SHAKESPEARE REVISITED.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 37, 13 February 1926, Page 21

SHAKESPEARE REVISITED.

«THE SUPERSTITION OF AUTHORITY." JUDGING WITH NEW EYES. (By A. G. STEPHENS.) jlosfc English commentary on Shakespeare is bad. because the commentators are too close to the subject or are oppressed by the weight of tradition. Besides all the other things, a critic wants a mind detached from his critical material. I expose myself recklessly in asserting" the fundamental truth that a donkey must be outside a cart to draw a cart. But Shakespeare's donkeys are in the cart. Sometimes they brood over the letter until they miss the spirit. TJsnalry they brood over the letter till they miss the letter. The Author and the Commentators. Shakespeare has become so great a factor in the soheme of English education that many people have lost the power of appreciating his work in perspective. His matter is merged in their minds, and they may easily be as incapable of judging it as a twenty-five-years married man is capable of judging the looks of his wife. Then the superstition of authority, the ingrained habit of laokin""" up, the accumulated obsession of literary ages, warp most English criteria of Shakespeare. As soon as an author is called and regarded Divine there is an end to the mental independence of the mob. There is a rut, and they travel in it. The only way for most of us to reach a true valuation of Shakespeare is to forget him and come back to him. Then we may receive the curious shock with which, after a long absence, we revisit scenes of childhood. These houses that seemed so huge to childish eyes, these distances that seemed so far, this creek that was a river, this hill that was a mountain —how they have shrunken! Shakespeare, revisited, is apt to shrink too, remaining quite large and wonderful enough. But the last person capable of expressing a just opinion of his size and attributes is a devotee who never leaves the shrine; or a student smothered under the text. Both these kinds of Shakespearean "critics" may be said almost to be disqualified before they begin;-, and disqualified in proportion as they have become valuable commentators. Few judgments are as misleading as a schoolmaster's judgment of his sacrificed author. Shakespeare a Playwright. One point is always being taken and always being forgotten. Shakespeare j didn't write books; he wrote plays. Further, he didn't write plays; he made plays. Further still, he didn't make Dlavs; he seized, stole, adapted, hacked, faked.and manufactured plays. There is a sense in which all these affirmations are untrue. In the main sense they are true. Most of us see Shakespeare, the playwrisht. as an author. He wrote books, things printed, things to read, things yon buy at booksellers! Or, rather, you don't buy until your in prbcess-of-being-"educated" offspring explains tii.n a play of Shakespeare is set fur the exam. Stiil. you see Shakespeare as a thing on a counter. That is precisely how Shakes,, en re never saw himself. He was - a thin? on the boards. His drama* were not originally regardril as literature, and usually they weren't even h : s. Shakespeare in his tlrar.it'tw' bi'7'nir.ngs was evidently very like the tar.ie author that is kept about some mtdern theatres now. His business iv;- tn -siake old plays actable "be:Vrc n new generation, to take old stm i' - «l!'l knock them into dramatic si'a i. t. translate the last French suc- ?■•-•.- Kiul borrow a* much as possible i-tun the hit.-'iiljy English poet. He was his theatre's j.layvvrisrht. play-carpenter, the handyman who wrote in a few lines while the star actor waited, who knocked out a scene when the stage manager instructed. SV-kcspsare's Box-office Eye. He took parts himself—any old parts —he was "general utility." He made himself so agreeable and so useful, he wis so'popular and so thrifty, that by-and-by he became a manager and proprietor himself—and still kept on manufacturing plays. But they were not; literature like "Venus and Adonis"; apparently Shakespeare couldn't conceive them as literature—certainly not as saleable literature or as something to bring him credit with a patron; or he would have published them and made a profit. Shakespeare had a theatrical manager's eye for profit;, he knew that ideals belong to the stage, but the true valuation of the universe is expressed in terms of 3/, 2/, and 1/. , •As to "Hamlet," Shakespeare didn't write "Hamlet." He wrote hiß version of "Hamlet," and then rewrote it. Apart from the quasi-historical origin of the piece, there is no doubt that there were Hamlet plays before Shakespeare's. Almost certainly this was one of the pieces he reconstructed and adapted in "loading the rifts with golden ore." In the sixteenth century authors, and especially dramatic authors, were all thieves together. Copyright was the vaguest, and modern notions about originality didn't exist. When in the Renascence the copying scribes become printers and translators, the classics were regarded as a quarry from which every man built his house as a matter of course. Paraphrases into the vulgar tongue ranked as we regard new work. Translation was authorship. It was an age of pillage from contemporaries, and from the common stock of antiquity. Shakespeare's addition to his material, much or most of it now vanished, was probably rather of form than of theme, rather in phrase than in fact. His essential art is to glorify the commonplace; apart from his dramatic interest and his wonderful poetic value, his popularity is due to his splendid decoration of middle-class ideas for middle-class people. " Hamlet's Dramatic Indecision. Commentators debate persistently whether "Hamlet" is a ponderous scholar or an invertebrate dreamer. Dramatically he is neither. As a dramatic character Hamlet's difficulty is that he has to wait on the drama. If he slew the king in the first act where would the play be? Because he delays his job till the fifth act he has been accused of infirmity of purpose! It is clear that all his irresolution is to ' oblige the audience. Hamlet is a man of action, impatiently waiting till he can stab his monarch at 11 o'clock. This is the explanation of his dubious conduct and his long-winded * speeches. Before he can kill Claudius he has to kill time, otherwise neither Shake speare's audience nor a modern audience could watch him. Besides, the circumstances of Hamlet's youth, his mother's marriage, and the trustworthy evidence of the ghost, give quite enough room for indecision, without imputing indecision of character. Hamlet acts as soon as Anybody can reasonably expect.