The Common Pursuit (25 page)

[Going. Claud.: Q hear me, Isabella!

It is all in keeping that she should betray, in the exalted assertion of her chastity, a kind of sensuality of martyrdom:

were I under the terms of death, The impression of keen whips I'd wear as ruhies, And strip myself to death, as to a bed That longing have been sick for, ere I'd yield My body up to shame.

[H, iv, 100]

Finally, it is surely significant that the play should end upon a hint that she is to marry the Duke—a hint that, implying a high valuation along with a criticism, aptly clinches the general presentment of her.

But at this point I come sharply up against the casual and confident assumption that we must all agree in a judgment I find staggering: *it is significant that the last two acts, showing obvious signs of haste, are little more than a drawing out and resolution of the plot/ The force of this judgment, as the last sentence of Knights's first paragraph confirms, is that the 'drawing out and resolution of the plot', being mere arbitrary theatre-craft done from the outside, in order to fit the disconcerting development of the poet's essential interests with a comedy ending that couldn't have been elicited out of their inner logic, are not, for interpretive criticism, significant at all. My own view is clean contrary: it is that the resolution of the plot of Measure for Measure is a consummately right and satisfying fulfilment of the essential design; marvellously adroit, with, an adroitness that expresses, and derives from, the poet's sure human insight and his fineness of ethical and poetic sensibility.

But what one makes of the ending of the play depends on what one makes of the Duke; and I am embarrassed about proceeding, since the Duke has been very adequately dealt with by Wilson Knight, whose essay Knights refers to. The Duke, it is important to note, was invented by Shakespeare; in Promos and Cassandra, Shakespeare's source, there is no equivalent. He, his delegation of authority and his disguise (themselves familiar romantic conventions) are the means by which Shakespeare transforms a romantic comedy into a completely and profoundly serious * criticism of life'. The more-than-Prospero of die play, it is the Duke who initiates

and controls the experimental demonstration—the controlled experiment—that forms the action.

There are hints at the outset that he knows what the result will be; and it turns out that he had deputed his authority in full knowledge of Angelo's behaviour towards Mariana. Just what he is, in what subtle ways we are made to take him as more than a mere character, is illuminatingly discussed in The Wheel of Fire. Subtly and flexibly as he functions, the nature of the convention is, I can't help feeling, always sufficiently plain for the purposes of the moment. If he were felt as a mere character, an actor among the others, there would be some point in the kind of criticism that has been brought against him (not explicitly, I hasten to add, by Knights—though, in consistency, he seems to me committed to it). How uncondonably cruel, for example, to keep Isabella on the rack with the lie about her brother's death!

I am bound to say that the right way of taking this, and everything else that has pained and perplexed the specialists, seems to me to impose itself easily and naturally. The feeling about the Duke expressed later by Angelo—

O my dread lord!

I should be guiltier than my guiltiness, To think I can be undiscernible, When I perceive your grace, like power divine Hath look'd upon my passes,

the sense of him as a kind of Providence directing the action from above, has been strongly established. The nature of the action as a controlled experiment with the Duke in charge of the controls, has asserted itself sufficiently. We know where we have to focus our critical attention and our moral sensibility: not, that is, upon the Duke, but upon the representatives of human nature that provide the subjects of the demonstration. This, we know, is to be carried to the promised upshot—

hence shall we see, If power change purpose, what our seemers be,

which will be, not only the exposure of Angelo, but his exposure in circumstances that develop and unfold publicly the maximum significance. The reliance on our responding appropriately is the more

patently justified and the less questionable (I confess, it seems to me irresistible) in that we can see the promise being so consummately kept. The 'resolution of the plot*, ballet-like in its patterned formality and masterly in stage-craft, sets out with lucid pregnancy the full significance of the demonstration: *man, proud man', is stripped publicly of all protective ignorance of'his glassy essence'; the ironies of 'measure for measure' are clinched; in a supreme test upon Isabella, 'J u dg e not > t ^ t Y e be not judged' gets an ironical enforcement; and the relative values are conclusively established—the various attitudes settle into their final placing with regard to one another and to the positives that have been concretely defined.

