Routledge Library Editions

THE VOYAGE TO ILLYRIA

SHAKESPEARE Routledge Library Editions — Shakespeare

CRITICAL STUDIES In 36 Volumes

I Shakespeare's Poetic Styles Baxter II The Shakespeare Inset Berry III Shakespeare Bradbrook IV Shakespeare's Dramatic Structures Brennan V Focus on Macbeth Brown VI Shakespeare's Soliloquies Clemen VII Shakespeare's Dramatic Art Clemen VIII A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard III Clemen IX The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery Clemen X Shakespeare Duthie XI Shakespeare and the Confines of Art Edwards XII Shakespeare the Dramatist Ellis-Fermor XIII Shakespeare's Drama Ellis-Fermor XIV The Language of Shakespeare's Plays Evans XV Coleridge on Shakespeare Foakes XVI Shakespeare Foakes XVII Shakespeare's Poetics Fraser XVIII Shakespeare Frye XIX The Shakespeare Claimants Gibson XX Iconoclastes Griffith XXI That Shakespeherian Rag Hawkes XXII The Living Image Henn XXIII Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne Kermode XXIV Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets Leishman XXV King Lear in Our Time Mack XXVI Shakespeare as Collaborator Muir XXVII Shakespeare's Sonnets Muir XXVIII The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays Muir XXIX The Voyage to Illyria M uir & O’Loughlin XXX Shakespeare Nicoll XXXI The Winter's Tale Pyle XXXII The Problem Plays of Shakespeare Schanzer XXXIII Swearing and Perjury in Shakespeare's Plays Shirley XXXIV The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose Vickers XXXV Literature and Drama Wells XXXVI Readings on the Character of Hamlet Williamson THE VOYAGE TO ILLYRIA

A New Study of Shakespeare

KENNETH MUIR AND SEAN O'LOUGHLIN First published in 193 7

Reprinted in 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2008

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Voyage to Ill yria ISBN 0-415-35300-9 ISBN 0-415-33086-6 (set) Miniset: Critical Studies

Series: Routledge Library Editions - Shakespeare 978-1-13656-405-5 (ebk) THE VOYAGE TO ILLYRIA A New Study of Shakespeare

KENNETH MUIR SEAN O’LOUGHLIN

The road to Xanadu could not be more phantom-thronged than the voyage to Illyria. a . l . a ttw a ter

M E T H U E N & CO. LTD. LONDON 36 Essex Street, Strand, W.C. 2 First published in 1937

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN FOR PAUL ENGLE This page intentionally left blank The authors make their grateful acknowledg­ ments to the editors o f The Dublin Magazine and o f The Times Literary Supplement for permission to reprint portions o f this book which have appeared in their columns. This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Page I. THE APPROACH I II. THE KEY 9 III. TUTELAGE, Part I 3 1 IV. TUTELAGE, Part II 81 V. JOURNEY TO THE PHOENIX 115 VI. BETRAYAL 141 VII. INFERNO 181 VIII. AFTER THE STORM 207 APPENDIX 237 This page intentionally left blank I THE APPROACH

Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare. . . . So far from Shakespeare9s being the least known, he is the one person in all modern history fully known to us. R. W. EMERSON This page intentionally left blank I

F the aim o f Shakespearean criticism be justice, the Iplays o f Shakespeare must eventually be studied by comparison with each other, no longer as separate entities. They must be related to one another, to the poems, and to the Sonnets. Each individual play acquires a deeper significance from its setting in the corpus. Too often the type o f criticism that views each play in isolation proclaims that Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, even Hamlet, are failures; that King Lear is not suitable for acting ; and that Cymbeline was fitted with a happy ending to suit the fashion set by Beaumont and Fletcher. If we are enabled to judge these plays by reference to a single criterion, our effort will not have been in vain. That criterion is to be sought in the personality o f the poet, and this will be our concern. We have no quarrel with those who refuse to occupy themselves with the poet’s personality, and we sympathize with many o f their criti­ cisms o f the opposite school, but a misapplication o f good methods does not automatically invalidate the theory on which they rest. Our starting-point has been admirably defined by Sir Edmund Chambers in his defence o f the authenticity o f the canon :

After all, we have read the plays for ourselves, and have learnt to recognize in them, through all their diversities, a continuous personality, o f which style is only one aspect. A single mind and a single hand dominate them. They are the outcome o f one man’s critical reactions to life, 3 THE VOYAGE TO ILLYRIA which make the stuff of comedy, and o f one man’s emotional reactions to life, which make the stuff of tragedy.

And we put forward this book as a reasoned attempt to convince the sceptical o f the validity o f the personal heresy. It is only too evident, from a study o f Shakespearean criticism, that the portrait o f the poet which emerges is more often a self-portrait o f the critic. We hope to have minimized that danger by our consciousness of its existence, and by the method o f collaboration. Though we are, of course, indebted to many o f our predecessors, we have also used, without slavishly accepting, the conclusions o f modern psychology. We have endeavoured by its means to range the discoveries o f Whiter, Miss Caroline Spurgeon, and Professor Wilson Knight in their just perspective, and, so far as we could, to bridge the gulf between the theories o f Frank Harris and the self-denying scholarship of Sir Edmund Chambers. Any force the book may have is cumulative, and we beg the reader, therefore, to suspend judgment until the last page has been read. It will at once be urged that such an attempt may succeed with a romantic poet, and yet fail miserably when applied to Shakespeare, who was, moreover, mainly a dramatic poet. 4 Others abide our question. Thou art free.’ But he was not so objective as Arnold (then twenty- five) would have us believe, and we must set out the various avenues o f approach to the mystery which is Shakespeare. They are five :

1. His biography. 2. His changing attitude to certain obvious concepts. 3. False notes, recurrences, and fervours. 4 THE APPROACH 4. His use of imagery. 5. His use and treatment o f his sources.

