Read Ebook: La donna nella vita e nelle opere di Giacomo Leopardi by Boghen Conigliani Emma

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Legends about Shakespeare began to spring up in Stratford as soon as there was a demand for them. Legends are a stupid man's excuse for his want of understanding. They are not evidence. Setting aside the legends, the lies, the surmises and the imputations, several uninteresting things are certainly known about him.

We know that he was the first son and third child of John Shakespeare, a country trader settled at Stratford, and of Mary his wife; that he was baptised on the 26th April, 1564; and that in 1582 he got with child a woman named Anne or Agnes Hathaway, eight years older than himself. Her relatives saw to it that he married her. A daughter was born to him in May 1583, less than six months after the marriage. In January 1585 twins were born to him, a son and a daughter .

At this point he disappears. Legend, written down from a hundred to a hundred and sixty years after the event, says that he was driven out of the county for poaching, that he was a country school-master, that he made a "very bitter" ballad upon a landlord, that he tramped to London, that he held horses outside the theatre doors, and that at last he was received into a theatrical company "in a very mean rank." This is all legend, not evidence. That he was a lawyer's clerk, a soldier in the Low Countries, a seaman, or a printer, as some have written books to attempt to show, is not evidence, nor legend, but wild surmise. It might be urged, with as great likelihood, that he became a king, an ancient Roman, a tapster or a brothel keeper.

It is fairly certain that the company which first received him was the Earl of Leicester's company, then performing at The Theatre in Shoreditch. The company changed its patron and its theatre several times, but Shakespeare, having been admitted to it, stayed with it throughout his theatrical career. He acted with it at The Theatre, at the Rose and Globe Theatres, at the Court, at the Inns of Court, and possibly on many stages in the provinces. For many years he professed the quality of actor. Legend says that he acted well in what are called "character parts." Soon after his entrance into the profession he began to show a talent for improving the plays of others.

Nothing interesting is known of his subsequent life, except that he wrote great poetry and made money by it. It is plain that he was a shrewd, careful, and capable man of affairs, and that he cared, as all wise men care, for rank and an honourable state. He strove with a noble industry to obtain these and succeeded. He prospered, he bought New Place at Stratford, he invested in land, in theatre shares and in houses. During the last few years of his life he retired to New Place, where he led the life of a country gentleman. He died there on the 23rd April, 1616, aged fifty-two years. The cause of his death is not known. His wife and daughters survived him.

Little is known of his human relationships. He is described as "gentle." Had he been not gentle we should know more of him. Ben Jonson "loved the man," and says that "he was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature." John Webster speaks of his "right happy and copious industry." An actor who wrote more than thirty plays during twenty years of rehearsing, acting, and theatre management, can have had little time for mixing with the world.

That we know little of his human relationships is one of the blessed facts about him. That we conjecture much is the penalty a nation pays for failing to know her genius when he appears.

Three portraits--a bust, an engraving, and a painting--have some claim to be considered as genuine portraits of Shakespeare. The first of these is the coloured half-length bust on the chancel wall in Stratford Church. This was made by one Gerard Janssen, a stonemason of some repute. It was placed in the church within seven years of the poet's death. It is a crude work of art; but it shows plainly that the artist had before him a man of unusual vivacity of mind. The face is that of an aloof and sunny spirit, full of energy and effectiveness. Another portrait is that engraved for the title page of the first folio, published in 1623. The engraving is by Martin Droeshout, who was fifteen years old when Shakespeare died, and about twenty-two when he made the engraving. It is a crude work of art, but it shows plainly that the artist had before him the representation of an unusual man.

It is possible that the representation from which he engraved his plate was a painting on panel, now at Stratford. This painting is now called "the Droeshout portrait." It is supposed to represent the Shakespeare of the year 1609. In the absence of proof, all that can be said of it is that it is certainly a work of the early seventeenth century, and that it looks as though it were the original of the engraving. No other "portrait of Shakespeare" has any claim to be considered as even a doubtful likeness.

There are, unfortunately, many graven images of Shakespeare. They are perhaps passable portraits of the languid, half-witted, hydrocephalic creatures who made them. As representations of a bustling, brilliant, profound, vivacious being, alive to the finger tips, and quick with an energy never since granted to man, they are as false as water.

THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRES

The Elizabethan theatres were square, circular, or octagonal structures, built of wood, lath and plaster, on stone or brick foundations. They stood about forty or forty-five feet high. They were built with three storeys, tiers, or galleries of seats which ran round three sides of the stage and part of the fourth. On the fourth side, at the back of the stage, was a tiring house in which the actors robed. The upper storeys of the tiring house could be used in the action, for a balcony, the upper storeys of a house, etc., according to the needs of the scene. It is possible, but not certain, that the tiring house itself was used in some plays to represent an inner chamber. The three storeys of seats were divided by partitions into "gentlemen's roomes" and "Twoe pennie roomes." The top storey was roofed in, either with thatch or tiles. The stage was roofed over in the same way. The space or yard between the stage and the galleries which surrounded it, was open to the sky. It contained no seats, but it held many spectators who stood. "Standing room" cost a penny. Those who stood could press right up to the stage, which was a platform four or five feet high projecting well out from the back of the house "to the middle of the yarde." It was possible to see the actors "in the round," instead of, as at present, like people in a picture. The audience got their emotions from the thing done and the thing said; not, as with us, from the situation. It was the custom of gallant gentlemen to hire stools placed on the stage itself. They sat and took tobacco there during the performance. Rank had then a greater privilege of impertinence than it has to-day. The performances took place by daylight. They were announced by the blowing of a trumpet. During a performance, a banner was hung from the theatre roof. The plays were played straight through, without waits. The only waits necessary in a theatre are those which rest the actors and those which give variety to the moods of the spectators. The double construction of Shakespeare's plays provided a sub-plot which held or amused the audience while the actors of the main plot rested. It is possible, but not certain, that the scenes were played on alternate halves of the stage, and that when one half of the stage was being cleared of its properties, or fitted with them, the play continued on the other half. It is not possible to speak of the general quality of the acting. Acting, like other dependent art, can only be good when it has good art to interpret. The acting was probably as good and as bad as the plays. Careful and impressive speaking and thoughtful, restrained gesture were qualities which Shakespeare and Ben Jonson praised. It is likely that the acting of the time was much quicker than modern acting. The plays were played very swiftly, without hesitation or dawdling over "business."

Women were not then allowed upon the stage. Women's parts were played by boys. Some have thought that this must have taken from the excellence of the performances. It is highly likely that it added much to it. Nearly all boys can act extremely well. Very few men and women can.

The playing of women's parts by boys may have limited Shakespeare's art. His women are kept within the range of thought and emotion likely to be understood by boys. This may account for their wholesome, animal robustness. There is no trace of the modern heroine, the common woman overstrained, or the idle woman in her megrims, in any Shakespearean play. The people of the plays are alive and hearty. They lead a vigorous life and go to bed tired. They never forget that they are animals. They never let any one else forget that they are also divine.

THE PLAYS

At the discussion, the King falls in love with the Princess, his three courtiers fall in love with the ladies of her train.

The lovers send vows of love to their ladies. They plot to visit them in disguises of masks and Russian clothes. The ladies, hearing of this plot in time, mask themselves. The men fail to recognise them. Each disguised lover makes love-vows to the wrong woman.

The ladies twit the men with a double perjury: that they have broken their vow to study, and their love vows.

The play is kept within the bounds of fantastic comedy by the members of the sub-plot, who intrude with their fun whenever the action tends to become real. They intrude here, to impersonate the Nine Worthies before the two Courts. The farce of their performance is heightened by ragging from the courtiers. When it is at its height, two of the members of the sub-plot begin to quarrel. One blow would ruin the play by making it real. At the crisis the violence is avoided; the reality is brought unexpectedly, by beauty. A messenger enters to tell the Princess that her father is dead.

The ladies bid the men test their love by waiting for twelve months. The trifling of the earlier acts is shown at its moral value against a background of tragic happening. Accomplishments are compared with life.

The members of the sub-plot enter. They end the play with the singing of a lyric.

The play gives the reader the uncanny feeling that something real inside the piece is trying to get out of the fantasy. The lip-love rattles like a skeleton's bones. The love of Biron for Rosaline is real passion. The conflict throughout is the conflict of the unreal with the real.

The play seems to have been written in a literary or sentimental mood, and revised in a real mood. There is little in the early version that is not fantastic. The situation is fantastic, the people are fantastic, the language is fantastic with all a brilliant young master's delight in the play and glitter of cunning writing. The later version was written during the passionate years of Shakespeare's growth, after something had altered the world to him. The two versions are carelessly stuck together, with the effect of a rose-bush growing out of bones.

The dramatic method is dual. He presents in the plot something eternal in human life, and in the sub-plot something temporal in human fashion. In the plot of this play, his intention seems to have been this--to show intellect turned from a high resolve, from a consecration to mental labour, by the coming of women, who represent, perhaps, untutored, natural intelligence. Later in the play the high resolve of intellect is betrayed again, indirectly by women; but more by the sexual emotions which distort the vision till even the falsest, loosest woman appears beautiful and "celestial," and worth the sacrifice of intellect. The end of the play is not so much an end as a clearing of the road of life.

It often happens that the setting down of a doubt in careful words resolves it. This play seems to free Shakespeare's mind from doubts as to the right use and preparation of intellect. He presents with extreme care the different types of literary intellect: the man who shuts himself up to study, the man who sparkles in society, the man whom books have made stupid and the man whom style has made mad.

