His passion is so intense that he has no desire to paint her seduction as greater than it was. She has got into his blood, so to speak, and each drop of it under the microscope would show her image. Take any sonnet at haphazard, and you will hear the rage of his desire.
But what is the youth like?—“the master-mistress” of his passion, to give him the title which seems to have convinced the witless of Shakespeare's guilt. Not one word of description is to be found anywhere; no painting epithet—nothing. Where is the cry of this terrible, shameless, outrageous passion that mastered Shakespeare's conscience and enslaved his will? Hardly a phrase that goes beyond affection—such affection as Shakespeare at thirty-four might well feel for a gifted, handsome aristocrat like Lord Herbert, who had youth, beauty, wealth, wit to recommend him. Herbert was a poet, too: a patron unparagoned! “If Southampton gave me a thousand pounds,” Shakespeare may well have argued, “perhaps Lord Herbert will get me made Master of the Revels, or even give me a higher place.” An aristocratic society tends to make parasites even of the strong, as Dr. Johnson's famous letter to Lord Chesterfield proves. But let us leave supposition and come to the sonnets themselves, which are addressed to the youth. The first sonnet begins:
This is a very good argument indeed when addressed to a woman; but when addressed to a man by a man it rings strained and false. Yet it is the theme of the first seventeen sonnets. It is precisely the same argument which Shakespeare set forth in “Venus and Adonis” again and again:
At the end of the third sonnet we find the same argument:
Again, in the fourth, sixth, and seventh sonnets the same plea is urged. In the tenth sonnet the poet cries:
And again at the end of the thirteenth sonnet:
Every one of these sonnets contains simply the argument which is set forth with equal force and far superior pertinence in “Venus and Adonis.”
That is, Shakespeare makes use of the passion he has felt for a woman to give reality to the expression of his affection for the youth. No better proof could be imagined of the fact that he never loved the youth with passion.
In sonnet 18 Shakespeare begins to alter his note. He then tells the youth that he will achieve immortality, not through his children, but through Shakespeare's verses. Sonnet 19 is rounded with the same thought:
Sonnet 20 is often referred to as suggesting intimacy:
The sextet of this sonnet absolutely disproves guilty intimacy, and is, I believe, intended to disprove it; Shakespeare had already fathomed the scandal-loving minds of his friends, and wanted to set forth the noble disinterestedness of his affection.
Sonnet 22 is more sincere, though not so passionate; it neither strengthens nor rebuts the argument. Sonnet 23 is the sonnet upon which all those chiefly rely who wish to condemn Shakespeare. Here it is:
We can interpret the phrases, “the perfect ceremony of love's rite” and “look for recompense” as we will; but it must be admitted that even when used to the uttermost they form an astonishingly small base on which to raise so huge and hideous a superstructure.
But we shall be told that the condemnation of Shakespeare is based, not upon any sonnet or any line; but upon the way Shakespeare speaks as soon as he discovers that his mistress has betrayed him in favour of his friend. One is inclined to expect that he will throw the blame on the friend, and, after casting him off, seek to win again the affections of his mistress. Nine men out of ten would act in this way. But the sonnets tell us with iteration and most peculiar emphasis that Shakespeare does not condemn the friend. As soon as he hears of the traitorism he cries (sonnet 33):
It is the loss of his friend he regrets, rather than the loss of his mistress; she is not mentioned save by comparison with “basest clouds.” Yet even when read by Gradgrind and his compeers the thirteenth line of this sonnet is utterly inconsistent with passion.
In the next sonnet the friend repents, and weeps the “strong offence,” and Shakespeare accepts the sorrow as salve that “heals the wound”; his friend's tears are pearls that “ransom all ill deeds.” The next sonnet begins with the line:
Shakespeare will be an “accessory” to his friend's “theft,” though he admits that the robbery is still sour. Then come four sonnets in which he is content to forget all about the wrong he has suffered, and simply exhausts himself in praise of his friend. Sonnet 40 begins:
This is surely the very soul of tender affection; but it is significant that even here the word “true” is emphasized and not “love”; he goes on:
Never before was a man so gentle-kind; we might be listening to the lament of a broken-hearted woman who smiles through her tears to reassure her lover; yet there is no attempt to disguise the fact that Herbert has done “wrong.” The next sonnet puts the poet's feeling as strongly as possible.
