The Poet and Immortality .sx By G. WILSON KNIGHT .sx IT is often assumed that Shakespeare's works have no positive religious meaning .sx And yet a sincere lover of the plays must be unwilling to let such a statement pass unchallenged .sx To be moved deeply by that sense of human sublimity that great literature gives us , to have our minds or souls purified by the contemplation of the human spirit in conflict with its fate ; to suffer in imagination and yet to treasure that suffering as good rather than ill ; to be thus reconciled to the necessity and beauty of the tragic fact surely all this is to be momentarily at one with the great principle of human creation .sx This surely is , if not " a religion , " yet certainly Religion in its widest and deepest sense .sx But if we isolate the separate themes of the greater plays it is , perhaps , a little hard to reconcile some of these with what we are accustomed to call " religion .sx " There is , of course , much definitely and obviously " religious " and of direct moral value in Shakespeare .sx But there is also much that is not .sx We are often told that Shakespeare admired the blunt and honest character :sx Horatio , Kent , Flavius .sx No doubt he did , so do we all .sx We know that he must have loved the fearless innocence of his Desdemona , his Cordelia's strength , and that broken flower of girlhood , Ophelia .sx Passages of extreme beauty on the Christian Redemption witness at least a fine sensibility to the beauty and truth of Orthodoxy .sx But beside these things of obvious beauty we must put the nightmare of Macbeth's blood-guilty soul ; the grand unbending pathos of his wife , whose dreadful will relaxes only in sleep to reveal the inevitable misery traced by crime upon her soul ; the passionate grief of Lear's madness ; the volcanic curses of a Timon's hate ; the sensuous and shameless fascination of Cleopatra .sx What of these ?sx They form the greater and more significant part of Shakespeare's grandest plays .sx And what , too , of Hamlet's .sx and Claudio's terrors at the Orthodox teaching of a possible survival in pain after death their poignant desire that death may be the utter annihilation of consciousness ?sx Is all this religion and if so , what exactly has it to tell of the meaning and the mysteries of existence ?sx In a most interesting article contributed to The Shakespeare Review Mr. Guy Boas writes of Shakespeare and Christianity , showing points of contact between the two .sx In writing of Othello he says :sx " Before the innocent meekness of Desdemona the huge physical strength of the Moor lies prostrate .sx Innocence in the end conquers suspicion not by expostulation or complaint , but merely by remaining itself and bearing no malice .sx Surely it is in such a sense as this that Christ meant that the meek shall inherit the earth ?sx " That is obviously true .sx But later Mr. Boas asserts that the plays of Shakespeare give us no insight into the mysteries of birth and death .sx And that I am impelled to deny .sx After pointing out individual instances of moral beauty in Shakespeare he writes :sx " But morals alone do not constitute religion .sx To .sx all religious teachers we look for an explanation of .sx the mysteries of existence :sx the miracle of creation , the .sx riddle of death , the hope of immortality .sx What has .sx Shakespeare to say to these eternal problems ?sx " My answer to this is that between the years 1599 and 1611 Shakespeare was engaged primarily with these very problems :sx and he has left us as clear an answer as a mind of his depth and imaginative insight can give .sx Within the compass of this note I cannot do more than indicate very briefly the bare outlines of my meaning , though I hope to deal with the question in more detail later .sx But a careful study of the texts from Hamlet to The Tempest will show my conclusions to be based on the rock of imaginative fact .sx First , consider Mr. Boas' words :sx " Morals alone do not constitute religion .sx " Now if we regard the reference above to Desdemona's death we see that " morals " is not the best word .sx Desdemona's purity and meekness are not the fruit of " morals " in the usual sense .sx Desdemona has even been blamed on " moral " grounds for the lie with which , to quote from Mr. Boas' article , she " tries to shield him from detection after he has mortally injured her .sx " " Morals " will not do ; its associations and derivation degrade it .sx Mr. Boas writes finely of " the unearthly love " with which Desdemona forgives Othello .sx And I think the author of this phrase will agree with me that a better word would be " Values .sx " The poetic dramatist is not concerned primarily with morals , in the cruder sense :sx they are to him no more than the background , like historical facts or social distinctions , against which the lightnings of spirit values shoot , evanescent perhaps , yet winged to immortality .sx Shakespeare from 1599 onwards is concerned with the passionate activity of the human spirit , that is with values ; of ambition , of faithfulness , of sorrow , of agony in crime but above all with the supreme value , Love :sx the pangs of its soul-torture , the ecstasy of its fruition .sx He is concerned too with death :sx with death that opens vistas of possible unending torment worse than .sx " the most loathed earthly life .sx That age , ache , penury , or imprisonment " .sx can lay on men ; with death , perhaps , if fate is kind , a .sx gentle sleep ; with death the ender of suffering .sx I think .sx in writing Macbeth and Lear Shakespeare knew death to .sx be in one sense the ender of life , and the thought brought .sx him peace :sx and yet somehow he had reached another .sx life-truth firm and based in eternity :sx in the mysterious .sx eternity of value ; the value of human aspiration and .sx passion , unmoral , timeless , indetructible .sx And at the end or nearly the end of the great sequence of tragedies .sx comes an act of poetic creation that surpasses all earlier .sx examples of Shakespeare's tragic and poetic achievement :sx a vision and revelation of death joyful , immediate , and final .sx I refer to the last two acts of Antony and Cleopatra .sx Here all the threads of obstinate questionings , fears , passions , and