[In the following essay, Hibbard argues that Crabbe was one of the few Augustan poets to successfully make use of Shakespeare in his writing, and delineates the influence of certain of Shakespeare's plays on Crabbe's works.]

Regarding the heroic as the highest form of poetry, the great Augustans had more sense than to write it. Instead of seeking to rival Homer, Vergil and Milton, Dryden and Pope preferred to translate the Ancients into the idiom of their own time, to utilize the work of all three, in no belittling spirit, for the purposes of mock-epic, and, above all, to enrich their own poetry by studied and purposeful allusion to the works of those whom they admired. The great Romantics substituted Shakespearean tragedy for the epic as the supreme kind of poetic achievement. Rasher in enterprise and less restrained by self-criticism than the Augustans had been, they also tried to write it. Ignoring the fact that the theatre was moribund, oblivious of Dryden's warning that all that could be accomplished in the Elizabethan manner had been done by the Elizabethans themselves and that there were ‘no bays to be expected in their walks’,¹ they set out to resurrect blank verse tragedy and resuscitate Elizabethan diction. The consequence was a series of miscarriages, still births and monsters. In Shelley's The Cenci, which is probably the best known of these misguided undertakings, the Augustan habit of significant allusion is replaced by a mingle-mangle of loose evocative echoes, so that figures as different as Hamlet, King Lear and the Claudio of Measure for Measure jostle each other for attention in the same speech and, indeed, in a dozen lines or so of it.²

Yet, at the very time that all this was happening, George Crabbe was quietly demonstrating just how Shakespeare could be profitably utilized by a poet writing in the early nineteenth century. He made no attempt to write a blank verse tragedy. He stuck to the tale which he understood, to the couplet which he could handle and to a diction that had nothing of the archaic about it. But he alludes to Shakespeare, as Pope had alluded to Homer and to Horace. He takes material from the plays and adapts it to his own age and to the life and society that he knew. And, in the process of doing so, he lays himself open to a larger influence: something of Shakespeare's attitude, and especially of his humanity, passes into his own work with a broadening and fertilizing effect. While his poetry remains narrative, it also becomes more dramatic; a sense of the tragic now gives depth and resonance to the moralizing; reproof is sweetened with compassion.

Crabbe's knowledge of the plays, beginning apparently in early childhood,³ became full and close. The readiest index to it is to be found in the epigraphs prefixed to each of the poems in the Tales of 1812. Without exception the quotations are taken from Shakespeare. They are always apt and are culled from a wide field, giving the impression that Crabbe had most of the plays at his finger-tips. Until he turned to Shakespeare for them, the choice of epigraphs had given him some trouble. At the end of his Preface to The Borough (1810) he writes with characteristic candour both about his motives in using them and the methods he employed to find them:

I know not whether to some readers the placing two or three Latin quotations to a Letter may not appear pedantic and ostentatious, while both they and the English ones may be thought unnecessary. For the necessity I have not much to advance; but if they be allowable (and certainly the best writers have adopted them), then, where two or three different subjects occur, so many of these mottoes seem to be required: nor will a charge of pedantry remain, when it is considered that these things are generally taken from some books familiar to the school-boy, and the selecting them is facilitated by the use of a book of common-place. Yet with this help, the task of motto-hunting has been so unpleasant to me, that I have in various instances given up the quotation I was in pursuit of, and substituted such English verse or prose as I could find or invent for my purpose.⁴

The true Augustan poet never found himself in this difficulty. It is one of the marks of difference between Crabbe and those whom he most admired and imitated—Dryden, Pope and Dr Johnson—that he was less at home with Latin poetry than they had been. The tradition he belonged to was essentially native, and he did his best work when he recognized this fact. It was with the writing of The Borough that he really found himself as a poet, and his turning to English sources for some of the epigraphs is a pointer to the way he was taking.