The first lines show that Shakespeare is pretending; he attempts not only to minimize the offence, but to find it charming. A mother who caught her young son kissing a girl would reproach him in this fashion; to her his faults would be the “pretty wrongs that liberty commits.” But this is not the way passion speaks, and here again the sextet condemns Herbert in the plainest terms. At length we have the summing-up:
This sonnet, with its affected word-play and wire-drawn consolation, leaves one gaping: Shakespeare's verbal affectations had got into his very blood. To my mind the whole sonnet is too extravagant to be sincere; it is only to be explained by the fact that Shakespeare's liking for Herbert was heightened by snobbishness and by the hope of patronage. None of it rings true except the first couplet. Yet the argument of it is repeated, strange to say, and emphasized in the sonnets addressed to the “dark lady” whom Shakespeare loved. Sonnet 144 is clear enough:
As soon as his mistress comes on the scene Shakespeare's passionate sincerity cannot be questioned. The truth is the intensity of his passion leads him to condemn and spite the woman, while the absence of passion allows him to pretend affection for the friend. Sonnet 133, written to the woman, is decisive:
The last couplet is to me “perforce” conclusive. But let us take it that these sonnets prove the contention of the cry of critics that Shakespeare preferred friendship to love, and held his friend dearer than his mistress, and let us see if the plays corroborate the sonnets on this point. We may possibly find that the plays only strengthen the doubt which the sonnets implant in us.
“The Merchant of Venice” has always seemed to me important as helping to fix the date of the sonnets. Antonio, as I have shown, is an impersonation of Shakespeare himself. It seems to me Shakespeare would have found it impossible to write of Antonio's self-sacrificing love for Bassanio after he himself had been cheated by his friend. This play then must have been written shortly before his betrayal, and should give us Shakespeare's ordinary attitude. Many expressions in the play remind us of the sonnets, and one in especial of sonnet 41. In the sixth scene of the second act, Jessica, when escaping from her father's house, uses Shakespeare's voice to say:
Here we have “the pretty follies” which is used again as “pretty wrongs” in sonnet 41. Immediately afterwards Lorenzo, another mask of Shakespeare, praises Jessica as “wise, fair, and true,” just as in sonnet 105 Shakespeare praises his friend as “kind, fair, and true,” using again words which his passion for a woman has taught him.
The fourth act sets forth the same argument we find in the sonnets. When it looks as if Antonio would have to give his life as forfeit to the Jew, Bassanio exclaims:
This is the language of passionate exaggeration, one might say. Antoniois suffering in Bassanio's place, paying the penalty, so to speak, for Bassanio's happiness. No wonder Bassanio exaggerates his grief and the sacrifice he would be prepared to make. But Gratiano has no such excuse for extravagant speech, and yet Gratiano follows in the self-same vein:
The peculiarity of this attitude is heightened by the fact that the two wives, Portia and Nerissa, both take the ordinary view. Portia says:
And Nerissa goes a little further:
The blunder is monstrous; not only is the friend prepared to sacrifice all he possesses, including his wife, to save his benefactor, but the friend's friend is content to sacrifice his wife too for the same object. Shakespeare then in early manhood was accustomed to put friendship before love; we must find some explanation of what seems to us so unnatural an attitude.
In the last scene of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” which is due to a later revision, the sonnet-case is emphasized. And at this time Shakespeare has suffered Herbert's betrayal. As soon as the false friend Proteus says he is sorry and asks forgiveness, Valentine, another impersonation of Shakespeare, replies:
This incarnation of Shakespeare speaks of repentance in Shakespeare's most characteristic fashion, and then coolly surrenders the woman he loves to his friend without a moment's hesitation, and without even considering whether the woman would be satisfied with the transfer. The words admit of no misconstruction; they stand four-square, not to be shaken by any ingenuity of reason, and Shakespeare supplies us with further corroboration of them.
“Coriolanus” was written fully ten years after “The Merchant of Venice,” and long after the revision of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” And yet Shakespeare's attitude at forty-three is, in regard to this matter, just what it was at thirty-three. When Aufidius finds Coriolanus in his house, and learns that he has been banished from Rome and is now prepared to turn his army against his countrymen, he welcomes him as “more a friend than e'er an enemy,” and this is the way he takes to show his joy:
Here's the same attitude; the same extravagance; the same insistence on the fact that the man loves the maid and yet has more delight in the friend. What does it mean? When we first find it in “The Merchant of Venice” it must give the reader pause; in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” it surprises us; in the sonnets, accompanied as it is by every flattering expression of tender affection for the friend, it brings us to question; but its repetition in “Coriolanus” must assure us that it is a mere pose. Aufidius was not such a friend of Coriolanus that we can take his protestation seriously. The argument is evidently a stock argument to Shakespeare: a part of the ordinary furniture of his mind: it is like a fashionable dress of the period—the wearer does not notice its peculiarity.
