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Of all writers in all human languages Shakespeare is pre-eminently the poet, and it is because of this that he is undoubtedly the world’s greatest dramatic writer. Of this, scholarship, reason, and intuition will be, in the end, convinced when the final word regarding such matters has been said, if it has not already been pronounced. For me it has been already spoken; for I believe that the Elizabethan age was blessed with the world’s supreme drama in all of its essentials, and that if we of the twentieth century cannot appreciate all of its qualities, it is rather because we, for some reason not so difficult to account for, have deteriorated; and not that the Shakespearean drama falls short of the truest dramatic ideals.

Some time ago two prominent writers, one English and the other Russian, had something to say pertaining to the failure of the bard of Avon as a writer of the drama. With the trend of their criticism we will not deal, except to say that it was adverse. The latter of these writers is a distinguished novelist, and one of the so-called realists of the nineteenth century. Of Tolstoi, who can speak without admiration for his earnestness? But in comparison with Shakespeare he is as a windmill to the solar system. At his best he speaks for a portion of the Russian people, and might be regarded as the protesting voice of that people in their present-day conditions. If he can be called great, it is to presuppose that anything really great and permanent can evolve from that people as they exist to-day. Cervantes, in his immortal satire, gave to the world a mirror of the Spanish character, its strength and weakness; and in a sense Tolstoi has also unconsciously accomplished the same purpose for Russia.

It may not be known, save to the ethnologist, that all of the woes of Russia are not to be ascribed to tyranny alone. Those who have studied this subject will realise that certain peoples of the world have been marred in their origin and making, and among these the Russian and the Spanish stand out prominently. There is a wide gulf fixed between the heredity, thought and ideal of Asia and that of Europe. One is in constant strife with the other for its very existence; and the tragedy of Russia is that she is, through her environment and heredity, a mixture of both. The result is that as a nation, for all purposes of self rule and progress, her people are not perfectly sane. They lack that poise, that self-control, that power of self-improvement which the north-western nations of Europe, especially the British, possess in no small degree. This may serve to explain the difference which exists between the extreme, almost hopeless, pessimism of Tolstoi, and the universally admitted sanity and human nature found in Shakespeare. The contrast between the two writers is not only one of degree, as between the poet and the prose writer, which is more truly seen in the contrast between Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, where the limitations of the novelist in comparison with the great dramatic poet are marked. But the difference in national characteristics between the British and the Russian writer separates them as wide as the poles apart. Shakespeare and Scott seem to possess that golden mean of perfect sanity which dominates and governs the master artist in literature, which can enter into and depict truly the darkest passions and the gloomiest tragedy, side by side with the shallower or sunnier aspects of life, and yet keep the perfect poise between. This attribute of genius can only spring originally from that heredity, that character and ideal of national life by which the British people have been in the past marked out from all others.

The wide range of treatment of human problems and aspects of fate by these two writers, especially Shakespeare, shows a healthy foundation of literature in a people whose human outlook, while occasionally from the gloomy valley or the bleak, mountain scarp, is, for the most part, from the sunny slopes and the middle plateaux of human existence. If Hamlet were all there was of Shakespeare, he had been nearer Tolstoi, though still afar. But there is nothing hectic about the oak leaf, or the British literature which is true to the national characteristics.

The other writer who has undertaken to criticise our master-bard is one of the same race, and one who represents with no mean ability the social drama of the present as it exists on the British stage. It might be easy to compare the author of Man and Superman, criticising Shakespeare, to a fly buzzing at a mountain, or to a pigmy tilting with a titan, and so leave him to posterity. But Mr. Shaw represents more than mere cleverness. He, too, in his way carries his reason for existence in literature, in his whole attitude toward life, which he interprets to society. He is in a sense the outcome of the social conditions which have produced him, and his fellows of the same school. That his whole repertoire of philosophy is made up of a bundle of clever aphorisms which blossom in a flippancy which in him has taken the place of humour, and which have their foundation and end in shallow cynicism, need not surprise those who have studied our age and its social ideal, or want of ideal. We have arrived at a period when the chief scope and aim of reading, apart from study, is amusement only. We have reached a condition of society when the search for a new sensation is more pleasing to many than any ideal or idea which poetry or prose could inspire or produce.

But this need not either surprise or discourage us. This phase of existence which society is passing through is nothing new. History, as we are told, is continually repeating itself. The progress of mankind is in epochs, in a series of cycles. The present general decadence of the intellectual life, and falling off in ideal is quite similar to that of the eighteenth century prior to the religious revival which accompanied the great literary resurrection. So that the extreme pessimism of a Tolstoi, or the seemingly more hopeless and less human, almost ape-like, aphorisms of a Bernard Shaw, do not necessarily suggest the final played-out end of things.

We see before us, though affected by our age and environment, a mere reflection of the love of pleasure, the chase after place and position, the lack of reverence and love of folly and the social flippancy; though lacking in much of its outward gentility; which marked the Britain of the middle and end of the eighteenth century. As that age was the result of a more than usual development of thought in the direction of the material, so it is quite natural that the nineteenth century, whose chief intellectual discovery was that man was evolved from the ape, should culminate intellectually and dramatically in a school of literature whose final and chief light should be the brilliant, if superficial, author of Man and Superman.

Far different, however, from this in character was the age which evolved Shakespeare. It was the period which produced or cradled the great discoveries of the new world; which translated the Bible into the English tongue, and which gave a new faith and a new liberty, a larger human outlook to European mankind. Is it not natural that such an age and such a condition as existed in a people like that of the England of Elizabeth should have produced such a supreme genius? When learning was in its blossom, when thought was reaching out, when faith was reading new truths out of the old; when society was rich in all those phases of character which belonged to a free, a bold and high-spirited and yet a reverent people; it was out of this matrix of human effort, ideal, heredity, and social struggle, that the greatest dramatic poet of the modern world was crystallised.

We have pictured the social and human conditions which produced these two writers, and it is no marvel that between William Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw there is a great gulf fixed—namely, that which has ever existed between the immortal seer and the mere cynic.

But, some present-day critics may say, this is all very well. We admit the great thought; but the plays of Shakespeare, as plays, are inferior to many modern dramas. This contention I have denied in the opening sentences of this essay. It is, however, almost impossible to discuss the Shakespearean dramas with some dramatic critics of to-day. My contention is that for us to class some modern plays as their superior is to renounce all our literary and human ideals; in fact, to virtually change our whole idea of the drama. In order to arrive at such a conclusion, we would have to unlearn all the best which the past has taught us. It means literally to change our whole outlook on life itself. This, however, we are not likely to do. In spite of social decadence, and the small cults that spring up, mushroom-like, now and again, and have their little day, human nature is in the main healthy; and the pendulum of social and literary ideal swings in time from the morbid and the self-conscious back to that large sanity which nature represents, and which Shakespeare stands for in literature and the drama. To conclude that Shakespeare does not represent the normal standard, would be to admit that life was moving toward a final social dissolution, which it would not be pleasant to contemplate. Therefore it is not difficult to see that all phases of the drama since Shakespeare, which are not modelled on his ideals, mark a decadence therefrom. To prove this it will be shown that the drama of the nineteenth century was vitiated by such influences as could not fail to undermine radically its best ideals, which were represented by such interpreters as Booth and Irving; and that even these, especially the latter, had their part in degrading its standards. This will be seen in the endeavour to interpret creations such as Hamlet in a new manner, so as, in some cases, almost to produce a new creation. This weakness of the actor in his endeavour to add new sensations, to satisfy his over-sated audience, and to meet his own already abnormal ideals, has gradually though imperceptibly weaned the theatrical world from the old, saner conception of the actor and the play to a false and morbid idea, which has resulted in a phase of drama which is to-day often quite absurd. It is not that the old tragedy and comedy are not so interesting, but that the play-going public have been gradually educated up to an almost hysterical appetite for the gruesome and the nasty; the suggestive, the unnatural, and the immoral, so that the quieter, more human and saner depiction of life fails any more to satisfy. This morbid condition of to-day is almost similar to that of the morphine or other fiend, and so much so that one sometimes despairs of all our social ideals. Booth, in his Fool’s Revenge, which some critics have regarded as more truly dramatic than Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps commenced this movement toward the hectic. This was a French play translated by Tom Hall into English. Undoubtedly it was a sensation. But it contained no great lesson from life. Its whole interest depended on one cleverly constructed, but hideous, situation. It was what the man of the world might call “more fetching” than Othello; just as red pepper is more spicy than salt. But it marked the beginning of a decadence in the public ideal and the class of play demanded. Irving also, in The Bells, and in Faust, led the dramatic world in the same degenerate direction. All of these plays were unBritish in ideals; they were almost hideous in their whole dramatic plot; and in them the gruesome action and ideas presented far over-reached the moral lesson which they claimed to inculcate. The Bells as a play was a pure horror, and its continuance on any stage must have, in the long run, a terrible influence on the nerves of both actor and audience.

Later, we have had Mansfield, who has just died a complete wreck; and no wonder, after daring to impersonate such a vulgar monster as that depicted in Hyde. Then how far-reaching was the influence of the Ibsen craze, in the direction of the morbid and the immoral in the passing drama! The influence also of Faust in its many presentations, as depicted by different actors, has, no doubt, done much to vitiate our dramatic taste. This is a view of the leading characteristics of the nineteenth century drama which may well cause us to pause and consider where we are drifting socially and ethically. It is at least sufficient to make us sceptical regarding present-day dramatic ideals and conceptions of what is the true drama.

Another side to this whole subject is found in the artificial ideals regarding poetry and the drama, consequent on the rage for such writers as Browning and Meredith. It is quite pitiful to see how many clever actresses have toiled to give a rendering of In a Balcony, and not because they were drawn to the part by inclination, but merely in pursuance of a social fad.

The influence of the drama, next to that of religion, is a very necessary, a beautiful and a human one. But like the latter it is susceptible to abuses and heresies, and it is these abuses and heresies which society should strive to avoid or cure. In religion the one chief cause of decadence is insincerity, and this is also the primal cause of decline in the drama as well as in literature. The drama owes its very existence to the poetry of life, which is founded in sublimity, beauty and reason. Hence we have the true tragedy and the true comedy. Tragedy must contain its element of hope. It must be set in the environment of a great possibility, from the failure to realise which, it has its source; or else it is no tragedy. So comedy, as tragedy involves hope, must contain the element of beauty; or else it is no true comedy.

The drama which fails in these elemental respects, no matter how clever or sensational from the stage standpoint, is not only not great drama, but it is not true drama. Indeed, it is a degeneracy, and a degeneracy so dangerous to society at large, that it should not be tolerated. The great drama, as found in Shakespeare at his highest, and in the lesser drama of his school since his day, should be a tremendous factor in the uplifting of human society. The reason for this is that it is the work of the poet who is unusually sane in his sense of the natural and the sublime, who has so run the whole gamut of human passion that he is not morbidly over-attracted to any one phase of life. There is a majesty, a dignity, a sublimity about such drama which leaves a sense of the greatness of human existence, which opens eternally doors of hope into that future morning of the universe toward which our best ideals are trending.

It is this element of hope which Shakespeare’s plays all possess, and which is found in none of the modern cynical plays; being conspicuously absent in Faust, the greatest of the later dramas.

Then, it is not merely what the drama sets out to teach which always constitutes its real influence, but rather the illusion which is created in the production of the play itself. The Sign of the Cross, a religious melodrama, had for its professed object the contrasting of paganism with Christianity to the advantage of the latter; but the end attained was the very opposite. Faust, supposedly a religious drama, owing to the preponderance of the character of Mephisto, degenerates on the stage into an incarnation of hopeless cynicism. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, instead of teaching a lesson, becomes a disgusting horror. The illusion created in all these cases failing to contain the sublime element of hope, and rather suggesting that of despair in the mind of the thinking observer. How different is the illusion created in Shakespeare’s dramas! In Hamlet, his seemingly most gloomy creation, the environment is large, human and sublime. The very sadness is that of the poet, and the great poet. The whole play is not a mere picture of evil, but rather a mourning over life’s greatness, abused and made impossible by reason of sin. Macbeth is another wonderful picture. In it the supernatural is blended with the depiction of human remorse. In each case there is nothing abnormal, nothing disgusting or revolting, but all is largely human and natural. There is nothing petty or common in the setting of those plays. In them all human life is shown in its greater aspects, and they all take one out of the mere present into history itself, depicting man as a part of the great environments of race, time and destiny. The human tragedy in them all is seen in the failure or falling off from the sublime possibility of life as shown in the ideal, and the creation of the illusion, which is the real play itself. This is, after all, what constitutes true drama, and it is in this essential that the drama proper stands or falls. Again, those who judge the play by its mere compression into so many acts and scenes voice a very common hypocrisy of the critic concerning the dramatic art. The most successful of modern plays have been those which have sinned against most of these traditions of what should constitute the ideal. No drama was ever written but has required changes at the hand of the stage carpenter. The final argument sometimes put forward, namely, that the modern playwright is more subtle and enters more deeply into life than does Shakespeare, is as great a falsity as the foregoing heresy. As already pointed out, the abnormal, the self-conscious, and the morbid have mistaken the merely vicious for the natural, and the probing for unhealthy phases of personality and fancied hidden motives, as depicted by Ibsen, are no proof of insight into human life as a whole. The greatest testimony for or against the play is the modern drama itself, and any one who prefers the general character of the Ibsen or Bernard Shaw play to that of Shakespeare is welcome to his opinion, but his mental attitude is scarcely one which will conduce to the development of the best ideals of the British race.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

A cover which is placed in the public domain was created for this ebook.

The article was originally published in The Canadian Magazine, November 1907 issue.

[The end of Shakespeare and the Latter-Day Drama by William Wilfred Campbell]