CHAPTER XII

THE APPROACH OF TRAGEDY

WITH the advent of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare entered the greatest period of his life as an artist the period of the Tragedies. During eight

eventful years he was brooding over the deepest problems of human experience, and facing, with searching and unfaltering gaze, the darkest aspects of life. That this absorption in themes which bore their fruit in the Tragedies was due primarily to a prolonged crisis in his own spiritual life is rendered practically certain by the persistence of the sombre mood, by the poet's evident sensitiveness to and dependence upon conditions and experience, and by a series of facts of tragical import in the lives of some of his friends. His development in thought and art was so evidently one of definite progression, of the deepening of feeling and broadening of vision through the unfolding of his nature, that it is impossible to dissociate the marked change of mood which came over him about 1600 from events which touched and searched his own spirit.

Until about 1595 Shakespeare had been serving his apprenticeship by doing work which was to a considerable extent imitative, and to a larger extent experimental; he had tried his hand at several kinds of

writing, and had revealed unusual power of observation, astonishing dexterity of mind, and signal skill in making the traditional characters of the drama live before the eyes and in the imagination of the theatregoers who made up his earliest constituency. From about 1594 to 1600 he had grown into harmonious and vital relations with his age, he had disclosed poetic genius of a very high order, and he had gone far in his education as a dramatist. He had written the Sonnets, and he had created Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, Juliet, Romeo, Mercutio, Benedict, Henry V., Falstaff, Shylock, Hotspur, and Dogberry. If he had died in 1600, his place would have been secure. His reputation was firmly established, and he had won the hearts of his contemporaries by the charm of his nature no less than by the fascination of his genius.

His serenity, poise, and sweetness are evidenced not only by his work but by the representations of his face which remain. Of these the bust in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford, made by Gerard Jonson, a native of Amsterdam, and a stonemason of Southwark in the poet's time, and the Droeshout portrait, which appeared on the title-page of the First Folio edition of the poet's works, issued in 1623, were accepted by his friends and contemporaries, and must present at least a general resemblance to the poet's features. They are so crude in execution that they cannot do justice to the finer lines of structure or to the delicacy of colouring of Shakespeare's face and head, but they make the type sufficiently clear. They represent a face of singular harmony and regularity of

feature, crowned by a noble and finely proportioned head. The eyes were hazel in colour, the hair auburn ; the expression, deeply meditative and kindly, was that of a man of thoughtful temper, genial nature, and thorough self-control. In figure Shakespeare was of medium stature and compactly built.

It is significant that, after the first outburst of jealousy of the young dramatist's growing popularity in Greene's "A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance," the expressions of Shakespeare's contemporaries indicate unusual warmth of personal regard, culminating in a magnificent eulogy from his greatest rival, and one who had reason to fear him most.

That he was of a social disposition, and met men easily and on pleasant terms, is evident from the extraordinary range of his knowledge of men and manners in the taverns of his time—those predecessors of the modern club. That he enjoyed the society of men of his own craft is evident both from his own disposition and from the fact that he stood so distinctly outside the literary and theatrical quarrels of his time. The tradition which associates him with the Mermaid Tavern which stood in Bread Street, not far from Milton's birthplace, is entirely credible. There he would have found many of the most brilliant men of his time. Beaumont's well-known description inclines one to believe that under no roof in England has better talk been heard:

What things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid? heard words that have been

So nimble and so full of subtle flame,

As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,

And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.

The age was eminently social in instinct and habit; society, in the modern sense of the word, was taking shape; and men found great attraction in the easy intercourse and frank speech of tavern meetings. Writing much later, but undoubtedly reporting the impression of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Thomas Fuller says, in his "Worthies": "Which two I beheld like a Spanish great gallion and an English man-ofwar: Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher up in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shake-spear, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention."

At the end of the sixteenth century Shakespeare was on the flood-tide of a prosperous life; at the very beginning of the seventeenth century a deep and significant change came over his spirit. In external affairs his fortunes rose steadily until his death; but in his spiritual life momentous experiences changed for a time the current of his thought, and clouded the serene skies in the light of which nature had been so radiant and life so absorbingly interesting to him. While it is highly improbable that the Sonnets record in chronological order two deep and searching emotional experiences, the autobiographic note in them is

unmistakable; it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that they express, if they do not literally report, a prolonged emotional experience culminating in a crisis which shook the very bases of his nature; which brought him in the beginning an intense and passionate joy, slowly dissolving into a great and bitter agony of spirit; and issuing at last, through the moralization of a searching insight, in a larger and deeper harmony with the order of life. This experience, in which friendship and love contended for supremacy in his soul; in which he entered into a new and humiliating consciousness of weakness in his own spirit, and in which he knew, apparently for the first time, that bitterness of disenchantment and disillusion which to a nature of such sensitiveness and emotional capacity as his is the bitterest cup ever held to the lips, found him gay, light-hearted, buoyant, full of creative energy, and radiant with the charm and the dreams of youth; it left him saddened in spirit, burdened with the consciousness of weakness, face to face with those tragic collisions which seem at times to disclose the play of the irony of fate, but out of which, in agony and apparent defeat, the larger and more inclusive harmony of the individual with the divine and the human order of society is secured and disclosed.

Shakespeare drank deep of the cup of suffering before he set in the order of art, with a hand at once stern and tender, the colossal sorrows of his kind. Like all artists of the deepest insight, the keenest sensitiveness to beauty, and that subtle and elusive but magical spiritual sympathy which we call genius,