The truth is, Shakespeare found in the literature of his time, and in the minds of his contemporaries, a fantastically high appreciation of friendship, coupled with a corresponding disdain for love as we moderns understand it. In “Wit's Commonwealth,” published in 1598, we find: “The love of men to women is a thing common and of course, but the friendship of man to man, infinite and immortal.” Passionate devotion to friendship is a sort of mark of the Renaissance, and the words “love” and “lover” in Elizabethan English were commonly used for “friend” and “friendship.” Moreover, one must not forget that Lyly, whose euphuistic speech affected Shakespeare for years, had handled this same incident in his “Campaspe,” where Alexander gives up his love to his rival, Apelles. Shakespeare, not to be outdone in any loyalty, sets forth the same fantastical devotion in the sonnets and plays. He does this, partly because the spirit of the time infected him, partly out of sincere admiration for Herbert, but oftener, I imagine, out of self-interest. It is pose, flunkeyism and the hope of benefits to come and not passion that inspired the first series of sonnets.
Whoever reads the scene carefully in “Much Ado About Nothing,” cannot avoid seeing that Shakespeare at his best not only does not minimize his friend's offence, but condemns it absolutely:
And in the sonnets, too, in spite of himself, the same true feeling pierces through the snobbish and affected excuses.
Shakespeare was a sycophant, a flunkey if you will, but nothing worse.
Further arguments suggest themselves. Shakespeare lived, as it were, in a glass house with a score of curious eyes watching everything he did and with as many ears pricked for every word he said; but this foul accusation was never even suggested by any of his rivals. In especial Ben Jonson was always girding at Shakespeare, now satirically, now good-humouredly. Is it not manifest that if any such sin had ever been attributed to him, Ben Jonson would have given the suspicion utterance? There is a passage in his “Bartholomew Fair” which I feel sure is meant as a skit upon the relations we find in the Sonnets. In Act V, scene iii, there is a puppet-show setting forth “the ancient modern history of Hero and Leander, otherwise called the Touchstone of true Love, with as true a trial of Friendship between Damon and Pythias, two faithful friends o' the Bankside.” Hero is a “wench o' the Bankside,” and Leander swims across the Thames to her. Damon and Pythias meet at her lodgings, and abuse each other violently, only to finish as perfect good friends.
Rare Ben Jonson would have been delighted to set forth the viler charge if it had ever been whispered.
Then again, it seems to me certain that if Shakespeare had been the sort of man his accusers say he was, he would have betrayed himself in his plays. Consider merely the fact that young boys then played the girls' parts on the stage. Surely if Shakespeare had had any leaning that way, we should have found again and again ambiguous or suggestive expressions given to some of these boys when aping girls; but not one. The temptation was there; the provocation was there, incessant and prolonged for twenty-five years, and yet, to my knowledge, Shakespeare has never used one word that malice could misconstrue. Yet he loved suggestive and lewd speech.
Luckily, however, there is stronger proof of Shakespeare's innocence than even his condemnation of his false friend, proof so strong, that if all the arguments for his guilt were tenfold stronger than they are, this proof would outweigh them all and bring them to nought. Nor should it be supposed, because I have only mentioned the chief arguments for and against, that I do not know all those that can be urged on either side. I have confined myself to the chief ones simply because by merely stating them, their utter weakness must be admitted by every one who can read Shakespeare, by every one who understands his impulsive sensitiveness, and the facility with which affectionate expressions came to his lips. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that while the sonnets were being written he was in rivalry with Chapman for this very patron's favour, and this rivalry alone would explain a good deal of the fervour, or, should I say, the affected fervour he put into the first series of sonnets; but now for the decisive and convincing argument for Shakespeare's innocence.
