Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  In this process of retrieval and recapitulation, Shakespeare effortlessly and inevitably refined many English archetypes. More than any other dramatist, he is the poet of dreams and visions. In the island of ghosts and spirits, according to the ancient topographers, he summons up Ariel and Titania, Oberon and the witches of Macbeth; ghosts wander through his tragedies and histories and his last plays are surrounded by visionary enchantments. His characters, in extremity, see humankind as an hallucination or phantasm where “Life’s but a walking Shadow”; it is the melancholy vision of the land lost in mist, populated by what Addison described as Shakespeare’s “Ghosts, Faeries, Witches and the like imaginary Persons” and addressed to an English race which is “naturally Fanciful” and “disposed to Gloominess and Melancholy of Temper.” Many of his plays are crowned with melancholy endings, followed of course by the jig of the actors. The most powerful passages of Shakespearian verse flow with the music of loss or transience:

  These our actors, (As I foretold you) were all Spirits, and Are melted into Ayre, into thin Ayre . . .

  The qualities of the English imagination are everywhere apparent in Shakespearian drama, but in so rare and refined a form that they often pass unrecognised or appear under the general rubric of “Shakespearian” effects. It says much about the antiquarian persuasion of the English genius, for example, that all of the plays set in England itself are also set in the past. The early sequence of the history plays represents the first serious and prolonged attempt to introduce the English chronicles to the stage; in a nation (or city) obsessed with its past, they proved instantly popular. Shakespeare had divined the native mood, and expressed a genuine native spirit, in dramas which reflect the bloodthirstiness and disparagement of death commonly associated with the English. They are in part designed to legitimise the dynasty of the Tudors, and thus to bring a political interpretation to bear upon English history, but they are also filled with an egalitarian spirit in the exploits of Pistol and Mistress Quickly. Shakespeare is aware of the lurking and ominous “mob,” a threatening force in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, but as a naturalised Londoner he could not help but be awed by the power of popular feeling. When the opening line of Henry V’s speech, “Once more unto the breach, deare friends, once more,” is echoed or parodied by Bardolfe’s “On, on, on, on, on, to the breach, to the breach” we know that the “low” characters may use a “low” language but that they can still plainly be heard.

  The antiquarian disposition itself is not of course unique to Shakespeare, although it has readily been associated with his name. Almost all of Charles Dickens’s and George Eliot’s novels, for example, are set in the past—generally some thirty or forty years before the time of their composition—and in the twenty-first century there has been a vast resurgence of interest in historical fiction. It is a constant tendency of the English imagination. In the case of Dickens his preoccupation with his own past is the source or root of his genuine interest in the historical past. Might the same be surmised of Shakespeare?

  When Shakespeare reached towards the more remote past, too, he re-created the English myths of Lear and Cymbeline which had previously lingered in the pages of old romances. But there are formal, as well as thematic, associations. In the simplicity of King Lear, in its pure and unattenuated beat of doom, it is possible to glimpse the outlines of the medieval morality plays in which the individual man upon the earth, or Everyman, submits himself to the divine will.

  The exemplary force of saints’ lives, particularly those female saints who played so large a role in Anglo-Saxon spirituality, lies behind the sufferings of Isabella in Measure for Measure, of Marina in Pericles, of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. The history plays are themselves a secular re-enactment of the mystery plays which, with their ritual and pageantry, satisfied the public appetite for spectacle. Shakespeare’s debt to medieval drama is various and profound. His clowns are latter-day lords of misrule, and Richard III a reincarnated Vice in another costume. How else may we interpret or explain the effective if crude sensationalism of the plays, early and late, except as the affirmation of a native form or spirit? The severed heads of the history plays—enter “the Queene with Suffolkes head” in the second part of Henry VI—converse with the severed head of Cloten in Cymbeline, while Tamora feasts upon the flesh of her children in Titus Andronicus . It has often been remarked that there is a vast disparity between the melodrama of Shakespeare’s plots and the miracle of his language. The two elements can be reconciled only in the desire of an English audience for ornate effectiveness. The equivalence of plangent lyricism and strident stage action may be repugnant to the scholar or sensitive critic, but not to anyone who understands the native appetite for variety and display. The Shakespearian tradition is part of a more general consciousness.

