The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story

Shakespeare's life seems to fall sharply into two halves. Till he met Mistress Fitton, about 1597, he must have been happy and well content, I think, in spite of his deep underlying melancholy. According to my reckoning he had been in London about ten years, and no man has ever done so much in the time and been so successful even as the world counts success. He had not only written the early poems and the early plays, but in the last three or four years half-a-dozen masterpieces: "A Midsummer's Night's Dream," "Romeo and Juliet," "Richard II.," "King John," "The Merchant of Venice," "The Two Parts of Henry IV." At thirty-three he was already the greatest poet and dramatist of whom Time holds any record.

Southampton's bounty had given him ease, and allowed him to discharge his father's debts, and place his dearly loved mother in a position of comfort in the best house in Stratford.

He had troops of friends, we may be sure, for there was no gentler, gayer, kindlier creature in all London, and he set store by friendship.

Ten years before he had neither money, place, nor position; now he had all these, and was known even at Court. The Queen had been kind to him.

He ended the epilogue to the "Second Part of Henry IV.," which he had just finished, by kneeling "to pray for the Queen." Ess.e.x or Southampton had no doubt brought his work to Elizabeth's notice: she had approved his "Falstaff" and encouraged him to continue. Of all his successes, this royal recognition was surely the one which pleased him most. He was at the topmost height of happy hours when he met the woman who was to change the world for him.

In the lives of great men the typical tragedies are likely to repeat themselves. Socrates was condemned to drain many a poisoned cup before he was given the bowl of hemlock: Shakespeare had come to grief with many women before he fell with Mary Fitton. It was his ungovernable sensuality which drove him in youth to his untimely and unhappy marriage; it was his ungovernable sensuality, too, which in his maturity led him to worship Mary Fitton, and threw him into those twelve years of bondage to earthy, coa.r.s.e service which he regretted so bitterly when the pa.s.sion-fever had burned itself out.

One can easily guess how he came to know the self-willed and wild-living maid-of-honour. Like many of the courtiers, Mistress Fitton affected the society of the players. Kemp, the clown of his company, knew her, and dedicated a book to her rather familiarly. I have always thought that Shakespeare resented Kemp's intimacy with Mistress Fitton, for when Hamlet advises the players to prevent the clown from gagging, he adds, with a snarl of personal spite:

"a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it."

Mary Fitton's position, her proud, dark beauty, her daring of speech and deed took Shakespeare by storm. She was his complement in every failing; her strength matched his weakness; her resolution his hesitation, her boldness his timidity; besides, she was of rank and place, and out of pure sn.o.bbery he felt himself her inferior. He forgot that humble worship was not the way to win a high-spirited girl. He loved her so abjectly that he lost her; and it was undoubtedly his overpowering sensuality and sn.o.bbishness which brought him to his knees, and his love to ruin. He could not even keep her after winning her; desire blinded him. He would not see that Mary Fitton was not a wanton through mere l.u.s.t. As soon as her fancy was touched she gave herself; but she was true to the new lover for the time. We know that she bore a son to Pembroke and two illegitimate daughters to Sir Richard Leveson. Her slips with these men wounded Shakespeare's vanity, and he persisted in underrating her. Let us probe to the root of the secret sore. Here is a page of "Troilus and Cressida," a page from that terrible fourth scene of the fourth act, when Troilus, having to part from Cressida, warns her against the Greeks and their proficience in the arts of love:

"_Troilus_. I cannot sing Nor heel the high lavolt, nor sweeten talk, Nor play at subtle games; fair virtues all, To which the Grecians are most prompt and pregnant: But I can tell thee in each grace of these There lurks a still and dumb-discoursive devil That tempts most cunningly: but be not tempted.

_Cressida._ Do you think I will?

_Troilus. No: but something may be done that we will not._"

The first lines show that poor Shakespeare often felt out of it at Court. The suggestion, I have put in italics, is unspeakable.

Shakespeare made use of every sensual bait in hope of winning his love, liming himself and not the woman. His vanity was so inordinate that instead of saying to himself, "it's natural that a high-born girl of nineteen should prefer a great lord of her own age to a poor poet of thirty-four": he strives to persuade himself and us that Mary Fitton was won away from him by "subtle games," and in his rage of wounded vanity he wrote that tremendous libel on her, which he put in the mouth of Ulysses:

"Fie, fie upon her!

