November 7, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
15 
Life and Letters oyJ.CSquize 
Shakespeare 
WHAT a pleasure it is to get a book on Shakes- 
peare and know before you open it that 
it will be fresh, frank, and sensible, free at once 
from old fustian and from new fantasies, and 
certain to send you back to read your author 
with increased understanding and enjoyment ! Sir Arthur 
Quiller-Couch's Shakespeare's Workmanship (Fisb.er Unwin, 
15s. net) has all the merits of his previous works and the 
additional attraction of the greatest subject a literary critic 
can write about. 
Sir Arthur treats Shakespeare as a human artist, though 
the greatest : a man capable of indolence, wilful caprice, 
and occasional ineptitude : an artist working, like others, 
under limitations, unwilling (as great artists are) to repeat 
old triumphs, always attacking new difficulties, and seme- 
times (as in that last group of plays which cover vast periods 
of time and deal with slow spiritual processes) failing to 
surmount them. With so full a book before him the reviewer 
can do no more than quote and criticise a few things at 
random. Sir Arthur throws light on every play and on the 
principles of art in general; the study of "workmanship" 
gives him a very wide reference with limits difficult to deter- 
mine. He is extraordinarily good on Hamlet, in which he 
says, after all the wiseacres have dowered Shakespeare with 
all their philosophies and pathologies, there is no "mystery" 
whatever — except the slight unsolved and usually unnoticed 
mystery as to why the murdered king was succeeded by his 
brother, and not by his son. He notes in the Merchant of 
Venice how Shakespeare was handicapped by his ready-made 
and preposterous plots about the pound of flesh and the 
casket. They gave him little room for the natural develop- 
ment of character ; he had to concentrate on Shylock or 
Portia. There ought, says Sir Arthur, "to be a close time" 
for the Trial Scene. 
Discussing criticisms made against the weaknesses 
and complexities of Cymbeline, he says, justly, that what 
Shakespeare did in that play was to create Imogen, 
the loveliest and noblest heroine in all literature ; and that 
since he did so rare a thing we may assume that that is what 
he was chiefly trying to do. As You Like It elicits the 
remark that it is "arguable of the greatest creative artists 
that, however they learn and improve, they are always 
trading on the stored memories of childhood." 
There is one play about which, exercising a reader's right 
with the utmost deference and diffidence, I dare to differ 
from Sir Arthur and from the majority of critics. I do not 
think Macbeth entirely comes off. Sir Arthur remarks, and 
this indisputable truth has been disastrously forgotten by 
many modern playwrights, that whatever a "hero" is, does, 
or suffers, it is essential that he should command the sym- 
pathies of the audience. He sets forth all the case against 
Macbeth, and adds that the great poetry which is put into 
his mouth "drapes him with the illusion of greatness," but 
that this is not enough, and that he is only saved by being 
represented as a victim of some fatal hallucination of unde- 
fined strength imposed on him by evil supernatural powers. 
I thoroughly agree with Sir Arthur's attack on those who 
under-estimate the importance of the supernatural element in 
the play, and who fail to understand the spell that a story 
like that of the witches on the blasted heath must exercise 
on all imaginative minds. 1 agree with his diagnosis of 
Shakespeare's problem here and of the means he adopted to 
solve it. Where 1 differ from him is in holding, unlike him, 
that Shakespeare failed. It was, I think, a double failure. 
Easy thougli Shakespeare found it to write great speeches 
and impute them to any character, it was not so easy to 
convince us that that character really spoke them. The 
great imaginative passages spoken by Hamlet, by Prospero, 
and by the raving Lear, we can accept not as Shakespeare's, 
but as theirs : they spring directly from their intellects and 
emotions as wc know them ; they are more intense than their 
contexts, but all of a piece with them. These men have no need 
to be "draped" with the illusion of greatness, for they aye great. 
