Mimesis (55 page)

Poins
: Why, a prince should not be so loosely studied as to remember so weak a composition.

Prince Henry
: Belike, then, my appetite was not princely got; for, by my troth, I do now remember the poor creature, small beer. But, indeed, these humble considerations make me out of love with my greatness. What a disgrace is it to me to remember thy name? or to know thy face to-morrow? or to take note how many silk stockings thou hast; viz., these, and those that were thy peach-coloured ones? or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as, one for superfluity, and one other for use? …

This is a conversation between Prince Henry (subsequently King Henry) and one of the boon companions of his youthful frolics. It occurs in Shakespeare’s
Henry IV
', part 2, at the beginning of the second scene of act 2. The comic disapproval of the fact that a person of such high rank should be subject to weariness and the desire for small beer, that his mind should be obliged so much as to notice the existence of so lowly a creature as Poins and even to remember the inventory of his clothes, is a satire on the trend—no longer negligible in Shakespeare’s day—toward a strict separation between the sublime and the realm of everyday realities. Attempts in this direction were inspired by the example of antiquity, especially by Seneca, and were spread by the humanist imitators of antique drama in Italy, France, and in England itself. But they had not yet met with complete success. However important the influence of antiquity may have been on Shakespeare, it could not mislead him, nor yet other dramatists of the Elizabethan period, into this separation of styles. The medieval-Christian and at
the same time popular-English tradition which opposed such a development was still too strong. At a much later period, more than a century and a half after his death, Shakespeare’s work became the ideal and the example for all movements of revolt against the strict separation of styles in French classicism. Let us try to determine what the mixture of styles in his work signifies.

The motif is introduced by Poins, and then immediately taken up by the Prince in a humorous vein with an undertone of rhetorical preciosity which serves to emphasize the contrasts: “it discolours the complexion of my greatness” versus “small beer.” Goaded on by Poins’s second reply, the Prince playfully develops the theme: “small beer” now becomes a wretched creature that has sneaked into the noble recesses of his consciousness against all law and order, as it were. Now other “humble considerations” occur to him and put him out of conceit with his own greatness. From among them, with wittily charming impertinence, he falls upon the very Poins who stands before him: is it not a shame to me, he argues, that I should remember your name, your face, and even the inventory of your clothes?

A large number of the elements of mixed style are mentioned or alluded to in these few lines: the element of physical creaturalness, that of lowly everyday objects, and that of the mixture of classes involving persons of high and low rank; there is also a marked mixture of high and low expressions in the diction, there is even use of one of the classical terms which characterize the low style, the word “humble.” All this is abundantly represented in Shakespeare’s tragic works. Examples of the portrayal of the physical-creatural are numerous: Hamlet is fat and short of breath (according to another reading he is not fat but hot); Caesar faints from the stench of the mob acclaiming him; Cassio in
Othello
is drunk; hunger and thirst, cold and heat affect tragic characters too; they suffer from the inclemencies of the weather and the ravages of illness: in Ophelia’s case insanity is represented with such realistic psychology that the resulting stylistic effect is completely different from what we find in Euripides’
Herakles
for example; and death, which can be depicted on the level of the pure sublime, here often has its medieval and creatural appearance (skeletons, the smell of decomposition, etc.). Nowhere is there an attempt to avoid mentioning everyday utensils or, in general, to avoid the concrete portrayal of the everyday processes of life; these things have a much larger place than they do in antique tragedy, although there too, even before Euripides,
they were not so completely taboo as with the classicists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

