Harold C. Goddard - The Meaning of Shakespeare

The Meaning of

SHAKESPEARE

Volume I

By

HAROLD C. GODDARD

Phoenix Books

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

chicago & london

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved
Published 1951. Paperback edition 1960
Printed in the United States of America
00 99 98 15 16

ISBN: 0-226-30041-2

LCN: 51-2288

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth.

king john

When such a spacious mirror's set before him
He needs must see himself.

antony and cleopatra

The secrets of nature
Have not more gift in taciturnity.

troilus and cressida

Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard
hearts?

king lear

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

sonnet 65

A Word to the Reader

How many a book on Shakespeare has been prefaced with a sort of shamefaced apology for "another book on Shakespeare." Anyone who feels that way should never have produced such a book. For my part, I believe we are nearer the beginning than the end of our understanding of Shakespeare's genius. Poetry forever makes itself over for each generation, and I cannot conceive a time that will not be able to ask with profit what Shakespeare has to say specifically to it. Twice within three decades our own time has called on its younger generation to avenge a wrong with the making of which it had nothing to do. For whom, then, if not for us, was Hamlet written? To whom, if not to us, did King Lear direct the question, "Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?" and of what age if not the atomic did Albany make his prediction:

It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.

Ours is a time that would have sent the Greeks to their oracles. We fail at our peril to consult our own.

Nor do I apologize for the length of this book. Maurice Morgann, in the eighteenth century, wrote one of the best books on Shakespeare ever published. When it was done, he was a bit appalled by its length. "The Book is perhaps, as it stands, too bulky for the subject," he remarked, having his quiet joke (it was on Falstaff), "but if the Reader knew how many pressing considerations, as it grew into size, the Author resisted, which yet seemed intitled to be heard, he would the more readily excuse him." Though the evidence may seem against me, I have exercised a like restraint. This book could easily have been several times as long. It is far longer than Morgann's. But, after all, he was writing of one character; I am compelled to bring in scores.

And then there are the theatrical criticsnot the theatrical reviewers but the critics whose central interest is dramaturgy. They too have obscured the greater Shakespeare. It is they who are forever insisting that Shakespeare was primarily a playwright, always concerned first of all with the theater, with dramatic construction, stagecraft, acting, scenic effect, and so on. That in his earlier career the theater did nearly "get" him, Shakespeare himself tells us in one of the Sonnets. But he plainly implies what his later works provethat he escaped that fate. Because he mastered the theater, he saw through it.

And so the time seems to have come for a return to Shakespeare the poet, for a consideration of his works not merely as poetry in the romantic meaning of that term but as works of the Imagination in the widest and deepest sense: imagination, that language in which all languages are written, that language within which the poet conceals himself as utterly from the crowd and from seekers after pleasure and power as he reveals himself to those rarer individuals who can enter his spirit. The purpose of the poet in this sense is often in direct contradiction with that of the playwright. It may even lead him in the interest of truth to distill

Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth,

a line which, for our present understanding of him, may be the most important one in all Shakespeare's works. "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves," said Jesus to his disciples. No one ever followed that advice more effectively than William Shakespeare. Here is a neglected aspect of his works. The world has long since recognized the dove. It has scarcely begun to detect the serpent. (This line of thought I develop in my introductory chapter, "Cadwal and Polydore," and more especially in the chapter, "The Poet-Playwright.")