by Oscar Wilde
were no longer isolated from the great aesthetic energies of Shakespeare’s life, but were an essential part of his dramatic activity, and revealed to us something of the secret of his method. To have discovered the true name of Mr. W. H. was comparatively nothing: others might have done that, had perhaps done it: but to have discovered his profession was a revolution in criticism.
ON THE ACTOR AS THE DRAMATIST’S DELIBERATE AND SELF-CONSCIOUS FELLOW WORKER6
Nash with his venomous tongue had railed against Shakespeare for “reposing eternity in the mouth of a player,”7 the reference being obviously to the Sonnets.
But to Shakespeare, the actor was a deliberate and self-conscious fellow worker who gave form and substance to a poet’s fancy, and brought into Drama the elements of a noble realism. His silence could be as eloquent as words, and his gesture as expressive, and in those terrible moments of Titan agony or of god-like pain, when thought outstrips utterance, when the soul sick with excess of anguish stammers or is dumb, and the very raiment of speech is rent and torn by passion in its storm, then the actor could become, though it were but for a moment, a creative artist, and touch by his mere presence and personality those springs of terror and of pity to which tragedy appeals. This full recognition of the actor’s art, and of the actor’s power, was one of the things that distinguished the Romantic from the Classical Drama, and one of the things, consequently, that we owed to Shakespeare, who, fortunate in much, was fortunate also in this, that he was able to find Richard Burbage8 and to fashion Willie Hughes.
With what pleasure he dwelt upon Willie Hughes’ influence over his audience—the “gazers” as he calls them; with what charm of fancy did he analyse the whole art! Even in the “Lover’s Complaint” he speaks of his acting, and tells us that he was of a nature so impressionable to the quality of dramatic situations that he could assume all “strange forms”
Of burning blushes, or of weeping water,
Or swooning paleness:9
explaining his meaning more fully later on where he tells us how Willie Hughes was able to deceive others by his wonderful power to
Blush at speeches rank, to weep at woes,
Or to turn white and swoon at tragic shows.10
It had never been pointed out before that the shepherd of this lovely pastoral, whose “youth in art and art in youth” are described with such subtlety of phrase and passion, was none other than the Mr. W. H. of the Sonnets. And yet there was no doubt that he was so. Not merely in personal appearance are the two lads the same, but their natures and temperaments are identical. When the false shepherd whispers to the fickle maid
All my offences that abroad you see
Are errors of the blood, none of the mind;
Love made them not:11
when he says of his lovers,
Harm have I done to them, but ne’er was harmed;
Kept hearts in liveries, but mine own was free.
And reigned, commanding in his monarchy:12
when he tells us of the “deep-brained sonnets” that one of them had sent him, and cries out in boyish pride
The broken bosoms that to me belong
Have emptied all their fountains in my well:13
it is impossible not to feel that it is Willie Hughes who is speaking to us. “Deep-brained sonnets,” indeed, had Shakespeare brought him, “jewels” that to his careless eyes were but as “trifles,” though
each several stone,
With wit well blazoned, smiled or made some moan;14
and into the well of beauty he had emptied the sweet fountain of his song. That in both places it was an actor who was alluded to, was also clear. The betrayed nymph tells us of the “false fire” in her lover’s cheek, of the “forced thunder” of his sighs, and of his “borrowed motion:” of whom, indeed, but of an actor could it be said that to him “thought, characters, and words” were “merely Art,” or that
To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep,
He had the dialect and different skill,
Catching all passions in his craft of will?15
The play on words in the last line is the same as that used in the punning sonnets, and is continued in the following stanza of the poem, where we are told of the youth who
did in the general bosom reign
Of young, of old; and sexes both enchanted16
that there were those who
… dialogued for him what he would say,
Asked their own wills, and made their Wills obey.17
Yes: the “rose-cheeked Adonis” of the Venus poem, the false shepherd of the “Lover’s Complaint,” the “tender churl,” the “beauteous niggard” of the Sonnets, was none other but a young actor;18 and as I read through the various descriptions given of him, I saw that the love that Shakespeare bore him was as the love of a musician for some delicate instrument on which he delights to play, as a sculptor’s love for some rare and exquisite material that suggests a new form of plastic beauty, a new mode of plastic expression. For all Art has its medium, its material, be it that of rhythmical words, or of pleasurable colour, or of sweet and subtly-divided sound; and, as one of the most fascinating critics of our day has pointed out, it is to the qualities inherent in each material, and special to it, that we owe the sensuous element in Art, and with it all that in Art is essentially artistic.19 What then shall we say of the material that the Drama requires for its perfect presentation? What of the Actor, who is the medium