Mimesis (57 page)

Thus Shakespeare’s ethical and intellectual world is much more agitated, multilayered, and, apart from any specific dramatic action, in itself more dramatic than that of antiquity. The very ground on which men move and actions take their course is more unsteady and seems shaken by inner disturbances. There is no stable world as background, but a world which is perpetually reengendering itself out of the most varied forces. No reader or spectator can fail to sense this; but it may not be superfluous to describe the dynamism of Shakespeare’s thought in somewhat greater detail and give an example of it. In antique tragedy the philosophizing is generally undramatic; it is sententious, aphoristic, is abstracted from the action and generalized, is detached from the personage and his fate. In Shakespeare’s plays it becomes personal; it grows directly out of the speaker’s immediate situation and remains connected with it. It is not a result of the experience gained in the action, nor an effective rejoinder in the stychomythia; it is dramatic self-scrutiny seeking the right mode and moment for action or doubting the possibility of finding them. When the most revolutionary of the Greek tragic poets, Euripides, attacks the class distinctions between
men, he does so in a sententiously constructed verse to the effect that only the name dishonors the slave; otherwise a noble slave is nowise inferior to a free man. Shakespeare does not attack class distinctions, and it would seem that he had no views of social revolutionary import. Yet when one of his characters expresses such ideas out of his own situation it is done with an immediacy, a dramatic force, which give the ideas something arresting and incisive: Let your slaves live as you live; give them the same food and quarters; marry them to your children! You say your slaves are your property? Very well, just so do I answer you: this pound of flesh is mine, I bought it. … The pariah Shylock does not appeal to natural right but to customary wrong. What a dynamic immediacy there is in such bitter, tragic irony!

The great number of moral phenomena which the constant renewal of the world as a whole produces, and which themselves constantly contribute to its renewal, engenders an abundance of stylistic levels such as antique tragedy was never able to produce. I open a volume of Shakespeare at random and come upon
Macbeth
, act 3, scene 6, where Lennox, a Scottish nobleman, tells a friend what he thinks of the most recent events:

The form of discourse employed in this passage—a form in which something is insidiously implied or “insinuated” without being stated—was well known in antiquity. Quintilian treats of it in his ninth book, where he discusses the
controversiae figuratae
, and the great orators
offer examples of it. But that it should be used so completely unrhetorically, in the course of a private conversation, and yet entirely within the somberly tragic atmosphere, is a mixture which is foreign to antiquity. I turn a few pages and come to the lines in which, immediately before his last battle, Macbeth receives the news of his wife’s death:

All the terrible things which Macbeth has done and which he has suffered because of what he has done, have made him hard and fearless. He is no longer easily affrighted (“I have supp’d full with horrors”). Furthermore all his strength is concentrated for a last stand. At this moment comes the news of the death of his wife—the companion who first drove him into crime and yet in whom the strength to live has failed before it has in him—and plunges him, though only for a moment, into somber brooding; it is a slackening of the tension, but one which can only lead to hopelessness, heaviness, and despair; yet it is heavy with humanity and wisdom too. Macbeth has become heavy with a self-acquired wisdom which has arisen for him from his own destiny, he has grown ripe for knowledge and death. This final ripeness he now attains, at the moment when his last and only human companion leaves him. As here from horror and tragedy, so, in another instance, it is from the grotesque and ridiculous that the man in all his purity arises, the man as he was really intended to be and as in fortunate moments he may possibly have realized himself. Polonius is a fool, he is silly and senile; but when he gives his blessing and final
advice to his departing son (1, 3), he has the wisdom and the dignity of age.

But something else is to be noted here besides the great variety of phenomena to which we referred above and the ever-varied nuances of the profoundly human mixture of high and low, sublime and trivial, tragic and comic. It is the conception, so difficult to formulate in clear terms although everywhere to be observed in its effects, of a basic fabric of the world, perpetually weaving itself, renewing itself, and connected in all its parts, from which all this arises and which makes it impossible to isolate any one event or level of style. Dante’s general, clearly delimited fìgurality, in which everything is resolved in the beyond, in God’s ultimate kingdom, and in which all characters attain their full realization only in the beyond, is no more. Tragic characters attain their final completion here below when, heavy with destiny, they become ripe like Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear. Yet they are not simply caught in the destiny allotted to each of them; they are all connected as players in a play written by the unknown and unfathomable Cosmic Poet; a play on which He is still at work, and the meaning and reality of which is as unknown to them as it is to us. Let me adduce in this connection a few lines from
The Tempest
(4, 1):

This says two things: that Shakespeare includes earthly reality, and even its most trivial forms, in a thousand refractions and mixtures, but that his purpose goes far beyond the representation of reality in its merely earthly coherence; he embraces reality but he transcends it. This is already apparent in the presence of ghosts and witches in his plays, and in the often unrealistic style in which the influences of Seneca, of Petrarchism, and of other fashions of the day are fused in a characteristically concrete but only erratically realistic manner. It
is still more significantly revealed in the inner structure of the action, which is often—and especially in the most important plays—only erratically and sporadically realistic and often shows a tendency to break through into the realm of the fairy tale, of playful fancy, or of the supernatural and demonic.

