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The Truth About Shakespearean Theater

Shakespeare died three hundred years ago. During these three centuries the peoples of Europe have ceaselessly tormented each other in the struggle for unnecessary domination, which none of them is able to achieve. The result is a decline in the well-being of all of them. But the light of the constellations in the sky of thought shines equally over all the fatherlands. No state, no country has special rights to genius. Having given his ashes to his native land, he becomes forever free from borders. Like stars in the night, geniuses shine for everyone.

May the star of "sweet and wild Shakespeare" serve us for a few moments, in the midst of the darkness that envelops us, as a beacon that unites all the hearts that have lost their way, a mysterious connection that gathers the eyes and souls of enemies into sheaves.

April 1916.

Truth in Shakespeare.

People of all times agree on one thing: they all profess a platonic love for the Truth and in fact they all fear it. They show this fear already by not recognizing it where it manifests itself, and pouting at everyone who points to it. The word Truth blossoms on all lips, but who really serves it? It would seem that its servants should be thinkers, writers, whose gaze is refined by the habit of observing and analyzing. It would take as much courage as it does intelligence. But if intelligence is rare, then courage is a very exceptional virtue. When an enthusiastic beginner enters a literary career, he does not at first suspect all the difficulties he will encounter. It seems to him that the main difficulty is to find an exact expression for his thought. Little by little he will notice that there is still a greater difficulty, namely, want to express your opinion. And that's not all, you still need to dare to think. Conscience, constrained by the limits that it has set for its truthfulness, seeks consolation for itself in a kind of self-sleep, it puts on blinders, tries to think only halfway - until now, but no further! The child easily knows how to convince himself that if he jumps beyond the line that he wrote with chalk on the pavement, he will fall into the abyss created by his imagination. Something similar is happening here as well. There remains a narrow circle of the human soul, surrounded on all sides by a thorny hedge of social prejudices and ditches of conventions. The only thing left for the spirit is to peacefully graze on the permitted meadow. Rarely come across animals more courageous, which allow themselves to look over the fence. But to jump over it - oh, here you will probably break your neck! Only a few madmen have accomplished this feat: Nietzsche, Pascal...

Meanwhile, we judge the moral and intellectual height of the artist precisely by the greater or lesser courage of his love of truth. Looking at things from this point of view, one sometimes wonders how modest this courage is in general. In the field of the theater more than in others: after all, here you have to turn to the average person. United, people merge their passions, their conventions, their prejudices into one compact mass. The artist must adapt to the temperament of this mass in order to be heard by this thousand-voiced monster. Adapting himself, he drowns in an all-leveling compromise the sharp and too precise nuances of his thought. At best, and if he has a lot of instinct, he can take the muzzle off his truth and let go of his prudent courage to chase after some game, foreshadowed by the passions of the age and its secret desires. After all, it happens quite often that a society that has fettered itself in various fetters, for the purpose of self-relief, begins semi-consciously to seek at least partial freedom, an exit at least in one direction. So, often a person suffering from a general malaise and not wanting to find the true source of evil, focuses all his attention on one symptom and tries to convince himself that this is his main enemy, which must be defeated. The moralist or satirist takes advantage of this mood of society in order to throw light on precisely the desired point: Truth is allowed to penetrate this hole in the fence. But, like a trained dog, she is obedient and runs only to the limit of what is permitted. Does the king set the tone in society, for whom it is beneficial and amusing to belittle the pride of the upper classes, and comedy, like Moliere's, begins to peck at the vices of the nobility, the ridiculous sides of the wealthy bourgeois and writers. Whether the scepter passes into the hands of the ambitious bourgeoisie, resonant, strong and shabby, the satire turns against religion, because there is a rival here who must be eliminated. Rarely, however, literature, winning on one side, does not lose simultaneously on the other. The writer seems to buy the right to be bold in some cases by flattering concessions on the rest of the front. A person can hardly endure all-encompassing criticism, too sincere worldview, which is ready to devalue the whole world, that is, that “nutshell” in which he was settled.

