The Imitative and Iterative Shakespeare–II

(The first Part of this article is Published in Triveni for April 1970)

PROF. K. VISWANATHAM

That we are damaged and ruined not so much by our vices as by our virtues is another frequent idea. Timon is undone by goodness. Adam speaks out of his experience and love:

Know you not, master, to some kind of men
Their graces serve them but as enemies?

Escalus knows the truth that

Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall.

The ‘gentle’ Shakespeare could not have approved of unrefined speech. Even truth should be expressed with gentleness. Satyam apriyam nabrooyat. Luciana is emphatic that

Ill deeds are doubled with an evil word.

Gonzalo tells Sebastian:

The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness
And time to speak it in; you rub the sore
When you should bring the plaster.

Duke Senior tells Jacques that it is

Most mischievous foul sin, in chiding sin.

Burke’s well-known Speech on Conciliation may be regarded as a detailed commentary on King Henry’s wisdom: For when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.

Honour is prized high. Simonides in Pericles says:

For who hates honour hates the gods above.

Examples gross as earth make Hamlet exclaim:

Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour is at the stake.

Mine honour is my life, says Norfolk in Richard II. Hotspur and Henry V are worlds apart but are one concerning honour. Imagination of a great exploit drives Hotspur into rhetoric:

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon.

Henry V is no less crazy after honour:

But if it be sin to covet honour
I am the most offending soul alive.

The age of Elizabeth was the age of Hierarchy. ‘Must’ should not be used to a Tudor princess. King Richard is conscious of his status:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king.

With the same consciousness Claudius speaks:

Let him go, Gertrude; do not fear our person:
There is a divinity doth hedge a king...

Prospero’s My foot, my tutor, sums up the whole ground. Hence C. S. Lewis on p. 75 of A Preface to Paradise Lost: The greatest statement of the Hierarchical conception in its double reference to civil and cosmic life is, perhaps, the speech of Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus. Its special importance lies in its clear statement of the alternative to Hierarchy.. Hierarchy is a favourite theme of Shakespeare. A failure to accept his notion of natural authority makes nonsense, for example, of The Taming of the Shrew. It drives the Poet Laureate into describing Katharina’s speech of submission as ‘melancholy clap-trap.’

That the poor obtain scant justice and are gobbled up by the V. I. Ps. is an argument glanced at frequently. The first fisherman in Pericles comments on the infirmities of men: “The great ones eat up the little ones; I can compare our rich misers to nothing fitly as to a whale. “Lear pities the poor too late:

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have taken
Too little care of this.

Lear is a socialist in modern political jargon when he says:

So distribution should undo excess
And each man have enough.

Lear is the champion of justice:

Plate sin with gold
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw doth pierce it.

None can be called deformed, states Antonio in Twelfth Night, but the unkind. The song in The Two Gentlemen runs as

For beauty lives with kindness.

The yellow metal was evil then as now and as has been always. King Henry in Henry IV P2 observes:

How quickly nature falls into revolt
When gold becomes her object...
and like the bees
Are murdered for our pains.

Timon, of course, is a play entirely devoted to gold:

This much of this will make black, white; foul, fair..
this embalms and spices
To the April day again.

Cloten knows its power: It is gold

Which buys admittance…
What
Can it not do and undo?

It is commonly stated that Shakespeare’s villains defy augury. Edmund is against whoremaster man’s laying his goatish disposition to the charge of a star. But Gloster is afraid of the late eclipses. Lear recognizes that ‘we do exist and cease to be’ by the operation of the stars or orbs. Kent finds explanation only in the stars:

The stars above us govern our conditions;
Else one self mate and mate could not beget
Such different issues

Helena in All’s Well rejects the fine foppery of the stars:

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven

like Cassius The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars.
But the mighty Caesar feels helpless and tells Calpurnia:

What can be avoided
Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?

And according to Pisanio

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

Romeo is afraid of ‘some consequences yet hanging in the stars’.

Hamlet’s is well-known:

If it be now, it is not to come; if it be not to come, it
will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the
readiness is all

There is a divinity that shapes our ends or ends our shapes

Art and Nature relationship is an aesthetic problem that crops up often in the plays. Polixenes’ opinion is

It is an art
Which does mend nature,–change it rather; but
The art itself is nature.

