The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  He is at first sight more of a psychologist than a philosopher; but again not as a theorist but, rather, as a mental photographer, catching the secret thoughts and symptomatic actions that reveal the nature of a man. However, he is no surface realist; things do not happen, people do not speak, in life as in his plays; but in the sum we feel that through these improbabilities and extravagances we are nearing the core of human instinct and thought. Shakespeare knows as well as Schopenhauer that “reason panders will”;60 he is quite Freudian in putting erotic ditties into the virgin mouth of the starved and crazed Ophelia; and he reaches beyond Freud to Dostoevski in studying Macbeth and his “worser” half.

  If we interpret philosophy not as metaphysics but as any large perspective of human affairs, as a generalized view not only of the cosmos and the mind but as well of morals, politics, history, and faith, Shakespeare is a philosopher, profounder than Bacon, as Montaigne is deeper than Descartes; it is not form that makes philosophy. He recognizes the relativity of morals: “There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,”61 and “our virtues lie in the interpretation of the time.”62 He feels the puzzle of determinism: some men are bad by heredity, “wherein they are not guilty, since nature [character] cannot choose his origin.”63 He knows the Thrasymachus theory of morals: Richard III holds that “conscience is but a word that cowards use, devised at first to keep the strong in awe; our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law”;64 Richard II judges that “they well deserve to have, that know the strong’st and surest way to get”;65 but both these Nietzscheans are brought to a sorry fate. Shakespeare notes, too, the feudal-aristocratic ethic of honor and gives it many a noble phrase, but he deprecates, as in Hotspur, its bent toward pride and violence, “defect of manners, want of [self-]government.”66 In the end his own ethic is one of Aristotelian measure and Stoic control. Measure and reason are the theme of Ulysses’ speech reproving Ajax and Achilles.67 Reason alone, however, is not enough; a stoic fiber must strengthen it:

  Men must endure

  Their going hence even as their coming hither:

  Ripeness is all …68

  Death is forgivable if it comes after we have fulfilled ourselves. Shakespeare welcomes Epicurus, too, and admits no inherent contradiction between pleasure and wisdom. He snaps at the Puritans, and makes the maid Maria tell Malvolio, “Go shake your ears”69—i.e., “You’re an ass.” He is as lenient as a pope to sins of the flesh, and puts into the mad Lear’s mouth a hilarious paean to copulation.70

  His political philosophy is conservative. He knew the sufferings of the poor and made Lear voice them feelingly. A fisherman in Pericles (1609?) notes that fishes live in the sea

  as men do a-land,—the great ones eat up the little ones. I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale; a’ plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful: such whales have I heard on o’ the land, who never leave gaping till they’ve swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.71

  Gonzalo, in The Tempest, dreams of an anarchistic communism where “all things in common nature should produce,” and there should be no laws, no magistrates, no labor, and no war;72 but Shakespeare smiles this utopia away as made impossible by the nature of man; under every constitution the whales will eat the fish.

  What was Shakespeare’s religion? Here especially the search for his philosophy is difficult. He expresses through his characters almost every faith, and with such tolerance as must have made the Puritans think him an infidel. He quotes the Bible often and reverently, and lets Hamlet, supposedly skeptical, talk believingly of God, prayer, heaven, and hell.73 Shakespeare and his children were baptized according to Anglican rites.74 Some of his lines are vigorously Protestant. King John speaks of papal pardons as “juggling witchcraft,” and quite anticipates Henry VIII:

  … no Italian priest

  Shall tithe or toll in our dominions;

  But as we, under heaven, are supreme head,

  So, under Him, that great supremacy,

  Where we do reign, we will alone uphold …

  So tell the Pope, all reverence set apart

  To him and his usurpt authority.75

  Though, of course, John goes to Canossa in the end. A later play, Henry VIII, only partly by Shakespeare, gives very favorable pictures of Henry and Cranmer and ends with a eulogy of Elizabeth—all chief architects of the Reformation in England. There are some pro-Catholic touches, as in the sympathetic portrayal of Catherine of Aragon and Friar Lawrence;76 but the latter character had come to Shakespeare as formed in the novelle of Italian Catholics.

  Some faith in God survives throughout the tragedies. Lear in his bitterness thinks that

  As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,—

  They kill us for their sport.77

  But: “The gods are just,” answers the good Edgar, “and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us”;78 and Hamlet affirms his faith in “a divinity that doth shape our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”79 Despite this struggling faith in a Providence that deals with us justly there is, in Shakespeare’s greatest plays, a spreading cloud of unbelief in life itself. Jaques sees in all the “seven ages” of man nothing but slow riping and fast rotting. We hear the same refrain in King John:

  Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale

  Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man;80

  and in Hamlet’s scorn of the world:

  Fie on’t! O, fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,

  That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

  Possess it merely;81

  and in Macbeth’s

  Out, out, brief candle!

  Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

  And then is heard no more: it is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  Signifying nothing.82

  Does any sense of immortality soften this pessimism? Lorenzo, after describing to Jessica the music of the spheres, adds that “such harmony is in immortal souls.”83 Claudio, in Measure for Measure, visions an afterlife, but in somber terms of Dante’s Inferno or Pluto’s Hades:

  Ah, but to die, and go we know not where;

  To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

  This sensible warm motion to become

  A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

  To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

  In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;

  To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,

  And blown with restless violence round about

  The pendent world … ’tis too horrible!84

  Hamlet speaks casually of the soul as immortal,85 but his soliloquy affirms no faith; and his dying words in the older version of the play, “Heaven receive my soul,” were changed by Shakespeare to read, “The rest is silence.”

  We cannot say with confidence how much of this pessimism came from the demands of tragic drama and how much voiced Shakespeare’s mood; but its repetition and emphasis suggest that it expressed the darker moments of his philosophy. The sole mitigation of it in these culminating plays is a hesitant recognition that amid the evils of this world there are blessings and delights, amid the villains many heroes and some saints—for every lago a Desdemona, for every Goneril a Cordelia, for every Edmund an Edgar or a Kent; even in Hamlet a fresh wind blows from Horatio’s faithfulness and Ophelia’s wistful tenderness. After the tired actor and playwright leaves the chaos and crowded loneliness of London for the green fields and parental consolations of his Stratford home he will recapture the strong man’s love of life.

  VI. RECONCILIATION

  However, he had no obvious reason to complain of London. It had given him success, acclaim, and fortune. There are over two hundred references to him, almost all favorable, in the surviving literature of his time. In 1598 Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury listed Sidney, Spenser, Daniel,
Drayton, Warner, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Chapman, in that order, as England’s leading authors, and ranked Shakespeare first among the dramatists.86 In that same year Richard Barnfield, a rival poet, declared that Shakespeare’s work (of which the best was yet to come) had already placed his name in “Fame’s immortal Book.”87 He was popular even with his competitors. Drayton and Jonson and Burbage were among his closest friends; and though Jonson criticized his inflated style, his careless facility in composition, and his outrageous neglect of classic rules, it was Jonson who, in the First Folio, rated Shakespeare above all other dramatists ancient or modern and judged him to be “not of an age, but for all time.” In the papers that Jonson left at his death he wrote, “I loved the man … this side idolatry.”88

  Tradition joins Jonson with Shakespeare in the meetings of literary men at the Mermaid Tavern in Bread Street. Francis Beaumont, who knew them both, exclaimed:

  What things have we seen

  Done at the Mermaid!—heard words that have been

  So nimble and so full of subtle flame

  As if that everyone from whence they came

  Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,

  And had resolved to live a fool the rest

  Of his dull life.89

  And Thomas Fuller’s Worthies of England (1662) reported:

  Many were the wit combats betwixt Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performances. Shakespeare … lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention.90

  Aubrey, about 1680, continued the easily credible tradition of Shakespeare’s “very ready and pleasant smooth wit,” and added that he “was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company.”91 The only extant likenesses of him are the bust placed over his tomb in the Stratford church and the engraving prefixed to the First Folio; they agree well enough, showing a man half bald, with mustache and (in the bust) beard, sharp nose, and meditative eyes, but giving no sign of the flame that burns in the plays. Perhaps the plays mislead us about his character; they suggest a man of high-strung energy and passion fluctuating between the summits of thought and poetry and the depths of melancholy and despair; while his contemporaries describe him as civil and honest, slow to take offense, “of an open and free nature,”92 enjoying life, careless of posterity, and showing a vein of practicality unbecoming a poet. Whether by thrift or gift, he was already rich enough in 1598 to join in financing the Globe theater; and in 1608 he and six others built the Blackfriars. His shares in these enterprises, added to his earnings as actor and playwright, gave him a substantial income—diversely estimated between £20093 and £60094 a year. The latter figure seems better able to explain his purchases of Stratford realty.

  “He was wont,” says Aubrey, “to go to his native country once a year.”95 Sometimes he stopped on the way at Oxford, where a John Davenant kept an inn; Sir William Davenant (poet laureate in 1637) liked to suggest that he was the unpremeditated result of Shakespeare’s dalliance there.96 In 1597 the dramatist, for sixty pounds, bought New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford, but he continued to live in London. His father died in 1601, leaving him two houses in Henley Street, Stratford. A year later, for £320, he bought near the town 127 acres of land, which he probably leased to tenant farmers. In 1605 he bought for £440 a share in the prospective ecclesiastical tithes of Stratford and three other communities. While he was writing his greatest plays in London he was known in Stratford chiefly as a successful businessman, frequently engaged in litigation about his properties and investments.