In essence, he cannot stand anyone who prevents him from resting on the pillows of illusion; he knows that it is illusions under his head, in extreme cases he is ready to admit that he is sometimes reminded of this, but in passing, fleetingly, laughing, by no means insisting. In order for him to recognize the Truth, she must put on a kind mask: appear in the costume of a symbol or a paradox. In order to captivate a person, Truth must try to make itself look like a lie.

And Shakespeare ran into these difficulties. True, he lived in a less timid era, when the artist had nothing to be ashamed of in front of the public, sufficiently hardened by the spectacle of physical suffering. Hamlet could talk about the tragic tasks of life and death with the greatest freedom - and no one wrinkled his nose. But as soon as he moved on to the criticism of society, his task became as difficult as the task of a modern writer, perhaps even more difficult. He was subject to all the foundations of a capricious and tyrannical authority, even several: royal power, noble gentlemen, the church, the crowd. In one of his sonnets, he expresses disgust at a life in which all free forces, all art that thirsts for truth, are swaddled and wear a plug in their mouths. And yet he managed to say, if not everything, then enough to allow us to read in the depths of this fearless soul, which loves life to the point that it was ready to be combined with all its forms, and so penetrated into its depths that no one of these forms of her could fool her.

In order to be able to express himself, he had to change clothes, and his dressings were varied.

His cunning irony was very pleased with the game: to put criticism into such mouths in which it seemed the most bearable. Thus, sovereigns will slander the great ones with impunity, kings will criticize birthrights, and the most vitriolic satire on woman will be put into the witty lips of Rosalind.

However, Shakespeare used to put the deepest truths into the mouths of persons of two definite categories, representing the poles of the moral world. On the one hand, these are the lowest representatives of society - slaves, jesters, who are allowed to say a lot, because who will reckon with them! Less often, these are those whose position is too high, those for whom the boundaries of the human are so narrow that they blow them up: supermen, heroes.

I will deal with this second category first. It is necessary to introduce into it not only heroes in essence, but also heroes due to circumstances, that is, people overtaken by great misfortune, or dying; their eyes are suddenly opened to things that they would never have dared to look in the face until the last hour. A weak and childish king like Henry VI, an Egyptian prostitute, a "black and wrinkled gypsy" like Cleopatra, suddenly transform on the threshold of the grave. They judge calmly from above about human illusions and about things that have fooled them for a long time. Mad Macbeth, in the midst of the hurricane that sweeps away his life, notices in the light of lightning the tragic insignificance of any human will. Gloucester, the exile, not only reveals with his gouged bloody eyes the ferocious irony of an indifferent Fate, similar to Anak Spitteler, but also social inequality. The storm of revolution, almost proletarian, sweeps through his words.

In these examples, an unfortunate or dying person without difficulty is able to broadcast the truth: after all, he is already outside of life, its conventions no longer bind him. But how many tact does the century see of people who are capable of remaining unrestrainedly truthful, wholly truthful in their perceptions, thoughts, words and deeds - in the very middle of life, within a given social order? Such people are rare at all times. We have to be afraid that it is getting smaller. What do we see around us now? Was there ever a time when independent and truthful personalities were so tragically lacking?

Great revolutionaries were less rare in Shakespeare's time than they are now, but still they were not often encountered. When a playwright wanted to portray such a type, he looked for him in the semi-darkness of legends, or in the depths of history. And in Shakespeare's own works there are few such characters. A few brave servants who, out of a sense of honor or the need to be frank, or, finally, out of the interest of their masters, dare to boldly tell them the most cruel truths. Such is Kent in King Lear, Pauline in The Winter's Tale. Above them we find a very small handful of the most chosen among the sovereigns, who are so superior to the masses, the management of which was entrusted to them by fate, that they are not blinded either by their flattery or their prejudices: such is the clear mind and reasonable Henry, like his chivalrous opponent, the ardently flaming Gotopor. True, the latter perishes because of his too fiery temperament, but his magnificent truthfulness puts him on the same level with his conqueror. Still higher is the "laughing lion" - the bastard from the drama "King John", as well as Alcibiades of Timol, this peculiar Bonaparte, throwing lawyers, dishonest politicians and all rotten legality in front of him. His speech in the fifth scene of the fifth act, as it were, predicts the speech of the 18th Brumaire. Finally, “at the top we see a free hero, absolutely free, standing alone against the whole world, and his every word whips the world with some kind of truth - this is Coriolanus! It can be said about this superman that he embodies super-truth, so that sometimes it is difficult for an ordinary person to breathe the atmosphere of his heights.

