The Magician Breaks His Staff

To this day there persists in the popular mind the romantic tradition that Shakespeare's life is veiled in mystery and obscurity. Yet literary history now knows Shakespeare's life better than that of any of his contemporaries. It is true that the more we know it, the more mysterious it becomes. As the outward obscurity disperses, the inner mystery deepens. The human figure of the great creator remains always a mystery and a marvel — and that is why it is so compelling and so disquieting.

Did the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets, his dark-haired mistress, truly betray the poet with the highborn friend, so ardently beloved, who also figures in those sonnets? Who can say? Verse in that age was not yet confession, as it later became. And perhaps we need not search for any lived experience to account for the great bitterness that pours undyingly towards us out of Shakespeare's tragedies. Perhaps it was not disappointments that made him so dark of vision, but simply that his was the soul of a tragedian. This is not the most mysterious thing in Shakespeare's story.

The most mysterious thing is Shakespeare's old age. By 1611 Shakespeare was not only a great dramatist but a wealthy man: part-owner of two theatres, with a good deal of money laid by, master of a small fortune. Now he writes his last play, The Tempest, set upon an enchanted isle beyond the oceans. The hero of The Tempest is Prospero, the banished Duke of Milan, who by his magic commands the wild monsters of the earth and the light spirits of the air. Fate so ordains that there comes to Prospero's island the usurper on whose account he had been forced to leave his homeland. Prospero forgives him and returns to Milan, after taking his leave of the isle of wonders. He bids farewell to his magic power as well, and breaks the staff with which he had commanded the spirits of the air and the fairies:

But this rough magic
I here abjure, and when I have required
Some heavenly music—which even now I do—
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

Scholars suppose that in these words Shakespeare, the great magician of words, is taking his leave of his own isle of wonders, his fairy palace: the theatre, where he was equally master of the monsters of the earth, of the unbridled passions, and of the spirits of the air, those fleeting, sweet and musing moods with which he would now shake the hearts of his listeners to their deepest root, now set them sailing towards the most distant longings. Prospero bids farewell to his magic power and returns to his birthplace. Shakespeare did the same. He returned to Stratford-upon-Avon, from where he once — if the story is true — had been obliged to flee, in most disagreeable circumstances, as a poacher escaping punishment.

Now he returns as a man of consequence, one to whom his native town points with pride. He buys land and becomes something of what the English today would call a gentleman-farmer: a gentleman who lives for the pleasures of husbandry. He takes part in the management of the little town's affairs, is an amiable, good neighbour, a hospitable host within his small country circle — and troubles himself no longer with literature or the theatre. Even the fate of his works left him indifferent: the famous Folio edition was assembled after his death by his friends, largely from the theatrical prompt-books.

This is the most baffling thing about Shakespeare: this withdrawal, this inexplicable conclusion. How can it be that a poet — and a Shakespeare, no less! — should be able to cut himself off so utterly from that which had been the glorious meaning of his life? Is poetry, then, no irresistible compulsion for the chosen one? Can a man simply leave off, as he might give up some lucrative line of business once he has earned enough? What is the explanation here?

The simplest explanation is that in Shakespeare too there lived that longing for the countryside, for nature, which runs so strong in the Englishman; he too yearned, in his little native town and ringed about with public esteem, to live for the calm and the pleasures of the simple life. Nor need one be English for this. It was Arany János's chief dream as well: 'A quiet nest in the shade of green leaves… and to plant and graft once more.' Perhaps in Shakespeare's soul, too, the sober and thrifty burgher always lay hidden, who, having walked the whole round of human passion in his dramas, came to anchor at last where Voltaire's Candide did: we must cultivate our gardens.

In his famous History of English Literature, Taine raises another thought: 'I like to imagine,' he says, 'that he too, like Goethe, freed himself from the perils of a tempestuous imagination, precisely by means of that tempestuous imagination; that the inner fire caused no explosion in his life because it found an outlet in poetry; that his theatre saved his life; for Shakespeare, having lived through all the follies and wretchedness of human existence in the characters he created, was able to settle down among his fellow men with a calm and melancholic smile, listening, for the sake of relaxation, to the airy music of his imagination.' The poet, Taine believes, was freed by his poetry from his passions, from the tragic tensions within him — and he withdrew to Stratford because this quiet setting and way of life answered to the serenity his soul had attained, so late and at such a great cost.

And yet a third explanation is possible. It is the more probable in that Shakespeare himself offers it, through Prospero's lips. Shakespeare had grown old; he too might have said, as Prospero does:

…retire me to my Milan, where
Every third thought shall be my grave.