There was a further advantage to be gained from substituting Shakespeare for the classics as a source of allusion. Writing for a wide audience, Crabbe could not assume that they would all be familiar with the ancient writers. He could, and did, take it for granted that they would know Shakespeare. His later tales are studded with references to the plays. In ‘Silford Hall’, for example, he describes the temptation to run away from home, that comes over the hard-worked boy, Peter, by glancing at The Merchant of Venice:

To him the Fiend, as once to Launcelot, cried,
‘Run from thy wrongs!’—‘Run where?’ his fear replied.
‘Run!’—said the Tempter; ‘if but hard thy fare,
Hard is it now—it may be mended there.’

(ll. 63-6)

The method is utterly different from Shelley's. The allusion is precise and pointed, not a piece of unconscious plagiarism. It endorses the fact that Peter is something of a servant in his own home, it helps to establish the comic tone of the tale in which it occurs and it lends a touch of drama to the narrative.

In this instance, however, the effect of the allusion is passing and local; it does not colour the tale as a whole. But there are cases in Crabbe's poetry where the reference is on a much larger scale and serves to establish a kind of dialectical relationship between a tale and a play. All four epigraphs prefixed to ‘The Wager’ (Tales, XVIII) are drawn from The Taming of the Shrew. They strongly suggest that it was the last act of that play which provided Crabbe with the basic idea for his tale, and they compel one to read it with the play in mind. The result is a kind of dialogue between two ages which is also an appreciation of Shakespeare's drama. Crabbe strips the story of all its Elizabethan qualities. Petruchio and Lucentio become Clubb and Counter, not young gallants in search of a wife and a fortune, but sober partners in business. The linguistic exuberance and the elaborate intrigues of the original disappear. The world of the tale is the world that Crabbe knew: East Anglia, not Italy. But the essential differences in character between the two women involved are carefully preserved and even sharpened. Clubb's wife is independent by nature; like Katharina, she prefers to have her own way; but she can distinguish between the unimportant and the serious. Consequently, when her husband tells her that, in a moment of rashness and under provocation from Counter, he has laid a wager on her obedience, she raises no difficulties, but says:

If I in trifles be the wilful wife,
Still for your credit I would lose my life.

(ll. 179-80)

Counter's wife, carefully chosen by him for her submissiveness, is the opposite type. Apparently soft and yielding, she uses her weakness to tyrannize over her husband. Clubb's wife sums up her and her kind in some quietly devastating lines at the end of the tale:

These weeping willows, though they seem inclined
By every breeze, yet not the strongest wind
Can from their bent divert this weak but stubborn kind;
Drooping they seek your pity to excite,
But 'tis at once their nature and delight.
Such women feel not; while they sigh and weep,
'Tis but their habit—their affections sleep;
They are like ice that in the hand we hold,
So very melting, yet so very cold;
On such affection let no man rely:
The husbands suffer, and the ladies sigh.

(ll. 283-93)

For Crabbe The Shrew was clearly a play about marriage and about the kinds of relationship between husband and wife that make for success or failure in it. ‘The Wager’ is a piece of Shakespeare criticism as well as a domestic tale.

Although he knew the comedies particularly well—the only one to which I have not found a reference of some kind in his work is Love's Labour's Lost—it was the tragedies and the dark comedies which most affected Crabbe's own art. This influence first makes itself felt in The Borough, where, in a number of tales, he shows a deeper sympathy with human failings than he had done hitherto and an understanding of abnormal states of mind that had appeared in only one previous poem of his, “Sir Eustace Gray” (1807). The most powerful tale in the collection is ‘Peter Grimes’. It is prefaced by three epigraphs: one from Scott's Marmion, one from Richard III and one from Macbeth. It is possible, of course, that Crabbe wrote the tale first and found the quotations afterwards, but the correspondences between the poem and the two plays are so close that it is hard not to believe that the plays were somewhere at the back of his consciousness while he was writing. Huchon is clearly of this opinion. Referring to the fact that the tale was, in part at least, based on actual events that Crabbe knew about, he writes:

As for ‘Peter Grimes’, his name was plain Tom Brown, and if he did lose his apprentices in a very suspicious manner, he never saw the spectres rise from the water. The perusal of Richard III and the quest of pathos alone procured us those horrors.⁵

The connection between the spectres and Richard III is plain enough. The passage from the play that Crabbe quotes is part of Richard's soliloquy in V. 3:

Methought the souls of all that I had murder'd
Came to my tent, and every one did threat.

