Complete. From “Shakespeare Commentaries.”

WE will first speak of the series of love plays, in which Shakespeare has more or less exclusively represented the essence and nature of love. All the above-named pieces are of this kind, whilst in Shakespeare’s later dramas it is only in true comedies that love adventures form the central point, and this indeed only of the plot, and no longer as here, at the same time, the very substance of the piece; whilst in his tragedies they are only introduced so far as they represent, in the great varieties of life itself, but one side of our existence. With our own German poets, even the greatest, this side of our being occupies far too wide a space, and must detract much from the wealth of their poetry, as compared with Shakespeare’s works. They felt nothing of that natural impulse of the English poet to establish themselves in the great sphere of active life, that is history, in order to counterbalance the life of sentiment. Where they have interwoven a love affair as an episode in an historical play, the preference for the sentimental part prevailed, and the poetic brilliancy and energy centred in it. Shakespeare’s words in “Love’s Labor’s Lost” may be almost universally applied to this sentimental poetry:—

	“Never durst poet touch a pen to write,
	Until his ink were tempered with love’s sighs.”

But this was not the case with our poet. We may conclude, from the circumstances of Shakespeare’s life, that in his youth he may have been for a while that which in “Love’s Labor’s Lost” and the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” he calls the “votary to love”; and this was indeed the very period in which he created the love pieces which we shall next consider. But it was at all events only a period, a passing time, in which he was personally swayed by this passion, and poetically engaged with it; and to this poetic occupation he in no wise surrendered himself entirely, but he took care, as we have said, in the happiest instinct of a many-sided nature, to maintain the just balance in his descriptions of the powerful life of feeling, by the contemplation of the great historical world of action.

  If we lose sight of this grand double-sidedness, if we become entirely and solely absorbed in the love pieces of this period, we find even in this exclusive view of the matter that he treated his theme quite otherwise than our German poets. The ideal love heroes of our own Schiller, and the weak sensual characters of our Goethe, are from that sentimental element which is infused throughout the love poetry of a modern date, of one uniform coloring; on our stage, therefore, there is one fixed character of a lover, which the player to whom it is committed acts nearly always in the same manner. It was not thus in Shakespeare’s time, and his works are not so designed. The vast theme, the passion of love, is treated by Shakespeare in a far grander manner. He depicted it not alone in reference to itself, but in the most manifold combination with other passions, and in the most widespread relations to other human circumstances; it is to him a necessity in those first five plays which we find devoted to this theme to represent it in the greatest fullness and variety possible, in its entire existence, in all its operations, in its good and its bad qualities. He shows us, in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” how it fares with a man who abandons himself wholly to this passion, and also its effect upon the energetic character still a stranger to it. He shows, in “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” how a set of youthful companions unnaturally endeavor to crush it by ascetic vows, and how the effort avenges itself. He shows, in “All’s Well that Ends Well,” how love is despised by manly haughtiness and pride of rank, and how it overcomes this by fidelity and devotion. He shows, in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in a marvelous allegory, the errors of blind unreasonable love, which transports man into a dream-life, devoid of reflection. He shows lastly, in that great song of love, in “Romeo and Juliet,” how this most powerful of all passions seizes human beings in its most fearful power, and how, enhanced by natures favorable to its reception and by circumstances inimical to it, it is carried to an extent in which it overstrains and annihilates itself. And when the poet, having advanced to this extreme point, has measured this side of human nature, in its breadth and depth, he returns back to himself, as it were, personally unconcerned, and in his later works he does not readily again permit it such a wide and exclusive space.

  This many-sidedness of love and its manifold bearings and effects upon human nature, Shakespeare alone, of all poets and of all ages, has depicted in its full extent. If we glance at the whole epic and dramatic poetry of France, Italy, and Spain, we shall find all the relations of love treated to tediousness after the same model and idea. This mannerism was a transmission from the Middle Ages, when knightly customs and gallantry first gave a spiritual beauty to sensual desire, and an extravagant adoration of women, unknown to the Ancients, penetrated life and poetry. In this period love was regarded as a source of civilization, as a source even of power and action; and the poetic generations of succeeding times conceived it only from this its ennobling side, and this with a preference and exclusiveness which such a judge of life as Shakespeare could not share. He had, moreover, experienced its shadow side: how it is just as capable of paralyzing the powers of action, of endangering morals, and of plunging a man in destruction and crime, as of tending to purity of life, and of ennobling mind and spirit. Shakespeare had penetrated in his early youth this double nature and twofold worth of love and its effects. In “Venus and Adonis,” his first poem, the goddess after the death of her favorite utters a curse upon love, which contains in the germ, as it were, the whole development of the subject, as Shakespeare has unfolded it in the series of his dramas. It is worth while to hear the passage in its whole extent:—