through which alone the Drama can truly reveal itself ? Surely, in that strange mimicry of life by the living which is the mode and method of Theatric art, there are sensuous elements of beauty that none of the other arts possess. Looked at from one point of view, the common players of the saffron-strewn stage are Art’s most complete, most satisfying instruments. There is no passion in bronze, nor motion in marble. The sculptor must surrender colour, and the painter fullness of form. The epos changes acts into words, and music changes words into tones. It is the Drama only that, to quote the fine saying of Gervinus, uses all means at once, and, appealing both to eye and ear, has at its disposal, and in its service, form and colour, tone, look, and word, the swiftness of motion, the intense realism of visible action.
It may be that in this very completeness of the instrument lies the secret of some weakness in the art. Those arts are happiest that employ a material remote from reality, and there is a danger in the absolute identity of medium and matter, the danger of ignoble realism and unimaginative imitation. Yet Shakespeare himself was a player, and wrote for players. He saw the possibilities that lay hidden in an art that up to his time had expressed itself but in bombast or in clowning. He has left us the most perfect rules for acting that have ever been written. He created parts that can be only truly revealed to us on the stage, wrote plays that need the theatre for their full realisation, and we cannot marvel that he so worshipped one who was the interpreter of his vision, as he was the incarnation of his dreams.
ON THE INFLUENCE OF NEOPLATONISM ON THE RENAISSANCE, AND ITS IMPORTANCE TO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF RENAISSANCE LOVE POETRY20
There was, however, more in this friendship than the mere delight of a dramatist in one who helps him to achieve his end. This was indeed a subtle element of pleasure, if not of passion, and a noble basis for an artistic comradeship. But it was not all that the Sonnets revealed to us. There was something beyond. There was the soul, as well as the language, of neo-Platonism.21
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” said the stern Hebrew prophet:22 “The beginning of wisdom is Love,” was the gracious message of the Greek.23 And the spirit of the Renaissance, which already touched Hellenism at so many points,24 catching the inner meaning of this phrase and divining its secret, sought to elevate friendship to the high dignity of the antique ideal, to make it a vital factor in the new cult
ure, and a mode of self-conscious intellectual development. In 1492 appeared Marsilio Ficino’s translation of the Symposium of Plato,25 and this wonderful dialogue, of all the Platonic dialogues perhaps the most perfect, as it is the most poetical, began to exercise a strange influence over men, and to colour their words and thoughts, and manner of living. In its subtle suggestions of sex in soul, in the curious analogies it draws between intellectual enthusiasm and the physical passion of love, in its dream of the incarnation of the Idea in a beautiful and living form, and of a real spiritual conception with a travail and a bringing to birth, there was something that fascinated the poets and scholars of the sixteenth century. Shakespeare, certainly, was fascinated by it, and had read the dialogue, if not in Ficino’s translation, of which many copies found their way to England, perhaps in that French translation by Leroy to which Joachim du Bellay contributed so many graceful metrical versions.26 When he says to Willie Hughes,
he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date,27
he is thinking of Diotima’s theory that Beauty is the goddess who presides over birth,28 and draws into the light of day the dim conceptions of the soul: when he tells us of the “marriage of true minds,” and exhorts his friend to beget children that time cannot destroy, he is but repeating the words in which the prophetess tells us that “friends are married by a far nearer tie than those who beget mortal children, for fairer and more immortal are the children who are their common offspring.”29 So, also, Edward Blount in his dedication of “Hero and Leander” talks of Marlowe’s works as his “right children,” being the “issue of his brain;” and when Bacon claims that “the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried and childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public,” he is paraphrasing a passage in the Symposium.30
Friendship, indeed, could have desired no better warrant for its permanence or its ardours than the Platonic theory, or creed, as we might better call it, that the true world was the world of ideas, and that these ideas took visible form and became incarnate in man, and it is only when we realise the influence of neo-Platonism on the Renaissance that we can understand the true meaning of the amatory phrases and words with which friends were wont, at this time, to address each other. There was a kind of mystic transference of the expressions of the physical sphere to a sphere that was spiritual, that was removed from gross bodily appetite, and in which the soul was Lord. Love had, indeed, entered the olive garden of the new Academe, but he wore the same flame-coloured raiment, and had the same words of passion on his lips.
