BOOK CARD Please keep this card in book pocket 9 r "s J [ J? 3 — 3 Ji- t' — X- °" 3 I J I If ^ 7 » gs I- ft 2< THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA ENDOWED BY THB DIALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC SOCIETIES M PR^70 .E81+ hlSK.^ ft ' * T CHAPEL HILL I 00014405280 This book is due at the LOUIS R. WILSON LIBRAR.Y on the last date stamped under "Date Due." If not on hold it may be renewed by bringing it to the library. 89f i & ]Wh DATE DUE KIL1 ' Si MMXXflWl I . 1 r THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY UPON HIS PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL OPINIONS EDITED BY PROFESSOR W. G. T. SHEDD IN SEVEN VOLUMES Yol. IV. tfa-s; c LECTURES UPON SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER DRAMATISTS NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1884 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty- three, by Harper & Brothers, in the Clerk s uflicc of the District Court of the SoutheiTi District of New York. NOTES AND LECTURES UPON SHAKESPEARE AND SOME OF THE OLD POETS AND DRAMATISTS WITH OTHER LITERARY REMAINS OF S. T. COLEKIDGE EDITED BY MRS. H. N. COLERIDGE TO JOSEPH HENRY GREEN, ESQ., MEMBER, OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS, THE APPROVED FRIEND OF COLERIDGE ft I)is t)0ltlttt£ IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil http://archive.org/details/completeworksofs04cole ADVERTISEMENT The present publication is for the most part a re-print of volumes i. and ii. of the Literary Remains, first published by my late husband in 1836. It consists in great measure of notes on poetry and dramatic literature, either written by my father's own hand, or taken down by others from his lectures. Of matter re- lating to the drama, and to poetry, however, there was not quite enough to fill a second volume ; I have therefore added to the r3marks on Shakspeare and contemporary dramatists, Dante, Milton, and other poets, some miscellaneous pieces, which, as being critical or on literary subjects, agree generally with the main contents of the volumes. Some of the lectures themselves, though purporting to be on the drama, appear miscellaneous. A.n old reviewer of the Literary Remains inquired how Asiatic and Greek Mythology, the Kabeiri, and the Samothracian Mys- teries came to be treated of in the same discourse with Robinson Crusoe ? — a question which would not have been asked by one who had been acquainted with the author's excursive habits of thought and of speech. His practice in this respect has been several times explained and, in some respects, vindicated by in- telligent disciples, who had perceived the subtle logic of his " ex- haustive and cyclical mode of discoursing." The " Selections from Mr. Coleridge's Literary Correspon- viii ADVERTISEMENT. dence," with the " Historie and Gestes of Maxilian," are repub- lished by permission of the Messrs. Blackwood, to whose Maga- zine they were contributed on their first appearance. Notes of the late Editor are signed Ed., those of the present S. C. The Preface of the original Editor of the Literary Remains is re-print- ed, with the exception of a passage not applicable to the present publication. PREFACE. Mr. Coleridge by his will, dated in September, 1829, author, ized his executor, if he should think it expedient, to publish any of the notes or writing made by him (Mr. 0.) in his books, or any other of his manuscripts or writings, or any letters which should thereafter be collected from, or supplied by, his friends or corres- pondents. Agreeably to this authority, an arrangement was made, under the superintendence of Mr. Green, for the collection of Coleridge's literary remains ; and at the same time the prep- aration for the press of such part of the materials as should con- sist of criticism and general literature, was intrusted to the care of the present Editor. The volume now offered to the public is the first result of that arrangement. It must in any case stand in need of much indulgence from the ingenuous reader ; — multa sw'it condonanda in opere 7] jUEjuvjjodai rbv loyov (ovre yap eg dpxns izapa- ytveodai, vnovvGrd^Eiv re) rd fievroi KscpdXaiov i(j)7], Trpooavaynd&Lv rbv 2a>- Kpdrrj ojuoXoyelv avrovg rov avrov dvdpbg eivat Ko/iudiav nal rpaywdiav krcia- raaBai noulv, ical rbv rex v V roaycpdoTtoLov bvra, nal K-dfiGihizoLbv elvat. Symp. sub fine. 24 GREEK DRAMA. tary restraint of its activity in consequence ; the opposite, there- fore, lies in the apparent abandonment of all definite aim or end, and in the removal of all bounds in the exercise of the mind, — attaining its real end, as an entire contrast, most perfectly, the greater the display is of intellectual wealth squandered in the wantonness of sport without an object, and the more abundant the life and vivacity in the creations of the arbitrary will. The later comedy, even where it was really comic, was doubt- less likewise more comic, the more free it appeared from any fixed aim. Misunderstandings of intention, fruitless struggles of absurd passion, contradictions of temper, and laughable situations there were ; but still the form of the representation itself was serious ; it proceeded as much according to settled laws, and used as much the same means of art, though to a different purpose, as the regular tragedy itself. But in the old comedy the very form it- self is whimsical ; the whole work is one great jest, comprehend- ing a world of jests within it, among which each maintains its own place without seeming to concern itself as to the relation in which it may stand to its fellows. In short, in Sophocles, the constitution of tragedy is monarchical, but such as it existed in elder Greece, limited by laws, and therefore the more venerable, — all the parts adapting and submitting themselves to the majesty of the heroic sceptre : — in Aristophanes, comedy, on the contrary, is poetry in its most democratic form, and it is a fundamental principle with it, rather to risk all the confusion of anarchy, than to destroy the independence and privileges of its individual con- stituents, — place, verse, characters, even single thoughts, con- ceits, and allusions, each turning on the pivot of its own free will. The tragic poet idealizes his characters by giving to the spir- itual part of our nature a more decided preponderance over the animal cravings and impulses, than is met with in real life : the comic poet idealizes his characters by making the animal the governing power, and the intellectual the mere instrument. But as tragedy is not a collection of virtues and perfections, but takes care only that the vices and imperfections shall spring from the passions, errors, and prejudices which arise out of the soul ; — so neither is comedy a mere crowd of vices and follies, but whatever qualities it represents, even though they are in a certain sense amiable, it still displays them as having their origin in some de- GREEK DRAMA. 25 pendence on our lower nature, accompanied with a defect in true freedom of spirit and self-subsistence, and subject to that uncon- nection by contradictions of the inward being, to which all folly is owing. The ideal of earnest poetry consists in the union and harmoni- ous melting down, and fusion of the sensual into the spiritual, — of man as an animal into man as a power of reason and self- government. And this we have represented to us most clearly in the plastic art, or statuary ; where the perfection of outward form is a symbol of the perfection of an inward idea ; where the body is wholly penetrated by the soul, and spiritualized even to a state of glory, and like a transparent substance, the matter, in its own nature darkness, becomes altogether a vehicle and fixure of light, a mean of developing its beauties, and unfolding its wealth of various colors without disturbing its unity, or causing a division of the parts. The sportive ideal, on the contrary, con- sists in the perfect harmony and concord of the higher nature, with the animal, as with its ruling principle and its acknowl- edged regent. The understanding and practical reason are rep- resented as the willing slaves of the senses and appetites, and of the passions arising out of them. Hence we may admit the ■ appropriateness to the old comedy, as a work of defined art, of allusions and descriptions, which morality can never justify, and, only with reference to the author himself, and only as being the effect or rather the cause of the circumstances in which he wrote, can consent even to palliate. (4) The old comedy rose to its perfection in Aristophanes, and in him also it died with the freedom of Greece. Then arose a species of drama, more fitly called, dramatic entertainment than comedy, but of which, nevertheless, our modern comedy (Shak- speare's altogether excepted) is the genuine descendant. Euri- pides had already brought tragedy lower down and by many steps nearer to the real world than his predecessors had ever done, and the passionate admiration which Menander and Phile- mon expressed for him, and their open avowals that he was their great master, entitle us to consider their dramas as of a middle species, between tragedy and comedy, — not the tragi-comedy, or thing of heterogeneous parts, but a complete whole, founded on principles of its own. Throughout we find the drama of Menan- der distinguishing itself from tragedy, but not, as the genuine old vol. iv. B 2G GREEK DRAMA. comedy, contrasting with, and opposing it. Tragedy, indeed, carried the thoughts into the mythologic world, in order to raise the emotions, the fears, and the hopes, which convince the in- most heart that their final cause is not to be discovered in the limits of mere mortal life, and force us into a presentiment, how- ever dim, of a state in which those struggles of inward free will with outward necessity, which form the true subject of the trage- dian, shall be reconciled and solved ; — the entertainment or new comedy, on the other hand, remained within the circle of experi- ence. Instead of the tragic destiny, it introduced the power of chance ; even in the few fragments of Menander and Philemon now remaining to us, we find many exclamations and reflections concerning chance and fortune, as in the tragic poets concerning destiny. In tragedy, the moral law, either as obeyed or violated, above all consequences — its own maintenance or violation consti- tuting the most important of all consequences — forms the ground ; the new comedy, and our modern comedy in general (Shakspeare excepted as before), lies in prudence or imprudence, enlightened or misled self-love. The whole moral system of the entertain- ment exactly like that of fable, consists in rules of prudence, with an exquisite conciseness, and at the same time an exhaustive ful- ness of sense. An old critic said that tragedy Avas the flight or elevation of life, comedy (that of Menander) its arrangement or ordonnance. (5) Add to these features a portrait-like truth of character, — not so far indeed as that a bona fide individual should be described or imagined, but yet so that the features which give interest and permanence to the class should be individualized. The old tra- gedy moved in an ideal world, — the old comedy in a fantastic world. As the entertainment, or new comedy, restrained the creative activity both of the fancy and the imagination, it in- demnified the understanding in appealing to the judgment, for the probability of the scenes represented. The ancients themselves acknowledged the new comedy as an exact copy of real life. The grammarian, Aristophanes, somewhat affectedly exclaimed : "0 Life and Menander, which of you two imitated the other ?" In short, the form of this species of drama was poetry, the ituff or matter was prose. It was prose rendered delightful by the blandishments and measured motions of the muse. Yet even this was not universal. The mimes of Sophron, so passionately admired GREEK DRAMA. 27 by Plato, were written in prose, and were scenes out of real life conducted in dialogue. The exquisite Feast of Adonis (Zvquxoikjioci 9i 'Adwvi&'rovaui) in Theocritus, we are told, with some others of his eclogues, were close imitations of certain mimes of Sophron — free translations of the prose into hexameters. (6) It will not be improper, in this place, to make a few remarks on the remarkable character and functions of the chorus in the Greek tragic drama. The chorus entered from below, close by the orchestra, and there, pacing to and fro during the choral odes, performed their solemn measured dance. In the centre of the orchestra, directly over against the middle of the scene, there stood an elevation with steps in the shape of a large altar, as high as the boards of the logeion or movable stage. This elevation was named the thymele (dviAilrj), and served to recall the origin and original purpose of the chorus, as an altar-song in honor of the presiding deity. Here, and on these steps, the persons of the chorus sate collectively, when they were not singing ; attending to the dia- logue as spectators, and acting as (what in truth they were) the ideal representatives of the real audience, and of the poet him- self in his own character, assuming the supposed impressions made by the drama, in order to direct and rule them. But when the chorus itself formed part of the dialogue, then the leader of the band, the foreman or coryphceus, ascended, as some think, the level summit of the thymele, in order to com- mand the stage, or, perhaps, the whole chorus advanced to the front of the orchestra, and thus put themselves in ideal connec- tion, as it were, with the dramatis personce there acting. This thymele was in the centre of the whole edifice, all the measure- ments were calculated, and the semicircle of the amphitheatre was drawn, from this point. It had a double use, a two-fold purpose ; it constantly reminded the spectators of the origin of tragedy as a religious service, and declared itself as the ideal representative of the audience by having its place exactly in the point, to which all the radii from the different seats or benches converged. (7) In this double character, as constituent parts, and yet at the same time as spectators, of the drama, the chorus could not but tend to enforce the unity of place ; — not on the score of any sup- posed improbability, which the understanding or common sense 28 GREEK DRAMA. might detect in a change of place ; — but because the s>v)r.ses them selves put it out of the power of any imagination to conceive a place coming to and going away from the persons, instead of the persons changing their place. Yet there are instances in which, during the silence of the chorus, the poets have hazarded this by a change in that part of the scenery which represented the more distant objects to the eye of the spectator — a demonstrative proof, that this alternately extolled and ridiculed unity (as ignorantly ridiculed as extolled) was grounded on no essential principle of reason, but arose out of circumstances which the poet could not remove, and therefore took up into the form of the drama, and co-organized it with all the other parts into a living whole. (8) The Greek tragedy may rather be compared to our serious opera than to the tragedies of Shakspeare ; nevertheless, the difference is far greater than the likeness. In the opera all is subordinated to the music, the dresses and the scenery ; — the poetry is a mere vehicle for articulation, and as little pleasure is lost by ignorance of the Italian language, so is little gained by the knowledge of it. But in the Greek drama all was but as in- struments and accessories to the poetry ; and hence we should form