Let us first ask ourselves how it is that real passion betrays itself and proves its force. Surely it is by its continuance; by its effect upon the life later. I have assumed, or inferred, as my readers may decide, that Shakespeare's liking for Herbert was chiefly snobbish, and was deepened by the selfish hope that he would find in him a patron even more powerful and more liberally disposed than Lord Southampton. He probably felt that young Herbert owed him a great deal for his companionship and poetical advice; for Herbert was by way of being a poet himself. If my view is correct, after Shakespeare lost Lord Herbert's affection, we should expect to hear him talking of man's forgetfulness and ingratitude, and that is just what Lord Herbert left in him, bitterness and contempt. Never one word in all his works to show that the loss of this youth's affection touched him more nearly. As we have seen, he cannot keep the incident out of his plays. Again and again he drags it in; but in none of these dramas is there any lingering kindness towards the betrayer. And as soon as the incident was past and done with, as soon as the three or four years' companionship with Lord Herbert was at an end, not one word more do we catch expressive of affection. Again and again Shakespeare rails at man's ingratitude, but nothing more. Think of it. Pembroke, under James, came to great power; was, indeed, made Lord Chamberlain, and set above all the players, so that he could have advanced Shakespeare as he pleased with a word: with a word could have made him Master of the Revels, or given him a higher post. He did not help him in any way. He gave books every Christmas to Ben Jonson, but we hear of no gift to Shakespeare, though evidently from the dedication to him of the first folio, he remained on terms of careless acquaintance with Shakespeare. Ingratitude is what Shakespeare found in Lord Pembroke; ingratitude is what he complains of in him. What a different effect the loss of Mary Fitton had upon Shakespeare. Just consider what the plays teach us when the sonnet-story is finished. The youth vanishes; no reader can find a trace of him, or even an allusion to him. But the woman comes to be the centre, as we shall see, of tragedy after tragedy. She flames through Shakespeare's life, a fiery symbol, till at length she inspires perhaps his greatest drama, “Antony and Cleopatra,” filling it with the disgrace of him who is “a strumpet's fool,” the shame of him who has become “the bellows and the fan to cool a harlot's lust.”
The passion for Mary Fitton was the passion of Shakespeare's whole life. The adoration of her, and the insane desire of her, can be seen in every play he wrote from 1597 to 1608. After he lost her, he went back to her; but the wound of her frailty cankered and took on proud flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and to madness. When at length he won to peace, after ten years, it was the peace of exhaustion. His love for his “gipsy-wanton” burned him out, as one is burnt to ashes at the stake, and his passion only ended with his life.
There is no room for doubt in my mind, no faintest suspicion. Hallam and Heine, and all the cry of critics, are mistaken in this matter. Shakespeare admired Lord Herbert's youth and boldness and beauty, hoped great things from his favour and patronage; but after the betrayal, he judged him inexorably as a mean traitor, “a stealer” who had betrayed “a twofold trust”; and later, cursed him for his ingratitude, and went about with wild thoughts of bloody revenge, as we shall soon see in “Hamlet” and “Othello,” and then dropped him into oblivion without a pang.
It is bad enough to know that Shakespeare, the sweetest spirit and finest mind in all literature, should have degraded himself to pretend such an affection for the profligate Herbert as has given occasion for misconstruction. It is bad enough, I say, to know that Shakespeare could play flunkey to this extent; but after all, that is the worst that can be urged against him, and it is so much better than men have been led to believe that there may be a certain relief in the knowledge.
The play of “Julius Caesar” was written about 1600 or 1601. As “Twelfth Night” was the last of the golden comedies, so “Julius Caesar” is the first of the great tragedies, and bears melancholy witness to us that the poet's young-eyed confidence in life and joy in living are dying, if not dead. “Julius Caesar” is the first outcome of disillusion. Before it was written Shakespeare had been deceived by his mistress, betrayed by his friend; his eyes had been opened to the fraud and falsehood of life; but, like one who has just been operated on for cataract, he still sees realities as through a mist, dimly. He meets the shock of traitorous betrayal as we should have expected Valentine or Antonio or Orsino to meet it—with pitying forgiveness. Suffering, instead of steeling his heart and drying up his sympathies, as it does with most men, softened him, induced him to give himself wholly to that “angel, Pity.” He will not believe that his bitter experience is universal; in spite of Herbert's betrayal, he still has the courage to declare his belief in the existence of the ideal. At the very last his defeated Brutus cries:
The pathos of this attempt still to believe in man and man's truth is over the whole play. But the belief was fated to disappear. No man who lives in the world can boast of loyalty as Brutus did; even Jesus had a Judas among the Twelve. But when Shakespeare wrote “Julius Caesar” he still tried to believe, and this gives the play an important place in his life's story.
