Biographical Essays

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These remarkable passages were probably not undesigned; but if we
suppose them to have been thrown off without conscious notice of
their tendencies, then, according to the superstition of the
ancient Grecians, they would have been regarded as prefiguring
words, prompted by the secret genius that accompanies every man,
such as insure along with them their own accomplishment. With or
without intention, however, it is believed that Shakspeare wrote
nothing more after this exquisite romantic drama. With respect to
the remainder of his personal history, Dr. Drake and others have
supposed, that during the twenty years from 1591 to 1611, he
visited Stratford often, and latterly once a year.

In 1589 he had possessed some share in a theatre; in 1596 he had a
considerable share. Through Lord Southampton, as a surviving friend
of Lord Essex, who was viewed as the martyr to his Scottish
politics, there can be no doubt that Shakspeare had acquired the
favor of James I.; and accordingly, on the 29th of May, 1603, about
two months after the king's accession to the throne of England, a
patent was granted to the company of players who possessed the
Globe theatre; in which patent Shakspeare's name stands second.
This patent raised the company to the rank of his majesty's
servants, whereas previously they are supposed to have been simply
the servants of the Lord Chamberlain. Perhaps it was in grateful
acknowledgment of this royal favor that Shakspeare afterwards, in
1606, paid that sublime compliment to the house of Stuart, which is
involved in the vision shown to Macbeth. This vision is managed
with exquisite skill. It was impossible to display the whole series
of princes from Macbeth to James I.; but he beholds the posterity
of Banquo, one "gold-bound brow" succeeding to another, until he
comes to an eighth apparition of a Scottish king,

"Who bears a glass
Which shows him many more; and some he sees
Who twofold balls and treble sceptres carry;"

thus bringing down without tedium the long succession to the very
person of James I., by the symbolic image of the two crowns united
on one head.

About the beginning of the century Shakspeare had become rich
enough to purchase the best house in Stratford, called _The Great
House_, which name he altered to _New Place_; and in 1602
he bought one hundred and seven acres adjacent to this house for a
sum (320L) corresponding to about 1500 guineas of modern money.
Malone thinks that he purchased the house as early as 1597; and it
is certain that about that time he was able to assist his father in
obtaining a renewed grant of arms from the Herald's College, and
therefore, of course, to re-establish his father's fortunes. Ten
years of well-directed industry, viz., from 1591 to 1601, and the
prosperity of the theatre in which he was a proprietor, had raised
him to affluence; and after another ten years, improved with the
same success, he was able to retire with an income of 300L, or
(according to the customary computations) in modern money of 1500L,
per annum. Shakspeare was in fact the first man of letters, Pope
the second, and Sir Walter Scott the third, who, in Great Britain,
has ever realized a large fortune by literature; or in Christendom,
if we except Voltaire, and two dubious cases in Italy. The four or
five latter years of his life Shakspeare passed in dignified ease,
in profound meditation, we may be sure, and in universal respect,
at his native town of Stratford; and there he died, on the 23d of
April, 1616. [Endnote: 18]

His daughter Susanna had been married on the 5th of June of the
year 1607, to Dr. John Hall, [Endnote: 19] a physician in
Stratford. The doctor died in November, 1635, aged sixty; his wife,
at the age of sixty-six, on July 11, 1640. They had one child, a
daughter, named Elizabeth, born in 1608, married April 22, 1626, to
Thomas Nashe, Esq., left a widow in 1647, and subsequently
remarried to Sir John Barnard; but this Lady Barnard, the sole
grand-daughter of the poet, had no children by either marriage. The
other daughter, Judith, on February 10, 1616, (about ten weeks
before her father's death,) married Mr. Thomas Quincy of Stratford,
by whom she had three sons, Shakspeare, Richard, and Thomas. Judith
was about thirty-one years old at the time of her marriage; and
living just forty-six years afterwards, she died in February, 1662,
at the age of seventy-seven. Her three sons died without issue; and
thus, in the direct lineal descent, it is certain that no
representative has survived of this transcendent poet, the most
august amongst created intellects.

