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_ There is even an advantage in having a book on Shakespear with the
Shakespearian irony left out of account. I do not say that the
missing chapter should not be added in the next edition: the hiatus
is too great: it leaves the reader too uneasy before this touching
picture of a writhing worm substituted for the invulnerable giant.
But it is none the less probable that in no other way could Mr Harris
have got at his man as he has. For, after all, what is the secret of
the hopeless failure of the academic Bardolaters to give us a credible
or even interesting Shakespear, and the easy triumph of Mr Harris in
giving us both? Simply that Mr Harris has assumed that he was dealing
with a man, whilst the others have assumed that they were writing
about a god, and have therefore rejected every consideration of fact,
tradition, or interpretation, that pointed to any human imperfection
in their hero. They thus leave themselves with so little material
that they are forced to begin by saying that we know very little about
Shakespear. As a matter of fact, with the plays and sonnets in our
hands, we know much more about Shakespear than we know about Dickens
or Thackeray: the only difficulty is that we deliberately suppress it
because it proves that Shakespear was not only very unlike the
conception of a god current in Clapham, but was not, according to the
same reckoning, even a respectable man. The academic view starts with
a Shakespear who was not scurrilous; therefore the verses about "lousy
Lucy" cannot have been written by him, and the cognate passages in the
plays are either strokes of character-drawing or gags interpolated by
the actors. This ideal Shakespear was too well behaved to get drunk;
therefore the tradition that his death was hastened by a drinking bout
with Jonson and Drayton must be rejected, and the remorse of Cassio
treated as a thing observed, not experienced: nay, the disgust of
Hamlet at the drinking customs of Denmark is taken to establish
Shakespear as the superior of Alexander in self-control, and the
greatest of teetotallers.
Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then
rejecting all the materials that do not fit him, with the ridiculous
result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all
(with your waste-paper basket full of them), ends in leaving
Shakespear with a much worse character than he deserves. For though
it does not greatly matter whether he wrote the lousy Lucy lines or
not, and does not really matter at all whether he got drunk when he
made a night of it with Jonson and Drayton, the sonnets raise an
unpleasant question which does matter a good deal; and the refusal of
the academic Bardolaters to discuss or even mention this question has
had the effect of producing a silent verdict against Shakespear. Mr
Harris tackles the question openly, and has no difficulty whatever in
convincing us that Shakespear was a man of normal constitution
sexually, and was not the victim of that most cruel and pitiable of
all the freaks of nature: the freak which transposes the normal aim
of the affections. Silence on this point means condemnation; and the
condemnation has been general throughout the present generation,
though it only needed Mr Harris's fearless handling of the matter to
sweep away what is nothing but a morbid and very disagreeable modern
fashion. There is always some stock accusation brought against
eminent persons. When I was a boy every well-known man was accused of
beating his wife. Later on, for some unexplained reason, he was
accused of psychopathic derangement. And this fashion is
retrospective. The cases of Shakespear and Michel Angelo are cited as
proving that every genius of the first magnitude was a sufferer; and
both here and in Germany there are circles in which such derangement
is grotesquely reverenced as part of the stigmata of heroic powers.
All of which is gross nonsense. Unfortunately, in Shakespear's case,
prudery, which cannot prevent the accusation from being whispered,
does prevent the refutation from being shouted. Mr Harris, the
deep-voiced, refuses to be silenced. He dismisses with proper
contempt the stupidity which places an outrageous construction on
Shakespear's apologies in the sonnets for neglecting that "perfect
ceremony" of love which consists in returning calls and making
protestations and giving presents and paying the trumpery attentions
which men of genius always refuse to bother about, and to which touchy
people who have no genius attach so much importance. No leader who
had not been tampered with by the psychopathic monomaniacs could ever
put any construction but the obvious and innocent one on these
passages. But the general vocabulary of the sonnets to Pembroke (or
whoever "Mr W. H." really was) is so overcharged according to modern
ideas that a reply on the general case is necessary. _
Read next: PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS: Shakespear's alleged Sycophancy and Perversion
Read previous: PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS: Jupiter and Semele
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