With Macbeth it is different. When he says things like 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death 
the great language is a "drapery." It hangs loosely and 
awkwardlj' upon him ; it does not belong to him ; the great- 
ness is Shakespeare's, and not his ; the illusion is not pro- 
duced. Macbeth is not made great by the mere loan of a 
poet's imagery, and he is not made sympathetic, however 
adequately his crime may be explained and palliated, by 
being the victim of a hallucination. We might feel very 
deeply with such a victim had he won our affection or admira- 
tion previous to his hallucination, or were he, outside that, 
a fine fellow ; but this man has never attracted us at all ; 
and though any weak doomed man must arouse some measure 
of pity, our interest in Macbeth is nothing compared with 
that which we take in Hamlet and Othello and Lear, and 
even less than that which is stirred by his inexcusable and 
unhallucinated, but tigerishly resolute, lady. 
The principal character in Macbeth, in fact, is dull ; he makes 
no appeal ; we do not greatly mind what happens to him ; 
and the play, in spite of sublime scenes and poetry, is an 
illustration and a \yarning to artists who deny, or forget, 
that no powers of execution and no subordinate achievement 
can compensate for a central figure who is "unsympathetic," 
and that it is better for a "hero" to provoke active fear 
or hate than indifference or half-contemptuous pity. It is 
no use having a hero who makes people feel, from first to 
last, that he wants a good shaking. The mistake was not 
one that Shakespeare usually made ; but his plot beat him. 
The emotional hold of the play would have been immeasur- 
ably greater had he set Macbeth against an equally pro- 
minent but lovable character : given him, say, an innocent, 
horror-stricken wife instead of a fellow-murderer who 
is not only as incapable as he of drawing our affection, 
but who incidentally throws him into the shade as a 
criminal. 
The end of Othello — on which Sir Arthur barely touches— is 
a subtler matter ; whether one thinks the workmanship fails 
depends upon whether one believes that the most noble and 
generous Othello, even though a Moor, and deceived, and 
mad with jealousy, really could have — did, in fact — kill 
his wife. Men in such situations, no doubt, have killed 
guiltless wives, and some of these men have possibly been 
strong and lovable people. But I, at least, experience 
when I come to that death not those feelings which one has 
when a tragedy works to its inevitable and natural climax, 
but, mingled with sickening horror for poor little Desdemona, 
anger and irritation not against Othello, but against Shake- 
speare, who is directing him. Sir Arthur, in his brief paren- 
thesis on the play, quotes a lady as having shouted to Othello 
from the auditorium: "You great black fool; can't you 
see? " What 1 feel like saying, and I can't think my impres- 
sions are unique, is not that, but : " Look here, Shakespeare, 
you'd no right to do this merely because, before you started, 
you decided that this was the way the story should go. You 
know better. You're monkeying with human nature, and 
you've no excuse." 
Sir Arthur's readers must hope that he will supplement 
this volume with another covering — with whatever central 
theme — those plays which are not studied in this volume. 
There is one, I think, which really should haive been here, 
the main characteristics of Shakespeare's technical aims -and 
achievements being the subject. That play is Troilus and 
Cressida. Too little attention has always been given to it ; 
and those critics who have, at length, written about 
it have concentrated too much upon the love-story- 
drawing, incidentally, from this quite convincing picture 
of a fickle girl and an embittered lover unjustifiable de- 
ductions about Shakespeare's frame of mind when he 
wrote it. 
The chief interest of the play seems to me, and certainly 
its chief interest as a piece of "workmanship," to lie in its 
vividness as a panorama, as a series of suddenly illuminated 
scenes in which many characters, Greek and Trojan, live 
and move, each with his distinct face and opinions and temper. 
It resembles one of those bright and crowded "compartment" 
pictures that the early Flemings painted. If both Troilus 
and Cressida were left out, the siege of Troy, in sections, 
would remain ; and I cannot think (and I am sure Sir 
Arthur would not think) that in making that great tapestry 
Shakespeare did not know what he was doing, and know that, 
in drama, it was a novel and difficult thing. 
