ABSTRACT
In Shakespeare's plays there are many attractive and sympathetic presentations of both maturity and old age, and it is only in deliberately cornie, or semi-comic, creations, such asJuliet's nurse, Shallow, Verges, Pandarus and (to some extent) Polonius, that the characteristicweaknesses ofage predominate. But in the Sonnets, although he says much about the compensations oflove and friendship for the evils oflife, he saysnothing whatever about the compensations which maturity and age are often supposed to bring with them for the loss of youth. There is not a word about the 'mellowness', 'maturity', 'experience', 'balance', and so forth, which come, or should come, with advancing years, and not a word about the inexperience, immaturity, rashness, excessive hopes and excessive despairs of youth. And this raises a further question: despite Socrates's success (or apparent success, for they had gone to sleep before
he had finished) in persuading Aristophanes and Agathon, in the Symposium, that a great writer of tragedy must necessarilybe also a great writer of comedy, is there anything at all in Shakespeare'sSonnets which evokes the creator of the great comic characters and comic scenes? Anything at all which evokes that fascinated observer ofmen's 'humours' and of all those 'little things' of which Dr. Johnson spoke in a memorable conversation with Boswell, all those innumerable details oflife in which, as well as in love and friendship, he must have found compensation? Is there here, perhaps, some resemblance between Shakespeareand Thomas Hardy-some resemblance between this seeming contradiction between Shakespeare's sonnets and Shakespeare's comedies and the seeming contradiction between the Hardy who wondered whether Nature, when she crossed the line from invertebrates to vertebrates, did not exceed her mission, and who so often seems to agree that the best of all is never to have been born, and Hardy the inexhaustible observer and enjoyer of every detail in the world around him? Is, perhaps, such a cyclic mode of living and experiencing, such prolonged submergence in moods of desolation and dejection and near-despair, moods in which so many ofthe normal compensations seem to be obliterated and forgotten, a necessary condition, or limitation (for it may be regarded in either of these ways), for the production ofa great tragic writer? Is this why Chaucer, although a great master of pathos, never achieves the intensity (I am almost tempted to say, the intense one-sidedness) of tragedy? For Chaucer, it would seem, the whole of his experience, his total impression of life, was more completely and habitually present with him than Shakespeare'swas with him. Mr. Eliot, in a famous and often quoted passage, once remarked that the characteristic 'wit' of our seventeenth-century poets 'involves, probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression ofevery experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible'.' If we choose to regard the Sonnets as expressions of a part ofShakespeare'sexperience, it is certainly not possible to detect in them an implicit recognition by Shakespeare himself that what he is expressing is only part of his total experience of life-not possible to detect anything like an admission, or hint, or warning that much of what he is saying is to be regarded as hyperbolical, or as what an Irishman would call 'a manner ofspeaking'. With Chaucer it was quite otherwise. Chaucer (it may be regarded either as a virtue or as a defect) would have been quite incapable of taking either himself or anything else so seriously for so long as Shakespeare was able to do (or unable not to do) in his sonnets and in the intensest of his tragedies. He
would, for example, have been incapable of taking the loss of his own youth so 'tragically' as Shakespeare does in the sonnet beginning 'That time of year thou may'st in me behold'. It is at least conceivable that Chaucer himself, under the influence and example of 'the laureat poete', might have begun to write a series of sonnets, but I fancy that he would not have proceeded very far, that before long he would have roundly declared that he was beginning to get 'agroted', bored, with 'alle thise sonettes', and that, perhaps after a certain amount of self-laughter and self-parody, he would have broken off. Perhaps because, although he experienced things intensely, he did not experience them with such overwhelming and submerging, such isolating and insulating, intensity as Shakespeare did, Chaucer was far more continuously aware of 'other kinds of experience which are possible', of other points of view, of other voices, of the voice of Harry Bailly, about to exclaim
No more of this, for Goddes dignitee.
