William Shakespeare: A Critical Study. Georg Brandes

The best of Biron's speeches, those which are in unrhymed verse, we evidently owe to the revision of 1598; but they are conceived in the spirit of the original play, and merely express Shakespeare's design in stronger and clearer terms than he was at first able to compass. Even at the end of the third act Biron is still combating as well as he can the power of love:—

      "What! I love! I sue! I seek a wife!

       A woman, that is like a German clock,

       Still a repairing, ever out of frame,

       And never going aright, being a watch,

       But being watch'd that it may still go right!"

      But his great and splendid speech in the fourth act is like a hymn to that God of Battles who is named in the title of the play, and whose outpost skirmishes form its matter:—

      "Other slow arts entirely keep the brain,

       And therefore, finding barren practisers,

       Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil;

       But love, first learned in a lady's eyes,

       Lives not alone immured in the brain,

       But, with the motion of all elements,

       Courses as swift as thought in every power,

       And gives to every power a double power,

       Above their functions and their offices.

       It adds a precious seeing to the eye;

       A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind;

       A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,

       When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd:

       Love's feeling is more soft, and sensible,

       Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.

       . . . . . . . .

       Never durst poet touch a pen to write,

       Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs;

       O! then his lines would ravish savage ears,

       And plant in tyrants mild humility."

      We must take Biron-Shakespeare at his word, and believe that in these vivid and tender emotions he found, during his early years in London, the stimulus which taught him to open his lips in song.

      [1] Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754), the great comedy-writer of Denmark, and founder of the Danish stage.—(TRANS.)

[2] Raleigh, by Edmund Gosse (English Worthies Series), p. 57.

[3] New Shakspere Society's Transactions,1880-86, Pt. ii. p. 241.

[4] The schoolmaster's wife in Ludvig Holberg's inimitable comedy, Barselstuen.—(TRANS.)

      X

      LOVE'S LABOUR'S WON: THE FIRST SKETCH OF ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL—THE COMEDY OF ERRORS—THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA

      As a counterpart to the comedy of Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare soon after composed another, entitled Love's Labour's Won. This we learn from the celebrated passage in Francis Meres' Palladis Tamia, where he enumerates the plays which Shakespeare had written up to that date, 1598. We know, however, that no play of that name is now included among the poet's works. Since it is scarcely conceivable that a play of Shakespeare's, once acted, should have been entirely lost, the only question is, which of the extant comedies originally bore that title. But in reality there is no question at all: the play is All's Well that Ends Well—not, of course, as we now possess it, in a form and style belonging to a quite mature period of the poet's life, but as it stood before the searching revision, of which it shows evident traces.

      We cannot, indeed, restore the play as it originally issued from Shakespeare's youthful imagination. But there are passages in it which evidently belong to the older version, rhymed conversations, or at any rate fragments of dialogue, rhymed letters in sonnet form, and numerous details which entirely correspond with the style of Love's Labour's Lost.

      The piece is a dramatisation of Boccaccio's story of Gillette of Narbonne. Only the comic parts are of Shakespeare's invention; he has added the characters of Parolles, Lafeu, the Clown, and the Countess. Even in the original sketch he no doubt gave new depth and vitality to the leading characters, who are mere outlines in the story. The comedy, as we know, has for its heroine a young woman who loves the haughty Bertram with an unrequited and despised passion, cures the King of France of a dangerous sickness, claims as her reward the right to choose a husband from among the courtiers, chooses Bertram, is repudiated by him, and, after a nocturnal meeting at which she takes the place of another woman whom he believes himself to have seduced, at last overcomes his resistance and is acknowledged as his wife.

      Shakespeare has here not only shown the unquestioning acceptance of his original, which was usual even in his riper years, but has transferred to his play all its peculiarities and improbabilities. Even the psychological crudities he has swallowed as they stand—such, for instance, as the fact of a delicate woman forcing herself under cover of night upon the man who has left his home and country for the express purpose of escaping from her.

      Shakespeare has drawn in Helena a patient Griselda, that type of loving and cruelly maltreated womanhood which reappears in German poetry in Kleist's Käthchen von Heilbronn—the woman who suffers everything in inexhaustible tenderness and humility, and never falters in her love until in the end she wins the rebellious heart.

      The pity is that the unaccommodating theme compelled Shakespeare to make this pearl among women in the end enforce her rights, after the man she adores has not only treated her with contemptuous brutality, but has, moreover, shown himself a liar and hound in his attempt to blacken the character of the Italian girl whose lover he believes himself to have been.

      It is very characteristic of the English renaissance, and of the public which Shakespeare had in view in his early plays, that he should make this noble heroine take part with Parolles in the long and jocular conversation (i. I) on the nature of virginity, which is one of the most indecorous passages in his works. This dialogue must certainly belong to the original version of the play.

      We must remember that Helena, in that version, was in all probability very different from the high-souled woman she became in the process of revision. She no doubt expressed herself freely, according to Shakespeare's youthful manner, in rhyming reveries on love and fate, such as the following (i. I):—

      "Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie

       Which we ascribe to Heaven: the fated sky

       Gives us free scope; only, doth backward pull

       Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull.

       What power is it which mounts my love so high;

       That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye?

       The mightiest space in fortune Nature brings

       To join like likes, and kiss like native things.

       Impossible be strange attempts to those

       That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose,

       What hath been cannot be. Who ever strove

       To show her merit, that did miss her love?"

      Or else he made her pour forth multitudinous swarms of images, each treading on the other's heels, like those in which she forecasts Bertram's love-adventures at the court of France (i. I):—

      "There shall your master have a thousand loves,

       A mother, and a mistress, and a friend,