Page:On Shakespeare, or, What You Will, Furness, 1908.djvu/23

1908.] you of a change of scene. (Let me here remark that I think these rhymed couplets were possibly intimations to the orchestra to play a few bars.) Very early in the play Shakespeare will tell you where the scene is laid, the time of the year, if it be necessary, and sometimes, by inference, even the day of the week, and you will neither know the source of the plot, nor care not a doit for it, if you did. Your conception of the characters must be formed, as in real life, by their words and their deeds. And, mark this: you must have sympathy with them all;—ay, to a certain degree, even with Iago, and with Richard the Third; so only will you find the key to their character, so only can you look out upon life through their eyes, and thereby give them a corner of your cloak of charity. There are two characters with whom I must acknowledge I cannot have the smallest shred of sympathy. There are no redeeming traits in Regan and Goneril. The only appeal which I can torture into activity for them is one that speaks to the orderly heart of a housekeeper, who would certainly find it trying, at the least, to have a guest with a large retinue enter at an unexpected hour and, announce that he would not “stay a jot for dinner.” It is in soliloquies that characters are laid bare, and motives revealed, which evoke a charitable judgement. Is it without purpose that Shakespeare vouchsafes soliloquies to neither of these two demi-devils? Each utters, once or twice, some lines as an Aside, but that is all.

Have words ever fallen from human lips more wise in their charity than Madame de Staël’s Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner? In unveiling to us the innermost thoughts of his characters, as he does in soliloquies, Shakespeare enables us to understand everything, and can we then withhold a pardoning sigh? Shakespeare himself warns us to look below the surface. Prince Hal, when his heart was inwardly breaking on account of his father’s sickness, asks Poins, “What would’st thou think of me, if I should weep?” “I would think thee,” replied Poins, “a most princely hypocrite.” “It would be every man’s thought,” rejoins the Prince, “and thou art a blessed fellow to think as every man thinks; never a man’s thought in the world keeps the road-way better than thine.” Therefore, in estimating a character, avoid the uncritical, humdrum road-way.

I have said you would not care a doit for the source of the plot; I might even add that you would hardly care for scenery and cos-