An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway by Martin Brown Ruud (best novels of all time .TXT) 📕

years of the plague, 1592-3, when the theaters were generally closed,

and Shakespeare no doubt had to battle for a mere existence. In 1594

Shakespeare's position became more secure. He gained the favor of

Southampton and dedicated the _Rape of Lucrece_ to him.

Collin develops at this point with a good deal of fullness his

theory that the motifs of the sonnets recur in _Venus and Adonis_

and _Lucrece_--in _Venus and Adonis_, a certain crass naturalism;

in _Lucrece_ a high and spiritual morality. In the sonnets the same

antithesis is found. Compare Sonnet 116--in praise of friendship--with

129, in which is pictured the tyranny and the treachery of sensual love.

These two forces, sensual love and platonic friendship, were mighty

cultural influences during Shakespeare's apprentice years and the young

poet shows plainly that he was moved by both.

If all this be true, then the Herbert-Fitton theory falls to the ground,

for in 1597 Herbert was only seventeen. But unquestionably the sonnets

are autobiographical. They reveal with a poignant power Shakespeare's

sympathy, his unique ability to enter into another personality, his

capacity of imaginative expansion to include the lives of others.

Compare the noble sonnet 112, which Collin translates:

  Din kjærlighed og medynk dækker til

  det ar, som sladderen paa min pande trykket.

  Lad andre tro og sige, hvad de vil,--

  du kjærlig mine feil med fortrin smykket.

  Du er mit verdensalt, og fra din mund

  jeg henter al min skam og al min ære.

  For andre er jeg død fra denne stund,

  og de for mig som skygger blot skal være.

  I avgrunds dyp jeg al bekymring kaster!

  for andres røst min høresans er sløv.

  Hvadenten de mig roser eller laster,

  jeg som en hugorm er og vorder døv.

  Saa helt du fylder ut min sjæl herinde,

  at hele verden synes at forsvinde.

At this point the article in _Samtiden_ closes. Collin promises to give

in a later number, a metrical translation of a number of significant

sonnets. The promised renderings, however, never appeared. Thirteen

years later, in 1914, the author, in a most interesting and illuminating

book, _Det Geniale Menneske_,[21] a study of "genius" and its relation

to civilization, reprinted his essay in _Samtiden_ and supplemented it

with three short chapters. In the first of these he endeavors to show

that in the sonnets Shakespeare gives expression to two distinct

tendencies of the Renaissance--the tendency toward a loose and

unregulated gratification of the senses, and the tendency toward an

elevated and platonic conception of friendship. Shakespeare sought in

both of these a compensation for his own disastrous love affair and

marriage. But the healing that either could give was at best transitory.

There remained to him as a poet of genius one resource. He could gratify

his own burning desire for a pure and unselfish love by living in his

mighty imagination the lives of his characters. "He who in his yearning

for the highest joys of love had been compelled to abandon hope, found

a joy mingled with pain, in giving of his life to lovers in whom the

longing of William Shakespeare lives for all time.

"He has loved and been loved. It was he whom Sylvia, Hermia, Titania,

Portia, Juliet, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, and Olivia loved,--and

Ophelia, Desdemona, Hermione and Miranda."

    [21. Chr. Collin, Christiania. 1914. H. Aschehoug & Co.]

In the second chapter Collin argues, as he had done in his essay on

_Hamlet_[22] that Shakespeare's great tragedies voice no pessimism, but

the stern purpose to strengthen himself and his contemporaries against

the evils and vices of Jacobean England--that period of moral and

intellectual disintegration which followed the intense life of the

Elizabethan age. Shakespeare battles against the ills of society as the

Greek dramatists had done, by showing sin and wickedness as destroyers

of life, and once this is done, by firing mankind to resistance against

the forces of ruin and decay. "To hold the mirror up to nature," that

men may see the devastation which evil and vice bring about in the

social body. And to do this he does not, like some modern writers, shun

moralizing. He warns against sensual excess in Adam's speech in _As You

Like It_, II, 3:

      Let me be your servant;

  Though I look old, yet am I strong and lusty;

  For in my youth I never did apply

  Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood;

  Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo

  The means of weakness and debility;

    [22. See pp. 71 ff. below.]

Or, compare the violent outburst against drunkenness in _Hamlet_ Act 1,

Sc. 4, and the stern warning against the same vice in _Othello_, where,

indeed, Cassius' weakness for strong drink is the immediate occasion of

the tragic complication. In like manner, Shakespeare moralizes against

lawless love in the _Merry Wives_, in _Troilus and Cressida_, in

_Hamlet_, in _Lear_.

On the other hand, Shakespeare never allows artistic scruples to

stand in the way of exalting simple, domestic virtues. Simple conjugal

fidelity is one of the glories of Hamlet's illustrious father and of the

stern, old Roman, Coriolanus; the young prince, Malcolm, is as chaste

and innocent as the young barbarians of whom Tacitus tells.

In a final section, Collin connects this view of Hamlet which he has

developed in his essay on _Hamlet_ and the Sonnets, with the theory of

human civilization which his book so suggestively advances.

The great tragedies from _Hamlet_ to _Timon of Athens_ are not

autobiographical in the sense that they are reflections of Shakespeare's

own concrete experience. They are not the record of a bitter personal

pessimism. In the years when they were written Shakespeare was contented

and prosperous. He restored the fortunes of his family and he was hailed

as a master of English without a peer. It is therefore a priori quite

unlikely that the tragic atmosphere of this period should go back

to purely personal disappointments. The case is more likely this:

Shakespeare had grown in power of sympathy with his fellows and his

time. He had become sensitive to the needs and sorrows of the society

about him. He could put himself in the place of those who are sick in

mind and heart. And in consequence of this he could preach to this

generation the simple gospel of right living and show to them the

psychic weakness whence comes all human sorrow.

