Shakespeare William - Berrymans Shakespeare

SOME PROBLEMS: POINTS OF ENTRY

SHAKESPEARE NO DOUBT is incomprehensible, like other things (work and man) out of the usual scale, whether too large (like Dante, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven) or too small (like Vermeer, Wordsworth, Thoreau). The natural scientists, too, remain baffled by the ultra-large and the ultra-small; but we may gain some confidence from their growing sense of a significant spectacular relation between those two ends: expressed by F. Hoyle (1955) as ten followed by thirteen zeros, a number which closely resembles (1) the ratio of the electrical force between a proton and an electron to the gravitational force between them, (2) the square root of the number of hydrogen atoms within the Olbers limit, and (3) the ratio of the density in the central region of a supernova to the average density of material in the universe. A layman, though lost here, cannot but be interested. A poet deals with two things, The I and The Other. It may appear, at a glance, that the purely lyric poet deals only with The I and the purely dramatic poet only with The Other, and that any enquiry into Shakespeare, who was bothsublimely both, and both in no apparent relation to each otheris foredoomed. It seems to me, on the contrary, that if we can establish a relation, in him, between his projection of The I and his introjection of The Other, each will appear less mysterious. Admittedly, this looks an ambitious enterprise, and its exposition, alas, has got to be serial, so I begin with some confessions.

Twenty years ago, in a Hodder lecture at Princeton and an article [Shakespeare at Thirty, above] in The Hudson Review, I drew attention to Richard IIIs line Richard loues Richard , that is, I am I. I was not yet in a position to understand this line, either in its expression of The I or in its expression of The Other, but at least I isolated it (and was encouraged, fumhlingly, by Edmund Wilsons surprise at its brilliance). I even applied to it a capital formulation which I did not understand either, calling it an instance of the unique stroking of presentment that drove Coleridge to one of his deepest conceptions, that of an ensouling of experience by meditation. Now if we take ensouling to relate to The Other, as imaginedfrom experience both of the self and of othersby The I in meditation, this seems to me to describe exactly what happens.

The King is in crisis, his unique self-corifidence shaken during the night before the crucial battle, by the eleven frightful apparitions of his victims, even to doubt of who he is. So he gives himself a basal reassurance: at least he loves himself. At the dramatic level, we read this as: at any rate (however others may hate him, and however justly) he loves himselfand Shakespeareans will recall Eliots interpretation of Othello as, in his final speech, cheering himself up (a view foreshadowed, we note, by Dr. Johnsons remark that Shakespeares tragic heroes have yet left, in their end, a miserable conceit). At the metaphysical level, we gloss Richards despair with an opinion of Whiteheads: that as a first approximation the notion of life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment; this is still available to the King, though Whiteheads other requirements (self-creation, creative advance, aim) are not, and so he is doomed. The philosophical reading, thenhe loves himselfunderlies, is deeper than, the dramatic. This is what we would expect. The poet is reading life, in the person of his shattered monarch in Act V.

The pivoting of the line after its fifth syllable has no parallel at this date, which is not ( pace Chambers) 1592 but 1590. It obliges us to contrast three heavy first words, a strong unit, with the hesitant traipsing that follows. Greene, Peele, Lodge, and the rest were incapable of course of this concision and brooding force. But those qualities, as well as the metrical achievement, are rivalled by Marlowe, several years later, at the climax of Dr. Faustus: See see where Christs blood / / streames in the firmamenta line as resonant Other-ly as Shakespeares inwardly. Having now listened to Professor Erikson, we can say with confidence that what is in question here is an unmas-terable identity crisis, and see that the unprecedented labour of the dramatists accumulation (Richard III is more than half again as long as the non-Shakespearean plays of its period) of an imperturbable andomnipotent ego for Richard, destroying without strain foe upon foe, wooing them even (Anne) into his evil bosom, was undertaken just toward this last-ditch line, where the rocking, unstable, unconvincing, double self-assertion suddenly reverses the process and he goes to pieces. Both in form and conception the line is integral with its play. During the course of our large study of Shakespeares identity crises, we will generally find this to be the case, though not always so centrally.

But my other passage for investigation here at the outset is antithetical: it performs no apparent function in its play, Alls Well that Ends Well . Count Bertram comes to the French court to seek service. The King is old and ill and good-natured:

Bertram sounds overwhelmed:

His good remembrance sir
Lies richer in your thoughts then on his tombe:
So in approofe liues not his Epitaph,
As in your royall speech.

The King has not heard: