longer dreams of making his characters formally hand over to the spectators the key to their mystery—when, on the contrary, with his sense of the secrets and inward contradictions of the spiritual life, he sedulously hides that key in the depths of personality.
XIX
SHAKESPEARE LOSES HIS SON—TRACES OF HIS GRIEF IN KING JOHN—THE OLD PLAY OF THE SAME NAME—DISPLACEMENT OF ITS CENTRE OF GRAVITY—ELIMINATION OF RELIGIOUS POLEMICS—RETENTION OF THE NATIONAL BASIS—PATRIOTIC SPIRIT—SHAKESPEARE KNOWS NOTHING OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN NORMANS AND ANGLO-SAXONS, AND IGNORES THE MAGNA CHARTA
In the Parish Register of Stratford-on-Avon for 1596, under the heading of burials, we find this entry, in a clear and elegant handwriting:—
"August 11, Hamnet filius William Shakespeare."
Shakespeare's only son was born on the 2nd of February 1585; he was thus only eleven and a half when he died.
We cannot doubt that this loss was a grievous one to a man of Shakespeare's deep feeling; doubly grievous, it would seem, because it was his constant ambition to restore the fallen fortunes of his family, and he was now left without an heir to his name.
Traces of what his heart must have suffered appear in the work he now undertakes, King John, which seems to date from 1596-97.
One of the main themes of this play is the relation between John Lackland, who has usurped the English crown, and the rightful heir, Arthur, son of John's elder brother, in reality a boy of about fourteen at the date of the action, but whom Shakespeare, for the sake of poetic effect, and influenced, perhaps, by his private preoccupations of the moment, has made considerably younger, and consequently more childlike and touching.
The King has got Arthur into his power. The most famous scene in the play is that (iv. I) in which Hubert de Burgh, the King's chamberlain, who has received orders to sear out the eyes of the little captive, enters Arthur's prison with the irons, and accompanied by the two servants who are to bind the child to a chair and hold him fast while the atrocity is being committed. The little prince, who has no mistrust of Hubert, but only a general dread of his uncle's malice, as yet divines no danger, and is full of sympathy and childlike tenderness. The passage is one of extraordinary grace:—
"Arthur You are sad. Hubert. Indeed, I have been merrier. Arth. Mercy on me Methinks, nobody should be sad but I: . . . . . . . . I would to Heaven, I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert. Hub. [Aside.] If I talk to him, with his innocent prate He will awake my mercy, which lies dead: Therefore I will be sudden, and despatch. Arth. Are you sick, Hubert? you look pale to-day. In sooth, I would you were a little sick, That I might sit all night, and watch with you: I warrant, I love you more than you do me."
Hubert gives him the royal mandate to read:—
"Hubert. Can you not read it? is it not fair writ? Arthur. Too fairly, Hubert, for so foul effect. Must you with hot irons burn out both mine eyes? Hub. Young boy, I must. Arth . And will you? Hub . And I will. Arth. Have you the heart? When your head did but ache, I knit my handkerchief about your brows, (The best I had, a princess wrought it me,) And I did never ask it you again; And with my hand at midnight held your head."
Hubert summons the executioners, and the child promises to sit still and offer no resistance if only he will send these "bloody men" away. One of the servants as he goes out speaks a word of pity, and Arthur is in despair at having "chid away his friend." In heart-breaking accents he begs mercy of Hubert until the iron has grown cold, and Hubert has not the heart to heat it afresh.
Arthur's entreaties to the rugged Hubert to spare his eyes, must have represented in Shakespeare's thought the prayers of his little Hamnet to be suffered still to see the light of day, or rather Shakespeare's own appeal to Death to spare the child—prayers and appeals which were all in vain.
It is, however, in the lamentations of Arthur's mother, Constance, when the child is carried away to prison (iii. 4), that we most clearly recognise the accents of Shakespeare's sorrow:—
"Pandulph. Lady, you utter madness, and not sorrow. Constance. I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine. If I were mad, I should forget my son, Or madly think, a babe of clouts were he. I am not mad: too well, too well I feel The different plague of each calamity."
She pours forth her anguish at the thought of his sufferings in prison:—
"Now will canker sorrow eat my bud,
And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost,
As dim and meagre as an ague's fit,
And so he'll die.
. . . . . . . . .
Pandulph. You hold too heinous a respect of grief. Constance. He talks to me, that never had a son. K. Philip. You are as fond of grief as of your child." Const. Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form."
It seems as though Shakespeare's great heart had found an outlet for its own sorrows in transfusing them into the heart of Constance.
Shakespeare used as the basis of his King John an old play on the same subject published in 1591.[1] This play is quite artless and spiritless, but contains the whole action, outlines all the characters, and suggests almost all the principal scenes. The poet did not require to trouble himself with the invention of external traits. He could concentrate his whole effort upon vitalising, spiritualising, and deepening everything. Thus it happens that this play, though never one of his most popular (it seems to have been but seldom performed during his lifetime, and remained in manuscript until the appearance of the First Folio), nevertheless contains some of his finest character-studies and a multitude of pregnant, imaginative, and exquisitely worded speeches.
The old play was a mere Protestant tendency-drama directed against Catholic aggression, and full of the crude hatred and coarse ridicule of monks and nuns characteristic of the Reformation period. Shakespeare, with his usual tact, has suppressed the religious element, and retained only the national and political attack upon Roman Catholicism, so that the play had no slight actuality for the Elizabethan public. But he has also displaced the centre of gravity of the old play. Everything in Shakespeare turns upon John's defective right to the throne: therein lies the motive for the atrocity he plans, which leads (although it is not carried out as he intended) to the barons' desertion of his cause.
Despite its great dramatic advantages over Richard II., the play surfers from the same radical weakness, and in an even greater degree: the figure of the King is too unsympathetic to serve as the centre-point of a drama. His despicable infirmity of purpose, which makes him kneel to receive his crown at the hands of the same Papal legate whom he has shortly before defied in blusterous terms; his infamous scheme to assassinate an innocent child, and his repentance when he sees that its supposed execution has alienated the chief supporters of his throne—all this hideous baseness, unredeemed by any higher characteristics, leads the spectator rather to attach his interest to the subordinate characters, and thus the action is frittered away before his eyes. It lacks unity, because the King is powerless to hold it together.
He himself is depicted for all time in