The poet in Timon thinks that it tutors nature. Enobarbus sees in Cleopatra’s pavilion ‘fancy outwork nature’. And Iacqimo describes to Posthumus the tapestried story of proud Cleopatra:

a piece of work
So bravely done, so rich, that it strive
In workmanship and value.

In Venus and Adonis the poet writes:

Look, when a painter would surpass the life
In limning out a well-proportioned steed,
His art with nature’s workmanship at strife
As if the dead should the living exceed.

Troilus’ words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart is paralleled by Claudius’

Words without thoughts never to heaven go
and the Queen’s more matter with less art.

The advice of the Countess in All’s Well:

and keep thy friend
Under thy own life’s key; be checked for silence,
But never taxed for speech

is paralleled by Polonius’

Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel...
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice: ...

Lucio’s ‘But it is impossible to extirp it quite, friar, till eating and drinking be put down’ is strengthened by Sir Toby’s Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’

Leonato’s

the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again

becomes the desperate agonized cry of Macbeth:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand?

and the penitent cry of Claudius:

Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow?

That a light heart lives long is a truism the poet is fond of stating.
Katherine in Loves Labours Lost tells Rosaline:

And so may you; for a light heart lives long

Autolycus sings: A merry heart goes all the way. Silence in Henry VI, P2 is not silent about this: And a merry heart lives long.

That sorrow suppressed saps the soul is mentioned often. Marcus in Titus Andronicus states this truism:

Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopped,
Doth burn the heart to cinders.

Malcolm echoes this:

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak
Whispers the overfraught heart, and bids it break.

Cleon’s remark that One sorrow never comes but brings

That may succeed as his inheritor

is more arrestingly phrased by Claudius:

When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalias.

Belarius and Lear point out that greater griefs eclipse the less:

Great griefs, I see, medicine the less

But where the greater malady is fixed
The lesser is scarcely felt.

We are all familiar with Antony’s well-known

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with the bones

but not with the less known Griffith’s

Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water
Brutus tells Lucilius: When love begins to sicken and decay,
It useth an enforced ceremony.

Timon explains to the lords: Ceremony was but devised at first

To set a gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes,
Recanting goodness, sorry ere it is shown;
But where there is true friendship there needs none.

Flattery is the monarch’s plague in Sonnet CXIV. Helicanus is of the view that

They do abuse the king that flatter him
For flattery is the bellows blows up sin.

Falstaff saves Henry from this plague and forthis service at least the king should not have said: I know thee not.

It is interesting to contrast what King Richard says about his cousin:

How he did seem to dive in their hearts
With humble and familiar courtesy...
And he our subjects next degree in hope

with King Henry’s reprimand to his son:

By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wondered at

whereas the Prince was like the King

He was but as the cuckoo in June,
Heard, not regarded

The Dauphin’s remark:

Self love, my liege, is not so vile a sin
As self-neglecting

is more emphatic in Sonnet LXII:

Sin of self love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy...
Self so self-loving were iniquity.

Whatever praises itself, observes Agamemnon, but in the deed devours the deed in the praise.

We are lacking in knowledge of self and hence the errors we commit for good or for bad. It is Menecrates’ acute mind that thinks:

We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms which the wise powers
Deny us for our good; so find we profit
By losing of our prayers.

Shakespeare knew the large gap between professions and practice, doing and thinking, praxis and gnosis. If to do were as easy, says Portia, as to know what were good to do chapels had been churches and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.

Coriolanus consoles his mother:

I shall be loved when I am lacked.

Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra tells the messenger:

And the ebbed man...
Comes deared by being lacked.

Absence brings lovers closer to each other than togetherness and is elaborated in the Absence Group of Sonnets:

For then my thoughts (from far where I abide)
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee. XXVII

Brutus replies to Cassius:

No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself
But by reflection, by some other things.

The same idea we find in Troilus and Cressida. Achilles informs Ulysses:

nor doth the eye itself,–
That most pure spirit of sense,behold itself
Not going from itself.

This vexing metaphysical problem re-phrases itself in Coleridge as the Subject that objectifies itself to itself. The problem of the eye is perhaps distantly related to

Light seeking light doth light of light beguile, and
The eye grows brighter by fixing it on a fairer eye

in Loves Labours Lost.

