But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.
What is central to Shakespeare’s tragic imagination is the understanding that, even without the fear of damnation, there is no way out – merely a universe of grey meaninglessness, which hems in the human life from either side. This is what the sinner and murderer Macbeth finally comes to believe in another of the tragedies:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
The arguments about whether Shakespeare was a secret Roman Catholic, struggling to disguise himself all his life, will go on. Most of the time, at least, he seems like a Christian who believes – unlike Christopher Marlowe – that divine judgement awaits a world of sinners. In that he’s a man of his time; what makes him a poet for all time is his inability to reconcile himself to the rites and consolations of any particular religious form. Here, human experience remains scarier and more thrilling than even the Bible admits.
For Shakespeare, the great escape from Thanatos was, inevitably, Eros. Again and again he presents love as the only answer to the great challenge of death and oblivion. The love of the other can quieten, if it cannot quite cancel, the remorseless and deadly passage of time, as his sublime thirtieth sonnet sings:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.
In his thirty-third sonnet, Shakespeare goes further. Love is one with nature. It has the power of creation itself:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.
But what of Shakespeare’s own experience of love? It is often pointed out that while his plays brim with hopeful, ardent suitors and erotic teasing, they are mostly silent when it comes to the experience of lifelong, marital love. This is surely related to Shakespeare’s own early marriage to a woman eight or nine years older than he, who was pregnant by him. Anne Hathaway was a rare catch, a twenty-six-year-old orphan with some property of her own, able, unlike most women of her age, to make her own decisions about love and sex. But Shakespeare was only eighteen when they married, and most of what we know about him – granted, not very much – suggests that it wasn’t an entirely happy union. It produced two adult daughters as well as a son, Hamnet, who died at the age of eleven. But Shakespeare spent most of his working life away from Anne, in London. He returned to her at Stratford-upon-Avon at the end of his career, but if his last will and testament is anything to go by, it was hardly an ardent reunion. His main will leaves her absolutely nothing – it all went to Susanna, the older daughter, and her husband – except, famously for a late codicil, leaving Anne ‘my second-best bed with the furniture’. However you play it, it’s not a compliment.
More significant, perhaps, than all of that is the fact that there are so few images of happy married life in Shakespeare’s plays. Here is a man who can describe everything – war, lust, the pleasures of drunken debauchery, the agonies of young love, the furies and dementia of the old, the pleasures of male friendship – but who hardly ever gives us the state that is supposed to be at the centre of Tudor (and modern) social existence: marriage. Again and again, ill-matched lovers are briskly yoked together at the end of the play, and we are not encouraged to look ahead at what follows. The rare displays of marriage in action are hardly reassuring – think of the black, bleak compact of Lady and Lord Macbeth, or of the guilt-stricken lust of Hamlet’s mother and uncle. We know that Shakespeare was perfectly capable of imagining a strong, sustaining, lifelong love, because he does as much in one of his greatest sonnets:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Yet it seems that in his own experience, Love was Time’s fool, and did indeed alter over months and years, if not weeks. Indeed, there is a disturbing loathing when it comes to describing love and sex between older people. The circumstances are hardly normal, of course, but remember Hamlet turning on his lustful mother:
O shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell,
If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones,
To