a better notion of the choral music from the solemn hymns and psalms of austere church music than from any species of theatrical singing. A single flute or pipe was the ordinary ac- companiment ; and it is not to be supposed, that any display of musical power was allowed to obscure the distinct hearing of the words. On the contrary, the evident purpose was to render the words more audible, and to secure by the elevations and pauses greater facility of understanding the poetry. For the choral songs are, and ever must have been, the most difficult part of the tragedy ; there occur in them the most involved verbal com- pounds, the newest expressions, the boldest images, the most rec- ondite allusions. Is it credible that the poets would, one and all, have been thus prodigal of the stores of art and genius, if they had known that in the representation the whole must have been lost to the audience, — at a time too when the means of after-publication were so difficult and expensive, and the copies of their works so slowly and narrowly circulated ? (9) The masks also must be considered — their vast variety and admirable workmanship. Of this we retain proof by the marble masks which represented them ; but tc this in the real mask we PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA. 29 must add the thinness of the substance and the exquisite fitting on to the head of the actor ; so that not only were the very eyes painted with a single opening left for the pupil of the actor's eye, but in some instances, even the iris itself was painted, when the color was a known characteristic of the divine or heroic per- sonage represented. (10) Finally, I will note down those fundamental characteristics which contra-distinguish the ancient literature from the modern generally, but which more especially appear in prominence in the tragic drama. The ancient was allied to statuary, the mod- ern refers to painting. In the first there is a predominance of rhythm and melody, in the second of harmony and counterpoint. The Greeks idolized the finite, and therefore were the masters of all grace, elegance, proportion, fancy, dignity, majesty — of what- 2ver, in short, is capable of being definitely conveyed by defined forms or thoughts : the moderns revere the infinite, and affect the indefinite as a vehicle of the infinite ; — hence their passions, their obscure hopes and fears, their wandering through the unknown, their grander moral feelings, their more august conception of man as man, their future rather than their past — in a word, their sub- limity. (11) PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA. Let two persons join in the same scheme to ridicule a third, and either take advantage of, or invent, some story for that pur- pose, and mimicry will have already produced a sort of rude comedy. It becomes an inviting treat to the populace, and gains an additional zest and burlesque by following the already established plan of tragedy ; and the first man of genius who seizes the idea, and reduces it into form, — into a work of art, — by metre and music, is the Aristophanes of the country. How just this account is will appear from the fact that in the first or old comedy of the Athenians, most of the dramatis per- sons were living characters introduced under their own names ; and no doubt, their ordinary dress, manner, person and voice were closely mimicked. In less favorable states of society, as that of England in the middle ages, the beginnings of comedy would be constantly taking place from the mimics and satirical minstrels : but from want of fixed abode, popular government, 30 PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA. and the succjisive attendance of the same auditors, it would still remain in embryo. I shall, perhaps, have occasion to observe that this remark is not without importance in explaining the es- sential differences of the modern and ancient theatres. Phenomena, similar to those which accompanied the origin of tragedy and comedy among the Greeks, would take place among the Romans much more slowly, and the drama would, in any case, have much longer remained in its first irregular form from the character of the people, their continual engagements in wars of conquest, the nature of their government, and their rapidly increasing empire. But, however this might have been, the conquest of Greece precluded both the process and the necessity of it ; and the Roman stage at once presented imitations or trans- lations of the Greek drama. This continued till the perfect es- tablishment of Christianity. Some attempts, indeed, were made to adapt the persons of Scriptural or ecclesiastical history to the drama ; and sacred plays, it is probable, were not unknown in Constantinople under the emperors of the East. The first of the kind is, I believe, the only one preserved, — namely, the Xgtaiog Iluo/hiv, or " Christ in his sufferings," by Gregory ]N"azianzen, — possibly written in consequence of the prohibition of profane liter- ature to the Christians by the apostate Julian.* In the "West, however, the enslaved and debauched Roman world became too barbarous for any theatrical exhibitions more refined than those of pageants and chariot-races ; while the spirit of Christianity, which in its most corrupt form still breathed general humanity, whenever controversies of faith were not concerned, had done away the cruel combats of the gladiators, and the loss of the dis- tant provinces prevented the possibility of exhibiting the engage- ments of wild beasts. I pass, therefore, at once to the feudal ages which soon suc- ceeded, confining my observation to this country ; though, indeed, the same remark with very few alterations will apply to all the other states, into which the great empire was broken. Ages of darkness succeeded ; — not, indeed, the darkness of Russia or of the barbarous lands unconquered by Rome ; for from the time of Honorius to the destruction of Constantinople and the consequent introduction of ancient literature into Europe, there was a contin- * A.D. 363. But I believe the prevailing opinion amongst scholars now is, that the Xpiorbg Tluax^v is not genuine. — Ed. PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA. 31 ued succession of individual intellects ; — the golden chain was never wholly broken, though the connecting links were often of baser metal. A dark cloud, like another sky, covered the entire cope of heaven, — but in this place it thinned away, and white stains of light showed a half-eclipsed star behind it, — in that place it was rent asunder, and a star passed across the opening in all its brightness, and then vanished. Such stars exhibited them- selves only ; surrounding objects did not partake of their light. There were deep wells of knowledge, but no fertilizing rills and rivulets. For the drama, society was altogether a state of chaos, out of which it was, for a while at least, to proceed anew, as if there had been none before it. And yet it is not undelightful to contemplate the eduction of good from evil. The ignorance of the great mass of our countrymen was the efficient cause of the reproduction of the drama ; and the preceding darkness and the returning light were alike necessary in order to the creation of a Shakspeare. + The drama recommenced in England, as it first began in Greece, in religion. The people were not able to read, — the priesthood were unwilling that they should read ; and yet their own interest compelled them not to leave the people wholly ig- norant of the great events of sacred history. They did that, therefore, by scenic representations, which in after-ages it has been attempted to do in Roman Catholic countries by pictures. They presented Mysteries, and often at great expense ; and rel- iques of this system still remain in the south of Europe, and in- deed throughout Italy, where at Christmas the convents and the great nobles rival each other in the scenic representation of the birth of Christ and its circumstances. I heard two. instances mentioned to me at different times, one in Sicily and the other in Rome, of noble devotees, the ruin of whose fortunes was said to have commenced in the extravagant expense which had been incurred in presenting the prcesepe or manger. But these Mys- teries, in order to answer their design, must not only be instruc- tive, but entertaining ; and as, when they became so, the people began to take pleasure in acting them themselves — in interloping, — (against which the priests seem to have fought hard and yet in vain) the most ludicrous images were mixed with the most awful personations ; and whatever the subject might be, however sub* lime, however pathetic, yet the Vice and the Devil, who are the 32 PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA. genuine antecessors of Harlequin and the Clown, were necessary component parts. I have myself a piece of this kind which I transcribed a few years ago at Helmstadt, in Germany, on the education of Eve's children, in which after the fall and repent- ance of Adam, the offended Maker, as in proof of his reconcilia- tion, condescends to visit them, and to catechize the children, — who with a noble contempt of chronology are all brought togethel from Abel to Noah. The good children say the ten Command- ments, the Belief and the Lord's Prayer; but Cain and his rout, after he had received a box on the ear for not taking off his hat, and afterwards offering his left hand, is prompted by the devil so to blunder in the Lord's Prayer as to reverse the petitions and say it backward !* Unaffectedly I declare I feel pain at repetitions like these, however innocent. As historical documents they are valuable ; but I am sensible that what I can read with my eye with perfect innocence, \ can not without inward fear and misgivings pro nounce with my tongue. Let me, however, be acquitted of presumption if I say that I can not agree with Mr. Malone, that our ancestors did not per ceive the ludicrous in these things, or that they paid no separate attention to the serious and comic parts. Indeed his own state- ment contradicts it. For what purpose should the Vice leap upon the Devil's back and belabor him, but to produce this sepa- rate attention ? The people laughed heartily, no doubt. Nor can I conceive any meaning attached to the words " separate at- tention," that is not fully answered by one part of an exhibition exciting seriousness or pity, and the other raising mirth and loud laughter. That they felt no impiety in the affair is most true. For it is the very essence of that system of Christian polytheism, which in all its essentials is now fully as gross in Spain, in Sicily and the south of Italy, as it ever was in England in the days of Henry VI. — (nay, more so, for a "WiclifFe had not then appeared only, but scattered the good seed widely), it is an essential part, 1 say, of that system to draw the mind wholly from its own inward whispers and quiet discriminations, and to habituate the con- science to pronounce sentence in every case according to the es- tablished verdicts of the church and the casuists. I have looked * See pp. 238, 239, where this is told more at length and attributed tc Hans Sachs. — Ed PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA. 33 through volume after volume of the most approved casuists, and still I find disquisitions whether this or that act is right, and under what circumstances, to a minuteness that makes reasoning ridiculous, and of a callous and unnatural immodesty, to which none but a monk could harden himself, Avho has been stripped of all the tender charities of life, yet is goaded on to make war against them by the unsubdued hauntings of our meaner nature, even as dogs are said to get the hydrophobia from excessive thirst. I fully believe that our ancestors laughed as heartily, as their posterity do at Grimaldi ; — and not having been told that they would be punished for laughing, they thought it very innocent ; and if their priests had left out murder in the catalogue of their prohibitions (as indeed they did under certain circumstances of heresy), the greater part of them, — the moral instincts common to all men having been smothered and kept from development, — would have thought as little of murder. However this may be, the necessity of at once instructing and gratifying the people produced the great distinction between the Greek and the English theatres ; — for to this we must attribute tho origin of tragi-comedy, or a representation of human events more lively, nearer the truth, and permitting a larger field of moral instruction, a more ample exhibition of the recesses of the human heart, under all the trials and circumstances that most concern us, than was known or guessed at by iEschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides ; — and at the same time we learn to account for, and — relatively to the author — perceive the necessity of, the Fool or Clown, or both, as the substitutes of the Vice and the Devil, which our ancestors had been so accustomed to see in every ex- hibition of the stage, that they could not feel any performance perfect without them. Even to this day in Italy, every opera — (even Metastasio obeyed the claim throughout) — must have six characters, generally two pairs of cross lovers, a tyrant and a con- fidant, or a father and two confidants, themselves lovers ; — and when a new opera appears, it is the universal fashion to ask — which is the tyrant, which the lover ? &c. It is the especial honor of Christianity, that in its worst and most corrupted form it can not wholly separate itself from morality ; — whereas the other religions in their best form (I do not include Mohammedanism, which is only an anomalous corrup- tion of Christianity, like Swedenborgianism), have no connection 34 PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA. with it. The very impersonation of moral evil under the name of Vice, facilitated all other impersonations ; and hence we see that the Mysteries were succeeded by Moralities, or dialogues and plots of allegorical personages. Again, some character in real history had become so famous, so proverbial, as Nero for instance, that they were introduced instead of the moral quality, for which they were so noted ; — and in this manner the stage was moving on to the absolute production of heroic and comic real characters, when the restoration of literature, followed by the ever-blessed Reformation, let in upon the kingdom not Only new knowledge, but new motive. A useful rivalry commenced between the me- tropolis on the one hand, the residence, independently of the court and nobles, of the most active and stirring spirits who had not been regularly educated, or who, from mischance or other- wise, had forsaken the beaten track of preferment, — and the universities on the other. The latter prided themselves on their closer approximation to the ancient rules and ancient regularity — taking the theatre of Greece, or rather its dim reflection, the rhetorical tragedies of the poet Seneca, as a perfect ideal, without any critical collation of the times, origin, or circumstances ; — whilst, in the meantime, the popular writers, who could not, and would not abandon what they had found to delight their coun- trymen sincerely, and not merely from inquiries first put to the recollection of rules, and answered in the affirmative, as if it had been an arithmetical sum, did yet borrow from the scholars whatever they advantageously could, consistently with their own peculiar means of pleasing. And here let me pause for a moment's contemplation of this interesting subject. We call, for we see and feel, the swan and the dove both