But far more is involved than these two lines indicate. The entire soliloquy seems to have been in Crabbe's mind, for what Richard expresses in it is his discovery that he has, after all, a conscience, and also his realization that the ultimate victim of all his crimes is himself. By his actions he has deliberately cut himself off from the society of men. He now learns what it really means to be completely alone. This is the realization that comes to Grimes also, but it does so in a way that owes something to Macbeth. The epigraph taken from that play is also concerned with a spectre, the ghost of Banquo in III. 4. But Crabbe had, I would suggest, consciously, or unconsciously, perceived that Macbeth, like Richard, is the victim of his own actions. But in Macbeth's case Shakespeare depicts the whole process in far greater depth and detail. Realization of what he has done to himself comes late to Richard; it comes early to Macbeth. He moves into a waste land of spiritual death in which life becomes merely a pointless sequence of events in time. It is precisely this sense of futility that is so splendidly embodied in the central section of Crabbe's tale, where he uses the flat East Anglian landscape of mud and marsh-banks to mirror his character's state of mind. Peter sitting idly in his boat, incapable of any action, except to

          view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide,

(ll. 186-7)

is, at his own more commonplace level, in the same condition as Macbeth when he says:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

Huchon was right to see Richard III behind ‘Peter Grimes’, but wrong to limit Shakespeare's influence on the tale merely to the appearance of the spectres, and still more mistaken in describing it as productive only of horrors. Richard III and Macbeth helped to free Crabbe's imagination, enabling him to write with sympathy, as well as with understanding, about the psychology of crime, the lust for power over others and the effects of a self-inflicted exile from society.

King Lear also left its mark on Crabbe's poetry. It is plain in ‘Resentment’ (Tales, XVII), where one of the epigraphs is Lear's address to the Fool before he enters the hovel in II. 2:

          How dost. … Art cold?
I'm cold myself, etc.

In this tale of the wife who is charitable in other things, but continues to harbour resentment against the husband who betrayed her trust by defrauding her of money, there are deliberate and telling echoes of Shakespeare's play. Becoming affluent again after the disaster of bankruptcy, the wife treats her husband, from whom she is separated and who has fallen into poverty and misery, rather as Goneril and Regan treat Lear. Just as Goneril says of her father, when he rushes out into the storm at the end of II. 4:

'Tis his own blame; hath put himself from rest,
And must needs taste his folly,

so the wife says of her husband, from the warmth and security of her fire-side:

Wilful was rich, and he the storm defied;
Wilful is poor, and must the storm abide.

(ll. 417-18)

Opposing this attitude is the maid, Susan, who has had far more reason than her mistress to distrust all men, but has remained good and charitable, despite all that has happened to her. It is she who states the wretched predicament of the husband, old, penniless, living in a hovel and exposed to a cruel winter. She does it in lines that recall in a suitably muted fashion the scenes on the heath:

‘The snow,’ quoth Susan, ‘falls upon his bed—
It blows beside the thatch—it melts upon his head.
Through his bare dress appears his shrivell'd skin,
And ill he fares without, and worse within;
                                                                                                              In pity do behold
The man affrighten'd, weeping, trembling, cold.
Oh! how those flakes of snow their entrance win
Through the poor rags, and keep the frost within.

(ll. 366-90)

In the end the maid wins. She forces her mistress to allow her to take succour to the husband. But the parallel with Lear still holds; she comes too late. When she arrives at the hovel, the old man is dead. Thereupon Susan blames not her mistress but herself for hardness of heart. It was not only the truth of Lear that excited Crabbe's interest, but also its compassion, which he embodies in the figure of the maid.

Perhaps the most interesting of all Crabbe's debts to Shakespeare is to be found in his use of Measure for Measure. It affects two tales: ‘The Confidant’ (Tales, XVI) and ‘Smugglers and Poachers’ (Tales of the Hall, XXI). ‘The Confidant’ is a story of blackmail, and Crabbe's main concern in it is explained by the last of the three epigraphs to it, a passage from Isabella's plea to Angelo in II. 2:

          It is excellent
To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

The confidant uses her knowledge of the wife's past to tyrannize over her, until the husband, who behaves like the Duke in Shakespeare's play and employs indirect courses to find out the truth, reveals to her, through an inset story he tells, that he is aware of what is going on. The similarity between the husband and the Duke is endorsed by the fact that the husband forgives his wife and even tempers justice with mercy in his dealings with the confidant. Like the play, the tale is brought to a happy conclusion.

