Classic Poem

Such phrases as 'Shakespeare the man' or 'Shakespeare's personality'
are, no doubt, open to objection. They seem to suggest that, if we could
subtract from Shakespeare the mind that produced his works, the residue
would be the man himself; and that his mind was some pure impersonal
essence unaffected by the accidents of physique, temperament, and
character. If this were so, one could but echo Tennyson's thanksgiving
that we know so little of Shakespeare. But as it is assuredly not so,
and as 'Shakespeare the man' really means the one indivisible
Shakespeare, regarded for the time from a particular point of view, the
natural desire to know whatever can be known of him is not to be
repressed merely because there are people so foolish as to be careless
about his works and yet curious about his private life. For my own part
I confess that, though I should care nothing about the man if he had not
written the works, yet, since we possess them, I would rather see and
hear him for five minutes in his proper person than discover a new one.
And though we may be content to die without knowing his income or even
the surname of Mr. W. H., we cannot so easily resign the wish to find
the man in his writings, and to form some idea of the disposition, the
likes and dislikes, the character and the attitude towards life, of the
human being who seems to us to have understood best our common human
nature.

The answer of course will be that our biographical knowledge of
Shakespeare is so small, and his writings are so completely dramatic,
that this wish, however natural, is idle. But I cannot think so.
Doubtless, in trying to form an idea of Shakespeare, we soon reach the
limits of reasonable certainty; and it is also true that the idea we can
form without exceeding them is far from being as individual as we could
desire. But it is more distinct than is often supposed, and it is
reasonably certain; and although we can add to its distinctness only by
more or less probable conjectures, they are not mere guesses, they
really have probability in various degrees. On this whole subject there
is a tendency at the present time to an extreme scepticism, which
appears to me to be justified neither by the circumstances of the
particular case nor by our knowledge of human nature in general.

This scepticism is due in part to the interest excited by Mr. Lee's
discussion of the Sonnets in his Life of Shakespeare, and to the
importance rightly attached to that discussion. The Sonnets are lyrical
poems of friendship and love. In them the poet ostensibly speaks in his
own person and expresses his own feelings. Many critics, no doubt, had
denied that he really did so; but they had not Mr. Lee's knowledge, nor
had they examined the matter so narrowly as he; and therefore they had
not much weakened the general belief that the Sonnets, however
conventional or exaggerated their language may sometimes be, do tell us
a good deal about their author. Mr. Lee, however, showed far more fully
than any previous writer that many of the themes, many even of the
ideas, of these poems are commonplaces of Renaissance sonnet-writing;
and he came to the conclusion that in the Sonnets Shakespeare
'unlocked,' not 'his heart,' but a very different kind of armoury, and
that the sole biographical inference deducible from them is that 'at one
time in his career Shakespeare disdained no weapon of flattery in an
endeavour to monopolise the bountiful patronage of a young man of rank.'
Now, if that inference is correct, it certainly tells us something about
Shakespeare the man; but it also forbids us to take seriously what the
Sonnets profess to tell us of his passionate affection, with its hopes
and fears, its pain and joy; of his pride and his humility, his
self-reproach and self-defence, his weariness of life and his
consciousness of immortal genius. And as, according to Mr. Lee's
statement, the Sonnets alone of Shakespeare's works 'can be held to
throw any illumination on a personal trait,' it seems to follow that, so
far as the works are concerned (for Mr. Lee is not specially sceptical
as to the external testimony), the only idea we can form of the man is
contained in that single inference.

Now, I venture to surmise that Mr. Lee's words go rather beyond his
meaning. But that is not our business here, nor could a brief discussion
do justice to a theory to which those who disagree with it are still
greatly indebted. What I wish to deny is the presupposition which seems
to be frequently accepted as an obvious truth. Even if Mr. Lee's view of
the Sonnets were indisputably correct, nay, if even, to go much further,
the persons and the story in the Sonnets were as purely fictitious as
those of Twelfth Night, they might and would still tell us something
of the personality of their author. For however free a poet may be from
the emotions which he simulates, and however little involved in the
conditions which he imagines, he cannot (unless he is a mere copyist)
write a hundred and fifty lyrics expressive of those simulated emotions
without disclosing something of himself, something of the way in which
he in particular would feel and behave under the imagined conditions.
And the same thing holds in principle of the dramas. Is it really
conceivable that a man can write some five and thirty dramas, and
portray in them an enormous amount and variety of human nature, without
betraying anything whatever of his own disposition and preferences? I do
not believe that he could do this, even if he deliberately set himself
to the task. The only question is how much of himself he would betray.

