Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then rejecting all the materials that do not fit him, with the ridiculous result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all (with your wastepaper basket full of them), ends in leaving Shakespeare with a much worse character than he deserves. For though it does not greatly matter whether he wrote the lousy Lucy lines or not, and does not really matter at all whether he got drunk when he made a night of it with Jonson and Drayton, the sonnets raise an unpleasant question which does matter a good deal; and the refusal of the academic Bardolaters to discuss or even mention this question has had the effect of producing a silent verdict against Shakespeare. Mr. Harris tackles the question openly, and has no difficulty whatever in convincing us that Shakespeare was a man of normal constitution sexually, and was not the victim of that most cruel and pitiable of all the freaks of nature: the freak which transposes the normal aim of the affections. Silence on this point means condemnation; and the condemnation has been general throughout the present generation, though it only needed Mr. Harris’s fearless handling of the matter to sweep away what is nothing but a morbid and very disagreeable modern fashion. There is always some stock accusation brought against eminent persons. When I was a boy every well-known man was accused of beating his wife. Later on, for some unexplained reason, he was accused of psychopathic derangement. And this fashion is retrospective. The cases of Shakespeare and Michelangelo are cited as proving that every genius of the first magnitude was a sufferer; and both here and in Germany there are circles in which such derangement is grotesquely reverenced as part of the stigmata of heroic powers. All of which is gross nonsense. Unfortunately, in Shakespeare’s case, prudery, which cannot prevent the accusation from being whispered, does prevent the refutation from being shouted. Mr. Harris, the deep-voiced, refuses to be silenced. He dismisses with proper contempt the stupidity which places an outrageous construction on Shakespeare’s apologies in the sonnets for neglecting that “perfect ceremony” of love which consists in returning calls and making protestations and giving presents and paying the trumpery attentions which men of genius always refuse to bother about, and to which touchy people who have no genius attach so much importance. No leader who had not been tampered with by the psychopathic monomaniacs could ever put any construction but the obvious and innocent one on these passages. But the general vocabulary of the sonnets to Pembroke (or whoever “Mr. W. H.” really was) is so overcharged according to modern ideas that a reply on the general case is necessary.
Shakespeare’s alleged Sycophancy and Perversion
That reply, which Mr. Harris does not hesitate to give, is twofold: first, that Shakespeare was, in his attitude towards earls, a sycophant; and, second, that the normality of Shakespeare’s sexual constitution is only too well attested by the excessive susceptibility to the normal impulse shown in the whole mass of his writings. This latter is the really conclusive reply. In the case of Michelangelo, for instance, one must admit that if his works are set beside those of Titian or Paul Veronese, it is impossible not to be struck by the absence in the Florentine of that susceptibility to feminine charm which pervades the pictures of the Venetians. But, as Mr. Harris points out (though he does not use this particular illustration) Paul Veronese is an anchorite compared to Shakespeare. The language of the sonnets addressed to Pembroke, extravagant as it now seems, is the language of compliment and fashion, transfigured no doubt by Shakespeare’s verbal magic, and hyperbolical, as Shakespeare always seems to people who cannot conceive so vividly as he, but still unmistakable for anything else than the expression of a friendship delicate enough to be wounded, and a manly loyalty deep enough to be outraged. But the language of the sonnets to the Dark Lady is the language of passion: their cruelty shows it. There is no evidence that Shakespeare was capable of being unkind in cold blood. But in his revulsions from love, he was bitter, wounding, even ferocious; sparing neither himself nor the unfortunate woman whose only offence was that she had reduced the great man to the common human denominator.
In seizing on these two points Mr. Harris has made so sure a stroke, and placed his evidence so featly that there is nothing left for me to do but to plead that the second is sounder than the first, which is, I think, marked by the prevalent mistake as to Shakespeare’s social position, or, if you prefer it, the confusion between his actual social position as a penniless tradesman’s son taking to the theatre for a livelihood, and his own conception of himself as a gentleman of good family. I am prepared to contend that though Shakespeare was undoubtedly sentimental in his expressions of devotion to Mr. W. H. even to a point which nowadays makes both ridiculous, he was not sycophantic if Mr. W. H. was really attractive and promising, and Shakespeare deeply attached to him. A sycophant does not tell his patron that his fame will survive, not in the renown of his own actions, but in the sonnets of his sycophant. A sycophant, when his patron