There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body.

O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue, That give accosting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every ticklish reader! set them down For s.l.u.ttish spoils of opportunity And daughters of the game."

His tortured sensuality caricatures her: that "ticklish reader" reveals him. Mary Fitton was finer than his portraits; we want her soul, and do not get it even in Cleopatra. It was the consciousness of his own age and physical inferiority that drove him to jealous denigration of his mistress.

Mary Fitton did not beguile Shakespeare to "the very heart of loss," as he cried; but to the innermost shrine of the temple of Fame. It was his absolute abandonment to pa.s.sion which made Shakespeare the supreme poet.

If it had not been for his excessive sensuality, and his mad pa.s.sion for his "gipsy," we should never have had from him "Hamlet," "Macbeth,"

"Oth.e.l.lo," "Antony and Cleopatra," or "Lear." He would still have been a poet and a dramatic writer of the first rank; but he would not have stood alone above all others: he would not have been Shakespeare.

His pa.s.sion for Mary Fitton lasted some twelve years. Again and again he lived golden hours with her like those Cleopatra boasted of and regretted. Life is wasted quickly in such o.r.g.a.s.ms of pa.s.sion; l.u.s.t whipped to madness by jealousy. Mary Fitton was the only woman Shakespeare ever loved, or at least, the only woman he loved with such intensity as to influence his art. She was Rosaline, Cressid, Cleopatra, and the "dark lady" of the sonnets. All his other women are parts of her or reflections of her, as all his heroes are sides of Hamlet, or reflections of him. Portia is the first full-length sketch of Mary Fitton, taken at a distance: Beatrice and Rosalind are mere reflections of her high spirits, her aristocratic pride and charm: her strength and resolution are incarnate in Lady Macbeth. Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia, are but abstract longings for purity and constancy called into life by his mistress's faithlessness and pa.s.sion.

Shakespeare admired Mary Fitton as intensely as he desired her, yet he could not be faithful to her for the dozen years his pa.s.sion lasted.

Love and her soft hours drew him irresistibly again and again: he was the ready spoil of opportunity. Here is one instance: it was his custom, Aubrey tells us, to visit Stratford every year, probably every summer: on his way he was accustomed to put up at an inn in Oxford, kept by John D'Avenant. Mrs. D'Avenant, we are told, was "a very beautiful woman, and of a very good witt and of conversation extremely agreeable." No doubt Shakespeare made up to her from the first. Her second son, William, who afterwards became the celebrated playwright, was born in March, 1605, and according to a tradition long current in Oxford, Shakespeare was his father. In later life Sir William D'Avenant himself was "contented enough to be thought his (Shakespeare's) son." There is every reason to accept the story as it has been handed down. Shakespeare, as Troilus, brags of his constancy; talks of himself as "plain and true"; but it was all boasting: from eighteen to forty-five he was as inconstant as the wind, and gave himself to all the "subtle games" of love with absolute abandonment, till his health broke under the strain.

In several of the Sonnets, notably in 36 and 37, Shakespeare tells us that he was "poor and despised ... made lame by fortune's dearest spite." He will not even have his friend's name coupled with his for fear lest his "bewailed guilt" should do him shame:

"Let me confess that we two must be twain, Although our undivided loves are one: So shall those blots that do with me remain Without thy help, by me be borne alone...."

Spalding and other critics believe that this "guilt" of Shakespeare refers to his profession as an actor, but that stain should not have prevented Lord Herbert from honouring him with "public kindness." It is clear, I think, from the words themselves, that the guilt refers to the fact that both Herbert and he were in love with the same woman. Jonson, as we have seen, had poked fun at their connection, and this is how Shakespeare tries to take the sting out of the sneer.

Shakespeare had many of the weaknesses of the neurotic and artistic temperament, but he had a.s.suredly the n.o.blest virtues of it: he was true to his friends, and more than generous to their merits.

If his ethical conscience was faulty, his aesthetical conscience was of the very highest. Whenever we find him in close relations with his contemporaries we are struck with his kindness and high impartial intelligence. Were they his rivals, he found the perfect word for their merits and shortcomings. How can one better praise Chapman than by talking of

"The proud full sail of his great verse"?