Consider the oft-quoted remark of Hamlet:

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

It occurs in Gloster’s speech in Henry VI, P3:

Why, I can smile, and murder while I smile. (III-2)

Antonio asks Bassamo to mark that the devil

Is like a villain with a smiling cheek (I-3)
The poet seems to be fond of the idea of one fire driving out another. Proteus in The Two Gentlemen makes use of this simile:

Even as one heat another heat expels
Or as one nail by strength drives out another

Brutus talking to Antony in Julius Caesar echoes it:

As fire drives out fire, so pity pity.

Aufidius uses the same idea:

One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail
Rights by rights falter.

The poet is much inclined to the simile of an object that inclines neither way. Northumberland describes his mind:

It is with my mind
As with the tide swelled up unto its height
That makes a still stand, running neither way.

Antony speaks of the swan’s down feather

That stands upon the swell at the full tide
And neither way inclines.

Closely associated with this is the Ghost’s fat weed that rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf and Caesar’s vagabond flag that rots itself with motion lackeying the varying tide going to and upon the stream.

Viola’s

She sat like patience on a monument
Smiling at grief

is repeated in a far-off play like Pericles
Yet thou dost look
Like patience gazing on kings’ graves and smiling
Extremity out of act
Rosaline’s

The blood of youth burns not with such excess
As gravity’s revolt to wantonness

is memorably and aphoristically expressed, in Sonnet XCIV:

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds

Aufidius’ I know thee not and King Henry’s I know thee not mark the beginning and end of two different adventures in friendship. Lear and Shallow remember the time when they made others ‘skip’. I have seen the time says Shallow, with my long sword I would have made yon four tall fellows skip like rats. Lear expresses almost the same:

I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion
I would have made them skip.

Falstaff ‘ensconces’ himself like Polonius but not with the same tragic sequence.

‘Happy man be his dole’ is mentioned by Slender in Merry Wives, by Hortentio in The Taming, by Leontes in The Winters Tale–perhaps a kind of ‘swear’ or wish word. It is on the lips of Falstaff too: Happy man be his dole, say I.

John Holland’s Labour in thy vocation in Henry VI, P2 is echoed by Falstaff: It is no sin to labour in his vocation, Hal.

Gaunt’s exhortation to Bolingbroke

There is no virtue like necessity 

dawns upon King Lear overpoweringly:

The art of our necessities is strange
That can make vile things precious.

Othello speaks of

men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders;

Gonzalo refers to men

Whose heads stood in their breasts.
Queen Elizabeth’s ‘You have no cause’ to the Archbishop of York is repeated in King Lear’s

‘Youhave some cause, they have not’ to Cordelia followed by her

No cause, no cause.

The snail in Venus and Adonis

whose tender horns being hit
Shrinks ward in his shelly cave with pain

emerges with new transferred vitality in Coriolanus:

It is Aufidius
Who hearing of our Marcius’ banishment
Thrusts forth his hornsagain into the World;
Which were inshelled when Marcius stood for Rome And
durst not oncepeep out.

As one connected with the theatre it will be surprising if Shakespeare does not refer to his own domain. York commisserates with Richard:

As in a theatre the eyes of men
After a well-graced actor leaves the stage
Are idly bent on him that enters next...

Sonnet XXIII explains that the poet failed to say the perfect ceremony of love’s rite

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put besides his part.

Hamlet is the Director of the Gonzago play and in ActIII, Sc. 2 gives a succinct and meaningful lecture on contemporary theatre:

“Speak the speech, I pray you,...shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.”
The love of England runs like a golden thread in the plays. The Bastard’s

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror

is as remarkable as old Gaunt’s

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle.

The Chorus in Henry V compares England to a “little body with a mighty heart.” Hasting’s in Henry VI, P. 3.

England is safe, if true with itself

foreshadows the Bastard’s sentiment. Imogen’s lyrical description is most happy:

In a great pool a swan’s nest.

Anne Bullen’s I swear again I would not be a queen

For all the world by my troth and maidenhead

is a distant cousin of Desdemona’s

Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?

Body-Mind correspondence is a frequent Renaissance idea. Viola talking about the Captain asserts this

And though this nature with a beauteous wall
Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee
I believe thou hast a mind that suits
With this thy fair and outward character.

