CHAPTER VIII

THE POETIC PERIOD

DURING the decade between 1590 and 1600 Shakespeare's productivity was continuous, and covered a wide field of poetic expression; the nineteen or twenty plays which were written during this period. included eight or nine comedies, one tragedy, and a group of historical dramas. To these must be added the two long lyrical pieces which bear his name, the few short pieces incorporated in "The Passionate Pilgrim," "A Lover's Complaint," "The Phoenix and the Turtle," and the lyrical poem on friendship and love which took the form of a sequence of one hundred and fifty-four sonnets. The apprentice work of the young dramatist may be said to end with the creation of the "Midsummer Night's Dream and "Romeo and Juliet," though in neither of these beautiful dramas does his genius reach full maturity. At the end of six or seven years after his arrival in London he had become sufficiently known and successful to awaken envy; he had tried various dramatic forms with success; he had learned the practical side of playwriting, and he had gone a long way towards mastering its theory; he had become an actor of intelligence, if not of marked gifts; and he had established himself in his profession.

It must have been a period of deep and eager spiritual striving and unfolding. Some of the poet's devout students in Germany, to whom his fame owes much, and who have enriched Shakespearean scholarship for all time with the fruits of loving study and of fruitful insight, find evidence that during this time the poet passed through a storm-and-stress period. There are many indications, however, that this phase of the dramatist's spiritual life came later, and was coincident with tragic events which touched him to the quick. His earlier work shows a sunny nature, a sensitive mind, a gay and eager interest in many forms of experience and art.

If "Titus Andronicus was written by Shakespeare, and at the beginning of his career, it was so purely external and imitative, so evidently outside the dramatist's life, that it does not count as a document in his spiritual history. The extraordinary accuracy of description, the resolute and unfailing grasp of the concrete, which stamp the very earliest work from his hand, show him at the start more absorbed in seeing than in meditating, more engrossed by the marvellous spectacle of the world than concerned with its spiritual order. It is true, he could not see without thinking, and Shakespeare was always of a meditative temper; but his first contact with the world called forth his full power of observation, and the emphasis of his thought fell, for a time, outside his own personality.

As he saw many sides of experience, so he felt the charm of various masters, and was drawn toward Lyly, Peele, and Marlowe; he came under the Italian

influence, and he was not indifferent to classical models and imagery. Neither in his work nor in his consciousness had he come into full possession of himself.

The poet in him took precedence, in the order of development, of the dramatist; and it is as a poet that his earliest artistic successes were secured. From the beginning he had that freshness of feeling which is the peculiar and characteristic quality of the artist of every kind; he had also the sensitive imagination and the ear for melody. The world was reflected in his mind as in a magical mirror; its large outlines and its more delicate shadings lying clear and luminous before him. But he did not fully discern as yet the interior relations of spirit and form, the interdependence of individuality and the institutional order, the reaction of the act upon the actor, the unfolding of personality through action, the inevitable infolding of the tragic temperament by the tragic circumstance, and the final identification of character with destiny. The deeper insights, the creative grasp of the forces of life, and the masterful revelation of the laws which govern them through all the processes of history, which were to make him the first of dramatists, were growing within him, but they were not yet in possession of his spirit and his art; he was still primarily a poet.

The earlier plays do not reveal the evolution of character, the action and reaction of circumstances and forces within the circle of movement, the subordination of incident to action, and the husbanding of action in character, which give the dramas of his

maturity their reality and authority. The poet was concerned chiefly with the beauty, the variety, and the humour of the spectacle. He was full of the charm of the show of things and of pleasure in the action of his own mind. He delighted in rhyme for its own sake; in classical allusions, not because, like torches held in the air, they illumine the path of his thought, but because they please his fancy; he gave his mind license in the use of puns, conceits, verbal dexterities of every kind; he pushed wit to the very limits of its rational meaning, and sometimes beyond; he exhausted imagery in the endeavour to drain it of its suggestiveness instead of leaving it to do its own work with the imagination. He kept comedy and tragedy apart, and simplified the drama at the expense of its manifold and deeper meaning. His eye was marvellously keen and his hand magically skilful, but he was not yet the master of the secrets of art and life; he was an ardent and impressionable young poet, playing with the problems of experience rather than closing with them in a life-and-death struggle, presenting their lighter aspects externally rather than penetrating to their heart and laying bare the fates which sleep in motive and passion.

It is easy to imagine the eager joy of the young playwright when he became conscious of the possession of the poet's insight and faculty. In his ardent imagination the great new world of the Renaissance, with the recovery of classical art in one hemisphere and the discovery of America in the other, lay in all its splendour of spiritual and material suggestiveness;

and in this vast territory, in which the human spirit seemed to have acquired a new freedom as well as an enlarged authority, he came swiftly to feel at home. He had the consciousness of great powers; the sonnets show that clearly enough. A member of a profession which was under the ban not only of institutional religion but of society, and excluded from the chief paths of preferment and fame, he had, nevertheless, the supreme joy of discovering the beauty of the world and the infinite variety of human experience and fate, and of giving this manifold loveliness and moving show of life order, consistency, and form.

The consciousness of the possession of creative power is never born in an hour; it comes like the breaking of the day; but, from the first gleam of light on the horizon, it stirs all the sleeping forces of the nature, and the adolescence of genius breeds an exaltation, an enthusiasm, a glow along the horizons of the future, born of a sudden awakening of passion, imagination, thought, and physical energy. To the young poet the world is as full of gods as it was to the mythmakers, and light flashes from it as if the order and splendour of the universe were being disclosed for the first time. For adolescence is the individual and personal discovery of life and the world; the young explorer is as much alone in his experience and exaltation of spirit as if a thousand thousand earlier discoverers had not traversed the same seas and made the same journeys before him.

In "Henry VI." and "Titus Andronicus," if he did more than touch the latter play in the most perfunc