More important than this is the mixture of characters and the consequent mixture of tragic and comic elements. To be sure, all the characters whom Shakespeare treats in the sublime and tragic manner are of high rank. He does not, as the Middle Ages did, conceive of “everyman” as tragic. He is also more consciously aristocratic than Montaigne. In his work the
humaine condition
is reflected very differently in the different classes, not only in practical terms but also from the point of view of aesthetic dignity. His tragic heroes are kings, princes, commanders, noblemen, and the great figures of Roman history. A borderline case is Shylock. To be sure, in terms of his class, he is not a common everyday figure; he is a pariah; but his class is low. The slight action of the
Merchant of Venice
, with its fairy-tale motifs, is almost too heavily burdened by the weight and problematic implications of his character, and many actors who have undertaken the part have tried to concentrate the entire interest of the play upon him and to make him a tragic hero. His character is a temptation to tragic overemphasis: his hatred has the deepest and most human motivation, is much more deeply based than the wickedness of Richard III; it becomes significant through its power and tenacity. In addition, Shylock formulates it in phrases which echo great humanitarian ideas, especially those which most deeply moved and influenced later centuries. The most famous of these formulations is the answer which he gives the doge at the beginning of the great court scene (4, 1) when, alone against all the others, he defends his rigid and pitiless legal viewpoint: Why do you not treat your slaves as your equals? You will answer: The slaves are ours: so do I answer you. At this and many other moments there is something about him of somber and at the same time truly human greatness. And in general he does not lack problematic depth, impressiveness of character, power and passion, and strength of expression. And yet in the end Shakespeare drops these tragic elements with heedless Olympian serenity. In earlier scenes he had already put a strong emphasis on ludicrous and grotesque traits in Shylock’s character, notably his miserliness and his somewhat senile fear; and in the scene with Tubal (end of 3, 1), where he alternately laments the loss of the valuables which Jessica has taken with her and rejoices over Antonio’s ruin, Shylock is frankly a figure from farce. In the end Shakespeare dismisses him, without greatness, as a circumvented fiend, just as he found him in his sources, and after his departure he adds a whole
act of poetical fairy-tale sport and amorous dalliance, while Shylock is forgotten and abandoned. There is no doubt, then, that the actors are wrong who have tried to make Shylock a tragic hero. Such a conception is at odds with the economy of the play as a whole. Shylock has less greatness by far than Marlowe’s gruesome Jew of Malta and that despite the fact that Shakespeare saw and stated the human problem of his Jew much more deeply. For him Shylock, both in terms of class and aesthetically, is a low figure, unworthy of tragic treatment, whose tragic involvement is conjured up for a moment, but is only an added spice in the triumph of a higher, nobler, freer, and also more aristocratic humanity. Our Prince has the same views. Far be it from him to respect Poins as his equal, although he is the best among the characters in the Falstaff group, although he possesses both wit and valor. What arrogance there is in the words he addresses to him only a few lines before the passage quoted above: “… I could tell to thee—as to one it pleases me, for fault of a better, to call my friend. …” The manner in which Shakespeare elsewhere treats the middle and lower classes we shall take up in due course. In any case, he never renders them tragically. His conception of the sublime and tragic is altogether aristocratic.