But if we could listen to truths only from the Coriolans and Falconbridges, even only from the Kents and Paulines, we would risk living a whole life without knowing its taste. Such luminaries are like comets, they return at indefinite intervals, and sometimes get lost in the night of space. For ordinary life, you have to resort to other sources. If Truth dare not show her face, she can put on a mask. This is where the usefulness of the jester is revealed to us, the essential role that he played in the old society, as well as in the theater of Shakespeare, who served as a mirror for this society.

Remember what Nak the Melancholic says in the seventh scene of the second act of the drama: "What do you want?" “Give me the freedom that all jesters enjoy, let me be like the wind and blow where I want. Dress me in a motley jester's jacket and let me say whatever I think - I will clean out, perhaps, the body of a corrupted world? .. "

There are real jesters and madmen, and fake ones: it is often very difficult to recognize what kind we have in front of us. In this obscurity lies the unsettling appeal of this character. As long as you look at him as a buffoon who amuses the happy people of this world with his obscene jokes and his ugliness, it is easy for you to despise, as is often done today, a society that can spend time in this way. But to look in this way means not to see the essence and too easily come to the consciousness of one's own superiority. Interesting, I would even say - the greatness of this custom lay in the fact that this creature - ugly, frail, of all the weakest, standing on the last rung of the social ladder - represented the freedom of the spirit: no one, not even the king, was immune from his irony . They laughed, pretended that they considered the jester insane, irresponsible. But did they really think so? This can be doubted. So, the duke from the play "What You Want" says about the jester: "He uses his madness like a screen: because of it he shoots his sarcasms." And Goneril to the jester Lear: "Big, my sir, more a rogue than a fool" ... This was a necessary fiction, allowing free air to penetrate to the court, which tyranny threatened with asphyxiation.

In Shakespeare we find all the stages of feigned foolishness, starting with the crudest and most innocent: the slaves in Coriolanus, the clown in The Winter's Tale and his colleague in the comedy The End of All Grandfather's Crown. The repulsive Thersites of Troilus, who is sometimes made clairvoyant by his poisonous envy, rises only a little above this level. But let's take it a step higher: here is the jester of "King Lear", who has been dying of anguish since Cordelia was expelled, and remains faithful to the abandoned old king. Who dares to say that he is really a madman? Another step, not morally, but intellectually, and before us are cynics, vicious revelers who know life through and through and do not allow anything to fool them: Anemantes, the colossal Falstaff, who is forgiven everything - both his gifts and his bitter truths, because love him for the eternally beautiful mood of the spirit, radiating around. But this Falstaff sometimes utters terrible words about everything that is considered the pillars of society: about the army, justice, honor.

Even higher are people of great heart and high birth, whose balance is destroyed by the blows of fate: Timon and Lear. Finally, above all, the best and most intelligent person, not crazy, but putting on the mask of a crazy person and under this cover revealing to us the soul of the poet himself: Hamlet!

Let's group together a few horrifying truths that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of his characters.

The main vice that he does not cease to pursue is hypocrisy. All peoples suffer from it, and the stronger the people, the more, because the more energetic animal instincts are in them, the more closely society is bound by the unity of the state will. In our modern civilization, almost no vice dares to appear naked, it is hypocritically dressed. La Rochefoucauld said that hypocrisy is a tribute to the vice of virtue. Perhaps, but at the same time it is the most cunning trap for virtue. Most people eventually cease to distinguish between true and counterfeit virtue, and even begin to prefer the latter, because it is cheaper. Let's say more: a just man will never be loved - perhaps even crucified - he is embarrassing, he is a living reproach for the comfortable lies of counterfeit truth and counterfeit virtue. The greatest poets have always seen their greatest enemy in hypocrisy. The favorite pastime of kings is hunting. The hunt for hypocrites is the favorite pastime of poets. Suffice it to recall the names of Molière and Ibsen. There were many great hunters of this kind in England: Ben Jonson, Swift, Byron, Dickens, Thackeray, Bernard Shaw.