transcendently beautiful. As absurd as it would be to institute a comparison between their separate claims to beauty from any abstract rule common to both, without reference to the life and being of the animals themselves, — or as if, having first seen the dove, we abstracted its outlines, gave them a false generalization, called them the principles or ideal of bird-beauty, and then pro- ceeded to criticize the swan or the eagle ; — not less absurd is it to pass judgment on the works of a poet on the mere ground that they have been called by the same class-name with the works of other poets in other times and circumstances, or on any ground PROGRESS OF THE DRAMa, 35 indeed, save that of their inappropriateness to their own eni and being, their want of significance, as symbols or physiognomy. ! few have there been among critics, who have followed with the eye of the imagination the imperishable yet ever wandering spirit of poetry through its various metempsychoses, and conse- quent metamorphoses ; or who have rejoiced in the light of clear perception at beholding with each new birth, with each rare avatar, the human race frame to itself a new body, by assimila- ting materials of nourishment out of its new circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power appropriate to the new sphere of its motion and activity! (d) 1 have before spoken of the Romance, or the language formed out of the decayed Roman and the Northern tongues ; and com- paring it with the Latin, we find it less perfect in simplicity and relation — the privileges of a language formed by the mere attrac- tion of homogeneous parts ; — but yet more rich, more expressive and various, as one formed by more obscure affinities out of a chaos of apparently heterogeneous atoms. As more than a metaphor, — as an analogy of this, I have named the true genu ine modern poetry the romantic ; and the works of Shakspeare are romantic poetry revealing itself in the drama. If the trage- dies of Sophocles are in the strict sense of the word tragedies, and the comedies of Aristophanes comedies, we must emancipate our- selves from a false association arising from misapplied names, and find a new word for the plays of Shakspeare. For they are, in the ancient sense, neither tragedies nor comedies, nor both in one, — but a different genus, diverse in kind, and not merely dif- ferent in degree. They may be called romantic dramas, or dramatic romances, (e) A deviation from the simple forms and unities of the ancient stage is an essential principle, and, of course, an appropriate ex- cellence, of the romantic drama. For these unities were to a great extent the natural form of that which in its elements was homogeneous, and the representation of which was addressed pre- eminently to the outward senses ; — and though the fable, the lan- guage and the characters appealed to the reason rather than to the mere understanding, inasmuch as they supposed an ideal state rather than referred to an existing reality — yet it was a reason which was obliged to accommodate itself to the senses, and so far became a sort of more elevated understanding. On the other 36 PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA. hand, the romantic poetry — the Shaksperian drama — appealed to the imagination rather than to the senses, and to the reason as contemplating our inward nature, and the workings of the pas- sions in their most retired recesses. But the reason, as reason, is independent of time and space ; it has nothing to do with them : and hence the certainties of reason have been called eternal 1 ruths. As for example — the endless properties of the circle ; — what connection have they with this or that age, with this or that country ? — The reason is aloof from time and space ; the imagination is an arbitrary controller over both ; — and if only the poet have such power of exciting our internal emotions as to make us present to the scene in imagination chiefly, he acquires the right and privilege of using time and space as they exist in ima- gination, and obedient only to the laws by which the imagination itself acts (/). These laws it will be my object and aim to point out as the examples occur, which illustrate them. But here let me remark what can never be too often reflected on by all who would intelligently study the works either of the Athenian dram- atists, or of Shakspeare, that the very essence of the former con- sists in the sternest separation of the diverse in kind and the dis- parate in the degree, whilst the latter delights in interlacing, by a rainbow-like transfusion of hues, the one with the other. And here it will be necessary to say a few words on the stage and on stage-illusion. A theatre, in the widest sense of the word, is the general term for all places of amusement through the ear or eye, in which men assemble in order to be amused by some entertainment presented to all at the same time and in common. Thus, an old Puritan divine says : — " Those who attend public worship and sermons only to amuse themselves, make a theatre of the church, and turn God's house into the devil's. Theatra cedes diabolola- tricai" The most important and dignified species of this genus is, doubtless, the stage (res theatralis histrionica), which, in ad- dition to the generic definition above given, maybe characterized in its idea, or according to what it does, or ought to, aim at, as a combination of several or of all the fine arts in an harmonious whole, having a distinct end of its own, to which the peculiar end of each of the component arts, taken separately, is made subordi- nate and subservient- — that, namely, of imitating reality — wheth« er external things, actions, or passions — under a semblance of re* PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA. 87 ality. Thus, Claude imitates a landscape at sunset, but only aa a picture ; while a forest-scene is not presented to the spectators as a picture, but as a forest; and though, in the full sense of the word, we are no more deceived by the one than by the other, yet are our feelings very differently affected ; and the pleasure de- rived from the one is nof composed of the same elements as that afforded by the other, even on the supposition that the quantum of both were equal. In the former, a picture, it is a condition of all genuine delight that we should not be deceived ; in the latter, stage-scenery (inasmuch as its principal end is not in or for itself, as is the case in a picture, but to be an assistance and means to an end out of itself), its very purpose is to produce as much illu- sion as its nature permits. These, and all other stage presenta- tions, are to produce a sort of temporary half-faith, which the spectator encourages in himself and supports by a voluntary con- tribution on his own part, because he knows that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is. I have often ob- served that little children are actually deceived by stage-scenery, never by pictures ; though even these produce an effect on their impressible minds, which they do not on the minds of adults. The child, if strongly impressed, does not indeed positively think the picture to be the reality ; but yet he does not think the con- trary. As Sir George Beaumont was showing me a very fine engraving from Rubens, representing a storm at sea without any vessel or boat introduced, my little boy, then about five years old, came dancing and singing into the room, and all at once (if I may so say) tumbled in upon the print. He instantly started, stood silent and motionless, with the strongest expression, first of wonder and then of grief in his eyes and countenance, and at length said, " And where is the ship ? But that is sunk, and the men are all drowned !" still keeping his eyes fixed on the print Now what pictures are to little children, stage illusion is to men, provided they retain any part of the child's sensibility ; except, that in the latter instance, the suspension of the act of comparison, which permits this sort of negative belief, is somewhat more as- sisted by the will, than in that of a child respecting a picture. The true stage-illusion in this and in all other things consists— not in the mind's judging it to be a forest, but, in its remission of the judgment that it is not a forest. And this subject of stage- illusion is so important, and so many practical errors and false 88 PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA. criticisms may arise, and indeed have arisen, either from reason- ing on it as actual delusion (the strange notion, on which the French critics built up their theory, and on which the French poets justify the construction of their tragedies), or from denying it altogether (which seems the end of Dr. Johnson's reasoning, and which, as extremes meet, would lead to the very same conse- quences, by excluding whatever would not be judged probable by us in our coolest state of feeling, with all our faculties in even balance), that these few remarks will, I hope, be pardoned, if they should serve either to explain or to illustrate the point. For not only are we never absolutely deluded — or any thing like it, but the attempt to cause the highest delusion possible to beings in their senses sitting in a theatre, is a gross fault, incident only to low minds, which, feeling that they can not affect the heart or head permanently, endeavor to call forth the momentary affec- tions. There ought never to be more pain than is compatible with co-existing pleasure, and to be amply repaid by thought. Shakspeare found the infant stage demanding an intermixture of ludicrous character as imperiously as that of Greece did the chorus, and high language accordant. And there are many ad- vantages in this ; — a greater assimilation to nature, a greater scope of power, more truths, and more feelings ; — the effects of contrast, as in Lear and the Fool ; and especially this, that the true language of passion becomes sufficiently elevated by your having previously heard, in the same piece, the lighter conversa- tion of men under no strong emotion. The very nakedness of the stage, too, was advantageous — for the drama thence became something between a recitation and a re-presentation ; and the absence or paucity of scenes allowed a freedom from the laws of unity of place and unity of time, the observance of which must either confine the drama to as few subjects as may be counted on the fingers, or involve gross improbabilities, far more striking than the violation would have caused. Thence, also, was pre- cluded the danger of a false ideal — of aiming at more than what is possible on the whole. "What play of the ancients, with refer- ence to their ideal, does not hold out more glaring absurdities than any in Shakspeare ? On the Greek plan a man could more easily be a poet than a dramatist ; upon our plan more easily a drama- tist than a poet. THE DRAMA GENERALLY. 39 THE DRAMA GENERALLY, AND PUBLIC TASTE. Unaccustomed to address such an audience, and having lost by a long interval of confinement the advantages of my former short schooling, I had miscalculated in my last Lecture the pro- portion of my matter to my time, and by bad economy and un- skilful management, the several heads of rny discourse failed in making the entire performance correspond with the promise pub- licly circulated in the weekly annunciation of the subjects, to be treated. It would indeed have been wiser in me, and perhaps better on the whole, if I had caused my Lectures to be announ- ced only as continuations of the main subject. But if I be, as perforce I must be, gratified by the recollection of whatever has appeared to give you pleasure, I am conscious of something bet- ter, though less flattering, a sense of unfeigned gratitude for your forbearance with my defects. Like affectionate guardians, you see without disgust the awkwardness, and witness with sympathy the growing pains, of a youthful endeavor, and look forward with a hope, which is its own reward, to the contingent results of practice — to its intellectual maturity. In my last address I defined poetry to be the art, or whatever better term our language may afford, of representing external nature and human thoughts, both relatively to human affections, so as to cause the production of as great immediate pleasure in each part as is compatible with the largest possible sum of pleas- ure on the whole. Now this definition applies equally to paint- ing and music as to poetry ; and in truth the term poetry is alike applicable to all three. The vehicle alone constitutes the differ- ence ; and the term ' poetry' is rightly applied by eminence to measured words, only because the sphere of their action is far wider, the power of giving permanence to them much more cer- tain, and incomparably greater the facility, by which men, not defective by nature or disease, may be enabled to derive habitual pleasure and instruction from them. , On my mentioning these considerations to a painter of great genius, who had been, from a most honorable enthusiasm, extolling his own art, he was so struck with their truth, that he exclaimed, "I want no other ar- guments ; — poetry, that is, verbal poetry, must be the greatest ; all that proves final causes in the world, proves this ; it would 40 THE DRAMA GENERALLY, be shocking to tliink otherwise !" — And in truth, deeply, ! far more than words can express, as I venerate the Last Judgment and the Prophets of Michel Angelo Buonaroti, — yet the very pain which I repeatedly felt as I lost myself in gazing upon them, the painful consideration that their having been painted in fresco was the sole cause that they had not been abandoned to all the accidents of a dangerous transportation to a distant capi- tal, and that the same caprice which made the Neapolitan sol- diery destroy all the exquisite masterpieces on the walls of the church of the Trinitado Mcnte, after the retreat of their antag- onist barbarians, might as easily have made vanish the rooms and open gallery of Raffael, and the yet more unapproachable wonders of the sublime Florentine in the Sixtine Chapel, forced upon my mind the reflection : How grateful the human race ought to be that the works of Euclid, Newton, Plato, Milton, Shakspeare, are not subjected to similar contingencies, — that they and their .fellows, and the great, though inferior, peerage of undying intellect, are secured ; — secured even from a second ir- ruption of Goths and Yandals, in addition to many other safe- guards, by the vast empire of English language, laws, and reli- gion founded in America, through the overflow of the power and the virtue of my country ; — and that now the great and certain works of genuine fame can only cease to act for mankind, when men themselves cease to be men, or when the planet on which they exist, shall have altered its relations, or have ceased to be Lord Bacon, in the language of the gods, if I may use an Ho meric phrase, has expressed a similar thought : — Lastly, leaving the vulgar arguments, that by learning man excelleth man in that wherein man excelleth beasts ; that by learning man ascendeth to the heavens and their motions, where in body he can not come, and the like ; let us conclude with the dignity and excellency of knowledge and learning in that whereunto man's nature doth most aspire, which is, im- mortality or continuance : for to this tendeth generation, and raising houses and families ; to this tend buildings, foundations, and monuments ; to this tendeth the desire of memory, fame, and celebration, and in effect the strength of all other human desires. We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hauds. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty -five hun- dred years, or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter ; during which time, infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been decayed and demol- ished ? It is not possible to have the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Coesar ; no, nor of the kings or great personages of mu'^h later AND PUBLIC TASTE. 41 years ; for tlie originals can not last, and the copies can not but lose of the life and truth. But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renova- tion. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing in- finite actions and opinions in succeeding ages : so that, if the invention of the sbip was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits ; how much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other ?* But let us now consider what the drama should be. And first, it is not a copy, but an imitation, of nature. This is the universal principle of the fine arts. In all well laid out grounds what delight do we feel from that balance and antithesis of feel- ings and thoughts ! Hoipv natural ! we say ; — but the very won- der which caused the exclamation, implies that we perceived art at the same moment. "We catch the hint from nature itself. Whenever in mountains or cataracts we discover a likeness to any thing artificial which yet we know is not artificial — what pleas- ure ! And so it is in appearances known to be artificial, which appear to be natural. This applies in due degrees, regulated by steady good sense, from a clump of trees to the Paradise Lost or Othello. It would be easy to apply it to painting, and even, though with greater abstraction of thought, and by more subtle yet equally just analogies — to music. But this belongs to others ; suffice it that one great principle is common to all the fine arts, a principle which probably is the condition of all consciousness, without which we should feel and imagine only by discontinuous moments, and be plants or brute animals instead of men ; — I mean that ever-varying balance, or balancing, of images, no- tions, or feelings, conceived as in opposition to each other ; — in short, the perception of identity and contrariety ; the least de- gree of which constitutes likeness, the greatest absolute diffci- erice ; but the infinite gradations between these two form all the play and all the interest of our intellectual and moral being, till it leads us to a feeling and an object more awful than it seems to me compatible with even the present subject to utter aloud ; though I am most desirous to suggest it. For there alone are all things at once different and the same ; there alone, as the prin- * Advancement of Learning, book 1. subjine. 42 ciple of all things, does distinction exist unaided by division. , there are will and reason, succession of time and unmoving eter- nity, infinite change and ineffable rest ! — Return, Alpheus ! the dread voice is past Which shrunk thy streams ! Thou honor'd flood, Smooth-flowi7ig Avon, crown'd -with vocal reeds, That strain I heard was of a higher mood ! — But now my voice proceeds. We may divide a dramatic poet's characteristics before we enter into the component merits of any one work, and with refer- ence only to those things which arc to be the materials of all, into language, passion, and character ; always bearing in mind that these must act and react on each other, — the language in- spired by the passion, and the language and the passion modified and differenced by the character. To the production of the high- est excellences in these three, there are requisite in the mind of the author ; — good sense ; talent ; sensibility ; imagination ; — and to the perfection of a work we should add two faculties of lesser importance, yet necessary for the ornaments and foliage of the column and the roof — fancy and a quick sense of beauty. As to language ; — it can not be supposed that the poet should make his characters say all that they would, or that, his whole drama considered, each scene, or paragraph should be such as, on cool examination, we can conceive it likely that men in such situations would say, in that order, or with that perfection. And yet, according to my feelings, it is a very inferior kind of poetry, in which, as in the French tragedies, men are made to talk in a style which few indeed even of the wittiest can be supposed to converse in, and which both is, and on a moment's reflection appears to be, the natural produce of the hot-bed of vanity, namely, the closet of an author, who is actuated originally by a desire to excite surprise and wonderment at his own superiority to other men, — instead of having felt so deeply on certain sub- jects, or in consequence of certain imaginations, as to make it almost a necessity of his nature to seek for sympathy, — no doubt, with that honorable desire of permanent action which distin- guishes genius. — Where then is the difference ? — In this, that each part should be proportionate, though the whole may be per- AND TUBLIC TASTE. 4b haps impossible At all events, it should be compatible with sound sense and logic in the mind of the poet himself. It is to be lamented that we judge of books by books, instead of referring what we read to oar own experience. One great use of books is to make their contents a motive for observation. The German tragedies have in some respects been justly ridiculed. In them the dramatist often becomes a novelist in his directions to the actors, and thus degrades tragedy into pantomime. Yet still the consciousness of the poet's mind must be diffused over that of the reader or spectator ; but he himself, according to his genius, elevates us, and by being always in keeping, prevents us from perceiving any strangeness, though we feel great exultation. Many different kinds of style may be admirable, both in different men, and in different parts of the same poem. See the different language which strong feelings may justify in Shylock, and learn from Shakspeare's conduct of that character the terrible force of every plain and calm diction, when known to proceed from a resolved and impassioned man. It is especially with reference to the drama, and its character- istics in any given nation, or at any particular period, that the dependence of genius on the public taste becomes a matter of the deepest importance. I do not mean that taste which springs merely from caprice or fashionable imitation, and which, in fact, genius can and by degrees will, create for itself; but that which arises out of wide-grasping and heart-enrooted causes, which is epidemic, and in the very air that all breathe. This it is which kills, or withers, or corrupts. Socrates, indeed, might walk arm and arm with Hygeia, whilst pestilence, with a thousand furies running to and fro, and clashing against each other in a com- plexity and agglomeration of horrors, was shooting her darts of fire and venom all around him. Even such was Milton; yea, and such, in spite of all that has been babbled by his critics in pretended excuse for his damning, because for them too profound excellences, — such was Shakspeare. But alas ! the exceptions prove the rule. For who will dare to force his way out of the crowd, — not of the mere vulgar, — but of the vain and banded aristocracy of intellect, and presume to join the almost supernat- ural beings that stand by themselves aloof? Of this diseased epidemic influence there are two forms es- pecially preclusive of tragic worth. The first is the necessary growth of a sense and love of the ludicrous, and a morbid sensibility of the assimilative power, — an inflammation produced by cold and weakness, — which in the boldest burst of passion will lie in wait for a jeer at any phrase, that may have an accidental coin- cidence in the mere words with something base or trivial. For instance, — to express woods, not on a plain, but clothing a hill, which overlooks a valley, or dell, or river, or the sea, — the trees rising one above another, as the spectators in an ancient theatre, — I know no other word in our language (bookish and pedantic terms out of the question) but hanging woods, the sylvcs super- impendentes of Catullus ; # yet let some wit call out in a slang tone, — "the gallows !" and a peal of laughter would damn the play. Hence it is that so many dull pieces have had a decent run, only because nothing unusual above, or absurd below, medi- ocrity furnished an occasion, — a spark for the explosive materials collected behind the orchestra. But it would take a volume of no ordinary size, however laconically the sense were expressed, if it were meant to instance the effects, and unfold all the causes, of this disposition upon the moral, intellectual, and even physical character of a people, with its influences on domestic life and in- dividual deportment. A good document upon this subject would be the history of Paris society and of French, that is, Parisian, literature from the commencement of the latter half of the reign of Louis XIY. to that of Bonaparte, compared with the preceding philosophy and poetry even of Frenchmen themselves. The second form, or more properly, perhaps, another distinct cause, of this diseased disposition is matter of exultation to the philanthropist and philosopher, and of regret to the poet, the painter, and the statuary alone, and to them only as poets, painters, and statuaries ; — namely, the security, the comparative equability, and ever increasing sameness of human life. Men are now so seldom thrown into wild circumstances, and violences of excite- ment, that the language of such states, the laws of association of feeling with thought, the starts and strange far-flights of the assimilative power on the slightest and least obvious likeness presented by thoughts, words, or objects, — these are all judged of by authority, not by actual experience, — by what men have * Confestim Peneos adest, viridantia Tempe, Tempee, quae cingunt sylvae superimpendentes. EpUh. Pel et Th. 286. AND PUBLIC TASTE. 46 been accustomed to regard as symbols of these states, and not the natural symbols, or self-manifestations of them. Even so it is in the language of man, and in that of nature. The sound sun, or the figures s, %i, n, are purely arbitrary modes of recalling the object, and for visual mere objects they are not only sufficient, but have infinite advantages from their very nothingness per se. But the language of nature is a subordinate Logos, that was in the beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the thing it represented. Now the language of Shakspeare, in his Lear for instance, is a something intermediate between these two ; or rather it is the former blended with the latter, — the arbitrary, not merely recall- ing the cold notion of the thing, but expressing the reality of it, and, as arbitrary language is an heirloom of the human race, being itself a part of that which it manifests. "What shall I de- duce from the preceding positions ? Even this, — the appropriate, the never to be too much valued advantage of the theatre, if only the actors were what we know they have been, — a delightful, yet most effectual remedy for this dead palsy of the public mind. What would appear mad or ludicrous in a book, when presented to the senses under the form of reality, and with the truth of na- ture, supplies, a species of actual experience. This is indeed the special privilege of a great actor over a great poet. No part was ever played in perfection, but nature justified herself in the hearts of all her children, in what state soever they were, short of abso- lute moral exhaustion, or downright stupidity. There is no time given to ask questions, or to pass judgments ; we are taken by storm, and, though in the histrionic art many a clumsy counter- feit, by caricature of one or two features, may gain applause as a fine likeness, yet never was the very thing rejected as a counter" feit. ! when I think of the inexhaustible mine of virgin treas- ure in our Shakspeare, that I have been almost daily reading him since I was ten years old, — that the thirty intervening years have been unintermittingly and not fruitlessly employed in the study of the Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish and German belie lettrists, and the last fifteen years in addition, far more intensely in the analysis of the laws of life and reason as they exist in man, — and that upon every step I have made forward in taste, in ac- quisition of facts from history or my own observation, and in knowledge of the different laws of being and their apparent ex« 46 SHAKSPEARE, A POET GENERALLY. ceptions, from accidental collision of disturbing forces, — thai at every new accession of information, after every successful exercise of meditation, and every fresh presentation of experience, I have unfailingly discovered a proportionate increase of wisdom and in- tuition in Shakspeare ;— when I know this, and know too, that by a conceivable and possible, though hardly to be expected, ar- rangement of the British theatres, not all, indeed, but a large, a very large, proportion of this indefinite all — (round which no comprehension has yet drawn the line of circumscription, so as to say to itself, ' I have seen the whole')— might be sent into the heads and hearts— into the very souls of the mass of mankind, to whom, except by this living comment and interpretation, it must remain forever a sealed volume, a deep well without a wheel or a windlass ;— it seems to me a pardonable enthusiasm to steal away from sober likelihood, and share in so rich a feast in the fairy world of possibility ! Yet even in the grave cheerfulness of a circumspect hope, much, very much, might be done ; enough, assuredly, to furnish a kind and strenuous nature with ample motives for the attempt to effect what may be effected. SHAKSPEARE, A POET GENERALLY. Clothed in radiant armor, and authorized by titles sure and manifold, as a poet, Shakspeare came forward to demand the throne of fame, as the dramatic poet of England. His excellen ces compelled even his contemporaries to seat him on that throne, although there were giants in those days contending for the same honor.° Hereafter I would fain endeavor to make out the title of the English drama as created by, and existing in, Shakspeare, and its right to the supremacy of dramatic excellence. But he had shown himself a poet, previously to his appearance as a dra- matic poet ; and had no Lear, no Othello, no Henry IV., no Twelfth Night ever appeared, we must have admitted that Shakspeare possessed the chief, if not every, requisite of a poet,— deep feeling and exquisite sense of beauty, both as exhibited to the eye in the combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet and appropriate melody ; that these feelings were under the command of his own will ; that in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own particular being, and felt, and made SHAKSPEARE, A POET GENERALLY. 47 others feel, on subjects no way connected with himself, except by force of contemplation and that sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that, on which it meditates. To this must be added that affectionate love of nature and natural objects, with- out which no man could have observed so steadily, or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of the externa) world : — And when thou Last on foot the purblind hare, Mark the poor wretch ; to overshoot his troubles, How he outruns the wind, and with what care, He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles ; The many musits through the which he goes Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes. Sometimes he runs among the flock of sheep, To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell ; And sometime where earth-delving conies keep, To stop the loud pursuers in their yell ; And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer : Danger deviseth shifts, wit waits on fear. For there his smell with others' being mingled, The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt, Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled, "With much ado, the cold fault cleanly out, Then do they spend their mouths ; echo replies, As if another chase were in the skies. By this poor Wat far off, upon a hill, Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear, To hearken if his foes pursue him still : Anon their loud alarums he doth hear, And now his grief may be compared well To one sore-sick, that hears the passing bell. Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch Turn, and return, indenting with the way : Each envious brier his weary legs doth scratch, Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay. For misery is trodden on by many, And being low, never relieved by any. Venus and Adonis. And the preceding description : — But lo ! from forth a copse that neighbors by, A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud, (fee. is much more admirable, but in parts less fitted for quotation. 48 SHAKSPEARE, A POET GENERALLY. Moreover Shakspeare had shown that he possessed fancy, con sidered as the faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one point or more of likeness, as in such a pas- sage as this : — Full gently now she takes him by the hand, A lily prisoned in a jail of snosv, Or ivory in an alabaster band : So white a friend ingirts so white a foe ! — lb. And still mounting the intellectual ladder, he had as unequivo vjally proved the indwelling in his mind of imagination, or the power by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others, and by a sort of fusion to force many into one ; — that which afterwards showed itself in such might and energy in Lear, where the deep anguish of. a father spreads the feeling of ingratitude and cruelty over the very elements of heaven ; — and which, combining many circumstances into one moment of con- sciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its principle and fountain, who is alone truly one. Various are the workings of this the greatest faculty of the hu- man mind, both passionate and tranquil. In its tranquil and purely pleasurable operation, it acts chiefly by creating out of many things, as they would have appeared in the description of an ordinary mind, detailed in unimpassioned succession, a one- ness, even as nature, the greatest of poets, acts upon us, when we open our eyes upon an extended prospect. Thus the flight of Adonis in the dusk of the evening : — Look ! how a bright star shooteth from the sky ; So glides he in the night from Yenus' eye ! How many images and feelings are here brought together without effort and without discord, in the beauty of Adonis, the rapidity of his flight, the yearning, yet hopelessness, of the enam- ored gazer, while a shadowy ideal character is thrown over the whole ! Or this power acts by impressing the stamp of humani- ty, and of human feelings, on inanimate or mere natural objects :-— Lo ! here the gentle lark, weary of re*st, From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast The cun ariseth in his majesty. SHAKSPEARE, A POET GENERALLY. 49 Who doth the world so gloriously behold, The cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold. Or again, it acts by so carrying on the eye of the reader as tc make him almost lose the consciousness of words, — to make him see every thing flashed, as Wordsworth has grandly and ap propriately said, — Flanked upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude ; — and this without exciting any painful or laborious attention, without any anatomy of description (a fault not uncommon in descriptive poetry) — but with the sweetness and easy movement of nature. This energy is an absolute essential of poetry, and of itself would constitute a poet, though not one of the highest class ; — it is, however, a most hopeful symptom, and the Venus and Adonis is one continued specimen of it. In this beautiful poem there is an endless activity of thought in all the possible associations of thought with thought, thought with feeling, or with words, of feelings with feelings, and of words with words. Even as the sun, with purple-color'd face, Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase : Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn. Siek-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-faeed suitor 'gins to woo him. Remark the humanizing imagery and circumstances of the first two lines, and the activity of thought in the play of words in the fourth line. The whole stanza presents at once the time, the ap pearance of the morning, and the two persons distinctly charac- terized, and in six simple verses puts the reader in possession of the whole argument of the poem. Over one arm the lusty courser's rein, Under the other was the tender boy, Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain, With leaden appetite, unapt to toy, She red and hot, as coals of glowing fire, He red for shame, but frosty to desire : — ■ This stanza and the two following afford good instances of that vol. iv. 50 SHAKSPEARE, A POET GENERALLY. poetic power, which I mentioned above, of making every thing present to the imagination — both the forms, and the passions which modify those forms, either actually, as in the representa- tions of love, or anger, or other human affections ; or imagina- tively, by the different manner in which inanimate objects, or ob- jects unimpassioned themselves, are caused to be seen by the mind in moments of strong excitement, and according to the kind of the excitement, — whether of jealousy, or rage, or love, in the only appropriate sense of the word, or of the lower impulses of our nature, or finally of the poetic feeling itself. It is, perhaps, chiefly in. the power of producing and reproducing the latter that the poet stands distinct. The subject of the Venus and Adonis is unpleasing ; but the poem itself is for that very reason the more illustrative of Shaks- peare. There are men who can write passages of deepest pathos and even sublimity, on circumstances personal to themselves, and stimulative of their own passions ; but they are not, therefore, on this account poets. Read that magnificent burst of woman's pa- triotism and exultation, Deborah's song of victory ; it is glorious, but nature is the poet there. It is quite another matter to be- come all things and yet remain the same, — to make the change- ful god be felt in the river, the lion and the flame ; — this it is, that is the true imagination. Shakspeare writes in this poem, as if he were of another planet, charming you to gaze on the movements of Venus and Adonis, as you would on the twinkling dances of two vernal butterflies. Finally, in this poem and the Rape of Lucrece, Shakspeare gave ample proof of his possession of a most profound, energetic, and philosophical mind, without which he might have pleased, but could not have been a great dramatic poet. Chance and the necessity of his genius combined to lead him to the drama his proper province : in his conquest of which we should consider both the difficulties which opposed him, and the advantages by which he was assisted. SHAKSPEARE S JUDGMENT EQUAL TO HIS GENIUS. Thus then Shakspeare appears, from his Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece alone, apart from all his great works, to have possessed all the conditions of the true poet. Let me now pre- A POET GENERALLY. 51 ceed to destroy, as far as may be in my power, the popular notion that he was a great dramatist by mere instinct, that he grew im- mortal in his own despite, and sank below men of second or third-rate power, when he attempted aught beside the drama — even as bees construct their cells and manufacture their honey to admirable perfection ; but would in vain attempt to build a nest. Now this mode of reconciling a compelled sense of inferiority with a feeling of pride, began in a few pedants, who having read that Sophocles was the great model of tragedy, and Aristotle the in- fallible dictator of its rules, and finding that the Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and other master-pieces were neither in imitation of Sophocles, nor in obedience to Aristotle, — and not having (with one or two exceptions) the courage to affirm, that the delight which their country received from generation to generation, in de- fiance of the alterations of circumstances and habits, was wholly groundless, — took upon them, as a happy medium and refuge, to talk of Shakspeare as a sort of beautiful lasits naturce, a delight- ful monster, — wild, indeed, and without taste or judgment, but like the inspired idiots so much venerated in the East, uttering, amid the strangest follies, the sublimest truths. In nine places out of ten in which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of "wild," " irregular," "pure child of nature," &e. If all this be true, we must submit to it ; though to a thinking mind it can not but be painful to find any excellence, merely hu- man, thrown out of all human analogy, and thereby leaving us neither rules for imitation, nor motives to imitate ; — but if false, it is a dangerous falsehood ; — for it affords a refuge to secret self- conceit, — enables a vain man at once to escape his reader's indig- nation by general swoln panegyrics, and merely by his ipse dixit to treat, as contemptible, what he has not intellect enough to comprehend, or soul to feel, without assigning any reason, or re- ferring his opinion to any demonstrative principle ; thus leaving Shakspeare as a sort of grand Lama, adored indeed, and his very excrements prized as relics, but with no authority or real influ- ence. I grieve that every late voluminous edition of his works would enable me to substantiate tne present charge with a vari- ety of facts, one tenth of which would of themselves exhaust the time allotted to me. Every critic, who has or has not made a collection of black-letter books — in itself a useful and respectable amusement, — puts on the seven-league boots of self-opinion, and 52 SHAKSPEARE, A POET GENERALLY. strides at once from an illustrator into a supreme judge, and blind and deaf, fills his three-ounce phial at the waters of Niagara ; aud determines positively the greatness of the cataract to be neither more nor less than his three-ounce phial has been able to receive. I think this a very serious subject. It is my earnest desire — my passionate endeavor, — to enforce at various times, and by va- rious arguments and instances, the close and reciprocal connection of just taste with pure morality. Without that acquaintance with the heart of man, or that docility and childlike gladness to be made acquainted with it, which those only can have, who dare look at their own hearts — and that with a steadiness which re- ligion only has the power of reconciling with sincere humility ; — without this, and the modesty produced by it, I am deeply con- vinced that no man, however wide his erudition, however patient his antiquarian researches, can possibly understand, or be worthy of understanding, the writings of Shakspeare. Assuredly that criticism of Shakspeare will alone be genial which is reverential. The Englishman, who, without rever- ence, a proud and affectionate reverence, can utter the name of William Shakspeare, stands disqualified for the office of critic. He wants one at least of the very senses, the language of which he is to employ, and will discourse at best, but as a blind man, while the whole harmonious creation of light and shade with all its subtle interchange of deepening and dissolving colors rises in silence to the silent fiat of the uprising Apollo. However inferior in ability I may be to some who have followed me, I own I am proud that I was the first in time who publicly demonstrated to the full extent of the position, that the supposed irregularity and extravagances of Shakspeare were the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had not the dimen- sions of the swan. In all the successive courses of lectures de- livered by me, since my first attempt at the Royal Institution, it has been, and it still remains, my object, to prove that in all points from the most important to the most minute, the judgment of Shakspeare is commensurate with his genius — nay, that his genius reveals itself in his judgment, as in its most exalted form. And the more gladly do I recur to this subject from the clear con- viction, that to judge aright, and with distinct consciousness of the grounds of our judgment, concerning the works of Shakspeare, A POET GENERALLY. 58 implies the power and the means of judging rightly of all other works of intellect, those of abstract science alone excepted. It is a painful truth that not only individuals, but even whole nations, are ofttimes so enslaved to the habits of their education and immediate circumstances, as not to judge disinterestedly even on those subjects, the very pleasure arising from which consists in its disinterestedness, namely, on subjects of taste and polite lit- erature. Instead of deciding concerning their own modes and customs by any rule of reason, nothing appears rational, becom- ing, or beautiful to them, but what coincides with the peculiari- ties of their education. In this narrow circle, individuals may attain to exquisite discrimination, as the French critics have done in their own literature ; but a true critic can no more be such without placing himself on some central point, from which he may command the whole, that is, some general rule, which, founded in reason, or the faculties common to all men, riust. therefore apply to each — than an astronomer can explain the movements of the solar system without taking his stand in the sun. And let me remark, that this will not tend to produce des- potism, but, on the contrary, true tolerance, in. the critic. He will, indeed, require, as the spirit and substance of a work, some- thing true in human nature itself, and independent of all circum- stances ; but in the mode of applying it, he will estimate genius and judgment according to the felicity with which the imperish- able soul of intellect, shall have adapted itself to the age, the place, and the existing manners. The error he will expose, lies in reversing this, and holding up the mere circumstances as per- petual to the utter neglect of the power which can alone animate them. For art can not exist without, or apart from, nature ; and what has man of his own to give to his fellow-man, but his own thoughts and feelings, and his observations, so far as they are modified by his own thoughts or feelings ? Let me, then, once more submit this question to minds eman- cipated alike from national, or party, or sectarian prejudice : — Are the plays of Shakspeare works of rude uncultivated genius, in which the splendor of the parts compensates, if aught can com- pensate, for the barbarous shapelessness and irregularity of the whole ? Or is the form equally admirable with the matter, and the judgment of the great poet, not less deserving our wonder than his genius ? — Or, again, to repeat the question in other words '— 54 SHAKSPEARE, A POET GENERALLY. Is Shakspeaie a great dramatic poet on account only of those beauties and excellences which he possesses in common with the ancients, but with diminished claims to our love and honor to the full extent of his