How can one touch his defect more lightly than by hinting that his learning needed feathers to lift it from the ground? And if Shakespeare was fair even to his rivals, his friends could always reckon on his goodwill and his unwearied service. All his fine qualities came out when as an elder he met churlish Ben Jonson. Jonson did not influence him as much as Marlowe had influenced him; but these were the two greatest of living men with whom he was brought into close contact, and his relations with Jonson show him as in a gla.s.s. Rowe has a characteristic story which must not be forgotten:

"His acquaintance with Ben Jonson began with a remarkable piece of humanity and good-nature; Mr. Jonson, who was at that time altogether unknown, had offered one of his playes to the Players, in order to have it acted; but the persons into whose hands it was put, after having turned it carelessly and superciliously over, were just upon returning it to him, with an ill-natured answer, that it would be of no service to their company, when Shakespeare luckily cast his eye upon it, and found something so well in it as to encourage him to read through and afterwards to recommend Ben Jonson and his writings to the publick. After this they were professed friends; though I don't know whether the other ever made him an equal return of gentleness and sincerity.

Ben was naturally proud and indolent, and in the days of his reputation did so far take upon him the premier in witt that he could not but look with an evil eye upon anyone that seemed to stand in compet.i.tion with him.

And if at times he has affected to commend him, it has always been with some reserve, insinuating his incorrectness, a careless manner of writing and a want of judgment; the praise of seldom altering or blotting out what he writt which was given him by the players over the first publish of his works after his death was what Jonson could not bear...."

The story reads exactly like the story of Goethe and Schiller. It was Schiller who held aloof and was full of fault-finding criticism: it was Goethe who made all the advances and did all the kindnesses. It was Goethe who obtained for Schiller that place as professor of history at Jena which gave Schiller the leisure needed for his dramatic work. It is always the greater who gives and forgives.

I believe, of course, too, in the traditional account of the unforgettable evenings at the Mermaid. "Many were the wit-combats,"

wrote Fuller of Shakespeare in his "Worthies" (1662), "betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which too I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man of war. Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all sides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention."

It was natural for the onlooker to compare Ben Jonson and his "mountainous belly" to some Spanish galleon, and Shakespeare, with his quicker wit, to the more active English ship. It was Jonson's great size--a quality which has always been too highly esteemed in England--his domineering temper and desperate personal courage that induced the gossip to even him with Shakespeare.

Beaumont described these meetings, too, in his poetical letter to his friend Jonson:

"What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid? Heard words that have been So nimble and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull life."

In one respect at least the two men were ant.i.theses. Jonson was exceedingly combative and quarrelsome, and seems to have taken a chief part in all the bitter disputes of his time between actors and men of letters. He killed one actor in a duel and attacked Marston and Dekker in "The Poetaster"; they replied to him in the "Satiromastix." More than once he criticized Shakespeare's writings; more than once jibed at Shakespeare, unfairly trying to wound him; but Shakespeare would not retort. It is to Jonson's credit that though he found fault with Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" and "Pericles," he yet wrote of him in the "Poetaster" as a peacemaker, and, under the name of Virgil, honoured him as the greatest master of poetry.

Tradition gives us one witty story about the relations between the pair which seems to me extraordinarily characteristic. Shakespeare was G.o.dfather to one of Ben's children, and after the christening, being in a deep study, Jonson came to cheer him up, and asked him why he was so melancholy. "No, faith, Ben," says he; "not I, but I have been considering a great while what should be the fittest gift for me to bestow upon my G.o.dchild and I have resolved at last." "I pr'ythee, what?" sayes he. "I'faith, Ben, I'll e'en give him a dozen good Lattin spoons, and thou shalt translate them." Lattin, as everybody knows, was a mixed metal resembling bra.s.s: the play upon words and sly fun poked at Jonson's scholarship are in Shakespeare's best manner. The story must be regarded as Shakespeare's answer to Jonson's sneer that he had "little Latine and lesse Greeke."

Through the mist of tradition and more or less uncertain references in his poetry, one sees that he had come, probably through Southampton, to admire Ess.e.x, and the fall and execution of Ess.e.x had an immense effect upon him. It is certain, I think, that the n.o.ble speech on mercy put into Portia's mouth in "The Merchant of Venice," was primarily an appeal to Elizabeth for Ess.e.x or for Southampton. It is plainly addressed to the Queen, and not to a Jew pariah:

"... It becomes The throned monarch better than his crown; His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this scepter'd sway, It is enthroned in the heart of kings.

