The Method of Shakespeare as an Artist, Deduced From an Analysis of His Leading Tragedies and Comedies

By HENRY I. RUGGLES. New York: Hurd and Houghton. Cambridge : Riverside Press.

THE author of this volume has taken three of the chief dramas of Shakespeare, and, adopting an organic idea, which he assumes to have been intended by the poet, for each, attempts to show a relation of the characters, incidents, and even the diction of the piece, throughout, to this central or informing idea. Now, although it may be presumed that Shakespeare knew what he was aiming at, yet we may safely doubt if he were not simply building worse than he knew, should we find that, as Mr. Ruggles tries hard to indicate (and this seems to us the chief distinguishing feature of his analysis), the great poet not only made each and every character a sort of stock figure on which to put some of the vari-colored garment of this presumed idea, but that the whole lexicon was ransacked for words to be used on every possible occasion and in every conceivable way to reflect and convey an allusion to the same organic idea, and that every incident and simile and metaphor was made to contribute its single might also to the general main. “ For,” says Mr. Ruggles. “ what the foliage and fruit are to the tree the metaphor and diction of these plays are to their fundamental ideas. As an oak is a forest of oaks, each bough, branch, limb, twig, and leaf being but a new development of the original germinal principle, so a play of Shakespeare’s is throughout all its parts but a production of the organic idea, even to the minutest points of phraseology and diction.” In illustration of this statement, Mr. Ruggles quotes the two lines from The Merchant of Venice,

“And,” he observes, “we exclaim how felicitous is the epithet ‘ costly,’ as applied to summer ! how Shakespearian ! how expressive of the pomp and opulence of the season ! but when we reflect that the play treats of material and moral values, and that a very large proportion of its diction is drawn from notions of cost, value, bargain, sale, etc., we perceive that the word 'costly' was selected by the poet by no merely happy flash of fancy, but by deliberate and philosophic choice.” That the purpose of a drama, or the impression of its history, should manifest itself in the general tone of the language is not improbable ; but that Shakespeare, not contenting himself with this general influence, felt rather than seen, throughout his plays, should obtrude the reserved moral in every possible way, thrusting it from behind a masked battery of metaphor here, making it lurk in a simile there, and, everywhere, behind and before, show itself, so that he who runs cannot escape reading it in nouns and verbs and adjectives,—this, we imagine, nobody but Mr. Ruggles believes. It is not the Method of a supreme or even superior artist, but rather the Method in the madness of a pedant or a pedagogue. Mr. Ruggles devotes many pages in his chapters on Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and Macbeth to the detection (or shall we not say arrest on suspicion ?) of those words that, directly or indirectly, bear or seem to bear, or may vaguely be fancied to seem to bear, relation to the given organic idea of each play.

As for the organic ideas which Mr. Ruggles attributes (or contributes) to Shakespeare, we are content to let that of Twelfth Night be “ Man in reference to Pastime.” Regarding Hamlet, we agree with many things that Mr. Ruggles says (and he often says well what he has to say), but we think that either Goethe’s, Schlegel’s, Ulrici’s, or Coleridge’s characterization of Hamlet as the leading person is fully as satisfactory, and, with a slight difference, comes to nearly the same thing as his own. The difference on Mr. Ruggles’s side is chiefly in “ words, words, words.” In Hazlitt’s lecture, too, we find much the same result, and, indeed, Mr. Ruggles uses almost similar expressions in one or two places to convey his own notion of Hamlet. In Macbeth, where the organic idea, according to Mr. Ruggles, is Man in reference to the State, we find many things to approve, but we think that, after having shown that Macbeth had no conscience, but that it was the effect of a strong imagination and the dread of possible earthly consequences that caused him to hear a voice that cried, “ Macbeth shall sleep no more,” we think it was hardly fair to admit tardily that he may have had a conscience, but that it was not a “religious conscience.” What is a “ religious conscience ” ? Certainly there is no proof, we admit, that Macbeth was a professor of religion. And what would the expression of Macbeth’s conscience have been if he had possessed a conscience and this conscience had been of a genuine religious cast ? We hope, however, that in that case he would not have murdered Duncan.

The comparison instituted between certain expressions from Bacon and the tragedy of Macbeth all seem to us to refer to facts and notions that must have been as familiar to educated people of that day as now, and the reference to these by both Shakespeare and Bacon at nearly the same time seems hardly marvellous, even if Shakespeare had not read nor breathed in the influence of Bacon.