differences from them ? — Or are these very dif- ferences additional proofs of poetic wisdom, at once results and symbols of living power as contrasted with lifeless mechanism — of free and rival originality as contra-distinguished from servile imitation, or, more accurately, a blind copying of effects, instead of a true imitation of the essential principles ? — Imagine not that I am about to oppose genius to rules. No ! the comparative value of these rules is the very cause to be tried. The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circum- scribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty. It must embody in order to reveal itself ; but a living body is of necessity an organized one ; and what is organization but the connection of parts in and for a whole, so that each part is at once end and means ? — This is no discovery of criticism ; — it is a necessity of the human mind ; and all nations have felt and obeyed it, in the invention of metre, and measured sounds, as the vehicle and involucrum of poetry — itself a fellow-growth from the same life — even as the bark is to the tree ! (g) No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius can not, be lawless ; for it is even this that constitutes it genius — the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination. How then comes it that not only single Zoili, but whole nations have combined in unhesitating condemnation of our great dramatist, as a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters — as a wild heath where islands of fertility look the greener from the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now shine out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we can not disentangle the weed without snapping the flower ? — In this statement I have had no reference to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire,^ save as far as * Take a slight specimen of it. Je suis bien loin assuvemeot de justifier en tout la tragedie d'Hamlet : c'est une piece grossiere et barbare, qui ne serait pas supporter par la plus vile populace de la France et de Vltalie. Hamlet y devient fou au second acte, et sa maitresse fole au troisieme; le prince tue le pere de sa mai- tresse, feignant de tucr un rat, et l'heroine se jette dans la riviere. On fait 6a fosse sut le theatre ; des fossoyeurs disent des quolibets dignes d'eux, en A POET GENERALLY. C5 his charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakspeare's own commentators and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous ad- mirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material ; — ag when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate ; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfec- tion of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms ; — each exterior is the physiog- nomy of the being within — its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror ; — and even such is the appropriate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakspeare — himself a nature humanized, a genial understanding directing self-con- sciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness. I greatly dislike beauties and selections in general ; but as proof positive of his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakspeare by this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the coincidence of the two (a feeling sui generis, et demo?istratio demonstrationum) called the conscience, the under- standing or prudence, wit, fancy, imagination, judgment — and then of the objects on which these are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming caprices of nature, the real- ities and the capabilities, that is, the actual and the ideal, of the human mind, conceived as an individual or as a social being, as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise, or in a war-field of temptation ; — and then compare with Shakspeare under each of these heads all or any of the writers in prose and verse that have tenant dans leurs mains des tetes de raorts ; le prince Hamlet repond a leurs grossieretes abominables par des folies nov moins degoutantes. Pendant co temps-la, un des acteurs fait la conquete de la Pologne. Hamlet, sa mere, et son beau-pere boivent ensemble sur le theatre ; on chante d table, on s'y qucrelle, on se bat, on se tue : on croirait que cet ouvrage est le fruit de V 'imagination dun sauvage ivre. Dissertation before Semiramis. This is not, perhaps, very like Hamlet ; but nothing can be more HTw Voltaire.— Ed. 56 CHARACTERISTICS OF ever lived ! Who, that is competent to judge, doubts the result ? — And ask your own hearts — ask your own common-sense — to conceive the possibility of this man being — I say not, the drunken savage of that wretched socialist, whom Frenchmen, to their shame, have honored before their elder and better worthies — but the anomalous, the wild, the irregular, genius of our daily criti- cism ! "What ! are we to have miracles in sport ? — Or, I speak reverently, does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man ? (h) RECAPITULATION AND SUMMARY OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF SHAKSPEARE's DRAMAS.* In lectures, of which amusement forms a large part of the object, there are some peculiar difficulties. The architect places his foundation out of sight, and the musician tunes his instrument before he makes his appearance ; but the lecturer has to try his chords in the presence of the assembly ; an operation not likely, indeed, to produce much pleasure, but yet indispensably necessary to a right understanding of the subject to be developed. Poetry in essence is as familiar to barbarous as to civilized nations. The Laplander and the savage Indian are cheered by it as well as the inhabitants of London and Paris ; — its spirit takes up and incorporates surrounding materials, as a plant clothes itself with soil and climate, whilst it exhibits the work- ing of a vital principle within independent of all accidental cir- cumstances. And to judge with fairness of an author's works, we ought to distinguish what is inAvard and essential from what is outward and circumstantial. It is essential to poetry that it be simple, and appeal to the elements and primary laws of our nature ; that it be sensuous, and by its imagery elicit truth at a flash ; that it be impassioned, and be able to move our feelings and awaken our affections. In comparing different poets with each other, we should inquire which have brought into the fullest play our imagination and our reason, or have created the greatest excitement and produced the completest harmony. If Ave con- sider great exquisiteness of language and sweetness of metre alone, it is impossible 10 deny to Pope the character of a delight- * For the most part communicated by Mr. Justice Coleridge. — Ed. SHAKSPEARE'S DRAMAS. 57 fnl writer ; but whether he be a poet, must depend upon our definition of the word ; and, doubtless, if every thing that pleases be poetry, Pope's satires and epistles must be poetry. This, I must say, that poetry, as distinguished from other modes of com- position, does not rest in metre, and that it is not poetry, if it make no appeal to our passions or our imagination. One char- acter belongs to all true poets, that they write from a principle within, not originating in any thing without ; and that the true poet's work in its form, its shapings, and its modifications, is distinguished from all other works that assume to belong to the class of poetry, as a natural from an artificial flower, or as the mimic garden of a child from an enamelled meadow; In the former the flowers are broken from their stems and stuck into the ground ; they are beautiful to the eye and fragrant to the sense, but their colors soon fade, and their odor is transient as the smile of the planter ; — while the meadow may be visited again and again with reneAved delight ; its beauty is innate in the soil, and its bloom is of the freshness of nature, (i) The next ground of critical judgment, and point of comparison, will be as to how far a given poet has been influenced by acci- dental circumstances. As a living poet must surely write, not for the ages past, but for that in which he lives, and those which are to follow, it is, on the one hand, natural that he should not violate, and on the other, necessary that he should not depend on, the mere manners and modes of his day. See how little does Shakspeare leave us to regret that he was born in his par- ticular age ! The great rera in modern times was what is called the Restoration of Letters ; — the ages preceding it are called the dark ages ; but it would be more wise, perhaps, to call them the ages in which we were in the dark. It is usually overlooked that the supposed dark period was not universal, but partial and successive, or alternate ; that the dark age of England was not the dark age of Italy, but that one country was in its light and vigor, whilst another was in its gloom and bondage. But no sooner had the Reformation sounded through Europe like the blast of an archangel's trumpet, than from king to peasant there arose an enthusiasm for knowledge ; the discovery of a manuscript became the subject of an embassy ; Erasmus read by moonlight, because he could not afford a torch, and begged a penny, not for the love of charity, but for the love of learning. The three great c* 58 CHARACTERISTICS OF points of attention were religion, morals, and taste ; men of ge- nius as well as men of learning-, who in this age need to be so widely distinguished, then alike became copyists of the ancients ; and this, indeed, was the only way by which the taste of mankind could be improved, or their understandings informed. Whilst Dante imagined himself a humble follower of Virgil, and Ariosto of Homer, they were both unconscious of that greater power working within them, which in many points carried them beyond their supposed originals. All great discoveries bear the stamp of the age in which they are made ; — hence we perceive the effects of the purer religion of the moderns, visible for the most part in their lives ; and in reading their works we should not content ourselves with the mere narratives of events long since passed, but should learn to apply their maxims and conduct to our- selves. Having intimated that times and manners lend their form and pressure to genius, let me once more draw a slight parallel be- tween the ancient and modern stage, the stages of Greece and of England. The Greeks were polytheists ; their religion was local ; almost the only object of all their knowledge, art, and taste, was their gods ; and, accordingly, their productions were, if the expression may be allowed, statuesque, whilst those of the moderns are picturesque, (j) The Greeks reared a structure, which in its parts, and as a whole, filled the mind with the calm and elevated impression of perfect beauty, and symmetrical pro- portion. The moderns also produced a whole, a more striking whole ; but it was by blending materials and fusing the parts together. And as the Pantheon is to York Minster or Westmin- ster Abbey, so is Sophocles compared with Shakspeare ; (k) in the one a completeness, a satisfaction, an excellence, on which the mind rests with complacency ; in the other a multitude of interlaced materials, great and little, magnificent and mean, ac- companied, indeed, with the sense of a falling short of perfection, and yet, at the same time, so promising of our social and indi vidual progression, that we would not, if we could, exchange it for that repose of the mind which dwells on the forms of sym- metry in the acquiescent admiration of grace. This general characteristic of the ancient and modern drama might be illus- trated by a parallel of the ancient and modern music ; — the one consisting of melody arising from a succession only of pleasing SHAKSPEARE'S DRAMAS. 59 bounds, — the modern embracing harmony also, the result of com • bination and the effect of a whole. (Z) I have said, and I say it again, that great as was the genius of Shakspeare, his judgment was at least equal to it. Of this any one will be convinced, who attentively considers those points in which the dramas of Greece and England differ, from the dis- similitude of circumstances by which each was modified and in- fluenced. The Greek stage had its origin in the ceremonies of a sacrifice, such as of the goat to Bacchus, whom we most erro- neously regard as merely the jolly god of wine ; — for among the ancients he was venerable, as the symbol of that power which acts without our consciousness in the vital energies of nature, — the vinum mundi, — as 'Apollo was that of the conscious agency of our intellectual being, (m) The heroes of old under the in- fluences of this Bacchic enthusiasm, performed more than hu- man actions ; — hence tales of the favorite champions soon passed, into dialogue. On the Greek stage the chorus was always before the audience ; the curtain was never dropped, as we should say ; and change of place being therefore, in general, impossible, the absurd notion of condemning it merely as improbable in itself was never entertained by any one. If we can believe ourselves at Thebes in one act, we may believe ourselves at Athens in the next. If a story lasts twenty-four hours or twenty-four years, it is equally improbable. There seems to be no just boundary but what the feelings prescribe. But on the Greek stage where the same persons were perpetually before the audience, great judgment was necessary in venturing on any such change. The poets never, therefore, attempted to impose on the senses by bringing places to men, but they did bring men to places, as in the well-known instance in the Eumenides, where during an evident retirement of the chorus from the orchestra, the scene is changed to Athens, and Orestes is first introduced in the temple of Minerva, and the chorus of Furies come in afterwards in pur- suit of him.* In the Greek drama there were no formal divisions into scenes * JEsch. Eumen. v. 230-239. Notandum est, scenam jam Athenas trans- latam sic institui, ut prime-- Orestes sohis conspiciatur in templo Miner vce supplex ejus simulacrum venerans ; paulo post avtem eum conseguantur Eumenides, &c, Schtitz's note. The recessions of the chorus were termed w.ravaardaeLc. There is another instance in the Ajax, v. 814. — Ed. CO CHARACTERISTICS OF and acts; there were no means, therefore, of allowing for the necessary lapse of time between one part of the dialogue and an- other, and unity of time in a strict sense was, of course, impossi- ble. To overcome that difficulty of accounting for time, which is effected on the modern stage by dropping a curtain, the judg- ment and great genius of the ancients supplied music and meas- ured motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the vacuity. In the story of the Agamemnon of JEschylus, the capture of Troy n supposed to be announced by a fire lighted on the Asiatic shore, and the transmission of the signal by successive beacons to My- cenae. The signal is first seen at the 21st line, and the herald from Troy itself enters at the 486th, and Agamemnon himself at the7 83d line. But the practical absurdity of this was not felt by the audience, who, in imagination, stretched minutes into hours, while they listened to the lofty narrative odes of the cho- rus which almost entirely filled up the interspace. Another fact deserves attention here, namely, that regularly on the Greek stage a drama, or acted story, consisted in reality of three dramas, called together a trilogy, and performed consecutively in the course of one day. Now you may conceive a tragedy of Shak- speare's as a trilogy connected in one single representation. Di- vide Lear into three parts, and each would be a play with the ancients ; or take the three JEschylean dramas of Agamemnon, and divide them into, or call them, as many acts, and they to- gether would be one play. (») The first act would comprise the usurpation of JEgisthus, and the murder of Agamemnon ; the second, the revenge of Orestes, and the murder of his mother ; • and the third, the penance and absolution of Orestes ; — occupy- ing a period of twenty-two years. The stage in Shakspeare's time was a naked room with a blanket for a curtain ; but he made it a field for monarchs. That law of unity, which has its foundations, not in the fac- titious necessity of custom, but in nature itself, the unity of feel- ing, is everywhere and at all times observed by Shakspeare in his plays. Read Romeo and Juliet ; — all is youth and spring ; — youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies ; — spring with its odors, its flowers, and its transiency ; it is one and the same feeling that commences, goes through, and ends the play. The old men, the Capulets and the Montagues, are not common old men : they have an eagerness, a heartiness, a vehemence, SHAKSPEARE'S DRAMAS. 