It is an attribute of G.o.d Himself, And earthly power doth then show likest G.o.d's, When Mercy seasons Justice."

All this must have seemed the veriest irony when addressed to an outcast Jew. It was clearly intended as an appeal to Elizabeth, and shows how far gentle Shakespeare would venture in defence of a friend. Like a woman, he gained a certain courage through his affections.

I feel convinced that he resented the condemnation of Ess.e.x and the imprisonment of Southampton very bitterly, for though he had praised Elizabeth in his salad days again and again, talked about her in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as a "fair vestal throned by the west"; walking in "maiden meditation, fancy-free"; yet, when she died, he could not be induced to write one word about her. His silence was noticed, and Chettle challenged him to write in praise of the dead sovereign, because she had been kind to him; but he would not: he had come to realise the harsh nature of Elizabeth, and he detested her ruthless cruelties. Like a woman, he found it difficult to forgive one who had injured those he loved. Now that I have discussed at some length Shakespeare's character, its powers and its weaknesses, let us for a moment consider his intellect. All sorts and conditions of men talk of it in superlatives; but that does not help us much. It is as easy to sit in Shakespeare's brain and think from there, as it is from Balzac's. If we have read Shakespeare rightly, his intelligence was peculiarly self-centred; he was wise mainly through self-knowledge, and not, as is commonly supposed, through knowledge of others and observation; he was a.s.suredly anything but worldly-wise. Take one little point. In nearly every play he discovers an intense love of music and of flowers; but he never tells you anything about the music he loves, and he only mentions a dozen flowers in all his works. True, he finds exquisite phrases for his favourites; but he only seems to have noticed or known the commonest.

His knowledge of birds and beasts is similarly limited. But when Bacon praises flowers he shows at once the naturalist's gift of observation; he mentions hundreds of different kinds, enumerating them month by month; in April alone he names as many as Shakespeare has mentioned in all his writings. He used his eyes to study things outside himself, and memory to recall them; but Shakespeare's eyes were turned inward; he knew little of the world outside himself.

Shakespeare's knowledge of men and women has been overrated. With all his sensuality he only knew one woman, Mary Fitton, though he knew her in every mood, and only one man, himself, profoundly apprehended in every accident and moment of growth.

He could not construct plays or invent stories, though he selected good ones with considerable certainty. He often enriched the characters, seldom or never the incidents; even the characters he creates are usually sides of himself, or humorous masks without a soul. He must have heard of the statesman Burleigh often enough; but nowhere does he portray him; no hint in his works of Drake, or Raleigh, or Elizabeth, or Sidney. He has no care either for novelties; he never mentions forks or even tobacco or potatoes. A student by nature if ever there was one, all intent, as he tells us, on bettering his mind, he pa.s.ses through Oxford a hundred times and never even mentions the schools: Oxford men had disgusted him with their _alma mater_.

The utmost reach of this self-student is extraordinary; the main puzzle of life is hidden from us as from him; but his word on it is deeper than any of ours, though we have had three centuries in which to climb above him.

"Men must abide Their going hence even as their coming hither.

Ripeness is all."

And if it be said that the men of the Renaissance occupied themselves more with such questions than we do, and therefore show better in relation to them, let us take another phrase which has always seemed to me of extraordinary insight. Antony has beaten Caesar, and returns to Cleopatra, who greets him with the astounding words:

"Lord of lords, O, infinite virtue, com'st thou smiling from The world's great snare uncaught?"

This is all more or less appropriate in the mouth of Cleopatra; but it is to me Shakespeare's own comment on life; he is conscious of his failure; he has said to himself: "if I, Shakespeare, have failed, it is because every one fails; life's handicap searches out every weakness; to go through life as a conqueror would require 'infinite virtue.'" This is perhaps the furthest throw of Shakespeare's thought.

But his worldly wisdom is to seek. After he had been betrayed by Lord Herbert he raves of man's ingrat.i.tude, in play after play. Of course men are ungrateful; it is only the rarest and n.o.blest natures who can feel thankful for help without any injury to vanity. The majority of men love their inferiors, those whom they help; to give flatters self-esteem; but they hate their superiors, and lend to the word "patron" an intolerable smirk of condescension. Shakespeare should have understood that at thirty.