	“Since thou art dead, lo! here I prophesy,
	Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:
	It shall be waited on with jealousy,
	Find sweet beginning, but unsavory end;
	Ne’er settled equally, but high or low,
	That all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe.
	“It shall be fickle, false, and full of fraud;
	Bud, and be blasted in a breathing while;
	The bottom poison, and the top o’erstrawed
	With sweets that shall the truest sight beguile:
	The strongest body shall it make most weak,
	Strike the wise dumb, and teach the fool to speak.
	“It shall be sparing and too full of riot,
	Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures;
	The staring ruffian shall keep in quiet,
	Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasure
	It shall be raging mad, and silly mild,
	Make the young old, the old become a child.
	“It shall suspect, where is no cause of fear;
	It shall not fear, where it should most distrust;
	It shall be merciful, and too severe,
	And most deceiving, when it seems most just;
	Perverse it shall be, where it shows most toward;
	Put fear to valor, courage to the coward.
	“It shall be cause of war and dire events,
	And set dissension ’twixt the son and sire;
	Subject and servile to all discontents,
	As dry combustious matter is to fire.”

    We must remember that this was written at an age, which in the first strength of feeling generally regards love only in the brightest light, and that it is placed in a poem which appeared to deify sensual desire in the usual manner of young poets; we must, I say, remember the period and the position of this passage, in order rightly to appreciate its value and importance. In the love pieces of the period, which we shall consider, these thoughts are variously repeated on more forcible occasions, and appear in choice sentences and passages; and far more than this, throughout Shakespeare’s works, they are also exhibited and embodied in characters, circumstances, and living images, with a fullness and depth such as never has been the case with any other poet. And not alone, in opposition to all usual poetry, is the curse of love portrayed in these pictures; but its richest blessing is unfolded in an equal number of counterpieces, with just as much ardor and with the same life. That in this passion the rich covetous man is “plucked down” and deceived, the poor man elevated and enriched, appears in the “Merchant of Venice.” That it makes a simpleton of the spendthrift, a ruffian of the weak, is represented in Roderigo. That it affects the wise, and that it is hardly united with reason and reflection, is brought before us in “Measure for Measure.” That it teaches fools to speak and makes the old young, in how many excellent caricatures has this been displayed by the burlesque parts of Shakespeare’s comedies! That it selects the “finest wits,” and often makes them its prey, is expressed in that graceful, oft-repeated image, that “in the sweetest bud the eating canker dwells”; and again in other pictures, as in the “Tempest,” the most charming innocence is seized by this spirit, without being even slightly injured in its stainless purity. That it is “fickle, false, and full of fraud,” that it forswears itself, that the strongest of love’s “oaths are straw to the fire of the blood,” is exhibited in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona”; at the same time, however, we are shown that true love, full of inner beauty, shames the fickleness of the unfaithful by deeds of sacrifice. The basest and most exalted phases of this fierce passion are to be found in “Troilus and Cressida,” in the highly ironical picture of the Trojan contest, in the parody of the immortal song on that love which was the cause of so long a war and of such frightful deeds. Then again, in contrast to this excited drama, we have a thoroughly spiritual picture; how love quickens the senses and the spirits, how it is the creator and the created of fancy, and the perpetual subject and the source of poetry; in what charming touches and symbols is this interwoven with the magic pictures of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”! How love surprises the man in idleness, when the character is relaxed in inactivity, how it fills his whole being and alters his very nature, is represented in Romeo, in Proteus, and in Antony; in Othello, however, the heroic nature does not permit love to enchain him by idle pleasures, and “with wanton dullness” to foil “his speculative and active instruments.” That jealousy is the attendant of love, exciting suspicion where there is no cause for it, and fearing nothing where there is ground for mistrust, is the subject of this same tragedy of “Othello,” and of the “Winter’s Tale”; that, on the other hand, this “green-eyed monster” may be overcome by a harmonious nature and confiding trust, is developed in strong contrast in the story of Posthumus and Imogen. That love is shared by high and low, that it may begin with bitterness and end with sweetness, is well depicted in “All’s Well that Ends Well”; but the main theme of the curse of the goddess of Love, that “all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe,” that it “finds sweet beginning, but unsavory end,” that it has “the bottom poison, and the top o’erstrawed with sweets,” that it “buds, and is blasted in a breathing while,” that violent in kind it leads to desperate resolutions, and spends itself like a lightning flash,—this is immortally sketched in the poem of “Romeo and Juliet.” The whole theme, which other poems and poets have broken into such manifold parts, is here comprised in one exuberant production. That love in all its power is in constant fatal struggle with class prejudice and propriety has been the central point at all times of all tragic portrayals of love, in life and poetry. “Love’s not love, when ’tis mingled with respects”: this is the mark by which nature and the poets denote the passion in its greatest power; in this its strength the conflict of nature against custom, of all-powerful boundless feeling against the necessary restraints of social life, is unavoidable; and in this collision the tragical nature of this passion is grounded,—a passion which no poet has ever depicted as Shakespeare has done in “Romeo and Juliet,” with such surpassing repose and yet lively emotion, with such excitement and yet moral ingenuousness, and with such fervor of personal experience and yet mental impartiality. “It is the only play,” the cold Lessing declared, “which love itself, as it were, helped to write.”