Part 4 (1/2)

”They have tied ht the course”

This seems to me intensely characteristic of Hamlet; the brutal side of action was never more contemptuously described, and Macbeth's next soliloquy makes the identity apparent to every one; it is in the true thinker-sceptic vein:

”Why should I play the Roman[1] fool and die On mine oord?”

[Footnote 1: About the year 1600 Shakespeare seems to have steeped himself in Plutarch For the next five or six years, whenever he thinks of suicide, the Ro made up his mind to kill himself, Laertes cries:

”I am more an antique Roman than a Dane,”

and, in like case, Cleopatra talks of dying ”after the high Roman fashi+on”]

Macbeth then meets Macduff, and there follows the confession of pity and reentle-kindness hich Hamlet treats Laertes and Romeo treats Paris Macbeth says to Macduff:

”Of all et thee back, ed With blood of thine already”

Then co desperate” in him that Hamlet boasted of--and the end

Here we have every characteristic of Ha difference of situation only brings out the essential identity of the two characters The two portraits are of the saht shades of difference between Macbeth and Hathen our contention that both are portraits of the poet; for the differences are es duepassion where Haht, so Macbeth is older than Harown deeper, the tone entler [Footnote: Immediately after the publication of these first two essays, Sir Henry Irving seized the opportunity and lectured before a distinguished audience on the character of Macbeth He gave it as his opinion that ”Shakespeare has presented Macbeth as one of the allery of men, instinct with the virtues and vices of their kind (_sic_)” Sir Henry Irving also took the occasion to praise the simile of pity:

”And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast”

This ridiculous fustian seeratuitous: no one needed to be inforht haveof psychology or any taste in letters] I venture, therefore, to assert that the portrait we find in Romeo and Jaques first, and then in Hamlet, and afterwards in Macbeth, is the portrait of Shakespeare hih these three stages

CHAPTER III DUKE VINCENTIO--POSTHUMUS

It may be well to add here a couple of portraits of Shakespeare in later life in order to establish beyond question the chief features of his character With this purpose in mind I shall take a portrait that is a mere sketch of him, Duke Vincentio in ”Measure for Measure,” and a portrait that is h consciously idealized, Posthumus, in ”Cy sketch, and contrast it with a highly-finished portrait, is that, though the sketch is here and there hardly recognizable, the outline being all too thin and hesitating, yet now and then a characteristic trait is over-emphasized, as we should expect in careless work And this sketch in lines now faint, now all too heavy, is curiously convincing when put side by side with a careful and elaborate portrait in which the same traits are reproduced, but harmoniously, and with a perfect sense of the relative value of each feature No critic, so far as I ae, has yet thought of identifying either Duke Vincentio or Posthumus with Hamlet, much less with Shakespeare himself The two plays are very unlike each other in tone and te a sort of tract for the times, while ”Cymbeline” is a purely romantic drama

Moreover, ”Measure for Measure” was probably written a couple of years after ”Has to the last period of the poet's activity, and could hardly have been completed before 1610 or 1611 The dissimilarity of the plays only accentuates the likeness of the two protagonists

”Measure for Measure” is one of the best exaecraft Not only is the ly slipshod, but the ostensible purpose of the play, which is to make the laws respected in Vienna, is not only not attained, but seeotten

This indifference to logical consistency is characteristic of Shakespeare; Hamlet speaks of ”the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns” just after he has been talking with his dead father The poetic dreamer cannot take the trouble to tie up the loose ends of a story: the real purpose of ”Measure for Measure,” which is the confusion of the pretended ascetic Angelo, is fulfilled, and that is sufficient for the thinker, who has thus shohat ”our seemers be”

It is no less characteristic of Shakespeare that Duke Vincentio, his _alter ego_, should order another to punish loose livers--a task which his kindly nature found too disagreeable But, leaving these general considerations, let us co speech of the Duke should have awakened the suspicion that Vincentio is but another mask for Shakespeare The whole speech proclaielo There is a kind of character in thy life,”

Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in what is supposed to be prose:

”There is a kind of confession in your looks”

A little later the line:

”Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues,”

is so characteristic of Hamlet-Shakespeare that it should have put every reader on the track

The speeches of the Duke in the fourth scene of the first act are also characteristic of Shakespeare But the four lines,

”My holy sir, none better knows than you How I have ever loved the life removed, And held in idle price to haunt assemblies, Where youth and cost and witless bravery keep,”

are toindeed of Hahts not me; no, nor woman neither” In any case it will be admitted that a dislike of asse monarch, so peculiar indeed that it reminds me of the exiled Duke in ”As You Like It,” or of Duke Prospero in ”The Tempest” (two other incarnations of Shakespeare), rather than of any one in real life A love of solitude; a keen contempt for shows and the ”witless bravery” of court-life were, as we shall see, characteristics of Shakespeare froe