Shakespeare's Search for A Hero

Extract

Harry the King intervenes between Falstaff and Hamlet. He is Shakespeare’s last successful version of the natural man. And by this I mean that he is the last of those heroes who is himself a success. He has all the natural graces and he has them in abundance. He meets no problem which he does not solve. He is victorious in arms, just though stem in government. He is a Hotspur sobered by responsibility and a Falconbridge of the blood royal. What he successfully answers are, of course, those questions on the nature of kingship which history had posed for Shakespeare in Richard II. The royalty in Harry is no mere lineal prerogative. It is a quality of the soul. It is an earthly echo of what we mean when we talk of the kingship of Christ. It draws its power from its capacity for fellowship with men, and it makes the humblest of men a king in his own kind. It operates with the discriminating generosity of grace and is at the disposal of all who seek it worthily.

After Henry V comes the great bend in the road of Shakespeare’s search. He begins to see into the depth of the human soul and into the extremities of human circumstance; and what he sees is his subject for the next few years. He sees the failure of the human nature he had glorified. He sees tragedy. His hero becomes Brutus and Antony who divide a play between them. There is no doubt that Shakespeare sympathized with Brutus, but he cannot help making him illustrate the thesis which is now hammering at his mind. I mean the futility of action, or rather the incompatibility of action and thought. Brutus is a philosopher-politician; the Arthur Balfour of republican Rome, intellectual, honourable, and detached. His material is thought, not men. But he becomes the General Franco of this particular conspiracy. He is drawn in reluctantly, but once in he assumes a full share of responsibility.