Shakespeare the Dramatist

And other papers

Una Ellis-Fermor, Kenneth Muir, Kenneth Muir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136560200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1961. On her death, Professor Ellis-Fermor left behind some uncollected essays and part of a book on Shakespeare the Dramatist. This volume includes the chapters of the unfinished work and three further articles on Shakespeare. It discusses Shakespeare's methods with regard to plot, character, diction, and imagery and it contains comparative analysis of Shakespeare with other dramatists, including Ibsen and Corneille.

III
Shakespeare and the Dramatic Mode ¹

FOR NEARLY A CENTURY and a half now Shakespeare has been generally admitted to be one of the greatest of the world's dramatists and for nearly two hundred years certain of his readers have believed him the greatest of all. For in his mature work he seems to stand alone in fulness of achievement. This belief is undoubtedly due, in the first place, to his supreme possession of all the essential qualities or powers that belong to a great dramatist; the passion, the thought, and the sympathy with human experience that characterize the true dramatic imagination. And no other writer seems to have so full and unflawed possession of all these simultaneously. He stands supreme, not simply as the greatest writer using the dramatic form, but precisely because he is a dramatist. Being in all things the essential dramatist, his greatness is commensurate with the essentially dramatic quality in him; the quality constitutes the greatness. Or, to put it rather differently, it is precisely because he is more profoundly and more fully dramatic than any other that he is supreme.

If this is true, if it is the essential dramatist that is the essential Shakespeare, we may expect to find in his writing, as a part of the revelation of his powers, some correspondingly distinctive mode of dramatic expression; some way, that is, of transmitting his perceptions, something in lois revealing of character or his articulation of structure which is distinctive precisely by reason of its service to dramatic ends. Here again, we should not expect to find him in sole possession of this secret, but we might discover that his continuous possession of it set him apart from all but a few of the greatest, and perhaps that the failure of others in respect of this peculiar artistic skill helped both to explain their relative failure as dramatists and to define, even more clearly, the wholly and supremely dramatic nature of Shakespeare's art.

The peculiar feature of his art that I have in mind, and that I venture to consider the distinctive mode in dramatic writing, is to be found in his way of revealing the profound movements of character or the hidden logic of event. His readers receive so nearly direct an impression of these that the immediacy, which is one source of the theatre's compelling power, is undimmed in the transmitting. We remain continuously immersed in the character's experience; we never cease to be Macbeth; we are never invited to observe him. This is in fact the essential difference between ‘Guilty creatures sitting at a play’ and those sitting at a sermon.

Many critics have, of course, been aware of Shakespeare's habit of writing from the depths and of a wholly different way of going to work on the part of certain other dramatists. In England, in the late eighteenth century, Lord Kames denounced the type of play in which description of experience was substituted for its revelation and, nearly simultaneously, Maurice Morgann gave us the unforgettable sentence, ‘Shakespeare contrives to make secret impressions upon us’.

The difference depends, in the first instance, upon the depth to which the dramatist's perception has carried him, on his understanding of hidden motive and the hidden relations of events. But it is manifested in his power to make us in our turn aware of these hidden movements, by means, as Morgann puts it, of those ‘secret impressions’, whereby we come into imaginative possession of realities beyond the reach of our conscious understanding. And it is the faculty which enables some dramatists so to communicate to the imaginations of their audiences the truths learned from their own imaginative explorations, while still using only the medium of speech and action common to all drama, that distinguishes them in respect of mode. A poet's knowledge of man's experience and of the obscure movements of event that make up his destiny may be profound, but when he attempts to communicate this in a play he must so use those technical resources of speech and action, as to evoke in his audience an imaginative response at a depth corresponding to that of the imagined experience of his character. The transmission is necessarily made through the medium of words and actions, which themselves constitute the visible surface of life: this is a primary law of drama, since immediacy of impression is there a necessity. But in the greatest drama it is so made as to be simultaneously the clue to those hidden processes which the surface in no way necessarily resembles. All great poetry makes its communication at a level below the surface meaning of the words; depth speaks to depth in line after line of Wordsworth's greatest passages. But the dramatist, working only in terms of the speech and action of imagined characters, has a task of peculiar difficulty and a reward, if he surmounts it, of peculiar glory. At the summit of its achievement, as in the greatest plays of Shakespeare, of Aeschylus, of Sophocles, this art conveys at once the reality of depth and the immediacy of direct presentation.