But there were other possibilities in Measure for Measure. Realist as he was, Crabbe must have asked himself what would have happened in the play had there been no Duke to control the action. He gives his answer in ‘Smugglers and Poachers’. The impression created by the opening of this particular tale is that Crabbe began it without any realization that Measure for Measure was relevant to it, but that as he wrote the parallel forced itself irresistibly upon him. According to Huchon, the story is based on fact and was suggested to Crabbe by Sir Samuel Romilly.⁶ It deals with two foundling brothers, James and Robert. James, the elder, is grave, upright and law-abiding, with just a touch of the prig about him. Robert is livelier and more lovable, but also more adventurous and irresponsible. The elder becomes a game-keeper, the younger a smuggler and eventually a poacher. Nevertheless, though they have their differences, the two remain on good terms with each other until they both fall in love with the same girl, Rachel. At this point differences of character and principle change into animosity. James sees more of Rachel than Robert does, since she works at the Hall where he is employed. But Rachel loves Robert and, though James tries to influence her by blackening his brother's character, she continues to love him.

Matters come to a head and the poem gathers dramatic force when James and his men capture four of the poachers, including Robert. The penalty for poaching is death. James, trusted implicitly by his master, has Robert's life in his hands. Though the precise relationships of the characters involved are different, the basic situation is that of Measure for Measure and it is developed with a firm moral grasp and with psychological subtlety. From this point onwards the play can be felt behind the tale, penetrating into its fabric and enriching it. James's first move is to acquaint Rachel with his power. He tells her:

He could his witness, if he pleased, withdraw,
Or he could arm with certain death the law.

(ll. 293-4)

At first, like Isabella when Angelo makes his first overtures to her, Rachel does not see James's meaning. Convinced that Robert must die, she decides to die with him. James, however, becomes more explicit; and Crabbe places his abuse of power firmly in a single couplet:

James knew his power—his feelings were not nice—
Mercy he sold, and she must pay the price.

(ll. 317-18)

In some ways Rachel's situation is even more harrowing than Isabella's. It is her lover's life that is at stake, not her brother's; and the price of it is not a single act of unchastity, but a lifetime of dull misery, married to a man she does not love and who has shown his lack of respect for her by resorting to blackmail. She decides to visit Robert in prison out of motives which seem to me finer than those that take Isabella to Claudio. It is the desire to be absolutely fair that impels her to take this course, rather than the hope of freeing herself from the burden of choice.

Rachel was meek, but she had firmness too,
And reason'd much on what she ought to do.
In Robert's place, she knew what she would choose—
But life was not the thing she fear'd to lose.
She knew that she could not their contract break,
Nor for her life a new engagement make;
But he was man, and guilty—death so near
Might not to his as to her mind appear;
And he might wish, to spare that forfeit life,
The maid he loved might be his brother's wife
Although that brother was his bitter foe,
And he must all the sweets of life forego.

(ll. 325-36)

The meeting between the two is handled with great dramatic skill. Rachel puts the proposition to Robert, whose immediate reaction, like Claudio's, is to refuse it. She is relieved, but asks him to think again, so that there may be no doubt. At this point his weakness begins to show. He suspects her of wishing to marry James. She repels the suspicion and tells him that she has already made it clear to James that if she marries him it will not be for love:

‘I ask'd thy brother, “James, would'st thou command,
Without the loving heart, the obedient hand?”
I ask thee, Robert, lover, canst thou part
With this poor hand, when master of the heart?
He answer'd, “Yes!”—I tarry thy reply,
Resign'd with him to live, content with thee to die.’

