Three hundred years ago, on April 23, 1616, William Shakespeare, of whom Carlyle wrote as “the pink and flower of remembered Englishmen—the greatest thing we have yet done and managed to produce in this world,” drew his last breath at “New Place,” the home he had earned for himself in his native town of Stratford-on-Avon. The great bell of the Guild Chapel facing the garden side of his “pretty house of brick and timber” tolled for his passing; but the great voice of the world which acclaims him so loudly to-day was dumb.
In those Puritan times he was but little considered; and no hint or whisper of his coming renown stirred the sleepy quietude of the little country place where he was born and where he died. His fellow-townsmen of that period kept no particular record of him, nor did they dream of him as the future King of English Literature. He was laid to rest in the chancel of the Parish Church—an honoured place allowed to him, not because of his genius as a Poet, for this was as indifferent a matter then to the good bucolic folk of Stratford-on-Avon as it is now, but because he had, by purchase, become part owner of the tithes and as a lay-rector had right of interment there.
In his lifetime he assumed to be nothing but a simple industrious man of business who “adapted” and rearranged old plays to suit the requirements of the Globe Theatre; and he flung out the splendid rays of his dazzling poetic genius over these dry bones of romance and history as freely and with as grand an absence of self-consciousness as the sun which shines alike on the just and the unjust.
Nothing probably would have surprised him more or moved him to such incredulous smiling as to have been told that in three hundred years his fame would surpass that of any other Englishman ever born! He would have put aside the prophecy with good-humoured laughter and would never have given it another thought. For his wordly aims were perfectly straightforward and simple; they were, plainly—to earn a sufficient competence and to stand on an independent footing with his fellows, to live with his family in ease and comfort, and to end his days in peace in the town where he was born. No ideal could be more free from arrogance. His whole career is an object lesson of infinite Greatness to the infinitely Little!
The vital centre of Shakespeare’s marvellous power is surely his impersonality. His creative spirit moved behind the passing show of kings and queens and historic events, moulding them to his mood, but never displaying itself. Like light it shed colour on whatsoever it illumined. So little may we guess of Shakespeare’s personality from his writings that he has made of himself an Enigma. We cannot even tell what form of creed he professed, though we know and feel that the devout worship of an invisible and intelligent Force behind Nature filled him with highest faith and purest service towards God. We cannot find out his special likes or dislikes, save in slight indications here and there, such as his plainly indicated abhorrence of Jews—and Germans! Great as is the professed admiration of the Teuton for our English Master-Mind, we wonder how he can get over such lines as these:—
While the discussion between Portia and Nerissa in the Merchant of Venice caps all:—
Nerissa: How like you the young German, the Duke of Saxony’s nephew?
Portia: Very vilely in the morning when he is sober, and most vilely in the afternoon when he is drunk; when he is best, he is a little worse than a man; and when he is worst, he is little better than a beast.
One other thing we may perceive, and that is our Poet’s scorn of pettiness and treachery. Individual deceit—public or private hypocrisy—these seem to Shakespeare’s mind unforgivable. The “black-handed” hit—the cruel slander—the malicious lie—against these he delivers his most trenchant blows; but farther than this we are unable to penetrate into the kingdom of his heart or sentiment.
To woman he assigns the highest place as inspirer and saviour of man; when he shows her other than this, as in Lady Macbeth, he makes remorse half condone her sins and death conclude them. He seemed to be absolutely unconscious of any superiority in himself to others of his own calling. His poetic gift was like song to a nightingale that warbles for sheer delight and amorousness, in delicious ignorance of the entrancing beauty of its melody.
What affects, or should affect, us most deeply to-day is the deplorable fact that for three hundred years we have had no poet, no dramatist, to approach Shakespeare in any sense—neither in beauty of language, loftiness of thought, nor simple naturalness of expression. He towers among us as a veritable giant among pigmies—for the men of letters in all parts of the world at this epoch, men who are scrambling and pushing themselves forward to offer a very poor and inadequate “homage” to this mightiest genius of all time, are of such microscopic attainment when compared with him that one needs a mental lens to perceive them at all.
These are they for whom Self is not only the keynote, but the whole tune. Some of them take pride in their “style”; whereas Shakespeare had no “style” save his own, which has become a living part of the English language. He defied laws and conventions and dramatic “unities”; he dared to be his own master; and fortunately there were no newspapers in his day to publish venomous criticisms which might have daunted or discouraged his efforts.
The earliest newspaper, or News Packet, as it was called, was issued in 1619, three years after Shakespeare’s death. Shakespeare’s critics were the public—in fact, the “gallery.” He “played to the gallery,” and played “up”—never “down.” Moreover, he was apparently so indifferent to his own literary reputation that he made no effort to publish any of his works, and allowed them to be pirated wholesale. Only in the case of the two poems dedicated to the Earl of Southampton—“Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece”—does he seem to have taken any personal interest in his own productions.
One may perhaps venture to suggest that probably he attached no importance to what he knew were “adaptations” of old plays, and thought nothing of the rich poesy wherewith he had endowed them. The most of his work was this of industrious “adaptation”; so that he might have modestly considered it to be scarcely his own and that the magnificent speeches he put in the mouths of his stage puppets were only a part of what is called “business.” The superb indifference he thus displayed to his own place in the estimation of others was a striking proof of his sub-conscious power. That his contemporaries mentioned him but little would not have troubled a mind like Shakespeare’s and Robert Green’s jealous attack upon him as “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, with his Tyger’s heart wrapt in a Player’s hide,” would but have moved him to a compassionate smile at such an outburst of malice and envy.
The chief lesson we may learn from Shakespeare’s unapproachable fame is of that greatness which is “impersonal.” The literary men of our day are all painfully personal and are seldom satisfied unless they are elbowing each other out of the way or scrambling over each other to the front; and some of them are never happier than when they can fasten themselves, like barnacles, to the splendid ship of Shakespeare’s immortal genius, which sails serenely onward over the seas of the infinite. As barnacles they do no particular harm; for, cling as they will, the great waves of time generally sweep them off in the progress of the voyage, while the great Ship goes on, carrying its messages of truth, honour, and strong patriotism to all the world! And it will still sail on, till the English language shall be no more. For if, in centuries to come, nothing should be left of England but Shakespeare, his name would be sufficient to prove that England once had lived!