Is Shakespeare an Allegory?
The Speaker, May 11, 1901


The Messiaship of Shakespeare. By Clelia (Charles Downing). London: Greening and Co. 5s

Mr. Charles Downing is the author of "God in Shakespeare". He believes that the great dramatist was a reincarnation of the Divine. If we should freely admit that Shakespeare was divine, merely extending the remark to Homer, Aristophanes, Mr. Bradlaugh, and Mr. James Harris of Brixton, we fear that Mr. Downing would not be satisfied. It is due to him, however, to say that his work is a great improvement, in point of refinement and restraint, upon the ordinary ruck of works on what is (for some mysterious reason) called the "problem of Shakespeare": the works which prove that he was Christ, Bacon, and anyone else but himself. There are real degrees of taste even in absurdity, and it is possible for a maniac to rave with the most perfect good breeding. Mr. Downing, in propounding his outrageous thesis, has real humility and the real dignity that only comes of humility. But his attitude is vitiated to the very root by a low and inadequate conception of the nature of symbolism. He opens his book with the following remarks:

"Of recent years there has been in literature a great turning of the spirit to symbolism and to what may be called essential religion. Maeterlinck abroad and Mr. Yeats at home are the names most prominent to me, at this moment, in the movement, but it pervades literature, and the latest minor poet will show traces of its influence."

This is profoundly and most fortunately true. But Mr. Downing entirely mistakes the real nature of symbolism as evinced in Maeterlinck and Mr. Yeats when he seeks in Shakespeare for a fixed scheme of allegory. "Hermione (of The Winter's Tale), the ideal of the Graeco-Roman world...has stepped down from her pedestal, a statue come to life, and clasped in her hands Perdita, the Christian ideal." This is not the sort of thing Maerterlinck or Mr. Yeats write, and is presumably not the sort of thing that Shakespeare wrote. Maeterlinck's characters do not represent particular cliques and schools in Belgian art and politics; they represent eternal things for which no philosophic name will ever be found. Mr. Yeats's pre-historic heroes are not introduced upon the stage in order to typify Mr. Redmond's party and Mr. Healy's party, but to typify elemental mysteries which cannot be typified in any other way. We need a much clearer conception of the real value and function of mysticism. It is not mysticism to explain a puzzle: to say that a green cross means evolution and a blue triangle means orthodoxy. This sort of allegorical art is a mere cryptogram which ceases to exist when it is explained. Whatever a mystic may be, he is surely not only a person who destroys mystery.

The real function of symbolism is much deeper and much more practical. We are surrounded in this world by huge and anonymous forces: as they rush by us we throw a name at them- love, death, destiny, remembrance- but the things themselves are infinitely vaster and more varied than the names. True artistic symbolism exists in order to provide another alphabet for the direct interpretation of these infinite anarchic things than the alphabet of language. It is not that a sea at sunset "represents" sorrow, but that a sea at sunset represents a great deal of the truth which is missed by the word "sorrow." So it is with Mr. Downing's Shakespeare allegory. It is not that Shakespeare is a mere philosopher: it is that philosophy is one way of describing certain unutterable things, and Shakespeare is another. Caliban, says Mr. Downing, "represents the mob." The truth is that Caliban represents an old, dark,and lawless element in things, an element which has no name except Caliban, and of which the mob is one of the hundred incarnations. So far from it being true that Caliban symbolises the mob in the street, it would be far truer to say that the mob in the street symbolises Caliban.

This error runs through the whole conception of The Messiahship of Shakespeare; the poet is perpetually being made to describe, not things themselves, but the metaphysical names of things. Shakespeare was in one sense a thorough  mystic; he saw in every stone in the street things which cannot be uttered till the end of the world. His Perdita is not "a type of the Reformation," but simply a girl in love; the Reformation is, in comparison, a trivial thing.

Mr. Downing's taste for turning good poetry into bad metaphysics has its entirely humorous aspects, as where he provides precise logical translations of many of the sonnets. We give one example. A famous sonnet begins

"Oh, how thy worth with manners may I sing
When thou art all the better part of me?
What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?

The following is, according to Mr. Downing, what the three lines really mean:

1. How in modesty can I sing the worth of Beauty?
2. When it is all my better part, my thought, my genius, my soul.
3. What value has self-praise?

 
If this is really what Shakespeare meant, we can only say that literature should be everlastingly grateful that it is not what he said.

It is, however, in his treatment of The Tempest that Mr. Downing shows most singularly his cut-and-dried conception of allegory. For The Tempest really is a mystical play: its figures are symbols, but not mere mathematical symbols. Here is a description of the meaning of the wreck:

Alonzo, the ruling class, is in despair, but still clings to Antonio and Sebastian, Ambition and Laissez Faire, its old vices.....Authority being thus divided between the Backward and Progressive parties, the Mob, Caliban, lifts up its head, and, led on by Stephano and Trinculo, Sensuality and Folly, riots freely, threatening the destruction of Prospero, all Justice, Law, and Civilisation, from the earth.

What is the good of this kind of symbolism? If Shakespeare meant to convey the word Ambition, why did he go to the trouble of saying the word Antonio? The truth is that Shakespeare was a symbolist of the genuine type, and symbolism of the genuine type is wholly misunderstood by Mr. Downing and his school. A real symbol of a certain law is not a mere cipherterm arbitrarily connected with that law, but an example of that law. A plough is symbolic of the toil of all things because it is an instance of it. The parables of the New Testament, for instance, are built wholly upon this principle; so are the one or two mystical plays of Shakespeare. It is not, as Mr. Downing would put it, that Prospero was not a man but an image of God, but that he was a man, and, therefore, an image of God. The same may be said of Shakespeare. We have said nothing about this central theological theory of Mr. Downing, and our silence has been deliberate. Before we decide whether any man (even the stupidest man in the street) is God, we must take the preliminary precaution of knowing what God is and what man is.