  His son Hamnet had died in 1596. In 1607 his daughter Susanna married John Hall, a prominent Stratford physician, and a year later she made the poet a grandfather. He had now new ties to draw him homeward. About 1610 he retired from London and the stage and moved into New Place. Apparently it was there that he composed Cymbeline (1609?), The Winter’s Tale (1610?), and The Tempest (1611?). Two of these are of minor rank, but The Tempest shows Shakespeare still master of his powers. Here is Miranda, who at the outset reveals her nature when, seeing a shipwreck from the shore, she cries out, “Oh, I have suffered with those that I saw suffer!”97 Here is Caliban, Shakespeare’s answer to Rousseau. Here is Prospero, the kindly magician, surrendering the wand of his art and bidding his airy world a fond goodbye. There is an echo of the poet’s melancholy in the undiminished eloquence of Prospero’s lines:

  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

  Are melted into air, into thin air:

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on; and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.98

  But this is not now the dominant mood; on the contrary, the play is Shakespeare relaxing, talking of brooks and flowers, singing songs like “Full fathom five” and “Where the bee sucks, there suck I.” And, despite all cautious demurrers, it is the aging poet who speaks through Prospero’s farewell:

  … graves at my command

  Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth

  By my so potent art. But this rough magic

  I here abjure … I’ll break my staff,

  Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

  And deeper than did ever plummet sound

  I’ll drown my book.99

  And perhaps it is Shakespeare again, rejoiced by his daughters and his grandchild, who cries out, through Miranda:

  O wonder!

  How many goodly natures are there here!

  How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world

  That hath such people in it!100

  On February 10, 1616, Judith married Thomas Quiney. On March 25 Shakespeare made his will. He left his property to Susanna, £300 to Judith, small bequests to fellow actors, and his “second-best bed” to his estranged wife. Perhaps he had arranged with Susanna to take care of her mother. Anne Hathaway survived him by seven years. In April, according to John Ward, vicar (1662–81) of Stratford Church, “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry party, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.”III101 Death came on April 23, 1616. The body was buried under the chancel of the Stratford church. Nearby on the floor, graved on a stone bearing no name, is an epitaph which local tradition ascribes to Shakespeare’s hand:

  GOOD FRIEND, FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE

  TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE.

  BLESE BE YE MAN YT [THAT] SPARES THES STONES,

  AND CURST BE HE YT MOVES MY BONES.

  VII. POST-MORTEM

  He had, so far as we know, taken no steps to have his plays published; the sixteen that severally appeared in his lifetime were printed, apparently, without his co-operation, usually in quarto form, and in various degrees of textual corruption. Stirred by these piracies, two of his former associates, John Heming and Henry Condell, issued in 1623 the First Folio, containing in one tall volume of some nine hundred double-column pages the authoritative text of thirty-six of the plays. “We have but … done an office to the dead,” said the foreword, “… without ambition either of self-profit or fame; only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend … alive as was our Shakespeare.” The volume could then be bought for a pound; each of the approximately two hundred extant copies is now valued at £17,000, more highly than any book except Gutenberg’s Bible.

  Shakespeare’s reputation fluctuated curiously in time. Milton (1630) praised “sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,” but during the Puritan interval, whe
n the theaters were closed (1642–60), the fame of the bard faded. It revived with the Restoration. Sir John Suckling, in his portrait by Vandyck (in the Frick Gallery, New York), holds the First Folio open at Hamlet. Dryden, the oracle of the later seventeenth century, commended Shakespeare as having, “of all modern, and perhaps ancient, poets … the largest and most comprehensive soul … always great when some great occasion is presented to him,” but “many times flat, insipid, his comic art degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast.”102 John Evelyn noted in his diary (1661) that “the old plays disgust this refined age, since his Majesty’s being so long abroad”—i.e., since Charles II and the returning royalists had brought to England the dramatic norms of France; soon afterward the Restoration theater produced the bawdiest dramas in modern literature. Shakespeare’s plays were still performed, but usually in “adaptation” by Dryden, Otway, or other models of Restoration taste.

  The eighteenth century restored the plays to Shakespeare. Nicholas Rowe published (1709) the first critical edition and the first biography; Pope and Johnson issued editions and commentaries; Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, and Mrs. Siddons made Shakespeare popular on the stage as never before; and Thomas Bowdler made his own name a verb by publishing (1818) an expurgated version omitting parts “which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” In the early nineteenth century the romantic movement took Shakespeare to its heart, and the superlatives of Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Lamb transformed him into a tribal god.

  France demurred. By 1700 its literary standards had been formed by Ronsard, Malherbe, and Boileau in the Latin tradition of order, logical form, polite taste, and rational control; it had adopted, in Racine, the classical rules of drama; it was disturbed by Shakespeare’s windy word play, his bubbling torrent of phrases, his emotional storms, his coarse clowns, his mingling of comedy with tragedy. Voltaire, returning from England in 1729, brought with him some appreciation of Shakespeare and “first showed the French a few pearls which I found in his enormous dunghill”;103 but when someone ranked the Englishman above Racine, Voltaire rose to the defense of France by calling Shakespeare “an amiable barbarian.”104 His Philosophical Dictionary (1765) made some amends: “In this same man there are passages which exalt the imagination and penetrate the heart…. He reaches sublimity without having searched for it.”105 Mme. de Staël (1804), Guizot (1821), and Villemain (1827) helped France to bear with Shakespeare. Finally the translation of the plays into good French prose by Victor Hugo’s son François won Shakespeare the respect of France, though never the devout admiration there accorded to Racine.