Part 35 (2/2)
Ninety-nine poets and dramatists out of a hundred would have followed Plutarch and , the _causa causans_ of her self-murder Shakespeare does not do this; he allows the love of Antony to count with her, but it is iradation that compel his Cleopatra to embrace the Arch-fear And just this same quality of pride is attributed to the ”dark lady” Sonnet 131 begins:
”Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art, As those whose beauties proudlyand sard for faith or truth; hearts steeled with an insane pride, and violent teed analysis is not needed A point of see difference between them establishes their identity Cleopatra is beautiful, ”a lass unparalleled,” as Charly we can believe that all e on the street or pretending to die she was alike be-witching; beauty has this s become a woman who is not beautiful, whose face soroan,”
who cannot even blind the senses with desire? And yet the ”dark lady” of the sonnets who is thus described, has the ”powerful ypt's queen The point of see as any likeness could be; the peculiarities of both wo fro, wily, faithless, passionately unrestrained in speech and proud as Lucifer, and so is the sonnet-heroine We , and mad vanity of his mistress were defects in Shakespeare's eyes as in ours; these, indeed, were ”the things ill” which nevertheless became her What Shakespeare loved in her hat he hiree--that daemonic power of personality which he makes Enobarbus praise in Cleopatra and which he praises directly in the sonnet-heroine Enobarbus says of Cleopatra:
”I saw her once Hop forty paces through the public street, And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted, That she did make defect perfection, And, breathless, power breathe forth”
One would be willing to wager that Shakespeare is here recalling a perforh for my purpose now to draw attention to the unexpectedness of the attribute ”power” The sonnet fastens on the same word:
”O, froht With insufficiency ain dwells upon her ”strength”: she was bold, too, to unreason, and of unbridled tongue, for, ”twice forsworn herself,” she had yet urged his ”auilty of the same fault What he admiredheld in her case: _ex forti dulcedo_; perhaps her confident strength had abandon and complete than those of weaker women; perhaps in those moments her forceful dark face took on a soulful beauty that entranced his exquisite susceptibility; perhaps--but the suppositions are infinite
Though a lover and possessed by his mistress Shakespeare was still an artist In the sonnets he brings out her overbearing will, boldness, pride--the elemental force of her nature; in the play, on the other hand, while justher ”power,” he lays the chief stress upon the cunning wiles and faithlessness of her whose trade was love But just as Cleopatra has power, so there can be no doubt of the wily cunning--”the warrantise of skill”--of the sonnet-heroine, and no doubt her faithlessness was that ”just cause of hate” which Shakespeare bemoaned
It is worth while here to notice his perfect comprehension of the powers and limits of the different forms of his art Just as he has used the sonnets in order to portray certain intimate weaknesses and maladies of his own nature that he could not present dra his hero ridiculously effeminate, so also he used the sonnets to convey to us the doth of his mistress--qualities which if presented dramatically would have see the sonnets and the play together we get an excellent portrait of Shakespeare's ht, as Cleopatra is vain of her superiority in this respect to Octavia, with dark complexion, black eyebrows and hair, and pitch-black eyes thatskies; her cheeks are ”darant with health, her voice ipsy to whom beauty ood idea of her person we have a still better idea of herthat I do not accept iry declarations that his th and pride is seldom merely wanton; but the fact stands that Shakespeare ainst his mistress; she is, he tells us, ”the bay where all men ride”; no ”several plot,” but ”the orld's common place”
The accusation is most explicit But if it ell founded why should he devote two sonnets (135 and 136) to i her to be as liberal as the sea and to receive his love-offering as well as the tributes of others?
”A a number one is reckon'd none Then in the number let me pass untold”
It is plain that Mistress Fitton dreay froiven herself to his friend, and this fact throws some doubt upon his accusations of utter wantonness A true ”daughter of the ga but ”a sluttish spoil of opportunity” who falls to Troilus or to Dio no reserve It must be reckoned to the credit of Mary Fitton, or to her pride, that she appears to have been faithful to her lover for the tis of Shakespeare But her desires seem to have been her sole restraint, and therefore we th, pride, and passionate teain attributes to her Her boldness is so reckless that she shows her love for his friend even before Shakespeare's face; she knows no pity in her passion, and always defends herself by attacking her accuser But she is cunning in love's ways and dulls Shakespeare's resent perhaps to lose her eo the sweetness of his honeyed flatteries, she blinded him to her faults by occasional caresses Yet this creature, with the soul of a struue of a fishwife and the ”proud heart” of a queen, was the crown and flower of womanhood to Shakespeare, his counterpart and ideal Hamlet in love with Cleopatra, the poet lost in desire of the wanton--that is the tragedy of Shakespeare's life
In this wonderful world of ours great draain in his disgrace Antony cries:
”Whither hast thou led ypt?”
Shakespeare's passion for Mary Fitton led hith broke down under the strain and he never won back again to health He paid the price of passion with his very blood It is Shakespeare and not Antony who groans:
”O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charipsy, hath, at fast and loose, Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss”
Shakespeare's love for Mary Fitton is to edies of life--a syenius is inevitably scourged and croith thorns and done to death; inevitably, I say, for the vast majority of men hate and despise what is superior to them: Don Quixote, too, was trodden into the enius suffers also through its own excess; is bound, so to speak, to the stake of its own passionate sensibilities, and consumed, as with fire
CHAPTER XI THE DRAMA OF MADNESS: ”LEAR”
Ever since Lessing and Goethe it has been the fashi+on to praise Shakespeare as a demi-God; whatever he wrote is taken to be the rose of perfection This senseless hero-worshi+p, which reached idolatry in the superlatives of the ”Encyclopaedia Britannica” and elsewhere in England, was certain to provoke reaction, and the reaction has co to praise in any of Shakespeare's works, and everything to blae, on the other hand, have praised ”Lear” as a world's masterpiece Lamb says of it:
”While we read it, we see not Lear; but we are Lear,--we are in his randeur which baffles the hters and storhty irregular power of reasoning, i its powers, as the wind blohere it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of e calls ”Lear,” ”the open and around of Nature's passions”
These dithyrambs show rather the lyrical power of the writers than the thing described