Dark Lady of the Sonnets | Page 9

morning in the country
which Orlando describes so perfectly in As You Like It was the
beginning and end of Shakespear's notion of religion. I say almost,
because Isabella in Measure for Measure has religious charm, in spite
of the conventional theatrical assumption that female religion means an
inhumanly ferocious chastity. But for the most part Shakespear
differentiates his heroes from his villains much more by what they do
than by what they are. Don John in Much Ado is a true villain: a man

with a malicious will; but he is too dull a duffer to be of any use in a
leading part; and when we come to the great villains like Macbeth, we
find, as Mr Harris points out, that they are precisely identical with the
heroes: Macbeth is only Hamlet incongruously committing murders
and engaging in hand-to-hand combats. And Hamlet, who does not
dream of apologizing for the three murders he commits, is always
apologizing because he has not yet committed a fourth, and finds, to his
great bewilderment, that he does not want to commit it. "It cannot be,"
he says, "but I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall to make oppression
bitter; else, ere this, I should have fatted all the region kites with this
slave's offal." Really one is tempted to suspect that when Shylock asks
"Hates any man the thing he would not kill?" he is expressing the
natural and proper sentiments of the human race as Shakespear
understood them, and not the vindictiveness of a stage Jew.

Gaiety of Genius
In view of these facts, it is dangerous to cite Shakespear's pessimism as
evidence of the despair of a heart broken by the Dark Lady. There is an
irrepressible gaiety of genius which enables it to bear the whole weight
of the world's misery without blenching. There is a laugh always ready
to avenge its tears of discouragement. In the lines which Mr Harris
quotes only to declare that he can make nothing of them, and to
condemn them as out of character, Richard III, immediately after
pitying himself because
There is no creature loves me And if I die no soul will pity me, adds,
with a grin,
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself Find in myself no pity
for myself? Let me again remind Mr Harris of Oscar Wilde. We all
dreaded to read De Profundis: our instinct was to stop our ears, or run
away from the wail of a broken, though by no means contrite, heart.
But we were throwing away our pity. De Profundis was de profundis
indeed: Wilde was too good a dramatist to throw away so powerful an
effect; but none the less it was de profundis in excelsis. There was more
laughter between the lines of that book than in a thousand farces by
men of no genius. Wilde, like Richard and Shakespear, found in
himself no pity for himself. There is nothing that marks the born
dramatist more unmistakably than this discovery of comedy in his own

misfortunes almost in proportion to the pathos with which the ordinary
man announces their tragedy. I cannot for the life of me see the broken
heart in Shakespear's latest works. "Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate
sings" is not the lyric of a broken man; nor is Cloten's comment that if
Imogen does not appreciate it, "it is a vice in her ears which horse hairs,
and cats' guts, and the voice of unpaved eunuch to boot, can never
amend," the sally of a saddened one. Is it not clear that to the last there
was in Shakespear an incorrigible divine levity, an inexhaustible joy
that derided sorrow? Think of the poor Dark Lady having to stand up to
this unbearable power of extracting a grim fun from everything. Mr
Harris writes as if Shakespear did all the suffering and the Dark Lady
all the cruelty. But why does he not put himself in the Dark Lady's
place for a moment as he has put himself so successfully in
Shakespear's? Imagine her reading the hundred and thirtieth sonnet!
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than
her lips' red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be
wire, black wires grow on her head; I have seen roses damasked, red
and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes
is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I
love to hear her speak; yet well I know That music hath a far more
pleasing sound. I grant I never saw a goddess go: My mistress, when
she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as
rare