From another viewpoint too the tragic in Shakespeare is not completely realistic. We alluded to it at the beginning of this chapter. He does not take ordinary everyday reality seriously or tragically. He treats only noblemen, princes and kings, statesmen, commanders, and antique heroes tragically. When common people or soldiers or other representatives of the middle or lower classes appear, it is always in the low style, in one of the many variations of the comic which he commands. This separation of styles in accordance with class appears more consistently in him than in medieval works of literature and art, particularly those of Christian inspiration, and it is doubtless a reflection of the antique conception of the tragic. It is true, as we have said, that in him tragic personages of the higher classes exhibit frequent stylistic lapses into the corporeal-creatural, the grotesque, and the ambiguous; but the reverse is hardly so. Shylock would seem to be the only figure which might be cited as an exception, and we have seen that in his case too the tragic motifs are dropped at the end. Shakespeare’s world-spirit is in no way a popular spirit—a point which distinguishes him basically from his admirers and imitators in the
Sturm und Drang
period and the romantic period. The dynamic throbbing of elemental forces which we feel in his works has nothing to do with the depths of the popular soul with which those men of a later age connected it. From this point of view it is instructive to compare Shakespeare’s and Goethe’s populace scenes. The first scene in
Romeo and Juliet
, where the servants of the Montagues and Capulets meet, has much in common with the meeting of peasant leaders with troopers from Bamberg at the beginning of
Götz von Berlichingen
. But how much more serious, more human, and more intelligently interested in the events are Goethe’s characters! And if in this case it might be objected that the problems developed in
Götz
concern the people directly, no such objection can be sustained in a comparison of the populace scenes in the Roman plays, in
Julius Caesar
or
Coriolanus
, with those in
Egmont
. It is not only any such sympathetic penetration of the popular soul which is foreign to Shakespeare; he shows nothing precursory of the Enlightenment, of bourgeois morality, and of the cultivation of sentiment. In his works, whose author remains
almost anonymously aloof, there is a very different atmosphere from that in the products of the era of Germany’s literary awakening, in which one always hears the voice of a deeply sensitive, richly emotional personality enthusiastically declaiming upon freedom and greatness in an austere bourgeois study. Consider how impossible a
Klärchen
or
Gretchen
, or a tragedy like
Luise Millerin
, would be in Shakespeare’s world; a tragic situation revolving about the virginity of a middle-class girl is an absurdity within the frame of Elizabethan literature.

In this context we should recall the famous interpretation of Hamlet in Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre
(book 4, chapters 3 and 13). It is profound and beautiful; it has been admired with good reason not only by the Romanticists but also by many later readers, both in Germany and in England. There is convincing force in Goethe’s explanation of Hamlet’s tragedy as resulting from the sudden collapse of the external and ethical security of his early years, from the break-down of his trust in the ethical order represented for him by the bond—now cruelly disrupted—which previously united his parents, whom he loved and revered. But Goethe’s interpretation is at the same time a stylistic mirror of his own time, the age of Goethe. Hamlet appears as a tender, emotional, modest young man, ideally striving for the highest good but insufficiently endowed with inner force. What happens—in Goethe’s words—is that “a great deed is laid upon a soul not equal to it”; or—as he puts it a little later—“a beautiful, pure, noble, and highly moral being, devoid of the physical strength which makes the hero, is crushed by a burden which it can neither bear nor cast off. …” Must we assume that Goethe failed to sense Hamlet’s native force, which continues to grow throughout the course of the play, his cutting wit, which makes all those about him tremble and flee, the cunning and boldness of his strategems, his savage harshness toward Ophelia, the energy with which he faces his mother, the icy calm with which he removes the courtiers who cross his path, the elasticity and boldness of all his words and thoughts? Despite the fact that he again and again puts off the decisive deed, he is by far the strongest character in the play. There is a demonic aura about him which inspires respect, awe, and often fear. Whenever he does move into action, it is quick, bold, and at times malicious, and it strikes the mark with assured power. True enough, it is precisely the events that summon him to vengeance which paralyze his power of decision. But can that be explained from a lack of vitality, a lack of that “physical
strength which makes the hero”? Is it not rather that in a strong and almost demonically gifted nature, doubt and weariness of life must assert themselves, that the entire weight of his existence must be displaced in this direction? That it is precisely because of the passion with which a strong nature abandons itself to its emotions that they become so overwhelming that the duty to live and to act becomes a burden and a torture? Our intention here is not to set up another interpretation of Hamlet in opposition to Goethe’s; we merely wish to indicate the direction in which Goethe and his age were moving when they undertook to assimilate Shakespeare to their own attitudes. In passing I might observe that more recent research has become very skeptical in regard to such homogeneously psychological interpretations of Shakespeare’s characters—indeed, to my mind, rather too skeptical.