void. But even in early manhood he never sought to deceive himself. His
Richard II. had sounded the shallow vanity of man's desires, the
futility of man's hopes; he knew that man
"With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing."
And this sad knowledge darkened all Shakespeare's later thinking.
Naturally, when youth passed from him and disillusionment put an end to
dreaming, his melancholy deepened, his sadness became despairing; we can
see the shadows thickening round him into night. Brutus takes an
"everlasting farewell" of his friend, and goes willingly to his rest.
Hamlet dreads "the undiscovered country"; but unsentient death is to him
"a consummation devoutly to be wished." Vincentio's mood is
half-contemptuous, but the melancholy persists; death is no "more than
sleep," he says, and life a series of deceptions; while Claudio in this
same play shudders away from death as from annihilation, or worse, in
words which one cannot help regarding as Shakespeare's:
"Claud. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot...."
A little later and Macbeth's soul cries to us from the outer darkness:
"there's nothing serious in mortality"; life's
"a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
And from this despairing gloom come Lear's shrieks of pain and pitiful
ravings, and in the heavy intervals the gibberings of the fool. Even
when the calmer mood of age came upon Shakespeare and took away the
bitterness, he never recanted; Posthumus speaks of life and death in
almost the words used by Vincentio, and Prospero has nothing to add save
that "our little life is rounded with a sleep."
It is noteworthy that Shakespeare always gives these philosophic
questionings to those characters whom I regard as his impersonations,[1]
and when he breaks this rule, he breaks it in favour of some Claudio who
is not a character at all, but the mere mouthpiece of one of his moods.
[Footnote 1: One of my correspondents, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, has
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