From the Elephant's Back (21 page)

Shakespeare's contribution, like many of the others in this book has been found extremely obscure and the scholars hardly mention it any more, despairing of finding its true meaning. But it seems to me that here once more I find echoes of the subject-matter of the sonnets, the counterpoint of W.H. and the dark lady—only now they are transmuted into metaphysical creatures, no longer man and woman so much as female phoenix and male turtle. Shakespeare calls them, magnificently the “Co-supreme and stars of love.” He describes their obsequies.

So they loved as loved in twain

Had the essence but in one;

Two distincts, divisions none;

Number there in love was slain.

So between them love did shine,

That the turtle saw his right

Flaming in the phoenix' sight;

Either was the other's mine.

Property was thus appalled

That the self was not the same;

Single nature's double name,

Neither two nor one was called.
[41]

Here too we will find a reference to the “treble-dated” crow (perhaps a misprint for “fated”?) And for my part the famous “death-divining swan” calls up the memory of Lucrece once more:

And now this pale swan in her watery nest

Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending.

“Few words” quoth she “shall fit the trespass best,

Where no excuse can give the fault amending.”
[42]

Lucrece also refers to the phoenix when she declares: “So of fame's ashes shall my fame be bred.” If one can broadly accept this rather daring identification of the short Threnos for the dead lovers which closes,
The Phoenix and The Turtle
is doubly moving, particularly with is reference (once more!) to posterity.

Death is now the phoenix nest

And the turtle's loyal breast

To eternity doth rest.

Leaving no posterity;

'Twas not their infirmity,

It was married chastity.

Truth may seem but cannot be;

Beauty brag but 'tis not she;

Truth and beauty buried.

To this urn let those repair

That are either true or fair;

For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
[43]

Did he perhaps mean that by this time his two “Co-supremes” were dead—or simply that he had surmounted the wounds they had inflicted on him and was able to transmute the experience into imperishable poetry: and incidentally to recognize the dark lady for the great phoenix, the paragon, and “nonpareil” that she had been? We cannot be sure. My own personal inclination would be to suspect her of being a gypsy in colour and a courtesan by profession. Alas! I cannot prove that Mr. W.H. picked her up in a brothel, or that he paid the price for his “sensual fault” as the poet describes it or something like it. Yet one is free to surmise. And despite the express statement of Aubrey that Shakespeare was “the more to be admired as he would not be debauched, and if invited to court was ill.”
[44]
There is no reason to imagine him as a prude. His plays are pleasingly full of good bawdry, and his references to the Elizabethan stews are many and pointed. There may well be some truth in the contemporary anecdotes about him and his amatory exploits which has come down to us—though I fear it sounds very like the kind of gossip which is invented about famous people the world over. I repeat it for what it is worth. Burbage,
[45]
the famous star who acted the hero in most of the company's plays had an assignation with a girl; but when he knocked at her door and was asked who was without he replied (it was a pardonable piece of complacency, for he had been a hit in the part) “Richard the Second”; whereupon the voice of his friend Shakespeare was heard within saying: “Tell him that William the Conqueror is here already—and he comes long before Richard.” True? False? We do not know.

Psychologists have already pointed out the poet's partiality towards substitution in the early comedies: girls are disguised as pages, brothers as sisters, and so on. This is regarded as a sign of sexual ambivalence; but I am not sure that this is very certain ground. The tradition from which he was borrowing was Italian, and here we may have simply a stage convention of the day and not a clue to psychological predispositions. I am, of course, prepared to concede that Rosalind says of herself that she would be “changeable, longing, and liking…full of tears, full of smiles…as boys and women are.”
[46]
But Rosalind is a renaissance woman. We might find more material in
Two Gentlemen of Verona
, where Proteus loves both Silvia and Julia, and where the latter says of the former: “Her hair is auburn, mine a perfect yellow.”
[47]
But there is not the space to deal exhaustively with such hints. Certainly all such tentative explanations must halt before the magnitude of his female creations, starting with those lovely and spirited girls in the comedies, and gradually gathering breadth and depth and tragic sense in a Cordelia, a Lady MacBeth, and Ophelia. On one score we can reassure ourselves; Shakespeare was not a woman, for no woman has ever or could ever, create beings like these! But perhaps it would be politer to say only that up to today no woman has done so.

All great experiences are a challenge to the artist. They are to be surmounted and transformed, and their precious essence must be distilled and turned to use—for in art lies the justification for reality (from the artist's point of view). I am prepared to presume that this early and seminal experience which marked and formed young Shakespeare finally dispersed itself into the rest of his work, enriching it even as it slowly faded—or was superseded by experiences more wounding, more damaging, more useful. We know almost nothing about the middle period of the great tragedies, except for fragmentary data of little interest. Freudians have done a systematic treatment of
Hamlet
in terms of the Oedipus complex which is extremely brilliant as far as it goes; and Freud, in trying to date
Hamlet
, has suggested that the death of the poet's mother might have set into train the emotions which led to the writing of the play. I would myself be inclined to favour an earlier date connected with the death of his son.

We speak of the artist and tend rather to forget the somewhat grasping peasant Shakespeare was; undeflected in his career he succeeded in making a comfortable fortune which was directed (one might say) obsessively towards re-establishing his family in Stratford. He bought a family coat of arms. Always the faithful Taurus, he kept in touch with his town, visiting it every year, according to Aubrey. He did not want the kind of honours London could have offered him—he left those for Ben Jonson. What he wanted for himself (what he wanted for W.H.) was to found a solid yeoman family with plenty of land. Nothing could turn him from this purpose and nothing did.