  That is why the sea flows everywhere in his drama. It is the key image uniting the language of Shakespeare’s first play, the “wilde Ocean” in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, to the wilder mysteries of The Tempest. There are six references to the sea in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but some thirty-two in The Tempest where the sea has an actual and mythical presence throughout the drama. The cold unruly sea of the Anglo-Saxon imagination is so pervasive in the plays of Shakespeare that it seems to break and dissolve into overwhelming mist and storm. Every play, including The Merry Wives of Windsor and the pastoral comedies, includes a reference to the sea; it is employed literally and metaphorically, with the “wild sea of my conscience” and “an Ocean of salt tears” flowing within the “sea in a stiff tempest” and the “sea, mounting to the welkin’s cheek.” Many of Shakespeare’s characters compare themselves with the sea, troubled by sighs and tears. The ocean itself is wide and wild, and within its depths many may suffer “a sea-change.” There are tempests and howling winds upon the face of the deep; there are rocks and sands and tides to mock the purposes of men. We “float upon a wilde and violent Sea”; with these words the Scottish thane Ross in Macbeth is united with the “Seafarer” of the Old English poem. Shakespeare himself may never have seen the sea, but his language is permeated by its presence.

  There is another aspect of Shakespeare’s art which has always been considered characteristic both of him and of the native tradition from which he springs. It lies in his mingling “high” and “low,” king and fool, prince and gravedigger, commander and soldier, scholar and buffoon. He ignores the “unities” as described by Aristotle and other classical sources, in favour of a “mixed” or “mungrell” mode inherited directly from the medieval drama. Samuel Johnson expressed it well in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare: “Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination.” His plays are as various as consciousness itself, fluently moving from farce to pathos, comedy to tragedy, while all the time shifting form from theatrical pageant to intense soliloquy. No mood is maintained for very long; all is variety and process with a fluidity and mobility which, as Johnson suggests, resemble life itself. The apparent death of Juliet is succeeded by a conversation between three mirthful musicians eager for their dinner and unwilling to play “some merie dump.” A conversation between Henry IV and the Earl of Warwick, on high matters of state, is quickly followed by the entrance of Justice Shallow and by a long farcical scene:

  KING: I will take your counsaile, And were these inward warres once out of hand, We would (deare Lords) vnto the holy land.

  SHALLOW: Come on, come on, give me your hand sir, giue me your hand sir.

  Here the contrast between verse and prose is an apt token of the larger contrasts within the play itself; the pressure of Shakespeare’s imagination can be measured in the repetition of “hand” in both passages, as if the elementary prose sprang naturally and inevitably from high poetry. This is one of the characteristics of Shak
espeare’s art—that high and tragic matters evoke low and farcical conclusions, almost as a principle of life itself. The same sudden transition occurs in the same play, the second part of Henry IV, where the consonance of sound between “die” and “pie” fashions a memorable moment:

  KING: But beare me to that chamber, there ile lie, In that Ierusalem shall Harry die.

  SHALLOW: By cock and pie, you shal not away to night, what Dauy I say?

  Poetry must give way to prose, and kings to clowns. Language itself may bear the burden of these changes:

  IUSTICE: There is not a white haire in your face, but should haue his effect of grauity.

  FALSTAFF: His effect of grauy, grauie, grauie.

  In Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary gravity is followed by gravy, also, with the same quotation from the second part of Henry IV (mistakenly marked by Johnson as from the first part). But if language performs its own tricks, of all writers Shakespeare heard them most clearly. The heterogeneity of the native tongue, compounded of so many sources and influences, seems in itself to create his heterogeneous sensibility. We cannot disinter language from consciousness, or speech from behaviour; all are of a piece. It is the imagination itself. Yet sometimes we seem to reach the limit of language:

  HAMLET: You cannot Sir take from mee any thing that I will more willingly part withall: except my life, my life, my life.