The play is full of the problem of what to do with the mind. Shall it be filled with study, or spent in society, or burnt in a passion, or tortured by strivings for style, or left as it is? Intellect is a problem to itself. Something of the problem seems to have made this play not quite impersonal, as good art should be.

The problems are settled wisely, though not without a feeling of sacrifice. The beauty and the worth of learning are baits by which many intellects are lured from wisdom. The knowledge that life is the book to study, life at its liveliest, in the wits of women

"Keen Above the sense of sense,"

and that style is a poor thing beside the "honest plain words" which pierce, only comes with a sense of loss. Youth desires all the powers. A man with great gifts desires all the mental gifts. Youth with nothing but great gifts is never sure that the gifts will be sufficient. When this play was written, the stage was supplied with plays by men of trained intellects, who set more store upon the training than upon the intellect itself. The society of well-taught men, who know and quote and criticise, always makes the untaught uncertain and ill at ease. Shakespeare seems to have risen from the writing of this play, certain that poetry is not given to the trained mind, nor to the untrained mind, but to the quick and noble nature, earnest with the passion which stands the touchstone of death. "Subtlety," so Cromwell wrote, "may deceive you, integrity never will." The mind is her own armour. She will not fail for the want of a little learning or a little grace.

In the sub-plot, among much low comedy, this truth is emphasised by the triumph of Costard, a natural mind, in an encounter with Armado, an artificial mind. At the end of the play the "learned men" are made to compile a dialogue "in praise of the owl and the cuckoo." The dialogue is of a kind not usual among learned men, but the choice of the birds is significant. The last speech of the play: "The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo," seems to refer to Marlowe, as though Shakespeare found it hard to justify an art so unlike his master's. Marlowe climbs the peaks in the sun, his bow never off his shoulders. I walk the roads of the earth among men.

There is little character drawing in the piece. The Princess is a gracious figure; but hardly real to us till the last scene of the play, when she speaks wisely. Biron is more of a person. He presents his point of view in a moment of pleasant poetry--

"For where is any author in the world, Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?"

He shows a prejudice against Boyet, the courtier in attendance on the Princess. This prejudice is expressed bitterly--

"This is the flower that smiles on every one,"

with the bitterness usual in Shakespeare when treating of the flunkey mind. The ladies of the Princess's train all talk exactly alike, with sharp feminine wit, infinitely swift in thrust. None of them has personality; but Rosaline is described for us, body and disposition. The members of the sub-plot are mental fashions well observed. Costard alone has life. Shakespeare came from the country. In the country a thinking man is reminded daily of the shrewdness of unspoiled minds. Armado, Costard's opponent, lives for us by one phrase--

"The sweet war-man is dead and rotten: sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a man."

It is interesting to see Shakespeare's mind trying for vividness. In his maturity he had supremely the power of giving life. In this early play one can see his first conscious literary efforts towards the obtaining of the power. Longaville makes the scene alive by the question--

"I beseech you a word. What is she in the white?"

The simple but telling means of giving reality is repeated a few lines later in Biron's question--

"What's her name in the cap?"

In Act V, sc. ii, the vividness is given in a strangely pathetic passage, that haunts, after the play is laid down. Two of the ladies are talking of Cupid--

The power of giving life in a line is seen in the remark of Dumaine --

"To look like her, are chimney-sweepers black."

The play is full of experiments. Some of it is written in a loose, swinging couplet, some in quatrains, some in blank verse, some in the choice, picked prose made the fashion by Lyly. It contains more lyrics than any other Shakespearean play. One of the lyrics, a sonnet in Alexandrines, is the fruit of a real human passion. The lyric at the end of the play is the loveliest thing ever said about England. If this play and most of the other plays were modern works, the Censor would not allow them to be performed publicly. The men and women converse with a frankness and suggestiveness not now usual, except among the young. Shakespeare is blamed for not conforming to standards unknown to his generation.

He is blamed for not being delicate-minded like the great Greek tragic poets. The Greek tragic poets wrote about the heroic life of legend. Shakespeare wrote about life. A man who writes about life must accept life for what it is, as largely an animal thing. Those who pretend that life is only lived in boudoirs, are in peril, and the world is in peril through them.

A play based on this story was acted in England in 1584. It is now lost. The gist of the story was published in lame English verses, by Barnabe Googe, in 1563.

Valentine tells him that he has planned to escape with Silvia that night. Proteus betrays this plot to the Duke. The Duke banishes Valentine and sends Proteus to Silvia to press the suit of Thurio.

Valentine joins a gang of outlaws.

Proteus woos Silvia for himself, and is rejected by her.

Julia, who has come in boy's dress from Verona to look for Proteus, finds him still unsuccessfully courting Silvia. She enters his service as a page. He sends her on a message to Silvia.

On her way to deliver the message, Julia meets Silvia flying from home in search of Valentine.

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