One is entitled to say this, I think, on general grounds; but we may
appeal further to specific experience. Of many poets and novelists we
know a good deal from external sources. And in these cases we find that
the man so known to us appears also in his works, and that these by
themselves would have left on us a personal impression which, though
imperfect and perhaps in this or that point even false, would have been
broadly true. Of course this holds of some writers much more fully than
of others; but, except where the work is very scanty in amount, it seems
to hold in some degree of all. If so, there is an antecedent
probability that it will apply to Shakespeare too. After all, he was
human. We may exclaim in our astonishment that he was as universal and
impartial as nature herself; but this is the language of religious
rapture. If we assume that he was six times as universal as Sir Walter
Scott, which is praise enough for a mortal, we may hope to form an idea
of him from his plays only six times as dim as the idea of Scott that we
should derive from the Waverley Novels.

And this is not all. As a matter of fact, the great majority of
Shakespeare's readers--lovers of poetry untroubled by theories and
questions--do form from the plays some idea of the man. Knowingly or
not, they possess such an idea; and up to a certain point the idea is
the same. Ask such a man whether he thinks Shakespeare was at all like
Shelley, or Wordsworth, or Milton, and it will not occur to him to
answer 'I have not the faintest notion'; he will answer unhesitatingly
No. Ask him whether he supposes that Shakespeare was at all like
Fielding or Scott, and he will probably be found to imagine that, while
differing greatly from both, he did belong to the same type or class.
And such answers unquestionably imply an idea which, however deficient
in detail, is definite.

Again, to go a little further in the same direction, take this fact.
After I had put together my notes for the present lecture, I re-read
Bagehot's essay on Shakespeare the Man, and I read a book by Goldwin
Smith and an essay by Leslie Stephen (who, I found, had anticipated a
good deal that I meant to say). These three writers, with all their
variety, have still substantially the same idea of Shakespeare; and it
is the idea of the competent 'general reader' more fully developed. Nor
is the value of their agreement in the least diminished by the fact that
they make no claim to be Shakespeare scholars. They show themselves much
abler than most scholars, and if they lack the scholar's knowledge they
are free from his defects. When they wrote their essays they had not
wearied themselves with rival hypotheses, or pored over minutiae until
they lost the broad and deep impressions which vivid reading leaves.
Ultra-scepticism in this matter does not arise merely or mainly from the
humility which every man of sense must feel as he creeps to and fro in
Shakespeare's prodigious mind. It belongs either to the clever faddist
who can see nothing straight, or it proceeds from those dangers and
infirmities which the expert in any subject knows too well.

The remarks I am going to make can have an interest only for those who
share the position I have tried to indicate; who believe that the most
dramatic of writers must reveal in his writings something of himself,
but who recognise that in Shakespeare's case we can expect a reasonable
certainty only within narrow limits, while beyond them we have to trust
to impressions, the value of which must depend on familiarity with his
writings, on freedom from prejudice and the desire to reach any
particular result, and on the amount of perception we may happen to
possess. I offer my own impressions, insecure and utterly unprovable as
I know them to be, simply because those of other readers have an
interest for me; and I offer them for the most part without argument,
because even where argument might be useful it requires more time than a
lecture can afford. For the same reason I shall assume, without
attempting to define it further, and without dilating on its
implications, the truth of that general feeling about Shakespeare and
Fielding and Scott.

But, before we come to impressions at all, we must look at the scanty
store of external evidence: for we may lay down at once the canon that
impressions derived from the works must supplement and not contradict
this evidence, so far as it appears trustworthy. It is scanty, but it
yields a decided outline.