Shakespeare tirelessly chases after this big game. The figures of hypocrites are scattered in almost all of his plays and are drawn with powerful distinctness. We will not dwell on their description for a long time. Here is the "honest Iago", the wise poisoner of souls, an Italian of the Renaissance, refined in his crime, playing with his victims, enjoying their convulsions. Here is the gloomy Angelo of Measure for Measure, a disgusting but not contemptible example of the danger to which excessive self-oppression in the name of social decorum leads, disproportionate to the passions hidden in the crude, still bestial human nature. Here is the queen from Cymbeline, this mixture of Belize and Agrippina, a honey-bearing wife and mother-in-law, a learned woman who knows medicine, cooks her poisons, ambitious, capable of killing for the benefit of her royal idiot son. Here - in a comic scale - Malvolio, the enamored and ridiculed Puritan from Twelfth Night. In other dramas, we see intellectuals to whom Timon shouts: “You are the best people in your business, but you have a small flaw - you affectionately feed a small rogue in your chest, and this rogue is a complete scoundrel!” Here is a marvelous drama, originally titled by Shakespeare "All the Truth" and renamed in 1613 as "Henry VIII". This is a refined court drama, in which passions hide their claws under a velvet glove: two kings of hypocrisy collide - King Henry VIII and Cardinal Walsey, a sly cat and a royal tiger, watching his opponent with a smiling and terrible calmness. Finally, here is the most complete hypocrite, the most brilliant, the most tragic - the York boar, the pot-bellied spider, the poisonous, humpbacked toad ”- Richard III. Tartuffe is the hero-king, the strangest image of a hypocrite of the rarest type: a hypocrite playing a rude simpleton: "I am too naive for this world." A man who dares to declare his love at the coffin of the people he has killed - to the widow, daughter, mother of those killed and forcing a woman full of hatred for him to love herself. One such woman will give him her body, the other her daughter ... The poet's disgust for hypocrisy is so great that he gives a strange flavor to the dissolute and frivolous behavior of his historical favorite young Harry, seeing the reason for it precisely in such disgust. His father is terminally ill, and Harry continues to laugh and play pranks, although his inner heart bleeds. To his fellow follies, Poins, who marvels at such indifference, he replies:

“It is you who prevent me from mourning.

- Why?

What would you think of me if I started crying?

“I would have thought you were hypocritical, as befits a prince.

Is that what everyone would think? Yes, everyone would take me then for a hypocrite.

This type of arrogant reticence is not uncommon in northern countries among the most courageous natures: they are so disgusted to slip insensibly to the hypocritical exaggeration of beautiful feelings that they prefer to hide under a mask of cynicism and severity.

Shakespeare exposes all forms of social and moral hypocrisy - hypocrisy towards others, hypocrisy towards oneself. Often the arrows he sends at this goal fly over it, because they are thrown by too passionate arrows, like Timon, King Lear and Hamlet. As a reaction against the stupid optimism of those who do not want to see, tart misanthropy sometimes unfolds a spectacle so rude and murderous that all life seems to be reduced, as if we see in front of us only its rotting corpse, similar to the terrible works of sculptors of the same 16th century , which, under the image of the “living”, were also carved from the stone of the “deceased”, devoured by worms. But an excess of pessimism characterizes here only the worldview of souls possessed by convulsions due to an excess of suffering. Shakespeare does not want to generalize this sentiment, but shows us that it is true for those unfortunates who give themselves up to it. No one dares to pronounce the final judgment on man and life until he weighs the terrible evidence of grief with his eagle eyes.

In order to accustom our eyes, gradually to this bright light, let us now go back along the steps of the social pyramid to its bottom. Let's go past kings and princes and the entire hierarchy of classes, to a completely naked person, devoid of any embellishment. If there is a risk of encountering the prejudices of this or that class, then this risk is transient, all of humanity as a whole passes by such a collision. But if you dive down to the deep sources of life, if you criticize the basic instincts like love, pride, passion, activity, all our sparkling idols, the seat of our strength, if you sacrifice all this, it touches all of humanity to the core.

