juvenile actors, he voices his real sentiments. Likewise in III, ii, in his advice to the players, we get an insight into his attitude towards his art through Hamlet's stage directions: ... the purpose of playing . . . to hold the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own features, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." The lines 41-50 particularly reveal this "edge" that I have mentioned. Quite likely he had in mind puncturing the bubble of ambition for some bumptious clown. His attitude toward friendship and his evaluation of manly qualities seem to me to find expression in Hamlet's words to Horatio, III, ii, 59-79. What are the qualities there set forth? Sincerity, valor, good cheer, poise. Do we not find Shakespeare's own expression in lines 74-76? "Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled, To sound what stop she please." The very phraseology here seems to me to have grown out of mingled disappointment and fulfilment in the dramatist's own life. Poise, "blood and judgment commingled"-are not these in very fact the elements of character that he exemplifies in his life? Is not this the reason that even his rivals called him "gentle Shakespeare"? Is it not precisely because he possessed these attributes of character to such a remarkable degree that we find it difficult to discover in his own works an expression of his own personal attitude toward life? Like any sincere man, he shrinks from "protesting too much." He seems to say: "My personal views are not important; the important thing is that the mirror should be held up to nature so that men may see themselves." Let them, then, write their own sermons. What did Shakespeare think of democracy? How did he treat the common man? How far would he have extended the right of suffrage? Perhaps it is hardly fair and might be distinctly misleading to judge him on this point by his plays. But do you recall any manual laborer, any person in lowly position, whom he invests with dignity, steadiness of purpose, honesty, ability, or to whom he assigns important tasks in life? Do you find any such character whom he endows with even a working modicum of intelligence and good sense, coupled with the virtues above noted? We must not, of course, forget Emilia, and the Fool in Lear. And we must remember Aragon's speech—II, ix, 46-47: "How much low peasantry would then be glean'd But are not Shakespeare's "commoners" so prevailingly as to be practically exclusively pictured as ignorant, unstable, cowardly, with, at best, a rude shrewdness of wit? Consider Nym, Bardolph, Lancelot, Dogberry, the grave digger and the like. "Upon the King," says Henry V, in despair of finding any one who will discharge responsibility acceptably— "Let us our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor lay upon the king. He must bear all." As for what "Shakespeare" said about democracy-he didn't "say"; but Harry Plantagenet's lines seem to me to reveal the edge of autobiographic experience and belief. There has been much feeling in some quarters about Shakespeare's unfairness to the Jew, and there are cities and districts where school boards have, by pressure of public opinion, been obliged to prohibit the study of "The Merchant of Venice" in the public schools. This has always seemed to me to be due to utter misapprehension of Shakespeare's real attitude in the matter. It is indeed suggested by some students of Shakespeare that while he began to write the play to cater to the anti-Jewish feeling then running high, his innate sense of right and his knowledge of human nature, together with his artistic fealty to truth, made the play a great object lesson (one hesitates to use the word lesson in speaking of Shakespeare) in fair thinking. In fact, according to Professor Tucker Brooke (Shakespeare's Principal Plays, Brooke, Cunliffe, McCrackin, p. 89) Shakespeare's version of the play was not used in the first forty years of the 18th century, a mutilated edition by Lansdowne being then in favor, in which the character of Bassanio is exalted, and Shylock is made "the incarnation of grim and terrible ferocity." Of course, in its early rendering, the play was enacted as an anti-Jewish play, but all one needs to do to disabuse his mind of the notion that Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" is essentially anti-Semitic, is to study the play itself. Note the characters carefully: Bassanio, the young Christian, is represented as utterly selfish and unheroic. He makes promises only to break them— "He shall not seal to such a bond for me; but presently, after Antonio's generous importunities, he does allow Antonio to seal to this very same objectionable bond. Again in Court Scene, "The Jew shall have my flesh, blood, bones, and all, yet there is nothing to indicate that Bassanio sought to interpose himself between the Jew's knife and Antonio when the latter was at his direst extremity. In the Lansdowne edition he does brandish a sword at this point, thus indicating that the Shakespeare play failed to make the young Christian gentleman sufficiently heroic to suit the "Christian" conception. So in the scene of the caskets, after he has voiced his lovely and unimpeachable sentiments on sincerity and reality as opposed to any outward semblance, he is obliged to admit to Portia the humiliating fact that he had not really told her the truth about his financial situation. In other words, this young Christian gentleman is represented as a selfish borrowing debtor, a fortune hunter (the first word that he says about Portia is "In Belmont is a lady richly left"-the italics are mine) who fails to mention to Antonio, in stating that the glances of this young woman have led him to think that he stands a fair chance of winning her love, the pertinent fact, with which he must have been familiar: namely, that the securing of Portia hung upon a hazard and that he stood only one chance in three of being the lucky suitor. In other words, he is willing to use his friends to an unlimited extent; he knows no conscience in using others to advance his ends; he fails utterly when it comes to really sound and generous and worthy conception of friendship. You have said all that you can say for Bassanio when you have admitted that he talks beautifully. He is a very promising young man, yet Portia and all the other Christians are represented as adoring him. And what of Jessica? Entrusted with the keys to the house and to her father's treasure, she betrays this trust, steals all the money and jewels she can lay hands on, not even considering sacred her father's engagement ring, and elopes with a Christian, detested, of course, by her father. Yet this betrayal of trust is hailed and acclaimed by all the Christians in the play as a good joke on the old Jew. In other words, any calamity that happens to one of his race is welcomed by the "Christians" in this play as an act of God. Surely Shakespeare was too keen an analyst of human nature to have sought seriously to represent so despicable a sentiment as being soundly representative of real Christianity. In fact, to my way of thinking, no other passage in the whole range of his writings, even including his sonnets, which are supposed in many instances to reveal his soul's own passion-nowhere else do we find the very quick of his spirit so near the surface as in the protesting speech of Shylock, III, i, 54-76. There you have, in the midst of the irony of the whole situation, all the intelligence, all the sensitiveness, all the spirit of fairness of an heroic soul, crying out in a sincere and impersonal, though tragically mistaken, spirit of vengeance, against a stupid, inhuman wrong, beating against the bars of ignorance and error, seeking to touch in people's hearts some sense of ordinary justice: "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" And likewise in IV, i, lines 99-100, "The pound of flesh which I demand of him is dearly bought." What a background of persecution, unfairness, injustice, and wrong is revealed to us by that one illuminating passage! Surely, then, we may think of Shakespeare as abhorring racial snobbishness of exposing and revealing thus the unloveliness of racial complacency. These fundamental elements of character-generosity and sincerity of spirit, poise, openness of mind, cheer and courage these he extols, and their opposites he decries; but if we ask him to chart out any particular path for us, to back us up in some immediate, personal, specific belief, he seems to say to us, "Better not come to me for that: box your own compass; write your own sermons; make your own quotations." Master Will The critic wrote that Shakespeare once taught school, And make the dullard mount the dunce's stool? To measure feet and turn them upside down? Rest well assured that Shakespeare knew the art He taught that Truth is robed in Beauty's stole Till on a poet's stage it finds a soul! -FREDERICK HERBERT ADLER. |