Shakespeare (Routledge Revivals)

Raymond Alden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317950844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di Shakespeare

This fascinating title, first published in 1922, presents a detailed overview of the life and works of Shakespeare. Alden first considers Shakespeare's Elizabethan context, alongside exploring the Classical and Italian foundations, political theories, concepts and theatrical trends that influenced his works. Next, a comprehensive biography provides insight into Shakespeare's probable education, relationships and contemporaries. The final sections are devoted to the genres into which Shakespeare's works have been categorised, with full analyses of and backgrounds to the poems, histories, comedies and tragedies. An important study, this title will be of particular value to students in need of a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare's life and works, as well as the more general inquisitive reader.

CHAPTER I

THE AGE

N 1564, when Shakespeare was born, Elizabeth had been on the throne of England for five and a half years, and the reign which more than any other still seems to represent the greatness of modern England was in full course. The Queen had already impressed her personality upon the government, and in a few more years was to make it felt throughout every corner of the land. After years of confused national feeling, and painful internal religious conflict, the beginnings of a stedfast political consciousness and of a fair degree of ecclesiastical unity were calming the hearts of the people, and making possible the great attainments of the early future in the fields of war, exploration, commerce, and the arts. When Shakespeare was six years old Elizabeth was excommunicated by the Pope; when he was eight, the court went into mourning in protest against the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day; and by these events the popular strength of British Protestantism was confirmed. When he was thirteen, Francis Drake set out on his voyage to South America and around the world, returning to Plymouth in Shakespeare’s seventeenth year. Seven years later, when the poet was probably a resident of London, Drake commanded the active division of the fleet which, in alliance with wind and ocean, defeated the Spanish Armada, and thereby made England definitively the leader of the Protestant powers. At the height of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, in 1603, the reign of Elizabeth came to an end with her death and the accession of James; but the England which she had so long incarnated before the world is still called “Elizabethan” throughout the reign of her successor. The new régime, despite the many differences that marked the personality of the sovereign, was in most respects a continuation of the old, and the poets and playwrights who had made glorious the court of the Virgin Queen became servants and celebrators of His Majesty, just as the admirals and gentlemen adventurers continued the story of English achievements in the West. During the years when Shakespeare was bringing his active career as dramatist to a close, from 1607 to 1611, the colony in Virginia was being founded and struggling into permanent form; and in 1616, the year of his death, Raleigh was making preparations for his final ill-fated expedition to the Spanish Main. At about the same time the English separatists at Leyden were inaugurating plans for the migration which was to result in the settlement of New England. King James survived the greatest of his subjects by nine years, and saw, two years before his death, the publication of Shakespeare’s collected plays. Twelve years earlier,—that is, five years before the death of Shakespeare,—had appeared the Authorized Version of the Bible. Thus it happened to be granted to James, and not to Elizabeth, that his reign should be made forever memorable by the appearance in close succession of the two books which are the chief glories of the English race.

If we now look at the same period from another standpoint, that of European culture rather than British history, we note first of all that it represents the culmination of the indefinable but pervasive moment which we call the Renaissance. Reaching Great Britain comparatively late, the influences covered by the word were only at the point, in early sixteenth-century England, which had long since been passed in Italy and only a little less long in France. The founding of John Colet’s Grammar School in 1510, the first regular Greek lectureship at Oxford in 1520, and the appearance of Coxe’s Rhetorick in 1524, are convenient landmarks for the impact of the new culture upon England. The Princess Elizabeth, as we know, received a sound and effective classical training (her tutor, Roger Ascham, himself a pupil of John Cheke at Cambridge, boasted that he had had the best master and the best scholar of his time), and could, at need, when Queen, harangue a displeasing ambassador in extempore Latin. By the time Shakespeare was a school-boy, there were “grammar schools” in most of the corporate towns of the kingdom, with curricula which seem commonly to have included Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Sallust, Horace and Ovid, so that the ordinary boy who was able to go through the local school had submitted himself to a decidedly more intensive classical discipline than the average American college graduate of to-day. He had, of course, heard nothing of economics, sociology, biology, or psychology, and knew rather more of the ancient world than he did of his own; knew, too, more of the legends of classical mythology than of the actualities of history,—more of Adonis and Phaëton than of the rise and progress of the English nation. To us this is likely to seem so irrational that we must make a distinct effort to discover what it was of significance and value that was poured into the mind of the sixteenth century from the stream of classical humanism. The question is far too wide for hasty analysis; but, for the present purpose, one may answer briefly that a principal part of the endowment of Renaissance education was a sense of the beauty and richness of the realm of the imagination, combined with a denationalized or universalized method of exploring it. The imagination, of course, may be cultivated by materials of any kind,—by enriching the actual experiences of one’s own dooryard, or the legends which lurk in the woods and hills immediately adjacent. And no people is without the means, in its own language, of satisfying the desire for such enrichment. A special quality, however, of pleasure and of fruitful stimulus lies in the sense that there is a great primal storehouse of imaginative material, common to the minds in every place and race that have learned the way to it,—a land of beauty and wonder into which all may pass, through the narrow gateway of a single discipline. The same thing appears in the realm of religion; for example, in the specific value, apprehended by Catholics of every land, of their common attitude of looking up to Rome, and back to the ancient life of the Church of Rome, as the center and source of their faith, and of finding this symbolized in such details as the use of the Latin tongue in their liturgy. From this special point of view (no matter what the more important merits of Protestantism), how inadequate seems the merely individual or local devotion of some modern sect, building its religious life directly, as needed, from the materials of daily experience, and perhaps expressing them in colloquial vernacular! What Rome is, then, to the Catholic, in the field of faith, Rome and Athens were to the cultivated man of the Renaissance in the field of the imagination,—and also, for that matter, in the field of thought, for the substance of their intellectual as well as their imaginative life had the same source. The richness and unity of this common experience, enjoyed by those trained in the narrow but extraordinary fruitful system of education thus developed, are values for which we of the twentieth century have found no comparable substitute, though we have sought it carefully and with tears. It may be added that the imaginative materials of Renaissance culture combined what we nowadays try to distinguish (in two of the most troublesome cant phrases of criticism ever invented) as the classical and the romantic elements of literary pleasure. Ancient story provided riches, beyond the dreams of avarice, of that compound of beauty, wonder, and emotional stimulus that we call romance; at the same time it was “classic” in its authoritative, established form, and its sense of “joy in widest commonalty spread” as distinguished from merely individual thrills.