Living in an aristocratic society, a friend of important gentlemen, the court poet Shakespeare treated with arrogant contempt the political harassment of the masses, but his works nevertheless reflect all the shudders of the universe and sometimes they seem to hear the distant peals of future revolutions. When reading Shakespeare, one feels, as Hamlet says, that "the foot of a passer-by follows the heel of a courtier so close that it will soon begin to scratch him."

Shakespeare has no illusions about the meaning of positions and titles.

Oh if high places 1

And titles and titles were not given

Crooked way! and if the price

Valid merit acquired

All honors - how many poor people

Not servants, but masters would be,

How many are those to whom power has been given

Command - others would obey,

How much unclean grain

Separated from pure grains of honor,

How much falsehood could then

Through the garbage of time to go out.

These sweets the playwright puts into the mouth of the Prince of Arragon (The Merchant of Venice, act II, scene nine).

The free-thinking and intelligent courtiers, who not only tolerated, but even sought his bourgeois friendship, the Essexes and Southamptons, completely allowed him to question the meaning of birth and "noble" blood. So, the French king in the comedy "The end of the whole thing is a crown" says:

It's strange to me

That the blood of people is unequal, if together

Mix it up. - one in front of the other

They do not differ in warmth or weight,

Not paint. And yet it sharply distinguishes us.

When from the dark source of the case

The beautiful ones are coming, believe me, they are

And they become shiny.

When we are swollen with the grandeur of the family,

But in us callous and evil nature -

Dropsy is obsessed with our external brilliance then.

The nobility that comes

Of our exploits, far superior

The one that our ancestor bequeathed to us.

Shakespeare often laughs with complete impunity at the court nobility and its vices. He is not inferior in this respect to Moliere, who enjoyed the special patronage of the Sun King.

But he rises even more sharply against a new force, the danger of which was already becoming obvious and which now reigns over the world on the ruins of aristocracies with more unlimitedness than any blood oligarchy. We are talking about money.

Oh gold metal

Sparkling, beautiful, precious.

Oh, enough gold

To make everything blackest whitest

Everything vile is beautiful, every sin

Truthfulness, everything low is high,

Cowardly - a brave brave man.

Everything is old, young and fresh.

Yes, this sparkling rogue knows how

And bind and break vows,

Bless the damned people

To prostrate before an old ulcer,

Surround robbers with honor,

Differences, kneeling,

Planting them high on benches

Senators. A widow, long gone

Will give grooms ...

And how is gold mined, this harvest of injustice? ... Crime. Timon throws in Shakespeare's first call for a mass struggle: “The hired servants, your self-important gentlemen, are nothing but thieves with broad hands who rob under the auspices of the law ... Break shops! Whomever you rob, only rob a thief."

Gold buys justice and becomes a guard dog that bites the beggar and lies on his back in front of the rich.

“Look at this judge,” says King Lear, “from accusing the poor thief! Listen, make them switch places! Where is the judge now, where is the thief? Have you heard how the dog on the farm barks at the beggar? How is he saved from her? Here's an accurate idea of ​​authority for you. Authority is a dog that is obeyed when it is strongest. AND! the usurer hangs the pickpocket. The slightest flaw is visible through the holes in the rags, but everything is hidden under the mantle lined with fur. Dress your sin with a golden cuirass and the sword of justice will break on it. But if you then dress in rags, the pygmy will knock you down with a simple straw.

A little gold is enough to free the fittest man from military service in that military presence presided over by the fat Falstaff, cynical and cowardly, and the lean Judge Shallo, "that wooden saber of vice, depraved as a monkey." But the poor will be "good enough for a pike." Even arched cripples, eaten away by disease, spitting out their lungs, all fit. "Cannon fodder! Cannon fodder! They fill the grave just as well as the best of mortals!” (The first part of "Henry IV", act. IV, scene two).

Money - or let's call it by a broader name - Interest - is the master of peoples and individuals. You can buy the state, just like a judge is bribed. Depending on the price - there will be peace or war. The blind insane mass knows nothing of their true causes. They do what they want with her. Let us recall the speech of Falconbridge in the second act of King John.

Crazy light!

O you, Frenchman, who was known as a fighter of the Lord,

That he lifted armor and led the army into battle

For truth, honor and own conscience.