I don't propose to do a detailed analysis of this winding-up— that seems to me unnecessary; if you see the general nature of what is being done, the main points are obvious. I will only refer, in illustration of the economy of this masterpiece in which every touch has significance, to one point that I don't remember to have seen noted. There is (as every one knows) another invention of Shakespeare's besides the Duke—Mariana, and her treatment by Angelo. It wasn't, as R. W, Chambers thinks, merely in order to save Isabella's chastity that Shakespeare brought in Mariana; as the winding-up scenes sufficiently insist, she plays an important part in the pattern of correspondences and responses by which, largely, the moral valuations are established. In these scenes, Angelo's treatment of her takes its place of critical correspondence in relation to Claudio's offence with Juliet; and Claudio's offence, which is capital, appears as hardly an offence at all, by any serious morality, in comparison with Angelo's piece of respectable prudence.

Finally, by way of illustrating how the moral aspect of the play is affected by an understanding of the form and convention, I must glance at that matter of Angelo's escape from death—and worse man escape (* ... the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claim of justice', etc.)—which has stuck in the throats of so many critics since Coleridge. One has, then, to point out as inoffensively as possible that the point of the play depends upon Angelo's not being a certified criminal-type, capable of a wickedness that marks him off from you and me:

Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know

THE COMMON PURSUIT

That's like my brother's fault: if it confess A natural guiltiness such as is his, Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue Against my brother's life.

If he had been as you, and you as he, You would have slipp'd like him . ..

There is a wider application than that which is immediately intended by the speaker. If we don't see ourselves in Angelo, we have taken the play very imperfectly. Authority, in spite of his protest, was forced upon him, and there are grounds for regarding him as the major victim of the experiment. He was placed in a position calculated to actualize his worst potentialities; and Shakespeare's moral certainly isn't that those potentialities are exceptional. It is not for nothing that Isabella reluctantly grants:

I partly think

A due sincerity govern'd his deeds Till he did look on me.

If any further argument should seem necessary for holding it possible, without offending our finer susceptibilities, to let Angelo marry a good woman and be happy, it may be said in complete seriousness that he has, since his guilty self-committals, passed through virtual death; perhaps that may be allowed to make a difference. It is not merely that immediate death has appeared certain, but that his image of himself, his personality as he has lived it for himself as well as for the world, having been destroyed, he has embraced death:

I am sorry that such sorrow I procure: And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy: 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it.

The bright idea of the recent 'Marlowe' production, the idea of injecting point, interest and modernity into the play by making him a study in neurotic abnormality, strained and twitching from his first appearance, was worse than uncalled-for. But then, if you can't accept what Shakespeare does provide, you have, in some way, to import your interest and significance.

THE CRITICISM OF SHAKESPEARE'S LATE PLAYS

A Caveat

T HAVE before me two essays on Cymbeline. In the later 1 of JL them Fr. A. A. Stephenson both criticizes the account of the play offered by F. C. Tinkler in the earlier, 2 and offers a positive account of his own. With the criticisms I find myself pretty much in agreement; but I also find myself as unconvinced by the new interpretation as by Tinkler's—or any other that I have read. Fr. Stephenson, judging that Tinkler's attempt to explain the play in terms "of critical irony' and 'savage farce' doesn't cover the admitted data, himself observes, and argues from, what he takes to be a significant recurrence of Valuation-imagery'. But while developing his argument he at the same time—and this is the curious fact that seems to me to deserve attention—makes a firm note of another set of characteristics, and draws an explicit conclusion:

the inequalities, the incongruities, the discontinuity, the sense of different planes, the only spasmodic and flickering life in Cymbeline. It must, I think, be recognized that Cymbeline is not an * organic whole', that it is not informed and quickened by an idea-emotion in all its parts.