This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut:

--so Jonson writes of the portrait in the Folio, and the same adjective
'gentle' is used elsewhere of Shakespeare. It had not in Elizabethan
English so confined a meaning as it has now; but it meant something, and
I do not remember that their contemporaries called Marlowe or Jonson or
Marston 'gentle.' Next, in the earliest extant reference that we have to
Shakespeare, the writer says that he himself has seen his 'demeanour' to
be 'civil.'It is not saying much; but it is not the first remark an
acquaintance would probably have made about Ben Jonson or Samuel
Johnson. The same witness adds about Shakespeare that 'divers of worship
have reported his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty.'
'Honesty' and 'honest' in an Elizabethan passage like this mean more
than they would now; they answer rather to our 'honourable' or 'honour.'
Lastly we have the witness borne by Jonson in the words: 'I loved the
man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He
was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature.' With this notable
phrase, to which I shall have to return, we come to an end of the
testimony of eye-witnesses to Shakespeare the Man (for we have nothing
to do with references to the mere actor or author). It is scanty, and
insufficient to discriminate him from other persons who were gentle,
civil, upright in their dealings, honourable, open, and free: but I
submit that there have been not a few writers to whom all these
qualities could not be truly ascribed, and that the testimony therefore
does tell us something definite. To which must be added that we have
absolutely no evidence which conflicts with it. Whatever Greene in his
jealous embitterment might have said would carry little weight, but in
fact, apart from general abuse of actors, he only says that the upstart
had an over-weening opinion of his own capacities.

There remain certain traditions and certain facts; and without
discussing them I will mention what seems to me to have a more or less
probable significance. Stratford stories of drinking bouts may go for
nothing, but not the consensus of tradition to the effect that
Shakespeare was a pleasant and convivial person, 'very good company, and
of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit.'That after his retirement
to Stratford he spent at the rate of £1000 a year is incredible, but
that he spent freely seems likely enough. The tradition that as a young
man he got into trouble with Sir Thomas Lucy for deer-stealing (which
would probably be an escapade rather than an essay in serious poaching)
is supported by his unsavoury jest about the 'luces' in Sir Robert
Shallow's coat. The more general statement that in youth he was wild
does not sound improbable; and, obscure as the matter is, I cannot
regard as comfortable the little we know of the circumstances of his
very early marriage. A contemporary story of an amorous adventure in
London may well be pure invention, but we have no reason to reject it
peremptorily as we should any similar gossip about Milton. Lastly,
certain inferences may safely be drawn from the facts that, once
securely started in London, Shakespeare soon began to prosper, and
acquired, for an actor and playwright, considerable wealth; that he
bought property in his native town, and was consulted sometimes by
fellow-townsmen on matters of business; that he enforced the payment of
certain debts; and that he took the trouble to get a coat of arms. But
what cannot with any logic or any safety be inferred is that he, any
more than Scott, was impelled to write simply and solely by the desire
to make money and improve his social position; and the comparative
abundance of business records will mislead only those who are
thoughtless enough to forget that, if they buy a house or sue a debtor,
the fact will be handed down, while their kind or generous deeds may be
recorded, if at all, only in the statement that they were 'of an open
and free nature.'

That Shakespeare was a good and perhaps keen man of business, or that he
set store by a coat of arms, we could not have inferred from his
writings. But we could have judged from them that he worked hard, and
have guessed with some probability that he would rather have been a
'gentleman' than an actor. And most of the other characteristics that
appear from the external evidence would, I think, have seemed probable
from a study of the works. This should encourage us to hope that we may
be right in other impressions which we receive from them. And we may
begin with one on which the external evidence has a certain bearing.

Readers of Shakespeare, I believe, imagine him to have been not only
sweet-tempered but modest and unassuming. I do not doubt that they are
right; and, vague as the Folio portrait and the Stratford bust are, it
would be difficult to believe that their subject was an irritable,
boastful, or pushing person. But if we confine ourselves to the works,
it is not easy to give reasons for the idea that their author was modest
and unassuming; and a man is not necessarily so because he is open,
free, and very good company. Perhaps we feel that a man who was not so
would have allowed much more of himself to appear in his works than
Shakespeare does. Perhaps again we think that anything like presumption
or self-importance was incompatible with Shakespeare's sense of the
ridiculous, his sublime common-sense, and his feeling of man's
insignificance. And, lastly, it seems to us clear that the playwright
admires and likes people who are modest, unassuming, and plain; while it
may perhaps safely be said that those who lack these qualities rarely
admire them in others and not seldom despise them. But, however we may
justify our impression that Shakespeare possessed them, we certainly
receive it; and assuming it to be as correct as the similar impression
left by the Waverley Novels indubitably is, I go on to observe that the
possession of them do