Hanging out his ears, he succumbed to the devil,

who tempts you to sin,

It always leads us astray,

Orders to break our vows

And plunder the souls of beggars, kings,

And young people, and old people, and the poor

Girls with nothing to lose

Except for the girl's name.

That devil is handsome from the face: he is in the world

The Lord over everything is called Interest.

Our globe of the earth is not badly created:

He walks on a flat field,

As long as the filthy hand benefits,

Demon-directed tricks,

And at random it will go, throw it,

On a whim, those jumps are directing.

This two-faced demon, this pimp

Flashed with changeable profit

In the eyes, human - and hence the grief!

At his whim, war is declared and peace is made again. However, peace is worth war. Not without reason, the servant Anfidius in Coriolanus says: “The world supports hatred between people. Why? Because they need each other less then." As for the cruelties of wartime, only those who do not see the cruelty of peacetime can be surprised at them. Timon says: “Are not our religious canons, our civil laws cruel? What to expect from the war!

If there is anything to be surprised at, it is the insignificance of the reasons why thousands of people suddenly begin to cut each other's throats. The Norwegian captain naively admits this to Hamlet. (Act 4, scene 4.). War, like peace, is for our time only a change in the phases of one and the same disease, the essential disease of life itself. “War gives rise to peace, peace gives rise to war, and each dictates his own conditions to the other, for one is an enemy to the other,” says Timon.

And if only one could still have a firm hope for progress, for a gradual improvement in social conditions! In Shakespeare, there is no such hope. He does not seek to replace by other masters the masters of today. One of his characters in Richard III says: “The king is dead!… Bad news. Rarely is a new king better than the old."

He had no hopes for the masses. Rarely has anyone spoken of them with more contempt. From quotations taken from his historical and Roman tragedies, one could compose a whole anti-democratic pamphlet. He does not expect anything from "this hydra" ("Coriolanus"), from this "floating algae, which floats here and there, obeying the tides, and from a frequent change of place eventually frays and rots." ("Antony and Cleopatra").

He resents the idea of ​​universal suffrage: “What? give the right to vote to those whose opinion is completely unstable! People who are as little able to command as they are to obey?!” ("Coriolanus").

Karyolan would like to take away from the people all the ways to control the state. In his opinion, this is in the interests not only of the latter, but also of the masses themselves. It is necessary to "pull out the tongue of the crowd in order to deprive it of the opportunity to lick the evil with which it is poisoned." No, Shakespeare does not call for a popular revolution, although some scenes are oddly prophetic foretelling the French Revolution. For example, Lord Xie's episode before Ked: "Why are you trembling? “Perhaps from old age, but at least not from fear.” "Doesn't that remind you of Bailly at the scaffold?" And the scene in which the revolutionaries carry the heads of two aristocrats on pikes and force them to kiss? The aversion to the rebellions of the lower classes, demanding renewal, is sufficiently proved by the figure of the bestial Caliban, conspiring against his master, and the image of the base jacquerie of Keda.

Of course, whoever wants to see the truth naked must return to nature, must look at humanity in its natural state, as King Lear does, tearing his clothes to become a naked man like poor Tom. “In rags, in tatters, borrowed jewelry. Be your own being!"

But the world view of King Lear is even more terrible. His "infected imagination," as he puts it himself, strives furiously to leave nothing of the illusions that cover the shameful nakedness of the human animal with a solemn cloak. His glances, his words, full of ferocious harshness, delve into the most intimate secrets of the body and spirit. And what is left for this being, humbled by shame and self-loathing? So everything is destroyed?

No. In the tragic night, where black truths pass us by, one little star still burns, a poor beacon: Pity. Always her. After the old mad king, crowned with weeds and meadow flowers, makes all the deceptions of men appear before the court of his merciless madness, after he forces us to recognize our equality in common shame, he ends up not with condemnation, ready to break with his frothy lips, no: We hear an unexpectedly severe forgiveness:

“No one is guilty, do you hear? There isn't one! I justify them all!”

Authorized translation by A. Lunacharsky.

All translations of quotations in verse are borrowed by us from the well-known Hungarian edition of Shakespeare.