After this review of Shakspeare's life, it becomes our duty to take
a summary survey of his works, of his intellectual powers, and of
his station in literature, a station which is now irrevocably
settled, not so much (which happens in other cases) by a vast
overbalance of favorable suffrages, as by acclamation; not so much
by the _voices_ of those who admire him up to the verge of
idolatry, as by the _acts_ of those who everywhere seek for
his works among the primal necessities of life, demand them, and
crave them as they do their daily bread; not so much by eulogy
openly proclaiming itself, as by the silent homage recorded in the
endless multiplication of what he has bequeathed us; not so much by
his own compatriots, who, with regard to almost every other author,
[Endnote: 20] compose the total amount of his _effective_
audience, as by the unanimous "all hail!" of intellectual
Christendom; finally, not by the hasty partisanship of his own
generation, nor by the biassed judgment of an age trained in the
same modes of feeling and of thinking with himself,--but by the
solemn award of generation succeeding to generation, of one age
correcting the obliquities or peculiarities of another; by the
verdict of two hundred and thirty years, which have now elapsed
since the very _latest_ of his creations, or of two hundred
and forty-seven years if we date from the earliest; a verdict which
has been continually revived and re-opened, probed, searched,
vexed, by criticism in every spirit, from the most genial and
intelligent, down to the most malignant and scurrilously hostile
which feeble heads and great ignorance could suggest when
cooperating with impure hearts and narrow sensibilities; a verdict,
in short, sustained and countersigned by a longer series of
writers, many of them eminent for wit or learning, than were ever
before congregated upon any inquest relating to any author, be he
who he might, ancient [Endnote: 21] or modern, Pagan or Christian.
It was a most witty saying with respect to a piratical and knavish
publisher, who made a trade of insulting the memories of deceased
authors by forged writings, that he was "among the new terrors of
death." But in the gravest sense it may be affirmed of Shakspeare,
that he is among the modern luxuries of life; that life, in fact,
is a new thing, and one more to be coveted, since Shakspeare has
extended the domains of human consciousness, and pushed its dark
frontiers into regions not so much as dimly descried or even
suspected before his time, far less illuminated (as now they are)
by beauty and tropical luxuriance of life. For instance,--a single
instance, indeed one which in itself is a world of new revelation,
--the possible beauty of the female character had not been seen as
in a dream before Shakspeare called into perfect life the radiant
shapes of Desdemona, of Imogene, of Hermione, of Perdita, of
Ophelia, of Miranda, and many others. The Una of Spenser, earlier
by ten or fifteen years than most of these, was an idealized
portrait of female innocence and virgin purity, but too shadowy and
unreal for a dramatic reality. And as to the Grecian classics, let
not the reader imagine for an instant that any prototype in this
field of Shakspearian power can be looked for there. The
_Antigone_ and the _Electra_ of the tragic poets are the
two leading female characters that classical antiquity offers to
our respect, but assuredly not to our impassioned love, as
disciplined and exalted in the school of Shakspeare. They challenge
our admiration, severe, and even stern, as impersonations of filial
duty, cleaving to the steps of a desolate and afflicted old man; or
of sisterly affection, maintaining the rights of a brother under
circumstances of peril, of desertion, and consequently of perfect
self-reliance. Iphigenia, again, though not dramatically coming
before us in her own person, but according to the beautiful report
of a spectator, presents us with a fine statuesque model of heroic
fortitude, and of one whose young heart, even in the very agonies
of her cruel immolation, refused to forget, by a single indecorous
gesture, or so much as a moment's neglect of her own princely
descent, and that she herself was "a lady in the land." These are
fine marble groups, but they are not the warm breathing realities
of Shakspeare; there is "no speculation" in their cold marble eyes;
the breath of life is not in their nostrils; the fine pulses of
womanly sensibilities are not throbbing in their bosoms. And
besides this immeasurable difference between the cold moony
reflexes of life, as exhibited by the power of Grecian art, and the
true sunny life of Shakspeare, it must he observed that the
Antigones, &c. of the antique put forward but one single trait of
character, like the aloe with its single blossom. This solitary
feature is presented to us as an abstraction, and as an insulated
quality; whereas in Shakspeare all is presented in the
_concrete_; that is to say, not brought forward in relief, as
by some effort of an anatomical artist; but embodied and imbedded,
so to speak, as by the force of a creative nature, in the complex
system of a human life; a life in which all the elements move and
play simultaneously, and with something more than mere simultaneity
or co-existence, acting and re-acting each upon the other, nay,
even acting by each other and through each other. In Shakspeare's
characters is felt for ever a real _organic_ life, where each
is for the whole and in the whole, and where the whole is for each
and in each. They only are real incarnations.