Michael Angelo, the “haughtiest spirit in Italy” as he has been called,31 addresses the young Tommaso Cavalieri in such fervent and passionate terms that some have thought that the sonnets in question must have been intended for that noble lady, the widow of the Marchese di Pescara, whose white hand, when she was dying, the great sculptor’s lips had stooped to kiss. But that it was to Cavalieri that they were written, and that the literal interpretation is the right one, is evident not merely from the fact that Michael Angelo plays with his name, as Shakespeare plays with the name of Willie Hughes, but from the direct evidence of Varchi, who was well acquainted with the young man, and who, indeed, tells us that he possessed “besides incomparable personal beauty, so much charm of nature, such excellent abilities, and such a graceful manner, that he deserved, and still deserves, to be the better loved the more he is known.”32 Strange as these sonnets may seem to us now, when rightly interpreted they merely serve to show with what intense and religious fervour Michael Angelo addressed himself to the worship of intellectual beauty, and how, to borrow a fine phrase from Mr. Symonds, he pierced through the veil of flesh and sought the divine idea it imprisoned.33 In the sonnet written for Luigi del Riccio on the death of his friend, Cecchino Bracci, we can also trace, as Mr. Symonds points out, the Platonic conception of love as nothing if not spiritual, and of beauty as a form that finds its immortality within the lover’s soul. Cecchino was a lad who died at the age of seventeen, and when Luigi asked Michael Angelo to make a portrait of him, Michael Angelo answered, “I can only do so by drawing you in whom he still lives.”
If the beloved in the lover shine,
Since Art without him cannot work alone,
Thee must I carve, to tell the world of him.34
The same idea is also put forward in Montaigne’s noble essay on Friendship, a passion which he ranks higher than the love of brother for brother, or the love of man for woman. He tells us—I quote from Florio’s translation, one of the books with which Shakespeare was familiar—how “perfect amitie” is indivisible, how it “possesseth the soule, and swaies it in all soveraigntie,”and how “by the interposition of a spiritual beauty the desire of a spiritual conception is engendered in the beloved.”35 He writes of an “internall beauty, of difficile knowledge, and abstruse discovery” that is revealed unto friends, and unto friends only.36 He mourns for the dead Etienne de la Boëtie, in accents of wild grief and inconsolable love. The learned Hubert Languet, the friend of Melanchthon and of the leaders of the reformed church, tells the young Philip Sidney how he kept his portrait by him some hours to feast his eyes upon it, and how his appetite was “rather increased than diminished by the sight,” and Sidney writes to him, “the chief hope of my life, next to the everlasting blessedness of heaven, will always be the enjoyment of true friendship, and there you shall have the chiefest place.”37 Later on there came to Sidney’s house in London, one—some day to be burned at Rome, for the sin of seeing God in all things—Giordano Bruno, just fresh from his triumph before the University of Paris.38 “A filosofia è necessario amore” were the words ever upon his lips,39 and there was something in his strange ardent personality that made men feel that he had discovered the new secret of life. Ben Jonson writing to one of his friends subscribes himself “your true lover,” and dedicates his noble eulogy on Shakespeare “To the memory of my Beloved.”40 Richard Barnfield in his “Affectionate Shepherd” flutes on soft Virgilian reed the story of his attachment to some young Elizabethan of the day.41 Out of all the Eclogues, Abraham Fraunce selects the second for translation, and Fletcher’s lines to Master W. C. show what fascination was hidden in the mere name of Alexis.42