aspirations of the earlier great plays are caught up into those supreme moments where love and death the two most recurrent of Shakespeare's problems are harmonised into one spiritual reality and shown to be mutually relevant and explanatory .sx As Mr. Boas convincingly shows us , the duty of the poetic dramatist is the representation of life .sx He does not press beyond the grave .sx He works in terms of this life .sx That is true .sx But his figures are not copies of life as we ordinarily observe it .sx Their characters are rather bodies infused with that innermost spirit of being apprehended alone by poetic intuition :sx and they reveal the basis of human existence , the springs of action , the deep compulsive current of passionate spiritual reality the substantial fabric of the unseen on which is woven the very pattern of human fate .sx The plays of Shakespeare , as too the poetry of all great poetic-humanists , go deep , for their poetry is rooted in the otherness of the spiritual order .sx Now these plays , thus created on the analogy of human life , necessarily have human and religious meaning .sx Especially does the great Julius Caesar Tempest succession have compelling force if regarded as a sequence of life representations .sx For it shows a clear progression and development .sx I will shortly outline this sequence .sx The three plays , Hamlet , Troilus and Cressida , Measure for Measure are all plays of pain .sx They question the truth of the romantic vision , they suggest horrors beyond the grave .sx Love in Troilus and Cressida is killed by the arch-enemy time :sx " Injurious time now with a robber's haste .sx Crams his rich thievery up , he knows not how .sx " This thought of time's destroying nature permeates the play and leaves the romantic flower drained of its sap and withered to the root .sx So too in Hamlet and Measure for .sx Measure is death horrible when viewed through the mists of time .sx Immortality in time is a thing to be dreaded :sx the time-processes of bodily disintegration and personal survival are hateful to Hamlet and Claudio , who would both welcome death if death were all .sx Now the supreme tragedies Macbeth , Lear and Timon contain answers to the foregoing problems .sx They are , of course , more than that , for great poetry is always more than an " answer " to any intellectual problem .sx But the fact remains that they do contain within their total significance answers to the earlier questions .sx In them we have a representation primarily of human passion :sx passion which reaches outward and upward stretching the limits of personality .sx There is no time-thinking about the matter of death and immortality .sx All three great figures at last cry out for death which comes blessedly , the ender of crime and suffering , surest balm of hurt minds .sx Macbeth cries :sx " I have lived long enough .sx " And Kent :sx " Vex not his ghost !sx O let him pass !sx He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer .sx " And Timon :sx " My long sickness .sx Of health and living does begin to mend , And nothing brings me all things .sx " There is no thought of individual persistence in Macbeth and Lear and Timon , and yet there is a grandeur which makes death shadowy and unreal .sx In great tragedy we are , in fact , faced with the expression of a spiritual value which carries its own conviction of immortality ; but the immortality of tragedy's revelation is not a temporal process .sx In Macbeth , in Lear , we watch a reality beyond the analysis of reason , something independent of the limits of time .sx The immortality expressed by tragedy is a time-less immortality in the realm of value .sx And then we have the final vision of Antony and Cleopatra .sx Here death is extolled as the supreme good :sx I will be .sx A bridegroom in my death , and run into 't As to a lover's bed .sx Cleopatra and Antony die for love :sx more , they die into love .sx The .sx delicate and romantic flower of love was killed by time in Troilus and Cressida :sx immortality in time was terrible to Hamlet and Claudio .sx But here death is .sx that thing that ends all other deeds , .sx Which shackles accidents and bolts up change .sx Death the ender the death of Macbeth and King Lear here kills time the slayer of romantic sight at the moment when that romantic sight is crystal clear .sx The supreme value Love , at a supreme moment , is thus synchronized with the time-destroying act of death ; and its immortality is then apparent , immediate and indisputable .sx This is how those last two acts answer at the same moment the love-misery and the death-misery of the earlier plays .sx Antony and Cleopatra asserts the timeless Immortality of Value .sx " Morals alone , " says Mr. Boas , " do not constitute religion .sx " No but values do .sx The tendency of the best modern religious thought .sx ( e.g. , W. R. Inge , Outspoken Essays , Second Series , 1927 , 3344 ; B. H. Streeter , Reality , 1927 , 31112 ) is clearly to assert that the .sx truth of immortality is to be read in terms not of quantity but of quality ; not of time , but of value .sx Canon Streeter , in his Reality , suggests that the truth of this timeless immortality can only be expressed " by metaphor or " .sx Now what form should such a myth take ?sx Values appear to be killed by time :sx they have so often immediate and unquestionable significance , only to fade , like sweet dreams in cold day-light , blurred , forgotten and unreal .sx The true myth of immortality should then assert that the intuitive perception of value is to be trusted and that all other evidences are to be regarded as false .sx That which inspires love cannot die , although it seems to die ; the beautiful thing which is lost , is not lost but is in safe keeping and will be restored .sx Hermione and Thaisa thus wake from seeming death to the sound of music , and are restored to Leontes and Pericles .sx Pericles finds Marina to " the music of the spheres " ( v. i. 231) .sx For .sx Pericles , The Winter's Tale , Cymbeline , are to be read as parables or .sx myths .sx We must cease to assert that Shakespeare throws no light on these eternal facts and that the final plays are inartistically " unreal" .sx Rather should we see that the unreality of these creations is a purely .sx