The Greek poets could not exhibit any approximations to
_female_ character, without violating the truth of Grecian
life, and shocking the feelings of the audience. The drama with the
Greeks, as with us, though much less than with us, was a picture of
human life; and that which could not occur in life could not wisely
be exhibited on the stage. Now, in ancient Greece, women were
secluded from the society of men. The conventual sequestration of
the hareem, or female apartment [Endnote: 22] of the house, and
the Mahommedan consecration of its threshold against the ingress of
males, had been transplanted from Asia into Greece thousands of
years perhaps before either convents or Mahommed existed. Thus
barred from all open social intercourse, women could not develop or
express any character by word or action. Even to _have_ a
character, violated, to a Grecian mind, the ideal portrait of
feminine excellence; whence, perhaps, partly the too generic, too
little individualized, style of Grecian beauty. But prominently to
_express_ a character was impossible under the common tenor of
Grecian life, unless when high tragical catastrophes transcended
the decorums of that tenor, or for a brief interval raised the
curtain which veiled it. Hence the subordinate part which women
play upon the Greek stage in all but some half dozen cases. In the
paramount tragedy on that stage, the model tragedy, the (_OEdipus
Tyrannus_ of Sophocles), there is virtually no woman at all; for
Jocasta is a party to the story merely as the dead Laius or the
self-murdered Sphinx was a party, viz., by her contributions to the
fatalities of the event, not by anything she does or says
spontaneously. In fact, the Greek poet, if a wise poet, could not
address himself genially to a task in which he must begin by
shocking the sensibilities of his countrymen. And hence followed,
not only the dearth of female characters in the Grecian drama, but
also a second result still more favorable to the sense of a new
power evolved by Shakspeare. Whenever the common law of Grecian
life did give way, it was, as we have observed, to the suspending
force of some great convulsion or tragical catastrophe. This for a
moment (like an earthquake in a nunnery) would set at liberty even
the timid, fluttering Grecian women, those doves of the dove-cot,
and would call some of them into action. But which? Precisely those
of energetic and masculine minds; the timid and feminine would but
shrink the more from public gaze and from tumult. Thus it happened,
that such female characters as _were_ exhibited in Greece,
could not but be the harsh and the severe. If a gentle Ismene
appeared for a moment in contest with some energetic sister
Antigone, (and chiefly, perhaps, by way of drawing out the fiercer
character of that sister,) she was soon dismissed as unfit for
scenical effect. So that not only were female characters few, but,
moreover, of these few the majority were but repetitions of
masculine qualities in female persons. Female agency being seldom
summoned on the stage, except when it had received a sort of
special dispensation from its sexual character, by some terrific
convulsions of the house or the city, naturally it assumed the
style of action suited to these circumstances. And hence it arose,
that not woman as she differed from man, but woman as she resembled
man--woman, in short, seen under circumstances so dreadful as to
abolish the effect of sexual distinction, was the woman of the
Greek tragedy. [Endnote: 23] And hence generally arose for
Shakspeare the wider field, and the more astonishing by its perfect
novelty, when he first introduced female characters, not as mere
varieties or echoes of masculine characters, a Medea or
Clytemnestra, or a vindictive Hecuba, the mere tigress of the
tragic tiger, but female characters that had the appropriate beauty
of female nature; woman no longer grand, terrific, and repulsive,
but woman "after her kind"--the other hemisphere of the dramatic
world; woman, running through the vast gamut of womanly loveliness;
woman, as emancipated, exalted, ennobled, under a new law of
Christian morality; woman, the sister and coequal of man, no longer
his slave, his prisoner, and sometimes his rebel." It is a far cry
to Loch Awe; "and from the Athenian stage to the stage of
Shakspeare, it may be said, is a prodigious interval. True; but
prodigious as it is, there is really nothing between them. The
Roman stage, at least the tragic stage, as is well known, was put
out, as by an extinguisher, by the cruel amphitheatre, just as a
candle is made pale and ridiculous by daylight. Those who were
fresh from the real murders of the bloody amphitheatre regarded
with contempt the mimic murders of the stage. Stimulation too
coarse and too intense had its usual effect in making the
sensibilities callous. Christian emperors arose at length, who
abolished the amphitheatre in its bloodier features. But by that
time the genius of the tragic muse had long slept the sleep of
death. And that muse had no resurrection until the age of
Shakspeare. So that, notwithstanding a gulf of nineteen centuries
and upwards separates Shakspeare from Euripides, the last of the
surviving Greek tragedians, the one is still the nearest successor
of the other, just as Connaught and the islands in Clew Bay are
next neighbors to America, although three thousand watery columns,
each of a cubic mile in dimensions, divide them from each other.