Before I begin to consider the character of Brutus I should like to draw attention to three passages which place Brutus between the melancholy Jaques of “As You Like It,” whose melancholy is merely temperamental, and the almost despairing Hamlet. Jaques says:
This is the view of early manhood which does not doubt its power to cure all the evils which afflict mortality. Then comes the later, more hopeless view, to which Brutus gives expression:
And later still, and still more bitter, Hamlet's:
But Shakespeare is a meliorist even in Hamlet, and believes that the ailments of man can all be set right.
The likenesses between Brutus and Hamlet are so marked that even the commentators have noticed them. Professor Dowden exaggerates the similarities. “Both (dramas),” he writes, “are tragedies of thought rather than of passion; both present in their chief characters the spectacle of noble natures which fail through some weakness or deficiency rather than through crime; upon Brutus as upon Hamlet a burden is laid which he is not able to bear; neither Brutus nor Hamlet is fitted for action, yet both are called to act in dangerous and difficult affairs.” Much of this is Professor Dowden's view and not Shakespeare's. When Shakespeare wrote “Julius Caesar” he had not reached that stage in self-understanding when he became conscious that he was a man of thought rather than of action, and that the two ideals tend to exclude each other. In the contest at Philippi Brutus and his wing win the day; it is the defeat of Cassius which brings about the ruin; Shakespeare evidently intended to depict Brutus as well “fitted for action.”
Some critics find it disconcerting that Shakespeare identified himself with Brutus, who failed, rather than with Caesar, who succeeded. But even before he himself came to grief in his love and trust, Shakespeare had always treated the failures with peculiar sympathy. He preferred Arthur to the Bastard, and King Henry VI. to Richard III., and Richard II. to proud Bolingbroke. And after his agony of disillusion, all his heroes are failures for years and years: Brutus, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Troilus, Antony, and Timon—all fail as he himself had failed.
There is some matter for surprise in the fact that Brutus is an ideal portrait of Shakespeare. Disillusion usually brings a certain bitter sincerity, a measure of realism, into artistic work; but its first effect on Shakespeare was to draw out all the kindliness in him; Brutus is Shakespeare at his sweetest and best. Yet the soul-suffering of the man has assuredly improved his art: Brutus is a better portrait of him than Biron, Valentine, Romeo, or Antonio, a more serious and bolder piece of self-revealing even than Orsino. Shakespeare is not afraid now to depict the deep underlying kindness of his nature, his essential goodness of heart. A little earlier, and occupied chiefly with his own complex growth, he could only paint sides of himself; a little later, and the personal interest absorbed all others, so that his dramas became lyrics of anguish and despair. Brutus belongs to the best time, artistically speaking, to the time when passion and pain had tried the character without benumbing the will or distracting the mind: it is a masterpiece of portraiture, and stands in even closer relation to Hamlet than Romeo stands to Orsino. As Shakespeare appears to us in Brutus at thirty-seven, so he was when they bore him to his grave at fifty-two—the heart does not alter greatly.
Let no one say or think that in all this I am drawing on my imagination; what I have said is justified by all that Brutus says and does from one end of the play to the other. According to his custom, Shakespeare has said it all of himself very plainly, and has put his confession into the mouth of Brutus on his very first appearance (Act i. sc. 2):
What were these “different passions,” complex personal passions, too, which had vexed Brutus and changed his manners even to his friends? There is no hint of them in Plutarch, no word about them in the play. It was not “poor Brutus,” but poor Shakespeare, racked by love and jealousy, tortured by betrayal, who was now “at war with himself.”