All this, it may be said, is true enough of the more learned writers of the Renaissance, but has little bearing on the aspects of the sixteenth century which are pertinent to the study of Shakespeare. Let us see. In the most popular of Shakespeare’s comedies there is a little love scene, set in a garden by moonlight, between a very ordinary young Venetian gentleman and a pretty Jewess. Here are ? few lines of their talk:

Lorenzo. In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.

Jessica. In such a night
Medea gathered the enchanted herbs
That did renew old Æson.

That is enough, in itself, to exemplify what has been said about the union of classic and romantic elements of pleasure. For the special atmosphere of moonlight and young love which Shakespeare desired to create, he drew upon the materials of ancient story akin to his purpose, and trusted to their familiarity, and the consequently instantaneous reaction of his hearers, to accomplish his end. The whole course of Renaissance culture was back of him, and he knew it, even if as linguist he boasted “small Latin and less Greek.” Even on the linguistic side, it is worth recalling that he could be assured that a good part of any of his popular audiences would be able to follow bits of Latin phrasing occasionally introduced into the plays. And, apart from all knowledge of the original language, there were the materials of culture which began to be naturalized in the English tongue, to meet the demands of the age. Of these, two exemplars are of supreme importance, for what they contributed to Elizabethan wealth in the respective fields of ancient story and ancient history: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, englished by Arthur Golding in Shakespeare’s infancy in a form which became one of the most popular books of the age, and Plutarch’s Lives, translated by Sir Thomas North from a French version in 1579, an English classic even to the present day.

But Renaissance culture meant, of course, something more than the transmission of the materials of Greek and Roman art and learning. In particular, for England, it meant a strong infusion of whatever Italy had to contribute to the age. For sculpture and painting, which we think of first in connection with sixteenth-century Italy, the influence in England was comparatively slight; for the lesser arts, such as those of dress and social manners, it was very great. Here one remembers Della Casa’s Galatea, englished in 1576 with the sub-title “A treatise of the manners and behaviours it behooveth a man to use and eschew in his familiar conversation”; or, if it be a question of manners in a deeper sense and for higher walks of life, Castiglione’s immortal work on The Courtier (Il Cortegiano), translated in 1561 by Thomas Hoby, by whom it was most justly declared to be “very necessary and profitable for young gentlemen and gentlewomen abiding in court, palace, or place.” In literature the Italian material meant so much that for whole segments of poetry and imaginative prose of the sixteenth century one might almost say the language used is a superficial accident: Italian, French, or English, Italy is the home of its soul. These, perhaps, may be thought the chief landmarks: Sannazaro’s pastoral romance of Arcadia, which appeared in 1504; Baptista Mantuan’s satiric pastorals, or eclogues, from about the same time; Ariosto’s romantic epic, the Orlando, from 1516; Bandello’s novelli, from 1554; Giraldo Cinthio’s Hundred Tales (Hecatommithi), 1565; Tasso’s pastoral masque, the Aminta, 1573, and his Jerusalem Delivered, 1581. All these were both translated (wholly or partially) and imitated by the Elizabethans, becoming not merely importations but actual grafts into the stock of the native literature. Aside from English versions of outstanding works like these, we should remember William Painter’s great collection of Italian stories called The Palace of Pleasure, published in 1566 and in many later editions, to which the plots of more than forty Elizabethan plays are traceable, and the numerous volumes of madrigals and other lyrics from the Italian, beginning with Yonge’s Musica Transalpina in 1588, by means of which the stream of continental lyric flowed the more readily into that of Britain. Nor can we separate—as has already been hinted—the French stream from the Italian. The Petrarchans of France, notably Marot, Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Desportes, whose poetic collections all appeared between 1539 and 1573, transmitted to England many of the forms and methods of Italian lyric, particularly the sonnet, with results indistinguishable from those coming from Italy more directly.