But if we disregard this class restriction, Shakespeare’s mixing of styles in the portrayal of his characters is very pronounced. In most of the plays which have a generally tragic tenor there is an extremely close interweaving of the tragic and the comic, the sublime and the low. This effect is brought about by the joint use of several methods. Tragic actions in which public or other tragic events occur, alternate with humorous popular and rowdy scenes which are now closely, now somewhat more loosely connected with the principal action. Or again in the tragic scenes themselves, and with the tragic heroes, there appear fools and other humorous types who accompany, interrupt, and—each in his own way—comment upon what the heroes do, suffer, and say. Finally, not a few of Shakespeare’s tragic characters have their own innate tendency to break the stylistic tenor in a humorous, realistic, or bitterly grotesque fashion. There are numerous examples of the three procedures, and very frequently two of these methods, or even all three, are used in conjunction. For the first—the alternation of tragic and comic scenes in a tragedy—we may cite the populace scenes in the Roman plays, or the Falstaff episodes in the histories, or the grave-digger scene in
Hamlet
. The last named example verges on the tragic and, because of Hamlet’s own appearance in it, might almost be
used as an illustration of the second or even the third procedure. The most famous example of the second procedure—sublime and tragic personages accompanied by comic commentators—is the fool in
King Lear
; but much more in the same genre can be found not only in
Lear
but also in
Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet
, and elsewhere. Still more decisive for the stylistic character of Shakespeare’s tragedy is the third procedure, the mixture of styles in the tragic personage himself. In Shylock’s case—where, to be sure, Shakespeare in the end decided in favor of an interpretation in terms of the comic and the low—we have already observed the shifting back and forth between the tragic and the comic within one character. But the same phenomenon, in variously proportioned mixtures, is also to be found in characters who are treated as unqualifiedly tragic. Even Romeo’s sudden falling in love with Juliet, for example, is almost fit for a comedy, and an almost unconscious development takes the characters in this play of love from childlike beginnings to a tragic climax. Gloucester’s successful wooing of Lady Anne at the bier of Henry VI (
King Richard III
, 1, 2), has something darkly grotesque; Cleopatra is childish and moody; even Caesar is undecided, superstitious, and his rhetorical pride is almost comically exaggerated. There is much more of this nature. Hamlet and Lear especially furnish the most significant examples. Hamlet’s half real, half pretended insanity rages, within a single scene and even a single speech, through all levels of style. He jumps from the obscene to the lyrical or sublime, from the ironically incongruous to dark and profound meditation, from humiliating scorn leveled at others and himself to the solemn assumption of the right to judge and proud self-assertion. Lear’s rich, forceful, and emotional arbitrariness has in its incomparable sublimity elements that strike us as painfully senile and theatrical. The speeches of his faithful fool themselves tear at his mantle of sublimity; but more incisive are the stylistic ruptures which lie in his own nature: his excesses of emotion, his impotent and helpless outbursts of anger, his inclination to indulge in bitterly grotesque histrionics. In the fourth scene of act 2 he falls on his knees before his wicked daughter Regan, who has hurt and is still hurting him most grievously, in order to act out as it were the step he is expected to take (that is, to ask Goneril, his other daughter, to forgive him). This is an extreme and theatrical gesture of bitterly grotesque self-humiliation. He is always ready to exaggerate; he wants to force heaven and earth to witness the extremes of his humiliation and to hear his complaints. Such gestures seem immeasurably shocking in an old man of eighty, in a
great king. And yet they do not in the least detract from his dignity and greatness. His nature is so unconditionally royal that humiliation only brings it out more strongly. Shakespeare makes him speak the famous words “aye, every inch a king,” himself, from the depth of his insanity, grotesquely accoutered, a madman playing the king for a moment. Yet we do not laugh, we weep, and not only in pity but at the same time in admiration for such greatness, which seems only the greater and more indestructible in its brittle creaturality.

Let these examples suffice. Their purpose is merely to remind the reader of these generally known facts and to present them in an arrangement that accords with our particular problem. Shakespeare mixes the sublime and the low, the tragic and the comic in an inexhaustible abundance of proportions. And the picture is further enriched if we also consider the fabulous and fantastic comedies in which there are also occasional overtones of the tragic. Among the tragedies there is none in which a single level of style is maintained from beginning to end. Even in
Macbeth
we have the grotesque scene with the porter (2, 1).

In the course of the sixteenth century the conscious distinction of the categories of tragic and comic in human destiny had come to the fore again. A similar distinction was not, it is true, entirely unknown during the Middle Ages, but in those earlier centuries the conception of the tragic could not develop unimpeded. This is not entirely due—as a matter of fact it is not due at all—to the fact that the tragic works of antiquity were unknown, that antique theory had been forgotten or misundersood. Facts of this nature could not have interfered with the independent development of the tragic. The reason is rather that the Christian figural view of human life was opposed to a development of the tragic. However serious the events of earthly existence might be, high above them stood the towering and all-embracing dignity of a single event, the appearance of Christ, and everything tragic was but figure or reflection of a single complex of events, into which it necessarily flowed at last: the complex of the Fall, of Christ’s birth and passion, and of the Last Judgment. This implies a transposition of the center of gravity from life on earth into a life beyond, with the result that no tragedy ever reached its conclusion here below. To be sure, we had occasion earlier, especially in the chapter on Dante, to point out that this by no means signifies a devaluation of life on earth or of human individuality; but it did bring with it a blunting of tragic climaxes here on earth and a transposition of catharsis into the other world.
Then, in the course of the sixteenth century, the Christian-figural schema lost its hold in almost all parts of Europe. The issue into the beyond, although it was totally abandoned only in rare instances, lost in certainty and unmistakability. And at the same time antique models (first Seneca, then the Greeks also) and antique theory reappeared, unclouded. The powerful influence of the authors of antiquity greatly furthered the development of the tragic. It was, however, unavoidable that this influence should at times have been at odds with the new forces which, arising from contemporary conditions and the autochthonous culture, were driving toward the tragic.