A second reason, which lends an emphasis of novelty and effective
power to Shakspeare's female world, is a peculiar fact of contrast
which exists between that and his corresponding world of men. Let
us explain. The purpose and the intention of the Grecian stage was
not primarily to develop human _character_, whether in men or
in women: human _fates_ were its object; great tragic
situations under the mighty control of a vast cloudy destiny, dimly
descried at intervals, and brooding over human life by mysterious
agencies, and for mysterious ends. Man, no longer the
representative of an august _will_, man the passion-puppet of
fate, could not with any effect display what we call a character,
which is a distinction between man and man, emanating originally
from the will, and expressing its determinations, moving under the
large variety of human impulses. The will is the central pivot of
character; and this was obliterated, thwarted, cancelled, by the
dark fatalism which brooded over the Grecian stage. That
explanation will sufficiently clear up the reason why marked or
complex variety of character was slighted by the great principles
of the Greek tragedy. And every scholar who has studied that grand
drama of Greece with feeling,--that drama, so magnificent, so
regal, so stately,--and who has thoughtfully investigated its
principles, and its difference from the English drama, will
acknowledge that powerful and elaborate character, character, for
instance, that could employ the fiftieth part of that profound
analysis which has been applied to Hamlet, to Falstaff, to Lear, to
Othello, and applied by Mrs. Jamieson so admirably to the full
development of the Shakspearian heroines, would have been as much
wasted, nay, would have been defeated, and interrupted the blind
agencies of fate, just in the same way as it would injure the
shadowy grandeur of a ghost to individualize it too much. Milton's
angels are slightly touched, superficially touched, with
differences of character; but they are such differences, so simple
and general, as are just sufficient to rescue them from the
reproach applied to Virgil's "_fortemque Gyan, forlemque
Cloanthem;_" just sufficient to make them knowable apart. Pliny
speaks of painters who painted in one or two colors; and, as
respects the angelic characters, Milton does so; he is
_monochromatic_. So, and for reasons resting upon the same
ultimate philosophy, were the mighty architects of the Greek
tragedy. They also were monochromatic; they also, as to the
characters of their persons, painted in one color. And so far there
might have been the same novelty in Shakspeare's men as in his
women. There _might_ have been; but the reason why there is
_not_, must be sought in the fact, that History, the muse of
History, had there even been no such muse as Melpomene, would have
forced us into an acquaintance with human character. History, as
the representative of actual life, of real man, gives us powerful
delineations of character in its chief agents, that is, in men; and
therefore it is that Shakspeare, the absolute creator of female
character, was but the mightiest of all painters with regard to
male character. Take a single instance. The Antony of Shakspeare,
immortal for its execution, is found, after all, as regards the
primary conception, in history. Shakspeare's delineation is but the
expansion of the germ already preexisting, by way of scattered
fragments, in Cicero's Philippics, in Cicero's Letters, in Appian,
&c. But Cleopatra, equally fine, is a pure creation of art. The
situation and the scenic circumstances belong to history, but the
character belongs to Shakspeare.

