Mary Macleon - The Shakespeare Story-Book

Literary critics have many times during the past two thousand years waged battle with one another over the question whether drama owes its excellence chiefly to plot or chiefly to character. Is it the business of the dramatist, critics ask successively through the ages, to inspire the playgoer with a deeper interest in the external circumstances which mould the fortunes of his heroes and heroines than in their individual temperaments and the inner workings of their minds and hearts? But critics commonly “count it a bondage to fix a belief,” and after clothing their question in the complexity of disquisition, they rarely “stay” for a clear and decisive answer. The glimmering light of dialectics usually involves in shadow one or other commanding phase of the problem. To the plain observer it would seem that both plot and character are essential constituents of perfect drama; that the strength of the one depends on the strength of the other; and that, except to the questioning critic, it is a matter of small practical consequence to which the greater importance be attached by the refinements of theory. In the best plays of Shakespeare the interest evoked respectively by plot and character is so evenly balanced that he must be exceptionally short-sighted who would set the value of the one above the value of the other. The external circumstances that mould the fortunes of Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, rivet the playgoer’s and the reader’s attention in no less a degree than the individual temperaments of these great dramatic personages or the inner workings of their minds and hearts. It is the perfectly harmonious co-operation of plot and character that is responsible for Shakespeare’s noblest triumphs.

Close and constant study of the great plays of Shakespeare must ultimately rouse in the student a more absorbing interest in their characters than in their plots. That is the final effect of supreme dramatic genius. But the full appreciation of Shakespeare’s sure and illimitable insight into character can never be reached until we have made ourselves thoroughly familiar with the plot in which the character has its substantive being. It follows, therefore, that if one would realise completely in due time the whole eminence of Shakespeare’s dramatic achievement, one should be encouraged at the outset to study closely the stories of the plays rather than the characters apart from their settings. When the youthful mind has grasped the manner and matter of the plots, it will in adult age be in a far better position than it could be otherwise to comprehend all the excellences, all the subtleties of the characters. Only when plot and character have received equally full attention will Shakespeare stand revealed to the mature student in his manifold glory.

It was this point of view that led Charles Lamb and his sister Mary to prepare their “Tales from Shakespeare, designed for the use of young persons.” Their volume was first published in 1807. The two writers narrated, in simple language for the most part, the plots of twenty of Shakespeare’s plays, fourteen comedies and six tragedies. None of the historical dramas, whether English or Roman, were included, nor was a place found for the comedies of Love’s Labour’s Lost , and the Merry Wives of Windsor , nor for the tragedies of Troilus and Cressida , and Titus Andronicus . The greater part of the volume was the work of Mary Lamb. Although Charles Lamb’s name alone appeared upon the title-page, he was responsible for no more than six of the tales – those of the six tragedies.

Mary Lamb had little of her brother’s literary power. She was in sympathy with his literary tastes, she had something of his shrewdness of judgment, but she had none of his wealth of fancy, his pliancy of style, his humorous insight, or his learning. Although Mary Lamb’s renderings of the plots of the comedies have the charm of matter-of-fact simplicity, they cannot be held on a close scrutiny to satisfy all the needs of the situation. They often trace the course of the stories too faintly and imperfectly to recall Shakespeare’s own image. Frequently in Mary Lamb’s work pertinent intricacies of plot are blurred by a silent omission of details, knowledge of which is essential to a complete understanding of the Shakespearean theme. For example, the story of the caskets is excluded altogether from Mary Lamb’s version of the plot of The Merchant of Venice . Of Bottom and his allies in Midsummer Night’s Dream she has nothing to tell; Titania falls in love with a nameless sleeping “clown who had lost his way in the wood.” And when (in Mary Lamb’s version) the ass’s head which Puck sets on the clown’s neck is removed, he is “left to finish his nap with his own fool’s head upon his shoulders.” Nothing more is vouchsafed about the “rude mechanicals” of Theseus’s Athens. Mary Lamb’s rendering of As You Like It admits no mention of the melancholy Jaques, of the shrewdly witty Touchstone, or of the rustic Audrey. The ludicrously self-centred Malvolio and his comically tragic self-deception disappear from her version of Twelfth Night . Elsewhere in the comedies, and even in Charles Lamb’s own work on the tragedies, Shakespeare’s text is at times misinterpreted. Consequently, however fascinating in themselves the narratives of the Lambs may prove to young readers, Lamb’s Tales offer them a very fragmentary knowledge of the scope of Shakespeare’s plots. An endeavour to supply young readers with a fuller and more accurate account of them is therefore well justified, and this endeavour is made in the present volume.

In studying the stories on which Shakespeare based his plays, it is always worth bearing in mind that he cannot be credited with the whole invention of any of them, except in the case of one play – the comedy of Love’s Labour’s Lost . In accordance with the custom of all dramatists of the day, it was his practice to seek the main lines of his plots in prose-fictions, or in historical chronicles by other hands.

Romantic fiction was born for modern Europe on Italian soil. Boccaccio of fourteenth-century Florence and Boccaccio’s long line of disciples – Bandello of Milan, Giraldi Cinthio of Ferrara, and many writers of less familiar name of the sixteenth century – had for generations before Shakespeare’s epoch furnished not only Italy, but all the Western countries of Europe with their chief recreative literature in prose. The Italian novels were through the second half of the sixteenth century constantly translated into English and French, and it was to those English or French translations of the Italian romances that Shakespeare owed the main suggestion for all the plots of his comedies (save Love’s Labour’s Lost ) and for many of those of his tragedies. Belleforest’s “Histoires Tragiques,” a collection of French versions of the Italian stories of Bandello, was very often in his hands. Novels by Bandello are the ultimate sources of the stories of Romeo and Juliet , of Much Ado about Nothing , and of Twelfth Night . All’s Well that Ends Well and Cymbeline largely rest on foundations laid by Boccaccio. The tales of Othello and Measure for Measure are traceable to Giraldi Cinthio.

But although Shakespeare’s borrowings from the frank and vivacious fiction of sunny Italy were large and open-handed, his debt was greater in appearance than it was in reality. He freely altered and adapted the borrowed stories in accordance with his sense of dramatic and artistic fitness, so that the finished plays present them in shapes which bear little relation to their original forms. At times he intertwined one borrowed story with a second, and his marvellous ingenuity completely changed the aspect of both; each assumed new and unexpected point and consistency. With such effect did he combine in The Merchant of Venice the story of the caskets with the story of Shylock’s bond with Antonio. His capacity of assimilating all that he read was as omnipotent as his power of assimilating all that passed in life within range of his eye or ear. The stories that he drew from books on which to found his plays can only be likened to base ore, which the magic of his genius had the faculty of transmuting into gold.