  Shakespeare often uses these triple repetitions to suggest distraction or emptiness; it is a way of continuing the sound without any formal sense, and finds its apotheosis when Hamlet does indeed part with his life:

  HAMLET: . . . the rest is silence. O, o, o, o

  It anticipates Lear’s own death scene:

  Neuer, neuer, neuer, pray you vndo This button, thanke you sir, O, o, o, o

  where language itself has a dying fall.

  There are two scenes, in Hamlet and King Lear respectively, which have by common consent become representative of Shakespeare’s hybrid art. One concerns the dialogue between Hamlet and the “two Clownes” who are also sextons. One clown sings as he throws up the skulls from an open grave meant for Ophelia, and this joyfulness in the face of death becomes the occasion for Hamlet’s aspersions upon human destiny. “Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till a find it stopping a bunghole?” In an earlier passage he had complained “that the toe of the pesant comes so neere the heele of the Courtier he galls his kybe”—he chafes his heel. This is of course precisely the effect of Shakespeare’s own dramaturgy where a scene at court is swiftly succeeded by a scene among fools. Shakespeare set the context for the appreciation of his own work, where what is most artificial can be deemed natural and true.

  The second example of this hybrid art concerns Lear and his Fool in the storm, where Shakespeare combines the foolishness of the once great king with the mad wisdom of his jester. Their actions and language have been blamed for their excess; Tolstoy in particular accused Shakespeare of grandiloquence and bombast. In his essay upon King Lear Tolstoy concluded that the play had no real meaning—or, rather, that it was devoid of religious consciousness or spiritual consolation. Tolstoy also accused Shakespeare of inelegant arbitrariness; he saw no order in the storm scene, for example. But there can be little doubt that Shakespeare would have delighted in the accusation. In the same essay Tolstoy concluded that the condition of great art was “Sincerity, i.e. that the author should himself keenly feel what he expresses. ” Yet Shakespeare “feels” only through the medium of contrast, just as he holds no settled opinion except within the play of oppositions. Lear cannot be imagined without the Fool any more than the Fool can be conceived without the presence of Lear. Just as their language is made out of opposition, so they are significant only in terms of their differences. In the dramatic re-enactment of character, “sincerity” is not an issue. To be merely sincere is to be incomplete. For a narrative to be animated by one passion or single theory, for a play to aspire to one form, for a novel to seek integrity and unity of design—all are in pursuit of a false principle.

  We are entering here a highly charged and rarefied area of the English imagination, which can only be fully understood by example. If we turn to Matthew Arnold for guidance, we will find conclusions which were generally accepted throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: “No people,” he wrote, “are so shy, so self-conscious, so embarrassed as the English, because two natures are mixed in them, and natures which pull them in such different ways.” He is alluding to the mingling of the Celtic and Germanic inheritance, to which he adds the observation that the English have “no fixed, fatal, spiritual centre of gravity.” We may recall here Tolstoy’s remark that Shakespeare lacked a religious sensibility; the dramatist did indeed play “grauity” against “grauy.” In the nineteenth century it seemed that “we have Germanism enough to make us Philistines, and Normanism enough to make us imperious, and Celtism enough to make us self-conscious and awkward; but German fidelity to Nature, and Latin precision and clear reason, and Celtic quick-wittedness and spirituality, we fall short of.” Arnold’s vocabulary may not be as persuasive in the twenty-first century as it seemed to his contemporaries, but he cannot be faulted for his generalisations upon “this mixed constitution of our nature.” The mixture grows every day, much to the delight of those who understand the inclusive nature of Englishness itself. Its name, once more, is Shakespeare.