The stress laid on these characteristics of the play seems to me much more indisputably justified than that laid on the valuation-imagery. So much so, in fact, that the question arises: Why didn't both Fr. Stephenson and Tinkler (whose argument also derives from observation of these characteristics) rest in the judgment that the play *is not an " organic whole", that it is not informed and quickened by an idea-emotion in all its parts' 2 Why must they set out to show that it is, nevertheless, to be paradoxically explained in terms of a pressure of 'significance'—

significance, according to Fr. Stephenson, of a kind that cannot be conveyed ?

That two such intelligent critics, bent on conclusions so different, should countenance one another in this kind of proceeding suggests some reflections on the difficulties and temptations of Shakespeare criticism—and especially of criticism of the late plays—at the present time. We have left Bradley fairly behind. We know that poetic drama is something more than drama in verse, and that consideration of the drama cannot be separated from consideration of the poetry. We are aware of subtle varieties of possibility under the head of convention, and we know we must keep a vigilant eye open for the development of theme by imagery and symbolism, and for the bearing of all these on the way we are to take character, action and plot. Shakespeare's methods are so subtle, flexible and varied that we must be on our guard against approaching any play with inappropriate preconceptions as to what we have in front of us. By assuming that the organization is of a given kind we may incapacitate ourselves for seeing what it actually is, and so miss, or misread, the significance. What a following-through of F. C. Tinkler's and Fr. Stephenson's account will, I think, bring home to most readers is that we may err by insisting on finding a 'significance' that we assume to be necessarily there.

I have put the portentous word in inverted commas in this last use of it, in order not to suggest a severity of judgment that is not intended. The play contains a great variety of life and interest, and if we talk of 'inequalities' and 'incongruities' it should not be to suggest inanity or nullity: out of the interplay of contrasting themes and modes we have an effect as (to fall back on the usefully corrective analogy) of an odd and distinctive music. But the organization is not a matter of a strict and delicate subservience to a commanding significance, which penetrates the whole, informing and ordering everything—imagery, rhythm, symbolism, character, episode, plot—from a deep centre: Cymbdine is not a great work of art of the order of The Winters Tale.

The Winters Tale presents itself as the comparison with which to make the point, in that it belongs with Cymbeline to the late group of plays—plays that clearly have important affinities, though my purpose here is to insist on the differences. In academic

tradition The Winter's Tale is one of the * romantic' plays; the adjective implying, among other things, a certain fairy-tale licence of spirit, theme and development—an indulgence, in relation to reality, of some of the less responsible promptings of imagination and fancy. Thus we have the sudden, unheralded storm of jealousy in Leontes, the part played by the oracle, the casting-out and preservation of the babe, the sixteen-year gap in the action, the pastoral scene (regarded as a pretty piece of poetical by-play) and, finally, the return to life after sixteen years' latency of Galatea-Hermione, in the reconciliation-tableau. But all this has in the concrete fulness of Shakespeare's poetry an utterly different effect from what is suggested by the enumeration. The Winter's Tale, as D. A. Traversi shows so well in his Approach to Shakespeare > is a supreme instance of Shakespeare's poetic complexity— of the impossibility, if one is to speak with any relevance to the play, of considering character, episode, theme, and plot in abstraction from the local effects, so inexhaustibly subtle in their inter-play, of the poetry, and from the larger symbolic effects to which these give fife.

Properly taken, the play is not romantically licentious, or loose in organization, or indulgent in a fairy-tale way to human fondness. What looked like romantic fairy-tale characteristics turn out to be the conditions of a profundity and generality of theme. If we approach expecting every Shakespearean drama to be of the same kind as Othello, we criticize Leontes' frenzy of jealousy as disconcertingly sudden and unprepared. But if our preconceptions don't prevent our being adverted by imagery, rhythm, and the developing hints of symbolism—by the subtle devices of the poetry and the very absence of 'psychology'—we quickly see that what we have in front of us is nothing in the nature of a novel dramatically transcribed. The relations between character, speech and the main themes of the drama are not such as to invite a psychologizing approach; the treatment of life is too generalizing (we may say, if we hasten to add 'and intensifying'); so large a part of the function of the words spoken by the characters is so plainly something other than to 'create' the speakers, or to advance an action that can profitably be considered in terms of the interacting of individuals. The detail of Shakespeare's processes