BOOKS OF THE DAY
Two Shakespeares
Shakespeare. By Ivor Brown. (Collins. 12s. 6d.) SHAKESPEARE'S devotees, Mr. Brown tells us, "have naturally seen their paragon as they want him ; that is, in the likeness of them- selves." The Brown Shakespeare is no exception. He has a love of words, like the author of A Word in Your Ear, a passion for the theatre, like a certain well-known dramatic critic, a dislike of pedagogues, and a proleptic hatred of bureaucrats. He is, politically, a middle-of-the-road man, a born reader of the Observer—in fact a man who would hail Mr. Brown as a brother. But the comparison must not be pushed too far, because Mr. Brown believes that "one must be, at least to some extent, a fellow-traveller of the scamps and the sensualists to be a complete Shakespearean."
In drawing his portrait Mr. Brown avoids the two extremes—the Lee Shakespeare, that solid, industrious, respectable disciple of Smiles, writing sonnets for hard cash, and the Frank Harris Shake- speare, the sex-ridden, neurotic insomniac. The Brown Shakespeare, after carrying on with two girls at the same time, is forced into a hasty marriage. He is anxious to repair the family fortunes, and is therefore compelled to give the public what it wants, within limits ; but the sonnets express a genuine friendship for Southampton and a tortured love for an anonymous and promiscuous brunette. The link between the two halves of his personality is the theatre, and here Mr. Brown speaks with authority. Shakespeare, for him, is not the great poet who condescended to write for the theatre, and who was prevented from becoming a great artist by the barbarous taste of the age, but rather an actor- producer-playwright-sharer who drew inspiration from the conditions of the theatre, even if his plays had to be cut and adapted for particular occasions. Mr. Brown argues persuasively that there were three factors governing the development of Shakespeare's work.
"He wrote for himself, as a professional theatre-worker with an eye to a competence: he wrota: for a 'cry of players' with whom he was associated, in friendship and finance, from first to last: and he wrote as a man of feeling, intensely susceptible to beauty, to passion and to Nature, easily and overwhelmingly horrified by the bestiality of man, and yet easily restored to calm and happiness by 'a fancy from a flower-bell '."
• Admittedly this theatrical Shakespeare, presented in a vigorous and attractive way by Mr. Brown, is nearer to the real Shakespeare than those images created by people who seldom enter a playhouse. But here and there one gets the uneasy feeling that Mr. Brown is thinking of Shakespeare as a sort of Elizabethan Noel Coward, possessing an added power of producing great poetry—" the hand of glory," as Mr. Brown calls it—but turning out a Bitter Sweet or a Cavalcade when the public were tired of The Vortex or Post Mortem.
It is difficult to believe that Shakespeare was always following, rather than setting, the fashion, and that he turned from tragedy to•
romance because of the popularity of such plays as Philaster. Mr. Brown, indeed, wants to have it both ways ; for at times he seems to subscribe to the romantic view that Romeo and luliet failed as a tragedy because Shakespeare was feeling too cheerful, and that the great tragedies succeeded because he was now adequately gloomy. Yet Hamlet may have been written at the same time as Twelfth Night ; and, as the most successful poetic dramatist of our time has said, the greater the poet the wider is the gulf between the heart that suffers and the mind that creates. Shakespeare suffered, of course ; but King Lear may well have been the expression of emotion recol- lected in tranquillity.
The dangers of seeking too close a link betwen the life and the works can be seen from the way Mr. Brown assumes that Cleopatra was a portrait of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Perhaps she was ; and perhaps, as Mr. Brown believes, the Dark Lady was by that time dead. But Shakespeare's Cleopatra is manifestly derived mainly from Plutarch and one passage in the play about angling, which to Mr. Brown "has the strong stamp of personal reminiscence" is based on a passage in North's translation, including even the reference to the diver who put "some old salt-fish" upon Antony's hook. An- other example of the dangers involved is afforded by Mr. Brown's approving quotation of Caroline Spurgeon, who believed that Shakespeare "was fair and flushed easily," merely because he often described the blushing of his characters.
Mr. Brown is rash to deduce from what was probably a scribal error that Shakespeare procured a licence to marry Anne Whateley only a day before a special licence was obtained for him to marry Anne Hathaway. As a Banjo' man; Mr. Brown should not have spoken of Shakespeare's son-in-law as a Cambridge man. On some matters Mr. Brown is old-fashioned. He sticks to the old date of Doctor Faustus. He uses the word " nasty " in connection with Venus and Adonis ; his opinion of Love's Labour's Lost is so low that he cheerfully allows that Shakespeare may only have revised a draft by some noble lord ; and he finds disgust, rather than charity, in Measure for Measure. Claudio's fear of death, he believes, "strikes to the icy core of pessimism" ; but in the character it exhibits surely a healthy love of life.
In spite, however, of the criticisms that may be made of Mr. Brown's book, and in spite of defects which are inseparable from this kind of imaginative reconstruction, he does succeed in making his hero a plausible human being, and his book is readable, racy and full of gusto. Mr. Brown is not above a pun, or a glance at present- day rationing. He radiates prejudices' which do not offend because he knows them for what they are. The book will be deservedly popular with the general reader, and the specialist will enjoy quarrel- ling with the author.
, Mr. Hesketh Pearson's Life appeared originally as a Penguin seven years ago. The new library edition is handsomely produced, and it contains an appendix giving a thirty-eight page anthology of Mr. Pearson's favourite lines. The lively biography, more or less unchanged, is a reasonable blend of fact and conjecture. Mr. Pearson's poet is bitterer than Mr. Brown's ; he is very much "weather-beaten in the Sea of this World" (to use Greville's phrase) and in his retirement excessively touchy. Mr. Pearson, formerly an actor, shares Mr. Brown's contempt for dons ; and they both under- value the plays of the last period. It is a pity that Mr. Pearson did not take the opportunity of revising his book, as some of his state- ments are difficult to justify. He declares that Shakespeare's "knowledge of the Bible was mostly confined to the first book of the Old Testament and to the first book of the New Testament, and even to the first four chapters of Genesis and the first seven of St.. Matthew. Further, that his familiarity with the fifteen books of Ovid's Metamorphoses did not extend beyond the first and second, and that he knew the first better than the second."
This sounds very circumstantial, but it is totally untrue. Shake- speare exhibits knowledge of almost every book in the Old and New Testaments ; he was acquainted with both the Bishops' and the Geneva versions, and he used the latter version increasingly in his later plays. He had certainly read the last book of the Metamor- phoses, as he echoes it in the Sonnets and in Hamlet. Mr. Pearson declares that both the Biblical and the Ovidian references appear less frequently in the later plays ; but it so happens that Shakespeare's longest borrowing from Ovid comes in one of his last plays, and it is one of the few borrowings that certainly exhibit a knowledge of the original as well as of Golding's translation. Shakespeare was an artist and not a scholar • but Mr. Pearson so hates pedagogues that he will not allow Shakespeare the knowledge he did actually
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