So we come to his last work—one which no biographer can afford to overlook though Shakespeare did not actually write it himself; his will. When he came to dictate it a little while before he died there still remained the old active peasant streak. What the death of his son cost him we shall never know; but his two daughters were still alive and suitably married. Either might bear him a male child to continue the succession. So the will was planned; on the surface it may appear a somewhat confusing document but there is no mistaking the central driving purpose to it. It was designed in such a way that the property would find itself intact in the hands of a male descendant—
a male heir
!

From fairest creatures we desire increase

That thereby beauty's rose may never die.
[48]

How touching the sonnets are when read in the light of this central dominating purpose of our gentle poet. Alas! his hopes died with his son Hamnet, though he did not live to know it. Within two generations the male side of the family was extinct, and the land for which he had struggled, plotted, and saved, had been slowly dispersed among the families of his daughters. The mainspring of his working life failed him in the last resort, and all his sacrifices were wasted.
[49]

We have, then, here the portrait of an exceptionally faithful man, true to old friends and old business ties, true to his own peasant origins and their attitudes, true to his own character with all its mutinous impulses. It would not be too much to suggest that he was also a faithful and truthful lover, and though time has covered up the record of later loves, we have in the sonnets at any rate the record of one great experience which formed him. Perhaps he did not entirely forget the dark lady and the fair youth? Perhaps echoes of them came back sometimes, faded like perfume in a room a long time uninhabited, among the images of his later plays? It is a pardonable sentimentality to imagine so. Here, for example, is one from his last play:
The Tempest
.

Gon:   What marvelous sweet music!

Alon:  Give us kind keepers, heavens! What were these?

Seb:   A living drollery. Now I will believe

That there are unicorns; that in Arabia

There is one tree, the phoenix throne; one phoenix

At this hour reigning there!
[50]

Eternal Contemporaries

Theatre

Sense and Sensibility

1939

HEAVEN AND CHARING CROSS

by A. Danvers-Walker—St. Martin's Theatre
[1]

FAMILY REUNION

by T.S. Eliot—Westminster Theatre

THOSE WHO WERE BAFFLED
by the dark spiritual implications of blood-guilt in T.S. Eliot's recent play will be able to turn with composure and pleasure to this human drama, in which every element that goes to make a murderer is psychologically apparent. It is a kind of behaviourist play,
[2]
written extremely well, articulated clearly and smoothly, and acted brilliantly by a good cast. Indeed, it is crashingly mediocre in conception; and only the marvellous interpretation of the players prevents one noticing the fact until the morning after.
[3]

Love, in the case of Charlie Norman, was blind; blind with rage. He loved Bella Wilson
[4]
with an adolescent lack of control; but even he did not plan the murder which came upon them all so suddenly, and which is the crux of the drama. The ingredients have been well mixed and served: several excellent cockney studies by Mary Clare, Alban Blakelock, Cyril Smith; a few morsels of shrewd and salty human philosophy delivered by George Carney; an extremely fine study of the murderer son by Frederick Peisley; and the best performance of all for balance and sureness of touch—that of Jean Shepheard as Lily, the hunchback.
[5]
It is a great pity that the solid workmanship and dramatic execution should not have been lit up by one internal spark. After all, drama is not merely events, but the transformation of people's souls in front of one's eyes. If the play of T.S. Eliot (which is by far the most effective comparison to a play of this kind) could be described as all sensibility and no sense,
Heaven and Charing Cross
could be as certainly described as all sense and no sensibility. The people do not move except in time and events; suffering does not alter them. Dramatic inevitability, which is the essence of form in drama becomes here a mere mechanical pattern which is fulfilled. It is a great pity because the acting is really magnificent throughout.

If it is not a winner it will be through no fault of the cast.

Turn to
The Family Reunion
,
[6]
however, and you are faced by dramatic entertainment of another order, presented every bit as brilliantly by a superb cast. This is a dire parable complicated enough in theme to sound aboriginal to the mind of Mr. Agate; but which the average playgoer should find enthralling, because he will get from it not only drama, but also a good moral judgement on life and destiny. The guilt from which Harry suffers, and which is personified by the Furies who appear so dramatically to him in the family mansion, is caused by more than murder. The murder itself was the result of the guilt—otherwise why so pointless, the pushing of a woman from the boat-deck of a liner? Why did Harry feel what he felt? Above all, exactly how did he feel? The poetry has some great moments in it: and the questions posed here could really only be answered by Hamlet, whose ghost haunts the wings of this play.
[7]

One cannot see this play without being convinced that it is a really noble statement on life; and that a great step has been made in verse drama—because the characters for the first time act and interact, not merely emote and mime. In fact this is true drama as opposed to pageant or Camden Town recitative by the waterproof boys' brigade. It shows up the shabby tinfoil conceptions of the other dramatic poets' writing; and reaches behind the shell of events towards the deep symbolic meanings of our actions and our feelings. It contains some of the best and most personal work of T.S. Eliot;
[8]
and a first class cast to interpret it including Catherine Lacey, who exploits her crooked Brontesque spirit to the full, and Michael Redgrave who does a weird and Hamletesque study of Harry.
[9]
This is the only play on at the moment that is not only intelligent and beautifully produced, but also poetic as well. This notice of it ends with an unequivocal categoric imperative. See it!