61 the effect of spring ; with Romeo, his change of passion, his sudden marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects of youth ; — whilst in Juliet love has all that is tender and melancholy in the nightingale, all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the freshness of spring ; but it ends with a long deep sigh like the last breeze of the Italian evening, (o) This unity of feeling and character pervades every drama of Shakspeare. It seems to me that his plays are distinguished from those of all other dramatic poets by the following characteristics : 1. Expectation in preference to surprise. It is like the true reading of the passage — ' God said, Let there be light, and there was light ;' — not there teas light. As the feeling with which we startle at a shooting star compared with that of watching the sunrise at the pre-established moment, such and so low is surprise compared with expectation. 2. Signal adherence to the great law of nature, that all opposites tend to attract and temper each other. Passion in Shakspeare generally displays libertinism, but involves morality ; and if there are exceptions to this, they are, independently of their in- trinsic value, all of them indicative of individual character, and, like the farewell admonitions of the parent, have an end beyond the parental relation. Thus the Countess's beautiful precepts to Bertram, by elevating her character, raise that of Helena her favorite, and soften down the point in her which Shakspeare does not mean us not to see, but to see and to forgive, and at length to justify. And so it is in Polonius, who is the personified memo- ry of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This admirable char- acter is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon ; for although it was natu- ral that Hamlet, — a young man of fire and genius, detesting formality, and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagin- ing that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation, — should ex- press himself satirically, — yet this must not be taken as exactly the poet's conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character had arisen from long habits of business ; but take his advice to Laertes, and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was meant to be represented as a states- man somewhat past his faculties — his recollections of life all full cf wisdom, and showing a knowledge of human nature, whilst 62 CHARACTERISTICS OF what immediately takes place before him, and escapes from him, is indicative of weakness. But as in Homer all the deities are in armor, even Venus ; so in Shakspeare all the characters are strong. Hence real folly and dulness are made by him the vehicles of wisdom. There is no difficulty for one being 1 a fool to imitate a fool ; but to be, re- main, and speak like a wise man and a great wit, and yet so as to give a vivid representation of a veritable fool, — hie labor, hoc opus est. A drunken constable is not uncommon, nor hard to draw ; but see and examine what goes to make up a Dogberry. 3. Keeping at all times in the high road of life. Shakspeare has no innocent adulteries, no interesting incests, no virtuous vice ; — he never renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kotzcbues of the day. Shak- speare's fathers are roused by ingratitude, his husbands stung by unfaithfulness ; in him, in short, the affections are wounded in those points in which all may, nay, must, feel. Let the morality of Shakspeare be contrasted with that of the writers of his own, or the succeeding age, or of those of the present day, who boast their superiority in this respect. No one can dispute that the result of such a comparison is altogether in favor of Shakspeare ; — even the letters of women of high rank in his age were often coarser than his writings. If he occasionally disgusts a keen sense of delicacy, he never injures the mind ; he neither excites, nor flatters passion, in order to degrade the subject of it ; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carries on war- fare against virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no wick- edness, through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the un- fortunate. In Shakspeare vice never walks as in twilight; nothing is purposely out of its place ; — he inverts not the order of nature and propriety, — does not make every magistrate a drunkard or glutton, nor every poor man meek, humane, and tem- perate ; he has no benevolent butchers, nor any sentimental rat- catchers. 4. Independence of the dramatic interest on the plot. The interest in the plot is always in fact on account of the characters, not vice versa, as in almost all other writers ; the plot is a mere canvass and no more. Hence arises the true justification of the tame stratagem being used in regard to Benedict and Beatrice,— SHAKSPEARE'S DRAMAS. 63 the vanity in each being- alike. Take away from the Much Ado About Nothing all that which is not indispensable to the plot, either as having little to do with it, or, at best, like Dogberry and his comrades, forced into the service, when any other less in- geniously absurd watchmen and night-constables would have an- swered the mere necessities of the action ; — take away Benedict, Beatrice, Dogberry, and the reaction of the former on the charac- ter of Hero, — and what will remain ? In other writers the main agent of the plot is always the prominent character ; in Shakspeare it is so, or is not so, as the character is in itself calculated, or not calculated, to form the plot. Don John is the mainspring of the plot of this play ; but he is merely shown and then withdrawn. 5. Independence of the interest on the story as the ground- work of the plot. Hence Shakspeare never took the trouble of inventing stories. It was enough for him to select from those that had been already invented or recorded such as had one or other, or both, of two recommendations, namely, suitableness to his particular purpose, and their being parts of popular tradi- tion, — names of which we had often heard, and of their fortunes, and as to which all we wanted was, to see the man himself. So it is just the man himself, the Lear, the Shy lock, the Richard, that Shakspeare makes us for the first time acquainted with. Omit the first scene in Lear, and yet every thing will remain ; so the first and second scenes in the Merchant of Venice. Indeed, it is universally true. 6. Interfusion of the lyrical — that which in its very essence is poetical — not only with the dramatic, as in the plays of Metas- tasio, where at the end of the scene comes the aria as the exit speech of the character, — but also in and through the dramatic. Songs in Shakspeare are introduced as songs only, just as songs are in real life, beautifully as some of them are characteristic of the person who has sung or called for them, as Desdemona's ' Willow,' and Ophelia's wild snatches, and the sweet carollings in As You Like It. But the whole of the Midsummer Night's Dream is one continued specimen of the dramatized lyrical. And observe how exquisitely the dramatic of Hotspur ; — Marry, and I'm glad on't with all my heart ; I'd rather be a kitten and cry — mew, &a melts away into the lyric of Mortimer ; — 64 OUTLINE OF AN INTRODUCTORY I understand thy looks : that pretty Welsh Which thou pourest down from thite swelling heavens, I am too perfect in, (fee. Henry IV. part i. act iii. se. i. 7. The characters of the dramatis personce, like those in real life, are to be inferrel by the reader ; — they are not told to him. And it is well worth remarking- that Shakspeare's characters, like those in real life, are very commonly misunderstood, and almost always understood by different persons in different ways. The causes are the same in either case. If you take only what the friends of the character say, you may be deceived, and still more so, if that which his enemies say ; nay, even the character himself sees himself through the medium of his character, and not exactly as he is. Take all together, not omitting a shrewd hint from the clown or the fool, and perhaps your impression will be right ; and you may know whether you have in fact discov- ered the poet's own idea, by all the speeches receiving' light from it, and attesting its reality by reflecting it. Lastly, in Shakspeare the heterogeneous is united, as it is in nature. You must not suppose a pressure or passion always acting on or in the character ! — passion in Shakspeare is that by which the individual is distinguished from others, not that which makes a different kind of him. Shakspeare followed the main march of the human affections. He entered into no analysis of the passions or faiths of men, but assured himself that such and such passions and faiths were grounded in our common nature, and not in the mere accidents of ignorance or disease. This is an important consideration and constitutes our Shakspeare the morn- ing star, the guide and the pioneer, of true philosophy. OUTLINE OF AN INTRODUCTORY LECTURE UPON SHAK- SPEARE Of that species of writing termed tragi-comedy, much has been produced and doomed to the shelf. Shakspeare's comic are con- tinually re-acting upon his tragic characters. Lear, wandering amidst the tempest, has all his fee ings of distress increased by the overflowings of the wild wit of the Fool, as vinegar poured LECTURE ON SIIAKSPEARE. 65 upon wounds exacerbates their pain. Thus even his comic hu- mor tends to the development of tragic passion. The next characteristic of Shakspeare is his keeping at all times in the high road of life, &c* Another evidence of his ex- quisite judgment is, that he seizes hold of popular tales ; Lear and the Merchant of Venice were popular tales, but are so ex- cellently managed, that both are the representations of men in all countries and of all times. His dramas do not arise absolutely out of some one extraor dinary circumstance, the scenes may stand independently of any such one connecting incident, as faithful representations of men and manners. In his mode of drawing characters there are no pompous descriptions of a man by himself; his character is to be drawn, as in real life, from the whole course of the play, or out of the mouths of his enemies or friends. This may be exempli- fied in Polonius, whose character has been often misrepresented. Shakspeare never intended him for a buffoon, &c.f Another excellence of Shakspeare in which no writer equals him, is in the language of nature. So correct is it, that we can see ourselves in every page. The style and manner have also that felicity, that not a sentence can be read, without its being discovered if it is Shaksperian. In observation of living charac- ters — cf landlords and postilions Fielding has great excellence ,* but in drawing from his own heart, and depicting that species of character, which no observation could teach, he failed in com- parison with Richardson, who perpetually places himself, as it were, in a day-dream. Shakspeare excels in both. Witness the accuracy of character in Juliet's Nurse ; while for the great characters of Iago, Othello, Hamlet, Richard III., to which h6 could never have seen any thing similar, he seems invariably to have asked himself, How should I act or speak in such circum- stances ? His comic characters are also peculiar. A drunken constable was not uncommon ; but he makes folly a vehicle foi wit, as in Dogberry : every thing is a substratum on which his genius can erect the mightiest superstructure. To distinguish that which is legitimate in Shakspeare from * See the foregoing Essay. — S. 0; \ See the Notes on Hamlet, which contain the same general view of the character of Polonius. As there are a few additional hints in the present report, I ha-ve thought it worth printing. — S. C. 66 LECTURE ON SHAKSPEARE. what does not belong to him, we must observe his varied images symbolical of novel truth, thrusting by, and seeming to trip up each other, from an impetuosity of thought, producing a flowing metre and seldom closing with the line. In Pericles, a play written fifty years before, but altered by Shakspeare, his additions may be recognized to half a line, from the metre, which has the same perfection in the flowing continuity of interchangeable metrical pauses in his earliest plays, as in Love's Labor's Lost.* Lastly contrast his morality with the writers of his own or of the succeeding age, &c.f If a man speak injuriously of our friend, our vindication of him is naturally warm. Shakspeare has been accused of profaneness. I for my part have acquired from perusal of him, a habit of looking into my own heart, and am confident that Shakspeare is an author of all others the most calculated to make his readers better as well as wiser. Shakspeare, possessed of wit, humor, fancy and imagination, built up an outward world from the stores within his mind, as the bee finds a hive| from a thousand sweets gathered from a thousand flowers. He was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher. Richard III., Iago, and FalstafT are men who re- verse the order of things, who place intellect at the head, whereas it ought to follow, like Geometry, to prove -and to confirm. No man, either hero or saint, ever acted from an unmixed motive ; for let him do what he will rightly, still Conscience whispers "it is your duty." Richard, laughing at conscience and sneering at religion, felt a confidence in his intellect, which urged him to commit .the most horrid crimes, because he felt himself, although inferior in form and shape, superior to those around him ; he felt * Lamb comparing Fletcher with Shakspeare, writes thus : " Fletcher's ideas moved slow ; his versification, though sweet, is tedious, it stops every turn ; he lays line upon line, making up one after the other, adding image to image so deliberately, that we see their junctures. Shakspeare mingles every thing, runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and meta- phors ; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched and clamor- ous for disclosure." Characters of Brain. Writers, contemp. with Shakspeare, \ See the foregoing Essay. \ There must have been some mistake in the report of this sentence, unless there was a momentary lapse of mind on the part of the lecturer. ORDER OF SHAKSPEARES PLAYS. 