Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

SHAKESPEARE
poet and dramatist appeared to more than fulfil the
utmost promise of the time. By right of imperial
command oyer all the resources of imaginative insight
and expression Shakespeare combined the rich dramatic
materials already prepared into more perfect forms and
carried them to the highest point of ideal development.
He quickly surpassed Marlowe in passion, music, and
intellectual povyer; Greene in lyrical beauty, elegiac grace
and narrative interest; Peele in picturesque touch and
pastoral sweetness y and Lyly in bright and sparkling
dialogue. And having distanced the utmost efforts of his
predecessors and contemporaries he took his own higher
way, and reigned to the end without a rival in the new
world of supreme dramatic art he had created. It is a
new world, because Shakespeare’s work alone can be said
to possess the organic strength and infinite variety, the
throbbing fulness, vital complexity, and breathing truth,
of nature herself. In points of artistic resource and
technical ability—such as copious and expressive diction,
freshness and pregnancy of verbal combination, richly
modulated verse, and structural skill in the handling
of incident and action—Shakespeare’s supremacy is
indeed . sufficiently assured. But, after all, it is of
course in the spirit and substance of his work, his power
of piercing to the hidden centres of character, of touch¬
ing the deepest springs of impulse and passion, out of
which are the issues of life, and of evolving those issues
dramatically with a flawless strength, subtlety, and truth,
which raises him so immensely above and beyond not only
the best of the playwrights who went before him, but the
whole line of illustrious dramatists that came after him.
It is Shakespeare’s unique distinction that he has an
absolute command over all the complexities of thought and
feeling that prompt to action and bring out the dividing
lines of character. He sweeps with the hand of a master
the whole gamut of human experience, from the lowest
note to the very top of its compass, from the sportive
childish treble of Mamilius and the pleading boyish tones
of Prince Arthur, up to the spectre-haunted terrors of
Macbeth, the tropical passion of Othello, the agonized
sense and tortured spirit of Hamlet, the sustained elemental
grandeur, the Titanic force and utterly tragical pathos, of
Lear.
Shake- Shakespeare’s active dramatic career in London lasted
dramaticabout twenty years, and may be divided into three
career— tolerably symmetrical periods. The first extends from the
first year 1587 to about 1593-94; the second from this date to
period, the end of the century; and the third from 1600 to about
1608, soon after which time Shakespeare ceased to write
regularly for the stage, was less in London and more and
more at Stratford. Some modern critics add to these a
fourth period, including the few plays which from internal
as well as external evidence must have been among the
poet s latest productions. As the exact dates of these
plays are unknown, this period may be taken to extend
from 1608 to about 1612. The three dramas produced
during these years are, however, hardly entitled to be
ranked as a separate period. They may rather be regarded
as supplementary to the grand series of dramas belonging
to the third and greatest epoch of Shakespeare’s pro¬
ductive power. To the first period belong Shakespeare’s
early tentative efforts in revising and partially rewriting
plays produced by others that already had possession of
the stage. These efforts are illustrated in the three parts
of Henry VI., especially the second and third parts, which
bear decisive marks of Shakespeare’s hand, and were to a
great extent recast and rewritten by him. It is clear
from the internal evidence thus supplied that Shakespeare
was at first powerfully affected by “ Marlowe’s mighty
line.” This influence is so marked in the revised second
763
and third parts of Henry VI. as to induce some critics to
believe Marlowe must have had a hand in the revision.
Ihese passages are, however, sufficiently explained by the
tact of Marlowe’s influence during the first period of
Shakespeare s career. To the same period also belong the
earliest tragedy, that of Titus Andronicus, and the three
comedies—Zone’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors
and the Two Gentlemen of Verona. These dramas are all
marked by the dominant literary influences of the time,
lliey present features obviously due to the revived and
widespread knowledge of classical literature, as well as to
the active interest in the literature of Italy and the South.
J itus Andronicus, in many of its characteristic features,
reflects the form of Roman tragedy almost universally
accepted and followed in the earlier period of the drama
Ihis form was supplied by the Latin plays of Seneca,
their darker colours being deepened by the moral effect of
the judicial tragedies and military conflicts of the time.
I he execution of the Scottish queen and the Catholic con-
spirators who had acted in her name, and the destruction
of the Spanish Armada, had given an impulse to tragic
representations of an extreme type. This was undoubtedly
rather fostered than otherwise by the favourite exemplars
of Roman tragedy. The Medea and Thyestes of Seneca are
crowded with pagan horrors of the most revolting kind.
It is true these horrors are usually related, not represented'
although in the Medea the maddened heroine kills her
children on the stage. But from these tragedies the
conception of the physically horrible as an element of
tragedy was imported into the early English drama, and
intensified by the realistic tendency which the events of the
time and the taste of their ruder audiences had impressed
upon the common stages. This tendency is exemplified
in Titus Andronicus, obviously a very early work, the
signs of youthful effort being apparent not only in the
acceptance of so coarse a type of tragedy but in the crude
handling of character and motive, and the want of har¬
mony in working out the details of the dramatic concep¬
tion. . Kyd was the most popular contemporary repre¬
sentative of the bloody school, and in the leading motives
of treachery, concealment, and revenge there are points
of likeness between Titus Andronicus and the Spanish
Tragedy. But how promptly and completely Shake¬
speare’s nobler nature turned from this lower type is
apparent from the fact that he not only never reverted to
it but indirectly ridicules the piled-up horrors and extra¬
vagant language of Kyd’s plays.
The early comedies in the same way are marked by the
dominant literary influences of the time, partly classic
partly Italian. In the Comedy of Errors, for example,
Shakespeare attempted a humorous play of the old classi¬
cal type, the general plan and many details being derived
directly from Plautus. In Lords Labour 's Lost many
characteristic features of Italian comedy are freely intro¬
duced : the pedant Holofernes, the curate Sir Nathaniel, the
fantastic braggadocio soldier Armado, are all well-known
characters of the contemporary Italian drama. Of this
comedy, indeed, Gervinus says, “the tone of the Italian
school prevails here more than in any other play. The
redundance of wit is only to be compared with a similar
redundance of conceit in Shakespeare’s narrative poems,
and with the Italian style which he had early adopted.”
These comedies display another sign of early work in the
mechanical exactness of the plan and a studied symmetry
in the grouping of the chief personages of the drama. In
the Two Gentlemen of Verona, as Prof. Dowden points out,
“ Proteus the fickle is set against Valentine the faithful’
Silvia the light and intellectual against Julia the ardent
and tender, Lance the humourist against Speed the wit.”
So in Lords Labour’s Lost, the king and his three fellow-