I assume the identity of Brutus with Shakespeare before I have absolutely proved it because it furnishes the solution to the difficulties of the play. As usual, Coleridge has given proof of his insight by seeing and stating the chief difficulty, without, however, being able to explain it, and as usual, also, the later critics have followed him as far as they can, and in this case have elected to pass over the difficulty in silence. Coleridge quotes some of the words of Brutus when he first thinks of killing Caesar, and calls the passage a speech of Brutus, but it is in reality a soliloquy of Brutus, and must be considered in its entirety. Brutus says:
Coleridge's comment on this deserves notice. He wrote: “This speech is singular; at least, I do not at present see into Shakespeare's motive, his rationale, or in what point of view he meant Brutus' character to appear. For surely ... nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here attributed to him—to him, the stern Roman republican; namely, that he would have no objection to a king, or to Caesar, a monarch in Rome, would Caesar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be! How, too, could Brutus say that he found no personal cause—none in Caesar's past conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Had he not entered Rome as a conqueror? Had he not placed his Gauls in the Senate? Shakespeare, it may be said, has not brought these things forward. True;—and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What character did Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be?”
All this is sound criticism, and can only be answered by the truth that Shakespeare from the beginning of the play identified himself with Brutus, and paid but little attention to the historic Brutus whom he had met in Plutarch. Let us push criticism a little further, and we shall see that this is the only possible way to read the riddle. We all know why Plutarch's Brutus killed Caesar; but why does Shakespeare's Brutus kill the man he so esteems? Because Caesar may change his nature when king; because like the serpent's egg he may “grow mischievous”? But when he speaks “truth” of Caesar he has to admit Caesar's goodness. The “serpent's egg” reason then is inapplicable. Besides, when speaking of himself on the plains of Philippi, Shakespeare's Brutus explicitly contradicts this false reasoning:
It would seem, therefore, that Brutus did not kill Caesar, as one crushes a serpent's egg, to prevent evil consequences. It is equally manifest that he did not do it for “the general,” for if ever “the general” were shown to be despicable and worthless it is in this very play, where the citizens murder Cinna the poet because he has the same name as Cinna the conspirator, and the lower classes are despised as the “rabblement,” “the common herd,” with “chapped hands,” “sweaty night-caps,” and “stinking breath.”
It is Dr. Brandes' idea and not Shakespeare's that Brutus is a “man of uncompromising character and principle.” That is the Brutus of Plutarch, who finds in his stern republican love of the common good an ethical motive for killing the ambitious Caesar. But Shakespeare had no understanding of the republican ideal, and no sympathy with the public; accordingly, his Brutus has no adequate reason for contriving Caesar's death. Shakespeare followed Plutarch in freeing Brutus from the suspicion of personal or interested motive, but he didn't see that by doing this he made his Brutus a conspirator without a cause, a murderer without a motive. The truth is our gentle poet could never find a convincing ground for cold-blooded murder. It will be remembered that Macbeth only murders, as the deer murders, out of fear, and the fact that his Brutus can find no justification of any sort for killing Caesar, confirms our view of Shakespeare's gentle kindness. The “uncompromising character and principle” of the severe republican we find in Plutarch, sit uneasily on Shakespeare's Brutus; it is apparent that the poet had no conception of what we call a fanatic. His difficulties arise from this limitation of insight. He begins to write the play by making Brutus an idealized portrait of himself; he, therefore, dwells on Brutus' perfect nobility, sincerity, and unselfishness, but does not realize that the more perfect he makes Brutus, the more clear and cogent Brutus' motive must be for undertaking Caesar's assassination.
In this confusion Shakespeare's usually fine instinct is at fault, and he blunders from mistake to mistake. His idealizing tendency makes him present Brutus as perfect, and at the same time he uses the historical incident of the anonymous letters, which goes to show Brutus as conceited and vain. If these letters influenced Brutus—and they must be taken to have done so, or else why were they introduced?—we have a noble and unselfish man murdering out of paltry vanity. In Plutarch, where Brutus is depicted as an austere republican, the incident of the letters only throws a natural shade of doubt on the rigid principles by which alone he is supposed to be guided. We all feel that rigid principles rest on pride, and may best be led astray through pride. But Shakespeare's Brutus is pure human sweetness, and the letters are worse than out of place when addressed to him. Shakespeare should never have used this incident; it is a blot on his conception.
All through the first acts of the play Brutus is incredible, for he is in an impossible position. Shakespeare simply could not find any valid reason why his alter ego, Brutus, should kill Caesar. But from the moment the murder is committed to the end of the play Brutus- Shakespeare is at peace with himself. And as soon as the dramatist lets himself go and paints Brutus with entire freedom and frankness, he rises to the height of tragic pathos, and we can all recognize the original of the portrait. At first Brutus is merely ideal; his perfect unsuspiciousness—he trusts even Antony; his transparent honesty—he will have no other oath among the conspirators