(ll. 373-8)

The temptation proves too much for Robert. The possibility of life on these terms allows the terror of death to flood into his mind, and with it the relationship of the tale to Measure for Measure becomes full and explicit. The echoes of Claudio's great speech, ‘Ay, but to die, and go we know not where’, are deliberate, adding the weight of Shakespeare's scene to the situation:

Assured of this, with spirits low and tame:
Here, life so purchased—there, a death of shame;
Death, once his merriment, but now his dread—
And he with terror thought upon the dead:
‘[Oh]! sure 'tis better to endure the care
And pain of life, than go we know not where!—
And is there not the dreaded hell for sin,
Or is it only this I feel within,
That, if it lasted, no man would sustain,
But would by any change relieve the pain?
Forgive me, love! it is a loathsome thing
To live not thine; but still this dreaded sting
Of death torments me—I to nature cling—
Go, and be his—but love him not, be sure—
Go, love him not—and I will life endure:
He, too, is mortal!’—Rachel deeply sigh'd,
But would no more converse: she had complied,
And was no longer free—she was his brother's bride.

(ll. 379-96)

Rachel is no Isabella. She lacks the heroic fibre and the masculine spirit; but she is also free from Isabella's self-regarding fanaticism. A nicer and more tolerant being altogether than her Shakespearean prototype, she conveys in her quiet acceptance of the situation Crabbe's implicit criticism of Isabella's violent outburst against Claudio.

The rest of the tale is Measure for Measure as it might have been without the Duke. James and Rachel marry. Robert is freed from gaol by some of his companions, not without connivance from the authorities. But, once he is free, the irrevocable nature of the bargain he has made fills him with the desire to see James dead. Another poaching expedition is planned. James, who has his spies abroad, gets wind of it. The two brothers clash in the woods at night and each kills the other. Rachel, through whose consciousness the last stages of the story are portrayed, is left alone with an experience that has made the rest of life seem remote and unimportant to her.

But, while the end of the tale is quite different from the end of Measure for Measure and, in a way, much more realistic, the Shakespearean vitality, that forces its way into Robert's speech about death, continues to affect Crabbe's writing. He is concerned not only with violent actions, but also with strong and passionate feelings, and he renders these feelings in the verse. The passages in which he describes the night on which the final disaster takes place are some of the most vivid and imaginative that he ever wrote, and they link up with and image the state of mind of the characters. When Robert and his companions decide to go poaching once more, Crabbe sets his scene thus:

It was a night such bold desires to move:
Strong winds and wintry torrents fill'd the grove;
The crackling boughs that in the forest fell,
The cawing rooks, the cur's affrighten'd yell,
The scenes above the wood, the floods below,
Were mix'd, and none the single sound could know;
‘Loud blow the blasts’, they cried, ‘and call us as they blow’.

(ll. 472-8)

And when Rachel, awakening from a dream of murder, sets off into the woods to discover what is happening, her terrors and uncertainties are reflected in the scene:

The moon was risen, and it sometimes shone
Through thick white clouds, that flew tumultuous on,
Passing beneath her with an eagle's speed,
That her soft light imprison'd and then freed;
The fitful glimmering through the hedge-row green
Gave a strange beauty to the changing scene;
And roaring winds and rushing waters lent
Their mingled voice that to the spirit went.

(ll. 559-66)

In the end, Crabbe being Crabbe, the tale makes its moral points that the game laws are too hard, that poaching is wrong and that, ‘'Tis wisdom to be good, 'tis virtue to obey’. But before this conclusion is arrived at he comes closer to tragedy than he does almost anywhere else in his work, and especially in the way in which he creates a sense of tumult and storm in the elements, imaging and running parallel to the tumult and storm in the minds of his characters. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the Shakespearean afflatus, pouring in through Robert's speech on death, liberated Crabbe's imagination and enabled it to rise well above its usual level.

Notes

1. Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker, Oxford, 1900, Vol. I, p. 99.

2. The Cenci, V, iv, 48-60.

3. See ‘Silford Hall’, Posthumous Tales, Tale I, ll. 135-40.

4. Poems by George Crabbe, ed. A. W. Ward, Cambridge, 1905-7, Vol. I, p. 282. All subsequent quotations from Crabbe's works are taken from this edition.

5. R. Huchon, George Crabbe and His Times, London, 1907, p. 310.

6. Ibid., p. 459.