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SCENERY IN SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS.

THE

HE word " scenery "here is ambiguous, and I must explain what I mean by it. I am not thinking of stage scenery, which, as everybody knows, was in Shakespeare's day practically non-existent. I use the word in its wide extratheatrical sense, and, when I speak of Shakespeare's scenery, I mean, in the first place, references, in the speeches of his characters, to exterior and interior background and surroundings, and, secondly, similes, metaphors, or other figures of speech, taken from phenomena of landscape or atmosphere. The first class must include (1) architecture and (if the action happens indoors) furnishings; (2) localities, i.e. the places where of the action; (3) references to natural phenomena, statical or dynamical, topical or atmospheric, in the neighbourhood of the action.

Thus limited, the subject is a large one and full of interest. For the consideration of it proves to be the consideration of Shakespeare mainly as an interpreter of nature. What the interpretation of nature in modern poetry and fiction has amounted to we know. A dramatist, it may of course be said, who writes only speeches and never speaks for himself, cannot interpret nature, and cannot give us his own feeling and thought about nature, as the lyrical or descriptive poet and the novelist can. But we must acknowledge-and it needs but a superficial acquaintance to force us to the acknowledgment that Shakespeare has somehow contrived to put a great deal of natural scenery into his plays, and that he did it because he liked it. This is too obvious to need elaborating. The wood near Athens

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where the hempen homespuns rehearsed so courageously and obscenely "; the throw-off of the hounds of Theseus, where we

Mark the musical confusion

Of hounds and echo in conjunction;

the moonlit gardens of Belmont; Macbeth's pleasant
seat with the smell of the nimble air and its temple-
haunting martlets; the storm in Lear; the landing
at Cyprus in Othello, when, after the great contention
of the sea and skies, the hero blessed the bay with
his tall ship, and after tempest tasted for a moment
in Desdemona's arms the calm which her serenity
had imposed on the elements during her own voyage.
Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds
The gutter'd rocks and congregated sands,
As having sense of beauty, do omit

Their mortal natures, letting go safely by
The divine Desdemona.2

Random allusions such as these remind the most casual reader of Shakespeare that there is more than human interest in his plays. He realizes that they abound in the interest of landscape, of the sun and moon, of stars and flowers, clouds and winds and waters; and that it is Shakespeare himself rather than any creature of his brain who reports of these things.

Before attempting some examination of Shakespeare's scenery, we have to notice briefly his attitude to two Elizabethan conventions which may detract, to some extent, from the individuality of his treatment.

One of these is the pastoral tradition, which, time and again, has given so much artificiality to the literary presentation of landscape. What this tradition could effect in Shakespeare's day, how much alive it could be and how instinct with genuine poetry, Spenser's Shephearde's Calendar, Peele's Arraignement of Paris, Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess

1 Midsummer Night's Dream, Act. IV. Sc. 1. 2 Othello, Act II. Sc. 1.

and Ben Jonson's Sad Shepherd (to take only obvious instances) show incontestably. That Shakespeare reminds us of it now and then is undeniable. But the quintessence of pastoral poetry, dramatic and non-dramatic, the replacement of genuinely human interest by that of beings artificially idealized or preternatural, in an open-air world of rural simplicity, is surely not to be found in him. Sir Sidney Lee calls As You Like It a pastoral, and, in so far as it is derived from Lodge, it may deserve the name. But as it comes from Shakespeare's hand, its character-drawing is too strong and its humanity too rich and vital for any real assimilation to the shepherd and shepherdess puppet-show of true pastoral poetry at its best. The landscape setting may be the same in both kinds; it may be, and often is, as inartificial and beautiful in Spenser and Fletcher as in Shakespeare; but the figures that move in it are at best abstractions. And so, beautiful as the pastoral scenery may be, it fails to attain the naturalness of Shakespeare's scenery. One touch of his humour or love, one sigh of Rosalind, one whimsey of Puck, one triumph of Autolycus, is fatal to the identity.

Another convention which may have influenced Shakespeare's scenery is the tendency to the use of nature-analogies which reaches its maximum in Lyly's Euphues. Now, though Shakespeare may have learned the habit where Lyly learned it, if not from Lyly himself, his earliest play shows that he transcended it and was alive to its absurdities. And, indeed, we have only to put together one of Lyly's analogies and one of his to feel the difference. Here is Lyly:

"The filthy sow, when she is sick, eateth the sea crab and is immediately recovered: the tortoise having tasted the viper, sucketh origanum and is quickly revived: the bear, ready to pine, licketh up the ants and is recovered . . . And can men by no herb, by no art, by no way procure a remedy for the

impatient disease of love? Ah well I perceive that love is not unlike the fig tree whose fruit is sweet, whose root is bitter, like the apple in Persia, whose blossom savoureth like honey, whose bud is more sour than gall."

And now Shakespeare :

I know you all, and will a while uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapour that did seem to strangle him.1

In Shakespeare's lyrical and narrative poems, and especially in his sonnets, analogies from nature are inevitably more prominent than in his plays, and sometimes they are conventional. It is with the plays only that I am now concerned. But it is permissible to remark that conventions may be inspired, and that it is the duty of criticism, as it is certainly within its powers, to recognize and exhibit the fire of individual genius which may glow within the form. Under such scrutiny Shakespeare's naturesymbolism has nothing to fear.

In his age, and for a home-keeper like Shakespeare, it is not wonderful that the topographical element in his plays is slight and variable. Of foreign scenery he attempts to portray hardly any, though so much of the action happens abroad, and so many of his sources were Italian. It is otherwise in the patriotic plays and when the scenes are near the parts of England he knew,-The cliffs at Dover stand out realistically amid the shadowy confusion of the scenery of King Lear. In Richard the Second, Northumberland complains to Bolingbroke of the high, wild hills and rough uneven ways of Gloucestershire as they journey towards Berkeley, and sighs over the 1 King Henry IV., Pt. I. Act I. Sc. 2.

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