The English Poetic Mind

Charles Williams

• Publisher: White Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781528767378
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

'The English Poetic Mind' (1932) is Williams' discussion of the source of the poetic impulse, creativity and drive behind three prominent English poets: Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth. The text is reflective of Williams' imaginative and critical approach to literature and his appreciation of poetry and verse. Charles Williams (1886-1945) was a British theologian, playwright, novelist and poet. As a member of the 'Inklings' literary group at Oxford, his work supported a strong sense of narrative. For Williams, spiritual exchanges were an undercurrent to life, and his Christian fantasy writing, such as 'Descent into Hell' (1937), earned him many followers. This classic work is now being republished in a new modern edition with a specially commissioned introductory biography.

III

THE CYCLE OF SHAKESPEARE

I

SHAKESPEARE has said very little about the function of a poet or about the life of genius. But the volume of the plays is in itself, if not an exposition of the one, at least an example of the other. The authority of a major scholar and of a major poet, Sir Edmund Chambers and Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, is sufficient to justify lesser minds in accepting that volume, roughly, as canonical: certainly for the purpose for which it will be used here.

That purpose is to consider the changes in Shakespeare’s way of dealing with things in his poetry. It involves no thesis about his nature except that he was a poet, nor about his life except that he made a (prosperous) living by writing plays. He may have been a neurotic or a philosopher, a commercial magnate or a spiritual ascetic, a tender friend or a Christian Shylock. Or all at once. He may even have been Bacon, or Oxford, or Burleigh, or Queen Elizabeth, or Archbishop Whitgift—we are concerned only with the poetry, by whomsoever it was written. Interestingly enough, this poetry is to be found in the poetry, not in anything else.¹

Every poet, like every man, sets out to enjoy himself. The English Muse, defeated so many times in this early occupation with ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’, seems to renew her search with undiminished ardour at every opportunity. Even Milton was not born old; even Mr. Housman has written happy lyrics. Hardy certainly—but some of even Hardy’s early inventions had a certain grotesquerie about them, as if his genius were playing a little with the bones of men. No one can take ‘thy worm shall be my worm, love’ quite seriously. It is a wan, a very romantic, hope; but it is a hope, and a deliberate enjoyment. Of this early delight Shakespeare had his full share. The diction of the plays is part of it: consider the dance of words, the puns and the rhymes, for instance in the antiphon between Luciana and Antipholus in the Comedy of Errors.

And more even than in the diction this enjoyment is felt in the manner of emotional apprehension. The bodies in Titus Andronicus, the proclaimed villainy of Richard III, the reckless and unconvincing pardon of Proteus in Two Gentlemen, are all examples of Shakespeare ‘having a good time’. Perhaps Romeo and Juliet contains the best example of all; hardly anywhere else has death, while remaining sad, been made more purely luxurious than in Romeo’s great speech, and this speech is in accord with the play. There is no malice and no injustice, except by chance. Quarrels do break out; letters do go wrong; appointments are missed; and death happens. What can one do about it? Nothing but enjoy.

In each of the earlier romantic comedies there is, speaking generally, a broad division—there is the poetic part and the comic part. These are sometimes held together by the plot; sometimes they are separate. Launce and Speed in the Two Gentlemen have nothing to do with the plot, the Dromios in the Comedy of Errors are closer; in Love’s Labour’s Lost the comic characters are brought under the same law without any serious connexion with the others; in the Midsummer-Night’s Dream the two groups are more closely intertwined. The Taming of the Shrew is all comic and little romantic management. But comic or romantic, the same characteristics mark each play and each division in the play—there is dance-music in them all, now verbal, now personal: they are willing to pretend—from the two pairs of twins in the Comedy of Errors to the three caskets and the bond in the Merchant of Venice. In the plays of 1592–4 we have, on the one hand, the gorgeous pretence of melodrama: the murders in Richard III and the murders in Andronicus are almost the height of a young man enjoying bloody violence for the sake of bloody violence; just as, on the other hand, in the Errors and in the Shrew a riotous good-tempered violence is called in to resolve the dance of misunderstanding and opposition. Daggers or sticks are the solvers of all crises. Something of this comic dance Shakespeare retained till very late: if the gravediggers in Hamlet could ever be persuaded to abandon their realism and be quicker at their talk than they are at their job, if they could play their play as if they were a comic chorus rather than navvies from London streets, we might be more amused at them.

But the ‘hero’ also appears thus early. Richard III depends on the personal effectiveness of Richard; the Shrew on the personal effectiveness of Petruchio. Action, tyrannical action (if we may abolish morality for a moment), broad tyrannical action, is their occupation and characteristic: from this seed the discoveries of Shakespeare sprang. His genius seems to say, almost in so many words, that when it did not choose to

prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

[It was] determinèd to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Even Richard III—Renaissance prince as he was—probably never actually sang himself so responsively into the throne.

