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_ I have rejected Mr Harris's view that Shakespear died broken-hearted
of "the pangs of love despised." I have given my reasons for
believing that Shakespear died game, and indeed in a state of levity
which would have been considered unbecoming in a bishop. But Mr
Harris's evidence does prove that Shakespear had a grievance and a
very serious one. He might have been jilted by ten dark ladies and
been none the worse for it; but his treatment by the British Public
was another matter. The idolatry which exasperated Ben Jonson was by
no means a popular movement; and, like all such idolatries, it was
excited by the magic of Shakespear's art rather than by his views.
He was launched on his career as a successful playwright by the Henry
VI trilogy, a work of no originality, depth, or subtlety except the
originality, depth, and subtlety of the feelings and fancies of the
common people. But Shakespear was not satisfied with this. What is
the use of being Shakespear if you are not allowed to express any
notions but those of Autolycus? Shakespear did not see the world as
Autolycus did: he saw it, if not exactly as Ibsen did (for it was not
quite the same world), at least with much of Ibsen's power of
penetrating its illusions and idolatries, and with all Swift's horror
of its cruelty and uncleanliness.
Now it happens to some men with these powers that they are forced to
impose their fullest exercise on the world because they cannot produce
popular work. Take Wagner and Ibsen for instance! Their earlier
works are no doubt much cheaper than their later ones; still, they
were not popular when they were written. The alternative of doing
popular work was never really open to them: had they stooped they
would have picked up less than they snatched from above the people's
heads. But Handel and Shakespear were not held to their best in this
way. They could turn out anything they were asked for, and even heap
up the measure. They reviled the British Public, and never forgave it
for ignoring their best work and admiring their splendid commonplaces;
but they produced the commonplaces all the same, and made them sound
magnificent by mere brute faculty for their art. When Shakespear was
forced to write popular plays to save his theatre from ruin, he did it
mutinously, calling the plays "As _You_ Like It," and "Much Ado About
Nothing." All the same, he did it so well that to this day these two
genial vulgarities are the main Shakespearian stock-in-trade of our
theatres. Later on Burbage's power and popularity as an actor enabled
Shakespear to free himself from the tyranny of the box office, and to
express himself more freely in plays consisting largely of monologue
to be spoken by a great actor from whom the public would stand a good
deal. The history of Shakespear's tragedies has thus been the history
of a long line of famous actors, from Burbage and Betterton to Forbes
Robertson; and the man of whom we are told that "when he would have
said that Richard died, and cried A horse! A horse! he Burbage cried"
was the father of nine generations of Shakespearian playgoers, all
speaking of Garrick's Richard, and Kean's Othello, and Irving's
Shylock, and Forbes Robertson's Hamlet without knowing or caring how
much these had to do with Shakespear's Richard and Othello and so
forth. And the plays which were written without great and predominant
parts, such as Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, and
Measure for Measure, have dropped on our stage as dead as the second
part of Goethe's Faust or Ibsen's Emperor or Galilean.
Here, then, Shakespear had a real grievance; and though it is a
sentimental exaggeration to describe him as a broken-hearted man in
the face of the passages of reckless jollity and serenely happy poetry
in his latest plays, yet the discovery that his most serious work
could reach success only when carried on the back of a very
fascinating actor who was enormously overcharging his part, and that
the serious plays which did not contain parts big enough to hold the
overcharge were left on the shelf, amply accounts for the evident fact
that Shakespear did not end his life in a glow of enthusiastic
satisfaction with mankind and with the theatre, which is all that Mr
Harris can allege in support of his broken-heart theory. But even if
Shakespear had had no failures, it was not possible for a man of his
powers to observe the political and moral conduct of his
contemporaries without perceiving that they were incapable of dealing
with the problems raised by their own civilization, and that their
attempts to carry out the codes of law and to practise the religions
offered to them by great prophets and law-givers were and still are so
foolish that we now call for The Superman, virtually a new species, to
rescue the world from mismanagement. This is the real sorrow of great
men; and in the face of it the notion that when a great man speaks
bitterly or looks melancholy he must be troubled by a disappointment
in love seems to me sentimental trifling.
If I have carried the reader with me thus far, he will find that
trivial as this little play of mine is, its sketch of Shakespear is
more complete than its levity suggests. Alas! its appeal for a
National Theatre as a monument to Shakespear failed to touch the very
stupid people who cannot see that a National Theatre is worth having
for the sake of the National Soul. I had unfortunately represented
Shakespear as treasuring and using (as I do myself) the jewels of
unconsciously musical speech which common people utter and throw away
every day; and this was taken as a disparagement of Shakespear's
"originality." Why was I born with such contemporaries? Why is
Shakespear made ridiculous by such a posterity?
_The Dark Lady of The Sonnets was first performed at the Haymarket
Theatre, on the afternoon of Thursday, the 24th November 1910, by Mona
Limerick as the Dark Lady, Suzanne Sheldon as Queen Elizabeth,
Granville Barker as Shakespear, and Hugh Tabberer as the Warder._ _
Read next: PLAY (Begins): The Dark Lady of the Sonnets
Read previous: PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS: Shakespear and Democracy
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