23 April: Boreham on William Shakespeare

The Music of the Maestro
To most people, William Shakespeare—the anniversary of whose birth and death we celebrate today—is a glorious ghost. He never materialises. He haunts that dim old 16th century of his, and never, by any chance, comes out into the light of common day. Few things are more amazing than the vicissitudes that, with the passage of time, have overtaken the name and fame of Shakespeare.

By many of his contemporaries he was regarded as the prince of dramatists, supreme, incomparable, peerless. He was first; second there was none. Then came the pitiful eclipse. Davinant, Lansdowne and others were hailed as the successors and supplanters of Shakespeare. Indeed, in the prologue to Lansdowne's "Merchant of Venice," Shakespeare is made to say:

These scenes in their rough native dress were mine,
But now, improved, with
nobler lustre shine.

To a generation that has forgotten that either Davinant or Lansdowne ever existed, all this must seem highly diverting and grotesque, but it represents the state of mind in which England for some time remained. During that shadowy period, Shakespeare was universally regarded as a back number. His crude but immature efforts were all very well in his own time; they had been offered to a generation that had known nothing better. But the world does not stand still; each age puts its predecessor to shame; the raw material yields pride of place to the finished article; Shakespeare had had his day and had passed into oblivion!

The 18th century was well advanced before this remarkable assumption was seriously challenged. To Charles Macklin, the Irish dramatist, belongs the distinction of having reinstated Shakespeare on the throne from which he had been ignominiously driven. Macklin bluntly maintained that the men who had usurped Shakespeare's place were unworthy to clean Shakespeare's boots. In comparison with him, they were mere froth and bubble. Their dramas were all glitter; his were purest gold. Macklin restored Shakespeare to the English stage, and England once more fell in love with him. Macklin had his reward. He become a centenarian, and, therefore, lived to see Shakespeare securely enshrined in the hearts of the British people.

Reconstruction Of A Personality
Strange as all this is, however, the vicissitudes that have overtaken the personality of Shakespeare are even more astonishing than those that have overtaken the plays. Until recently, it was the fashion to say that, concerning Shakespeare himself, little or nothing is known. He was a shadow, a spectre, a wraith, a mere legendary figure. He was lost—apparently lost forever—in the mists of obscurity.

From this golden haze, this enveloping fog, he has happily emerged. Thanks to the painstaking researches of men like Dr. C. H. Herford, Sir Sidney Lee, and Charles Norman, we know Shakespeare, not only as a name, but as a person—a person of smiles and tears, of pathos and humour, of humanness and life. He is a Shakespeare of red blood and sparkling eye, and eager, sprightly movement.

We see the chestnut-haired, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked boy at the little school in High Street, where doing reasonably well in other subjects, he excels in Latin. We see him scouring the leafy lanes and primrosed woods of Warwickshire in search of birds' nests or participating with the other lads of the village in the keen rivalry of field sports. We see him, a raw, callow, loose-limbed youth, wandering across the dewy meadows or strolling along the graceful banks of the Avon, sometimes imbibing in solitude the lore of the countryside and sometimes courting—or being courted by—the girl, some years his senior, to whom he was married at the age of 18 years.

And—which is still more to the point—we see him a few years later bidding farewell to his wife, setting out for London and succeeding beyond his most roseate dreams. He won the favour both of the Court and of the crowd, earned a thousand a year; and whilst still in the forties, was able to retire. At 22 he went up to London almost penniless; at 52 he died, having been for some years a wealthy landowner and a gentleman in authority in the county.

Honoured By Contemporary And Posterity
If, during the lifetime of the bard, the people of Stratford had been unconscionably proud of his achievements, their enthusiasm reached a perfect crescendo immediately after his death. Sharing his dread lest his tomb should be disturbed, they buried him 17 feet deep and inscribed on the stone the rhyme that he himself had written.

The words were inspired by his gruesome memory of the bonehouse near the church into which the contents of old graves were tossed to make room for other interments. The epitaph pronounced a withering curse on anybody who dared to meddle with his own bones. Soon after his death, a monument was erected in the town. The inscription declares that other poetry was to his as a page boy is to a prince.

Shakespeare is a cataract of amazements. To have produced so enormous a volume of work, most of which is not only excellent but superexcellent, is itself an extraordinary achievement. To have scattered up and down those pages hundreds of gems so elegant and so beautiful that they will be declaimed with passion and with pride as long as the language lasts, is an accomplishment that flings a unique lustre around his name.

William Basse, a contemporary poet, rejoiced that Shakespeare was not buried in Westminster Abbey. It would, he felt, have made him one of a crowd. Milton, writing 14 years later, declares that, sepulchred in the splendour of his own writings, "he in such pomp doth lie that kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die." We like to feel that he who, three centuries after his death, stands peerless among the laureates of the ages, was loved and applauded and crowned by those who gazed with delight into his fine and flexible face, and who listened, night after night, to the moving music of his sonorous voice.

F W Boreham

Image: William Shakespeare