In the great world, therefore, of woman, as the interpreter of the
shifting phases and the lunar varieties of that mighty changeable
planet, that lovely satellite of man, Shakspeare stands not the
first only, not the original only, but is yet the sole authentic
oracle of truth. Woman, therefore, the beauty of the female mind,
_this_ is one great field of his power. The supernatural
world, the world of apparitions, _that_ is another. For
reasons which it would be easy to give, reasons emanating from the
gross mythology of the ancients, no Grecian, [Endnote: 24] no
Roman, could have conceived a ghost. That shadowy conception, the
protesting apparition, the awful projection of the human
conscience, belongs to the Christian mind. And in all Christendom,
who, let us ask, who, who but Shakspeare has found the power for
effectually working this mysterious mode of being? In summoning
back to earth "the majesty of buried Denmark," how like an awful
necromancer does Shakspeare appear! All the pomps and grandeurs
which religion, which the grave, which the popular superstition had
gathered about the subject of apparitions, are here converted to
his purpose, and bend to one awful effect. The wormy grave brought
into antagonism with the scenting of the early dawn; the trumpet of
resurrection suggested, and again as an antagonist idea to the
crowing of the cock, (a bird ennobled in the Christian mythus by
the part he is made to play at the Crucifixion;) its starting "as a
guilty thing" placed in opposition to its majestic expression of
offended dignity when struck at by the partisans of the sentinels;
its awful allusions to the secrets of its prison-house; its
ubiquity, contrasted with its local presence; its aerial substance,
yet clothed in palpable armor; the heart-shaking solemnity of its
language, and the appropriate scenery of its haunt, viz., the
ramparts of a capital fortress, with no witnesses but a few
gentlemen mounting guard at the dead of night,--what a mist, what a
_mirage_ of vapor, is here accumulated, through which the
dreadful being in the centre looms upon us in far larger
proportions, than could have happened had it been insulated and
left naked of this circumstantial pomp! In the _Tempest_,
again, what new modes of life, preternatural, yet far as the poles
from the spiritualities of religion! Ariel in antithesis to
Caliban! What is most ethereal to what is most animal! A phantom of
air, an abstraction of the dawn and of vesper sun-lights, a
bodiless sylph on the one hand; on the other a gross carnal
monster, like the Miltonic Asmodai, "the fleshliest incubus" among
the fiends, and yet so far ennobled into interest by his
intellectual power, and by the grandeur of misanthropy! [Endnote:
25] In the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_, again, we have the old
traditional fairy, a lovely mode of preternatural life, remodified
by Shakspeare's eternal talisman. Oberon and Titania remind us at
first glance of Ariel. They approach, but how far they recede. They
are like--"like, but, oh, how different!" And in no other
exhibition of this dreamy population of the moonlight forests and
forest-lawns, are the circumstantial proprieties of fairy life so
exquisitely imagined, sustained, or expressed. The dialogue between
Oberon and Titania is, of itself, and taken separately from its
connection, one of the most delightful poetic scenes that
literature affords. The witches in Macbeth are another variety of
supernatural life, in which Shakspeare's power to enchant and to
disenchant are alike portentous. The circumstances of the blasted
heath, the army at a distance, the withered attire of the
mysterious hags, and the choral litanies of their fiendish Sabbath,
are as finely imagined in their kind as those which herald and
which surround the ghost in Hamlet. There we see the
_positive_ of Shakspeare's superior power. But now turn and
look to the _negative_. At a time when the trials of witches,
the royal book on demonology, and popular superstition (all so far
useful, as they prepared a basis of undoubting faith for the poet's
serious use of such agencies) had degraded and polluted the ideas
of these mysterious beings by many mean associations, Shakspeare
does not fear to employ them in high tragedy, (a tragedy moreover
which, though not the very greatest of his efforts as an
intellectual whole, nor as a struggle of passion, is _among_
the greatest in any view, and positively _the_ greatest for
scenical grandeur, and in that respect makes the nearest approach
of all English tragedies to the Grecian model;) he does not fear to
introduce, for the same appalling effect as that for which
Aeschylus introduced the Eumenides, a triad of old women,
concerning whom an English wit has remarked this grotesque
peculiarity in the popular creed of that day,--that although potent
over winds and storms, in league with powers of darkness, they yet
stood in awe of the constable,--yet relying on his own supreme
power to disenchant as well as to enchant, to create and to
uncreate, he mixes these women and their dark machineries with the
power of armies, with the agencies of kings, and the fortunes of
martial kingdoms. Such was the sovereignty of this poet, so mighty
its compass!

A third fund of Shakspeare's peculiar power lies in his teeming
fertility of fine thoughts and sentiments. From his works alone
might be gathered a golden bead-roll of thoughts the deepest,
subtilest, most pathetic, and yet most catholic and universally
intelligible; the most characteristic, also, and appropriate to the
particular person, the situation, and the case, yet, at the same
time, applicable to the circumstances of every human being, under
all the accidents of life, and all vicissitudes of fortune. But
this subject offers so vast a field of observation, it being so
eminently the prerogative of Shakspeare to have thought more finely
and more extensively than all other poets combined, that we cannot
wrong the dignity of such a theme by doing more, in our narrow
limits, than simply noticing it as one of the emblazonries upon
Shakspeare's shield.

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