And through this expansion of his ethical consciousness what had

he gained? Not merely a fine insight as in _Macbeth_, _Antony and

Cleopatra_, and _Coriolanus_, an insight which enables him to treat with

comprehending sympathy even great criminals and traitors, but a high

serenity and steady poise which enables him to write the romances of his

last years--_Cymbeline_, _A Winter's Tale_, and _The Tempest_. He had

come to feel that human life, after all, with its storms, is a little

thing, a dream and a fata morgana, which soon must give place to a

permanent reality:

      We are such stuff

  As dreams are made of, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

In 1904 Collin wrote in _Nordisk Tidskrift för Vetenskap, Konst och

Industri_[23] a most suggestive article on Hamlet. He again dismisses

the widely accepted theory of a period of gloom and increasing pessimism

as baseless. The long line of tragedies cannot be used to prove this.

They are the expression of a great poet's desire to strengthen mankind

in the battle of life.

    [23: This article is reprinted in _Det Geniale Menneske_ above

    referred to. It forms the second of a group of essays in which

    Collin analyzes the work of Shakespeare as the finest example of

    the true contribution of genius to the progress and culture of

    the race. Preceding the study of _Hamlet_ is a chapter called

    _The Shakespearean Controversy_, and following it is a study of

    Shakespeare the Man. This is in three parts, the first of which

    is a reprint of an article in _Samtiden_ (1901).

    In _Det Geniale Menneske_ Collin defines civilization as that

    higher state which the human race has attained by means of

    "psychic organs"--superior to the physical organs. The psychic

    organs have been created by the human intellect and they are

    controlled by the intellect. Had man been dependent upon the

    physical organs solely, he would have remained an animal. His

    psychic organs have enabled him to create instruments, tangible,

    such as tools and machines; intangible, such as works of art.

    These are psychic organs and with their aid man has become a

    civilized being.

    The psychic organs are the creation of the man of genius. To

    create such organs is his function. The characteristics, then,

    of the genius are an immense capacity for sympathy and an immense

    surplus of power; sympathy, that he may know the needs of mankind;

    power, that he may fashion those great organs of life by which the

    race may live and grow.

    In the various chapters of his book, Collin analyzes in an

    illuminating way the life and work of Wergeland, Ibsen, and

    Bjørnson as typical men of genius whose expansive sympathy gave

    them insight and understanding and whose indefatigable energy

    wrought in the light of their insight mighty psychic organs of

    cultural progress.

    He comes then to Shakespeare as the genius par excellence. The

    chapter on the _Shakespearean Controversy_ gives first a survey

    of the development of modern scientific literary criticism from

    Herder to Taine and Saint Beuve. He goes on to detail the

    application of this method to the plays and sonnets of

    Shakespeare. Furnivall, Spalding, and Brandes have attempted to

    trace the genesis and the chronology of the plays. They would have

    us believe that the series of tragedies--_Hamlet_, _Macbeth_,

    _Othello_, _Lear_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, _Troilus and Cressida_,

    _Coriolanus_, and _Timon_ are the records of an increasing

    bitterness and pessimism. Brandes and Frank Harris, following

    Thomas Tyler have, on the basis of the sonnets, constructed a

    fascinating, but quite fantastic romance.

    Vagaries such as these have caused some critics, such as Sidney

    Lee and Bierfreund, to declare that it is impossible on the basis

    of the plays to penetrate to Shakespeare the man. His work is

    too purely objective. Collin is not willing to admit this. He

    maintains that the scientific biographical method of criticism

    is fundamentally sound. But it must be rationally applied. The

    sequence which Brandes has set up is quite impossible. Goswin

    Kønig, in 1888, applying the metrical tests, fixed the order as

    follows: _Hamlet_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _Measure for Measure_,

    _Othello_, _Timon_, and _Lear_, and, in another group, _Macbeth_,

    _Antony and Cleopatra_, and _Coriolanus_. These results are

    confirmed by Bradley in his _Shakespearean Tragedy_.

    Collin accepts this chronology. A careful study of the plays in

    this order shows a striking community of ethical purpose between

    the plays of each group. In the plays of the first group, the poet

    assails with all his mighty wrath what to him seems the basest of

    all wickedness, treachery. It is characteristic of these plays

    that none of the villains attains the dignity of a great tragic

    hero. They are without a virtue to redeem their faults.

    Shakespeare's conception of the good and evil in these plays

    approaches a medieval dualism. In the plays of the second group

    the case is altered. There is no longer a crude dualism in the

    interpretation of life. Shakespeare has entered into the soul of

    Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, of Antony and Cleopatra, of Coriolanus,

    and he has found underneath all that is weak and sinful and

    diseased, a certain nobility and grandeur. He can feel with the

    regicides in Macbeth; he no longer exposes and scourges; he

    understands and sympathizes. The clouds of gloom and wrath have

    cleared away, and Shakespeare has achieved a serenity and a fine

    poise.

    It follows, then, that the theory of a growing pessimism is

    untenable. We must seek a new line of evolution.]

We need dwell but little on Collin's sketch of the "Vorgeschichte"

of _Hamlet_, for it contributes nothing that is new. _Hamlet_ was a

characteristic "revenge tragedy" like the "Spanish Tragedy" and a whole

host of others which had grown up in England under the influence, direct

and indirect, of Seneca. He points out in a very illuminating way how

admirably the "tragedy of blood" fitted the times. Nothing is more

characteristic of the renaissance than an intense joy in living. But

exactly as the appetite for mere existence became keen, the tragedy of

death gained in power. The most passionate joy instinctively calls up

the most terrible sorrow. There is a sort of morbid caution here--a

feeling that in the moment of happiness it is well to