And now appears the paradox we have already suggested, for the surface of life in most societies differs from its underlying cause more often than it resembles it, being, in fact, rather an indication of its presence than an exact reflection of its form. Thomas Hardy, in a poem called ‘The Slow Nature’, once isolated this simple truth with great clarity and with an analytical precision denied to the dramatist, who must not make his own comments. A countrywoman, in this poem, receives the news of her husband's sudden death with seeming apathy. The only thing that appears to concern her is that the house is not yet in order and the beds not yet made. The neighbour who breaks the news is shocked at this evidence of an unfeeling heart, this preoccupation with unimportant details. But it was not an unfeeling heart that caused that first reaction; hers was a slow nature and the passage from inner experience to outward expression was a long and devious one. A fortnight later she began to droop and soon after she was dead herself. There had been no obvious evidence, in her first bewildered response, of the mortal shock that had already laid hold on her; the surface conduct utterly belied the truth that was later proved. Now, Hardy sets out explicitly this relationship between depth and surface; he isolates this particular sequence of cause and effect by making of it a brief work of art; he picks out, if not always for comment, at least for emphasis and for juxtaposition (which almost constitutes comment), the main points in his story. A dramatist can do few of these things, though he may know as well as Hardy that the story is true and that the recognition of such truth is essential to the understanding of human nature in life or in drama. But he is here at the heart of a paradox of dramatic art, compelled to reveal the unseen through the seen, which offers no dependable image of it and may even at times be in flat contradiction. He must, in a sense Polonius never intended, ‘by indirections find directions out’; and his ‘indirections’, his ‘assays of bias’, are sometimes little less than the total content of the play. So at least it is with Shakespeare in the fulness of his powers: Cordelia's behaviour, in the first scene of King Lear, offers a surface utterly at variance with her deeplying motives; her knowledge of them is by no means as full as is Shakespeare's or even as ours must attempt to be. A modern dramatist, Pirandello, attempted to meet this paradox by demonstrating schematically the surprises that await his imaginary investigators as they proceed, with an orderliness seldom permitted to the average observer, to examine level below level of truth or reality, only to find a succession of contradictions, something, at each step, different from the appearance that had covered it. Each appearance, in such plays, is at once a fact in its own right and the sign of a deeper-lying fact which it misrepresents while yet deriving from it. A long recession of such reassessments is implied, each leading to another which appears in turn to invalidate it, although Pirandello only analyses the first few terms of the series. We know that neither life nor great drama is as neat as this, but the truth to which Pirandello and Hardy point us, which they in fact so precisely isolate for our inspection, is of the first order of importance when we consider the nature of drama and its relation to the multiform evidence that it takes for its material.

The dramatist's mind, that is to say, and the drama he creates, must move not merely in a two-dimensional world, cause and effect, motive, action and reaction being enacted and observed upon a single plane, but also in a bewildering series of planes, each with its own related world of cause and result, each obscurely related with, yet different in kind and in form from, those above and beneath. In this three-dimensional world, this ocean of experience, he is guided by intuitions of depth and distance; but he is bound, by the nature of dramatic art, to reveal his perceptions in terms of the end-product of the process he has discerned, in terms of that efflorescence upon the surface which is made up of the words and deeds of his characters. Only by so disposing these that, simultaneously with their outward and recognizable surface forms, there are revealed also the varying depths from which they took their origin, can he hope to reveal also what he has divined, either of those depths or of the mysterious relationship. Moreover, again because of the nature of his art, he must, out of the great complexity even of this surface take only a few fragmentary details, mere hints and indications of the vast movements, currents and powers, of the infinite variety that lies below, having, after all, for the instrument of his expression, only the words contained in some 3000 verse lines.

This is why I have suggested that it is precisely in revealing his apprehension of these relations, surface to surface, depth to depth and each to all, that the dramatist discloses the measure at once of his spirit's capacity and of his strength as an artist. Unless he has transcendent capacity of soul, he cannot explore the ultimate depths the k...