SHAKESPEARE

Taranaki Daily News, 15 August 1931, Page 17 (Supplement)

SHAKESPEARE

IMMORTAL SHAKESPEARE

(By

T.C.L.)

The story of the playgoer. who near! a Shakespearean play for the first time and complained that it was “full oi quotations” is classical. The Bible, Shakespeare and. .Pilgrim s Progress were the three repositories of English undefiled, and the fact that the work of every dramatist of note in more recent English history has been instinctively compared with that of Shakespeare shows the undying character of his compositions and their standard of excellence.

Appreciation of Shakespeare may have been slow to awaken, but has been that of intellectual giants since Dryden's day. A dramatist who. could .quicken interest and sustain, it in men of letters like Johnson, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Bagshot, Sir Sydney Lee, Robertson Nicoll and Masefield needed genius to justify his work. That opinions of his work diffeij .is a tribute to its deathless qualities. To a Wordsworth if is the poet of the Sonnets “with which key Shakespeare unlocked his heart” that shows the living man. To a Johnson his charm is that he has no heroes.. His men are men of like virtues and failings to our own, and so we know and understand them.

The gentle Charles Lamb notes that even Shakespeare’s men of action have their poetic and introspective moments, and all of them love music, Wallace thinks his womankind were but. idealised types of those he knew in life, and that the one or two shrews he paints were the poet’s reply to domestic tyranny, as his tribute to filial love finds expression in his choicest ’ oman character, Cordelia. She is flesh and blood. She has a temper, as well as a soul, but she is alive. His painting of the coquette, Cleopatra, is thought by Frank Harris to have been Shakespeare’s revenge on the .“dark lady of his Sonnets who jilted, him, and tae fact that he so often shows his abhorrence of treachery gives colour to the theory that he lost his love thiough the treachery of a friend. No man who had not known great suffering could have written Hamlet, Macbeth. Lear and Othello, for they come from the depths, and yet he coulu turn to the summer gaiety of “Twelfth Night,” or the “Midsummer Night s Dream” and hide an aching heart beneath a comedian’s motley. . _ - But what has 'appealed to all investigators is that, as a modern critic puts it,'“ho keeps on the high road.” He ha.s no innocent adulteries, no sentimental ratcatchers, no aesthetic butchers and no inverted morality that, would make immorality appear morality itself. Nor does he explain his characters; they are to'be inferred from their own lives and actions. “Througl* tribulation,” says another, ' “Shakespeare came to know, men better, and he has left behind as his testament to mankind poetry so rich and full of a multitude of characters that the language in which it was written has become the noblest in the wond. A gallery of portraits of men and women whom we know intimately and whose thoughts correspond with our own in the most inspiring and unforgettable phraseology that ever a man. could desire to solace and refresh him in the arid deserts of life.’’ (Such an inspiration to the literature of a nation is by no means a small gift from the gods. “Shakespeare is a quarry from which every "writer has drawn supplies,” said one.*' “He is the master of epigram and of satire,” remarked another. “The nervous language of our Common Law, the most impressive forensic efforts in our Courts, the eloquence of the pulpit whether in cathedral or conventicle all owe breadth and richness in idiomatic and national phrases to the masterminded poet,” so said'Stopford Brooke. ■Shakespeare had been eight years in London before he published his first work, “Venus and Adonis.” It was followed a year later by the “Rape of Lucrece.” * Three years later came the first printed copy of his plays, and the next year a contemporary says Shakespeare held in England both in comedy and tragedy a similar place to that assigned by the Latins to Plautus and Seneca. That might be very fulsome flattery, but proof of his “drawing” ability, to use a stage expression,, can be found in the fact that in 159-5 piracy of his works began by unscrupulous publishers. One of these, “The Passionate Pilgrim,” published by Wm. Jaggard, contained only five of Shakespeare’s compositions, and when its second edition appeared- in 1012 both Shakespeare and another author, from whom thefts had been made, were moved to make formal protest. From 1595 for 10 years at least Shakespeare continued to publish plays,, sonnets and poems that are still the wonder of English literature. Shakespeare came to the Metropolis when, as Emerson puts it, “’the English people were importunate for dramatic entertainmentis. . .The common people had tasted of this new joy, and as we could not suppress newspapers now, neither could authority then suppress what was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture and library at the same time.” He found a great body of plays of all dates and writers existed in manuscript. It supplied him with material, stodgy and lifeless, until quickened by the hand of the master. “There was then no literature for the million. A great poet who appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating.” So it was with Shakespeare. That is not to say his genius won instant recognition, “It took a century to make it suspected,” ea.ys Emerson. “Not until two centuries had passed after his death did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear. “Now literature, philosophy and thought are Shakespearised. His mind is the horizon beyond -which at present we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. There is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power and beau,ty.” That is the tribute of an American-, man of- letters-to the greatest; mind and power in Uteratura,