of knowledge gained by experience; this most precious intellect was freighted once for all with the infinite fortunes and aspirations of the race, and—to exaggerate slightly—neither study nor thought nor travel nor age could add one little weight of knowledge. A mind so described is not the normal mind, as we know it, and in the description is no place for that flavor of contact, that smack of immediate experience, which is the first mark of Shaksperian thought.

Most of the criticism of our century, even of our own day, would explain Shakspere's comprehensiveness at the cost of his naturalness. German philosophy in the early years and German scholarship later have tried to establish a sort of standard of omniscience, against which the poet's faults if perceived at all are measured as lapses from his true self. From Germany, though he denied it, the elder Coleridge learned to deal with Shakspere as with a god, whose mind was of a higher order than ours, yet might with labor be dimly learned; whose clearest utterance hinted at divine plans not in our fate to conceive, but only to admire; whose occasional vacuities meant no more than that the god perchance was sleeping or on a journey. "A nature humanized," Coleridge pictures Shakspere, "a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness." Again, echoing the theme of his son's verses, he gives us this conception of a meditating, Coleridgean Shakspere— "The body and substance of his works came out of the depths of his own oceanic mind; his observation and reading, which was considerable, supplied him with the draperies of his figures." And again, "He was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher."

No more significant but probably better known is that passage in which Hazlitt subtilizes about the mind of Shakspere, saying nothing new, perhaps, but setting an example in his phrase for the manner of question we noticed in the student's guide-book. "The striking peculiarity of Shakspere's mind," he says, "was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds, so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. . . . He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives—as well those that they knew, as those that they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves."

Through this rhapsody how shall we approach the man Shakspere with human faults of speech and conduct; or how shall we see the roots of his genius in any faculty that is ours?

This school of criticism might be called the philosophical adoration of Shakspere. In the soberer end of the nineteenth century we have had the scholarly adoration, a milder but no less devoted flame, as befits much telling of syllables and matching of texts. To make the account somewhat brief—those who have studied the matter know that the chief furnishings of Shakspere's lodgings and of his theatres must have been the shelves crowded with his sources. Where an earlier version is not forthcoming, as in Love's Labor's Lost, we yet live in hope; if it be not found, at least some thesis will prove that it has been mislaid. We are supposed to know also that Shakspere was a lawyer, a doctor, an experimental psychologist, a sociologist, an aristocrat, a democrat, a moralist, a cryptic preacher of esoteric religion. To be specific, we observe, for example, that in modern society rich and idle families when they degenerate have a trick of announcing their end in one of two ways; the latest descendant sometimes reverts to the original vulgarity and common sense of the peasant who founded the line and by dint of practice and the family fortune becomes an almost efficient, if uneconomic, hunter or sailor or farmer; or the latest descendant inherits grace of manner, the cumulative breeding of generations, but the exhausted stock bequeathes him nothing more, and he is at best a gentlemanly fool. This twofold degeneracy the student of society teaches us to observe,—and lo ! Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Ague-cheek. Or, to illustrate again, the old French poets had a definite type of lyric called the chanson d'aubade, or dawn song—the complement of the serenade, or evening song. A famous example of this type, the French scholar tells the French student, is "Hark! Hark! the lark," from Cymbeline. One other type of dawn song, the chanson d'aube, expressed the sorrow of two lovers who must leave each other's arms at daybreak. Among the marks of this type are the man's anxiety not to be found by his enemies, and the woman's reckless desire to detain him if only for a moment. He tells her that already the birds of dawn are singing; she answers that he hears the birds of a darkening twilight. And of this type of French lyric there is one perfect illustration, Juliet's cry to Romeo,

"Will you begone? It is not yet near day! It was the nightingale and not the lark."

So Shakspere is become a research scholar, poor man!

Or dare we dissent from all that this sort of criticism implies? Only two things actually known of Shakspere bear on this problem; for other aids to the understanding of his mind we should look not in books, but in life. We know that he was a man of action, a man infinitely busy with practical affairs, a man who produced several plays a year, and who could have no leisure. We know also that from the first he had a fluent gift of speech; he could say what he would, with the least possible impediment of language. But for the radical secret of his mind perhaps we should look in our own experience, if we would justify the hope that he was such a man as we are.

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