It was no wonder then that Shakespeare had been stirred by a spirit that so stirred his age. There had been critics, like Hallam, who had regretted that the Sonnets had ever been written, who had seen in them something dangerous, something unlawful even.43 To them it would have been sufficient to answer in Chapman’s noble words:
There is no danger to a man that knows
What Life and Death is: there’s not any law
Exceeds his knowledge: neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.44
But it was evident that the Sonnets needed no such defence as this, and that those who had talked of “the folly of excessive and misplaced affection” had not been able to interpret either the language or the spirit of these great poems, so intimately connected with the philosophy and the art of their time.45 It is no doubt true that to be filled with an absorbing passion is to surrender the security of one’s lover life,4648 and yet in such surrender there may be gain, certainly there was for Shakespeare. When Pico della Mirandola crossed the threshold of the villa of Careggi, and stood before Marsilio Ficino in all the grace and comeliness of his wonderful youth, the aged scholar seemed to see in him the realisation of the Greek ideal, and determined to devote his remaining years to the translation of Plotinus, that new Plato, in whom, as Mr. Pater reminds us, “the mystical element in the Platonic philosophy had been worked out to the utmost limit of vision and ecstasy.”47 A romantic friendship with a young Roman of his day initiated Winckelmann into the secret of Greek art, taught him the mystery of its beauty and the meaning of its form.48 In Willie Hughes, Shakespeare found not merely a most delicate instrument for the presentation of his art, but the visible inca
rnation of his idea of beauty, and it is not too much to say that to this young actor, whose very name the dull writers of his age forgot to chronicle, the Romantic Movement of English Literature is largely indebted.
ON THE GENESIS OF THE BOY-ACTOR, THE AMBIGUITY OF THE SEXES, AND THE “ESSENTIALLY MALE” CULTURE OF THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE49
In 1587 a certain Thomas Hews brought out at Gray’s Inn a Euripidean tragedy entitled “The Misfortunes of Arthur,” receiving much assistance in the arrangement of the dumb shows from one Francis Bacon, then a student of law. Surely he was some near kinsman of the lad to whom Shakespeare said
Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all;50
the “profitless usurer” of “unused beauty,” as he describes him.51 But the proofs, the links—where were they? Alas! I could not find them. It seemed to me that I was always on the brink of absolute verification, but that I could never really attain to it. I thought it strange that no one had ever written a history of the English boy-actors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and determined to undertake the task myself, and to try and ascertain their true relations to the drama. The subject was, certainly, full of artistic interest. These lads had been the delicate reeds through which our poets had sounded their sweetest strains, the gracious vessels of honour into which they had poured the purple wine of their song. Foremost, naturally, amongst them all had been the youth to whom Shakespeare had intrusted the realisation of his most exquisite creations. Beauty had been his, such as our age has never, or but rarely seen, a beauty that seemed to combine the charm of both sexes, and to have wedded, as the Sonnets tell us, the grace of Adonis and the loveliness of Helen. He had been quick-witted, too, and eloquent, and from those finely curved lips that the satirist had mocked at had come the passionate cry of Juliet, and the bright laughter of Beatrice, Perdita’s flower-like words, and Ophelia’s wandering songs.52 Yet as Shakespeare himself had been but as a god among giants, so Willie Hughes had only been one out of many marvellous lads to whom our English Renaissance owed something of the secret of its joy, and it appeared to me that they also were worthy of some study and record.