The riotous battles of those early plays are intellectualized in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The young laughter of Shakespeare’s poetry there becomes a part of the poetry; the verse indulges itself with a romantic idea and with romantic laughter at the romantic idea. The comic side is intellectualized also; everything is to be kept in the same courtly key—no doubt because it was for a courtly entertainment. But that is only the motive and opportunity, not the act and the poetry. Battle had been noisy; it is now exquisite. But it still exists, between the King and his courtiers and the Princess and her ladies; between the individual lovers; between Armado and Costard; between culture and pedantry; between the men’s intentions and their actions; between—how lightly! how joyously! but still between—intention and necessity. There was to be another play of opposition, made up of oppositions, another play of love’s labour, long afterwards, but that would be called not, as this might be, Berowne and Rosaline but Antony and Cleopatra. It was not then to be the exquisiteness of the pattern which caused delight, nor was death to be introduced far off merely to end a play. And in some sense—again ever so lightly—Berowne’s line breathes a coming change.

‘Worthies, away! the scene begins to cloud.’ It is not only in the lovely seriousness of the conclusion; it is more clearly in the accompanying plays—in Romeo and Juliet, in Richard II, in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream that the cloud appears—different in all, yet something the same in all. In Romeo its name is accident; in Richard II, Bolingbroke; in the Dream, Puck or Oberon or, perhaps even more exactly, ‘a little western flower’. It cannot be called Fate, but it is something incalculable and sometimes destructive. It is not enough to make the poetry seriously attend to it; or rather—at least, in the two romantic plays—it only offers poetry an opportunity of dancing to new measures, of luxuriating in grief, of turning fairies into charming copies of men and women.¹

Yet poetry is still in the stage that Wordsworth described when he spoke of ‘unknown modes of being’. Romeo’s great speech is precisely that. Shakespeare is thoroughly enjoying himself in luxurious grief. There is no analysis of many emotions; it is all magniloquence and brave rhetoric of sorrow. We know nothing more about Romeo at the end than at the beginning, nor do we want. It is perfect—for Romeo. With it may be compared the chorus that laments in the Capulets’ house over Juliet; in the midst of which Shakespeare does not in the least mind having his little bit of fun with the Nurse—‘Death is my son-in-law; Death is my heir’, says Capulet, and the Nurse almost parodies him, and then Paris elegantly paraphrases her, and then Capulet comes back. It is, no doubt, partly the fashion of speech and behaviour of the time. Capulet might, in Elizabethan London, have said just that: ‘Death is my son-in-law; Death is my heir’. But Shakespeare did not risk having any one like the Nurse about when he came to Constance—

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

This is the banishment of Wordsworth’s widow: the coming of ‘a grave unto a soul’. Much more like it in Romeo is Mercutio’s dying epigram, more incidental than Romeo’s but more directly effective—‘No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.’ It is a sharper prophecy of the realism that was to come than ‘insubstantial death is amorous’. Or rather the two speeches are two sides of a single thing; the greater poetry was peeping out here and there through chinks and crevices, lines and phrases. When it fully emerged all the irony and truth of ‘ ’twill serve’ were found to be one with ‘the palace of dim night’. Romeo’s speech and state of being is ‘a palace of dim night’, a palace afterwards measured by phrases and meanings as exact as ‘deep as a well . . . wide as a church door’.

But this is an appearance of material tragedy; there exists also in the play—I think the first—appearance of spiritual evil, in the unexpected and sudden apostasy of the Nurse, who has her moment and becomes a premonition of horror. Juliet has defied her father and mother, refusing to marry Paris, in a strenuous devotion to romantic love. When they go, she turns to the Nurse with an exquisite phrase—

What sayst thou? hast thou not a word of joy?

Some comfort, Nurse?

The ‘word of joy’ which the Nurse offers is advice to marry Paris—‘Romeo’s a dishclout to him’, and

is dead; or ’twere as good he were,

As living here, and you no use of him.

‘The use of him’ that Juliet still has, the intense imagination and sense of him that fills her, is understood at once, not merely now to be, but through all the play to have been, entirely beyond the Nurse’s apprehension. Her good humour, her harmless sensuality, is understood at once to be, in her case, a greedy and acquiescent sensuality—the enemy, not the ally, of ‘true love’s passion’. Love is to her but a use of him, a convenience, a pleasure. It is with the indignation of poetry itself that Juliet breathes after her (her back, as she hobbles away, turned on that high imagination which Juliet’s love possesses), breathes after the denial of poetry itself—

Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!

It is not merely that the Nurse is a realist; Falstaff is a realist. But if Falstaff had ever wanted to give similar advice, he would have done it by defeating imagination by imagination; he would have cast out one spirit by another. The Nurse is thinking of casting out spirit by flesh.

To mention Falstaff is to enter on another stage of Shakespeare’s imagination. But before Falstaff there is in King John a figure who possesses a unity which was afterwards to be divided, the significant figure of the Bastard. The poetry which the Bastard speaks is of various kinds marvellously harmonized. He is ironical and realistic, passionate and faithful, patriotic and pitiful. Even Henry V does not greatly improve on his warlike rhetoric; even Kent in Lear hardly more definitely, though perhaps more profoundly, conveys a sense of solitary devotion to his sovereign; even Falstaff or Hamlet need not have been ashamed of the sense of the speech on Commodity, though their style might have been more intense; even in Macbeth there is hardly a more real, though ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• About the Author
• Preface
• Contents
• I. A Note on Great Poetry
• II. ‘The Growth of a Poet’s Mind’
• III. The Cycle of Shakespeare
• IV. Milton
• V. Wordsworth
• VI. The Crisis in Lesser Poets
• VII. Conclusion
• Appendix