The poet tells the young men in Sonnet XI

She carved thee tor her seal, and meant thereby
Thou shouldst print more, nor let thy copy die.

He questions him in XCIII

How like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow,
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show?

Miranda thinks There is nothing ill can dwell in such a temple.
Lear’s ferocious curses hurled at his daughter:

If she must teem
Create her child of spleen, that it may live
And be a thwart disnatured torment to her!

has the same blasting vocabulary as Prospero’s

but barren hate,
Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both.

There is no need to talk about Shakespeare’s bawdy so neatly collected by Partridge and Hilda Hulme. Bowdler will stir in his grave that expressions that appeared so innocent were not so innocent after all! Hilda Hulme’s explanation of a Table of green fields almost revolutionizes our interpretation of Falstaff’s end. Even a fine generalization like

Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall

has indecent connotation. Partridge connects Bawdy with Bravado in creativity Burgundy’s frankness of mirth in Henry V:

Can you blame her then, being a maid yet rosed-over with the virgin crimson of modesty if she deny the appearance of a naked blind boy in her naked seeing self

flows into Mercutio’s talk to Benvolio:

it would anger him
To raise a spirit in his mistress circle
Of some strange nature, letting it there stand
Till she had laid it and conjured it down.

(In one of the stories of the great Sanskrit classic, Kathasaritsagara this ‘naked seeing self’ is described as a wound which no physician can heal; the daughter saves her father from the jaws of an ogre by stipulating that the ogre could devour her father if he healed her wound.) This bawdy has its origins in the Dark Lady. The poet asks her salaciously and sarcastically and pitifully

Wilt thou whose will is large and spacious
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine? CXXV

This “mistress” circle colours and taints Shakespeare’s imagination either creating an Ariel of love or a Caliban of lust, goading him to a raging madness and demented speech or gracious music and marriage of minds:

Hang there like fruit, my soul,
Till the tree die!

What is it we learn from this imitation and iteration illustrated above?

The poet does not hesitate to imitate or repeat himself in fun or seriousness if a fine expression or idea got inscribed on the tablets of his mind. The ideas repeated take us closer to Shakespeare. He (at a lower level) had the trick of repeating words as we find in Hamlet; (at a higher level) he hated slander as much as his Duke:

-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes.

It is through these observations that we get to know the author and we realize the wisdom of C. S. Lewis’ statement: I believe that Sidney and Shakespeare are in this respect like Spencer, and to grasp this is one of the first duties of their critics. I do not think Shakespeare wrote a single line to express ‘his’ ideas. What some call his philosophy, he would have called common knowledge. (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 387) He is the poet of the common man hating the things he hates, loving the things he loves, glorying in his glory and failing with his frailties, always aware of the other man’s point of view, frequently buttonholing us with an observation like:

The man that once did sell the lion’s skin
While the beast lived was killed with hunting him

or upsetting us by ‘Think we had mothers’ washing the dirty linen of human suspicion.

As Melville said:

No utter surprise can come to him
Who reaches Shakespeare’s core;
That which we seek and shun is there
Man’s final lore.

Shakespeare’s poetry is a bountiful answer that fits all questions; it is a Barber’s chair that fits all buttocks (as the Clown picturesquely re-phrases the statement of the Countess in All’s Well–II, 2)

The testament of Shakespeare’s life is in Gloster’s words in Richard III:

It is death for me to be at enmity
I hate it and desire all good men’s love,–

and in Hamlet’s:

Odd’s bodkin, man, better: Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve the more merit is in your bounty and in Lear’s

None does offend

and in Edgar’s

Ripeness is all

Is it correct to think that he was not one

Whose blood and judgment are so well co-medled
That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please?

The documented wisdom and ineffable commonsense cancels that allegation. He was that rarest of all human beings, as Prof. Raleigh wrote, a complete man–one who achieved sophrosyne through laughter as broad as ten thousand beeves at pasture, through the vast reciprocity of human tears.

Valmiki’s Nakaschinnaparadhyati, and Shakespeare’s Odd’s bodkin, man, better–are the most healing rubrics of advice to humanity diseased with fault-finding. Tolerance, Charity, Respect for the other man’s or woman’s point of view, Democracy–are implicit in the world-view of Valmiki and Shakespeare.