The first approach is the most important, since it is direct, and leaves little to inference. Had we the same wealth o f material that we possess for later poets, letters, personal reminiscences, and biographies written while his close friends and his relations were still alive, the whole question would have been settled long ago. In Shake­ speare’s day, however, only the socially and politically great were considered worthy o f commemoration, though Heywood planned, but apparently never wrote, his Lives of all the Poets. On the other hand, what we possess is o f great assistance, and to it we have added the evidence o f the Sonnets, which, after mature consideration, we see no reason to accept at other than their face value. Under the heading * His attitude to certain obvious concepts’, we shall find most o f our evidence. The poet concerns himself with emotional problems, and if he is to advance, he must face those problems. The record, then, o f his solved problems is the record o f his spiritual develop­ ment, and when all problems have been solved, the impulse to write normally dies out. It is as if the Life Force, having employed the instrument for its purpose, cast it away, its task done. But several o f the greatest artists have ended with a magical state, in which conflicts no longer arise. Only technical problems remain. It is then that their greatest and serenest works are produced. The romantic becomes classical, but on a plane where such labels are meaningless. This development is closely connected with certain quite natural problems o f human life, and with their 5 THE VOYAGE TO ILLYRIA solution. Death is one problem that every man must face, and the conquest o f death and time is one o f the aims o f all artists, for ‘ Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes’. The bitterness against faithless lovers arises because the faithless one, having sworn to be true for ever, thus defeating Time, finally proves Time’s omni­ potence, and the artist is himself defeated by the defeat o f love. Poetry is ‘ a forted residence ’gainst the tooth of time And razure o f oblivion \ Shakespeare, having in vain pleaded with his friend to marry, in order that his beauty should not be lost in the grave, declared that he would perpetuate it by his art. The plays may be regarded, from one important aspect, as a series o f conquests over the fear o f death, on successively higher levels, until in The Tempest he could depart in peace, having seen salvation, a salvation which emerged from his previous attempts, and could be attained to only when all his other problems had been solved. He had forgiven ; and death had no more power over him. The nature o f the subsidiary problems will be made apparent when we come to discuss the separate plays.1 The third approach we have postulated is by means o f false notes, recurrences, and fervours. We have not attempted an exhaustive treatment o f these, since a so-called ‘ false note ’ may be claimed by another critic as part o f Shakespeare’s intention o f holding the mirror up to Nature. Nevertheless, when the false notes recur, we are in a stronger position. When the poet reverts to seemingly irrelevant topics, it is justifiable to infer that, to him, the topic was not irrelevant. This method o f investigation is closely linked with a 1 See Appendix. 6 THE APPROACH study o f the poet’s imagery. Metaphor and simile are part o f Shakespeare’s mental processes. His thought moved by images, and his utterance was conditioned by the sequence that the association o f ideas provoked. He embroidered his main theme with a counterpoint o f imagery that sprang from his unconscious mind, and whatever the objectivity o f the actual words spoken, the imagery betrays the attitude o f the dramatist. Images are to the poet what inflexions o f the voice are to the speaker. The first use of the method was by Walter Whiter in a book published in 1794, entitled A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake­ speare . on a new principle of criticism derived from Mr. Locke's Doctrine of the Association of Ideas. This is in every way a remarkable piece o f work, anticipating by more than a century some o f the most interesting discoveries o f the past dozen years, though nobody, so far, has attempted to draw any biographical inferences from the material provided by such investigations. By this means, we are enabled to discover the successive problems that beset Shakespeare, and the theme o f our book is a description o f the journey that the poet visualized in his most persistent and vital imagery, and a recognition o f the pregnant saying of Keats that ‘ Shakespeare led a life of Allegory. His works are the comments on it \ Our last consideration is the treatment o f the sources from which Shakespeare derived the crude material for his plays. In a considerable number o f instances he altered very little. This may be due to one o f two causes. The material may have been exactly suited to his require­ ments, or he may have been too weary or too bored to make any alteration. In each case, we must judge the problem on its merits. When he made alterations, their form and B 7 THE VOYAGE TO ILLYRIA reason must weigh very considerably in our judgment o f the genesis o f his play. What he omits, inserts, or simply expands will often furnish a clue, and we have found such evidence o f considerable value as a confirmation o f other methods o f approach, and as a pointer to an explanation o f some o f the more enigmatic plays; for instance, Measure for Measure. We have devoted our second chapter to an examination o f the effect o f external events on Shakespeare’s mind, and the third and fourth to an analysis o f their reaction on his art. Thenceforward, we have endeavoured to show how, with his triumphant emergence as a complete master o f dramatic poetry, he ceased to write light-hearted comedy, why that change coincided with the appearance o f the great tragedies, and why, finally, he abandoned tragedy to write romance.

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