The poets of both tongues had been studied on their own soil by Sir Thomas Wyatt, diplomatist and humanist of the court of Henry the Eighth, and his imitations of their work were promptly recognized by his countrymen as a new force in the refinement of English letters according to Renaissance standards. Now it happened that Wyatt’s verse, though he died in 1542, remained unpublished until, seven years before Shakespeare’s birth, the publisher Tottel brought out a good part of it in his far-famed collection of Songs and Sonnets, together with poems by Wyatt’s follower the Earl of Surrey. From this date, 1557, and this anthology,—unappealing as a great part of it now appears,—we commonly date the flowering of Renaissance lyric in England, and the growing sense that the English tongue was capable of such beauties as only the continental poets had thus far achieved. Thus George Put-tenham, twenty-two years later, wrote in a well-known passage: “In the latter end of [Henry the Eighth’s] reign sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry Earl of Surrey were the two chieftains, who, having traveled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style.”¹ In Shakespeare’s boyhood Wyatt’s and Surrey’s poems, with the others in Tottel’s Miscellany, were still being reprinted in numerous editions; and it is not improbable that the familiar volume is that to which Master Slender pays tribute, in the first scene of the Merry Wives of Windsor: “I had rather than forty shillings I had my book of Songs and Sonnets here.” It was among these poems of Wyatt’s and Surrey’s that the sonnet first appeared in English poetry. For more than twenty years after it was thus made familiar, the form nevertheless languished with little or no growth on British soil; then, beginning with the posthumous publication of Sidney’s sonnets in 1591, it burst into sudden and splendid bloom. During the last decade of the century every English poet, great and small, appears to have become a sonneteer, studying now the Italian models, now the French, now the beautiful exemplars of Sidney himself. And in the same era there began to appear treatises on the making of verse, giving rules for the exotic forms, specimens of experimentation in new metres, and stimulus for both scholars and gentlemen to further the expanding glory of English poetry. It was at this time that Philip Sidney was arguing, in his Apology for Poetry, that “for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the mind, which is the end of speech,” the English tongue “hath it equally with any other tongue in the world.”

Art prose always lags behind poetry in development, but that too now had its chance. Here the Spanish Renaissance contributed more than in the field of verse, and such works as Guevara’s Golden Epistles, translated in 1574, joined with the influence of The Courtier and other Italian classics to show that the same loving care which the poets lavished on their art might be bestowed upon even such relatively humble forms of composition as letter and dialogue. In the same year in which Spenser stimulated the practice of pastoral verse with his Shepherd’s Calendar, 1579, John Lyly made the first notable experiment in artistic prose, in Euphuës, the Anatomy of Wit, and gave the word “euphuism” to the language. Sad, indeed, is the fate which has made a Euphuist—who ought, by authority of both etymology and Matthew Arnold, to be a wholly well-fashioned man, one “who tends toward sweetness and light”—to mean instead a person whose language is characterized by over-elaborateness and affectation; all because Lyly, in presenting his ideal Euphuës to England, sought to beautify his native prose by devices akin to the most daring and dangerous verbal conceits of the poets. In the stricter sense, this euphuistic style was a game of skill in phrasing which had a happily brief though important vogue (for a time, Edward Blount the publisher tells us, “that beauty in court which could not parley euphuism was as little regarded as she which now there speaks not French”); in its larger significance, it meant the new possibilities of an elegant prose which, in saner and more liberal form, appeared in Sidney’s Arcadia, in Lodge’s Rosalind, and, best of all, in the lightly scattered, flashing jewels of dialogue in Much Ado and As You Like It.

Not only the modes and manners of the continental Renaissance were brought to bear upon English literature at this time, but—as was inevitable—something also of its ideas. Its critical principles, for signs of which one would naturally look first, drifted in, of course, with all the other materials of the new culture; but their actual fruitage in English criticism was slight. English men of letters in almost every period have been far more interested in creating than in explaining how and why, and this was doubly true of the Elizabethans. Only Sidney’s Defence of Poetry remains as a single flawless specimen of Renaissance criticism in Britain. The ideas which underlay the romance and the poetry of the Italians excited more interest; they were likely, however, to be treated with imperfect seriousness,—to be played with, utilized for romantic color, even satirized and condemned, rather than adopted into English thought. Of such ideas those concerned with the doctrine of love are perhaps most important. The problem of love, as a phenomenon both of the sensuous and of the supersensuous life, is one which every generation meets afresh, and attempts to solve in its own way. In the medieval p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter I. The Age
• Chapter II. Life and Works
• Chapter III. The Poems
• Chapter IV. The Chronicle-Histories
• Chapter V. The Comedies
• Chapter VI. The Tragedies
• Chapter VII. The Tragi-Comedies
• Chapter VIII. Shakespeare
• Bibliography
• Index