  CHAPTER 29

  And Now for Streaky Bacon

  The mixed and mongrel style of the English imagination emerges in the most disparate contexts. The alliterative line of the Anglo-Saxons encouraged “paradox or antithesis.”1 Beowulf combines heroic adventure and horror, pathos and fantasy. Chaucer can change tone from farce to tragedy in an instant. Spenser delights in his alterations of mood. Marlowe specialises in comedy and horror mixed. The fact that precisely the same descriptions have been applied both to Shakespeare and to Dickens suggests, at the very least, a certain continuity of expression.

  The absence of studied or central feeling can be glimpsed in fourteenth-century English music, also, with its unique “interactions between the popular and the learned.”2 The upper part of one motet is an anthem to the Virgin Mary while the tenor accompaniment is a demotic and secular song entitled “Dou way, Robin”; both are to be sung at the same time. In Worcester Cathedral the arcades of the choir are composed “in a deliberately clashing rhythm, a technique borrowed from Lincoln.” 3 The poetry of Wyatt and Skelton is filled with “deliberately clashing” imagery also. In one love poem or “balet” Skelton proceeds with the conventional aureate diction:

  Of al your feturs fauorable to make tru discripcion

  only to descend quickly into lewd abuse:

  Jaist ye, Jenet of Spayne, for your tayll wagges

  Wyatt performs the same act of sudden transition:

  For fancy ruleth though right say nay, Even as the good man kissed his cow . . .

  If the English language contains the elements of many other languages, Saxon and Latin among them, then paradox and incongruity will be of its very nature. It may encourage irony or scepticism, and when Samuel Johnson observed that in “metaphysical” poetry, “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked violently together” he was remarking upon a native tendency. But it does not have to be a violent practice; in the archaic and artificial diction of The Faerie Queene all possible languages are accommodated within the music of Spenser’s verse, in a poem which in the words of Shakespeare ’s Polonius is “pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral” all at once.

  The English delight in the hybrid emerges forcefully in English drama. The nature of the earliest plays, where buffoonery and death were paraded side by side, is the context for a thousand years of what Sir Philip Sidney called “mungrell” drama which “be neither right Tragedies, nor right Comedies, mingling Kings and Clownes.” In the great “cycles” of York or Chester, a multitude of verse forms encompass a variety of styles and themes. C
hrist is surrounded by figures of fun, and the crudity of farce can sometimes be touched by intimations of eternity. So the “mungrell” style can in a way achieve transcendence—of all the mystery cycles in Europe, only the English aspired to a complete statement of human destiny from Creation to Doom. The “mixed” or “mingled” style, abused and rejected by the more learned courtiers and scholars, might nevertheless afford the direct experience of extremes. Here are all the constituents of divine comedy. The rapid movement from farce to the sublime in the York plays was accompanied in 1426, according to one censorious preacher, by “feastings, drunkenness, shouts, songs, and other insolences.”

  Moralists also inveighed against sixteenth-century drama, often on the assumption that “high” and “low” elements were being promiscuously mingled. The drama offended decorum on every level. The “unities” of time and place are not observed in the Elizabethan theatre, where the imperative is still that of the mystery plays; a vast inclusiveness is required, registering complexity and variety in each part of the design. There were “medlies” which were “part pageant, part morality play, part clowning and political cabaret.”4 The contemporary play-wright, however, did not necessarily apologise for his various genius: “If we pretend a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused, because the whole world is become an hodge-podge.” Lyly can in “hodge-podge” fashion parody himself. One soliloquy in his play Endymion is couched in a “high” style—“Behold my sad tears, my deep sighs, my hollow eyes, my broken sleeps, my heavy countenance”—only to be deflated by a young page who ridicules “moonshine on the water.” All the pastoral romances of the Elizabethan stage have this double perspective, so that in characteristic English fashion love is mocked as well as celebrated. Heywood asked himself “why among sad & grave Histories, I have here & there inserted fabulous jeasts & tales, savouring of Lightnesse?” And he answered, simply, that “I have therein imitated our Historical & comical Poets, that write to the Stage.”