67 ne possessed a power, which they had not. Iago, on the same principle, conscious of superior intellect, gave scope to his envy, and hesitated not to ruin a gallant, open and generous friend in the moment of felicity, because he was not promoted as he ex- pected. Othello was superior in place, but Iago felt him to be inferior in intellect, and unrestrained by conscience, trampled upon him. — Falsta'ff, not a degraded man of genius, like Burns, but a man of degraded genius, with the same consciousness of superiority to his companions, fastened himself on a young Prince, to prove how much his influence on an heir-apparent would exceed that of a statesman. With this view he hesitated not to adopt the most contemptible of all characters, that of an open and pro- fessed liar : even his sensuality was subservient to his intellect ; for he appeared to drink sack, that he might have occasion to show off his wit. One thing, however, worthy of observation., is the perpetual contrast of labor in FalstafF to produce wit, with the ease with which Prince Henry parries his shafts ; and the final contempt which such a character deserves and receives from the young king, when Falstaff exhibits the struggle of in- ward determination with an outward show of humility. ORDER OF SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS. Various attempts have been made to arrange the plays of Shakspeare, each according to its priority in time, by proofs de- rived from external documents. How unsuccessful these at- tempts have been might easily be shown, not only from the widely different results arrived at by men, all deeply versed in the black-letter books, old plays, pamphlets, manuscript records and catalogues of that age, but also from the fallacious and un- satisfactory nature of the facts and assumptions on which the evidence rests. In that age, when the press was chiefly occupied with controversial or practical divinity, — when the law, the church and the state engrossed all honor and respectability, — when a degree of disgrace, levior quczdam infamice, macula, was attached to the publication of poetry, and even to have sported with the Muse, as a private relaxation, was supposed to be — a venial fault, indeed, yet — something beneath the gravity of a wise man, — when the professed poets were so poor, that the very 68 ORDER OF SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS. expenses of the press demanded the liherality of some wealthy individual, so that two thirds of Spenser's poetic works, and those most highly praised by his learned admirers and friends, remained for many years in manuscript, and in manuscript perished, — when the amateurs of the stage were comparatively few, and therefore for the greater part more or less known to each other, — when we know that the plays of Shakspeare, both during and after his life, were the property of the stage, and published by the players, doubtless according to their notions of acceptability with the visitants of the theatre, — in such an age, and under such circumstances, can an allusion or reference to any drama or poem in the publication of a contemporary be received as con- clusive evidence, that such drama or poem had at that time been published ? Or, further, can the priority of publication it- self prove any thing in favor of actually prior composition. We are tolerably certain, indeed, that the Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, were his two earliest poems, and though not printed until 1593, in the twenty-ninth year of his age, yet there can be little doubt that they had remained by him in manuscript many year?. For Mr. Malone has made it highly probable, that he had commenced a writer for the stage in 1591, when he was twenty-seven years old, and Shakspeare himself assures us that the Venus and Adonis was the first heir of his invention.* Baffled, then, in the attempt to derive any satisfaction from outward documents, we may easily stand excused if we turn our researches towards the internal evidences furnished by the writ- ings themselves, with no other positive data than the known facts, that the Venus and Adonis Avas printed in 1593, the Rape of Lucrece in 1594, and that the Romeo and Juliet had appeared in 1595, — and with no other presumptions than that the poems, his very first productions, were written many years earlier, — (for who can believe that Shakspeare could have remained to his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year without attempting poetic compo- sition of any kind ?) — and that between these and Romeo and Juliet there had intervened one or two other dramas, or the chief materials, at least, of them, although they may very possi- * But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, &a. Dedication of the V. and A. to Lord Southampton. ORDER OF SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS. 69 bly have appeared after the success of the Romeo and Juliet and some other circumstances had given the poet an authority with the proprietors, and created a prepossession in his favor with the theatrical audiences. CLASSIFICATION ATTEMPTED, 1802. First Epoch. The London Prodigal. Cromwell. Henry VI., three parts, first edition. The old King John. Edward III. The old Taming of the Shrew. Pericles. All these are transition- works, TJebergangswerlce ; not his, yet of him. Second Epoch. All's Well That Ends "Well : — hut afterwards worked up afresh (umgearbeitet), especially Parolles. The Two Gentlemen of Verona; a sketch. Romeo and Juliet ; first draft of it. Third Epoch rises into the full, although youthful Shakspeare ; it was the r\eg~ ative period of his perfection. Love's Labor's Lost. Twelfth Night. As You Like It. Midsummer Night's Dream. Hi chard II. Henry IV. and V. Henry VIII. ; Gelegenheitsgedicht. Romeo and Juliet, as at present. Merchant of Venice. Fourth Epoch. Much Ado About Nothing. Merry "Wives of Windsor ; first edition. Henry VI. ; rifacimento 70 ORDER OF SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS. Fifth Epoch. The period of beauty was now past ; and that of deivfotfs and grandeur succeeds. Lear. Macbeth. Hamlet. Timon of Athens ; an after- vibration of Hamlet. Troilus and Cressida ; Uebergang in die Ironie. The Roman Plays. King John, as at present. Merry Wives of Windsor. ) , . . . m • /■ i «i ( umgearoeitefi. laming 01 the bhrew. ) Measure for Measure. Othello. Tempest. Winter's Tale. Cymbeline. CLASSIFICATION ATTEMPTED, 1810. Shakspeare's earliest dramas I take to be, Love's Labor's Lost. All's Well That Ends Well. Comedy of Errors. Homeo and Juliet. In the second class I reckon Midsummer Night's Dream. As You Like It. Tempest. Twelfth Night. In the third, as indicating a greater energy — not merely of poetry, but — of all the world of thought, yet still with some of the growing pains, and the awkwardness of growth, I place Troilus and Cressida. Cymbeline. Merchant of Venice. Much Ado About Nothing. Taming of the Shrew. ORDER OF SHAKSPE ARE'S PLAYS. 71 In the fourth, I place the plays containing the greatest char- acters : Macbeth. Lear. Hamlet. Othello. And lastly, the historic dramas, in order to be able to show my reasons for rejecting some whole plays, and very many scenes in others. CLASSIFICATION ATTEMPTED, 1819. I think Shakspeare's earliest dramatic attempt — perhaps even prior in conception to the Venus and Adonis, and planned before he left Stratford — was Love's Labor's Lost. Shortly afterwards I suppose Pericles and certain scenes in Jcronymo to have been produced ; and in the same epoch, I place the Winter's Tale and -Cymbeline, differing from the Pericles by the entire rifacimento of it, when Shakspeare's celebrity as poet, and his interest, no less than his influence as a manager, enabled him to bring for- ward the laid-by labors of his youth. The example of Titus An- dronicus, which, as well as Jeronymo, was most popular in Shak- speare's first epoch, had led the young dramatist to the lawles? mixture of dates and manners. In this same epoch I should place the Comedy of Errors, remarkable as being the only speci- men of poetical farce in our language, that is, intentionally such ; so that all the distinct kinds of drama, which might be educed d priori, have their representatives in Shakspeare's works. I say intentionally such ; for many of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, and the greater part of Ben Jonson's comedies are farce-plots. I add All's Well That Ends Well, originally intended as the counter- part of Love's Labor's Lost, Taming of the Shrew, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and Romeo and Tuliet. Second Epoch. Richard II. King John. Henry VI., — rifacimento only. Richard III. Third Epoch. Henry IV 72 NOTES ON THE TEMPEST. Henry V. Merry Wives of Windsor. Henry VIII. , — a sort of historical masque, or show play. Fourth Eiwch gives all the graces and facilities of a genius in full possession and habitual exercise of power, and peculiarly of the feminine, the lady's character. Tempest. As You Like It. Merchant of Venice. Twelfth Night, and, finally, at its very point of culmination, — Lear. Hamlet. Macbeth. Othello. Last Epocn, when the energies of intellect in the cycle of genius were, though in a rich and more potentiated form, becoming predominant ovei passion and creative self-manifestation. Measure for Measure. Timon of Athens. Coriolanus. Julius Caesar. Antony and Cleopatra. Troilus and Cressida. Merciful, wonder-making Heaven ! what a man was this Shakspeare ! Myriad-minded, indeed, he was. NOTES ON THE TEMPEST. There is a sort of improbability with which we are shocked in dramatic representation, not less than in a narrative of real life. Consequently, there must be rules respecting it ; and as rules are nothing but means to an end previously ascertained — (inattention to which simple truth has been the occasion of all NOTES ON THE TEMPEST. 73 tne pedantry of the French school), — we must first determine what the immediate end or object of the drama is. And here, as I have previously remarked, I find two extremes of critical de- cision ; — the French, which evidently presupposes that a perfect delusion is to he aimed at, — an opinion which needs no fresh confutation ; and the exact opposite to it, brought forward by Dr. Johnson, who supposes the auditors throughout in the full reflective knowledge of the contrary. In evincing the impossi- bility of delusion, he makes no sufficient allowance for an inter- mediate state, which I have before distinguished by the term, illusion, and have attempted to illustrate its quality and character by reference to our mental state, when dreaming. In both cases we simply do not judge the imagery to be unreal ; there is a neg- ative reality, and no more. Whatever, therefore, tends to pre- vent the mind from placing itself, or being placed, gradually in that state in which the images have such negative reality for the auditor, destroys this illusion, and is dramatically improbable. JNTow the production of this effect — a sense of improbability — will depend on the degree of excitement in which the mind is supposed to be. Many things would be intolerable in the first scene of a play, that would not at all interrupt our enjoyment in the height of the interest, when the narrow cockpit may be made to hold The vasty field of France, or we may cram Within its wooden 0, the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt. Again, on the other hand, many obvious improbabilities will be endured, as belonging to the groundwork of the story rather than to the drama itself, in the first scenes, which would disturb or disentrance us from all illusion in the acme of our excitement ; as for instance, Lear's division of his kingdom, and the banish- ment of Cordelia. But, although the other excellences of the drama besides this dramatic probability, as unity of interest, with distinctness and subordination of the characters, and appropriateness of style, are all, so far as they tend to increase the inward excitement, means towards accomplishing the chief end, that of producing and sup- porting this willing illusion, — yet they do not on that account- cease to be ends themselves ; and we must remember that, as vol. iv. D 74 NOTES ON THE TEMPEST. such, they carry their own justification with them, as long as they do not contravene or interrupt the total illusion. It is not even always, or of necessity, an objection to them, that they prevent the illusion from rising to as great a height as it might otherwise have attained ; — it is enough that they are simply compatible with as high 'a degree of it as is requisite for the purpose. Nay, upon particular occasions, a palpable improbability may be haz- arded by a great genius for the express purpose of keeping down the interest of a merely instrumental scene, which would other- wise make too great an impression for the harmony of the entire illusion. Had the panorama been invented in the time of Pope Leo X., Rafiael would still, I doubt not, have smiled in contempt at the regret, that the broom-twigs and scrubby bushes at the back of some of his grand pictures were not as probable trees as those in the exhibition. The Tempest is a specimen of the purely romantic drama, in which the interest is not historical, or dependent upon fidelity of portraiture, or the natural connection of events, — but is a birth of the imagination, and rests only on the coaptation and union of the elements granted to, or assumed by, the poet. It is a species of drama which owes no allegiance to time or space, and in which, therefore, errors of chronology and geography — no mortal sins in any species — are venial faults, and count for nothing. It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty ; and although the illusion may be assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of modern times, yet this sort of assistance is dangerous. For the principal and only genuine excitement ought to come from within, — from the moved and sympathetic imagination ; whereas, where so much is addressed to the mere external senses of seeing and hearing, the spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without will withdraAV the mind from the proper and only legiti- mate interest which is intended to spring from within. The romance opens with a busy scene admirably appropriate to the kind of drama, and giving, as it were, the key-note to the whole harmony. It prepares and initiates the excitement required for the entire piece, and yet does not demand any thing from the spectators, which their previous habits had not fitted them to understand. It is the bustle of a tempest, frorn"which the real horrors are abstracted; — therefore it is poetical, though not in NOTES ON THE TEMPEST. 75 strictness natural — (the distinction to which I have so often al- killed)— and is purposely restrained from concentering the inter- est on itself, but used merely as an induction or tuning for what is to follow. In the second scene, Prospero's speeches, till the entrance of Ariel, contain the finest example, I remember, of retrospective narration for the purpose of exciting immediate interest, and put- ting the audience in possession of all the information necessary for the understanding of the plot * Observe, too, the perfect probability of the moment chosen by Prospero (the very Shak- speare himself, as it were, of the tempest) to open out the truth to his daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how completely any thing that might have been disagreeable to us in the ma- gician, is reconciled and shaded in the humanity and natural feelings of the father. In the very first speech of Miranda the simplicity and tenderness of her character are at once laid open ; —it would have been lost in direct contact with the agitation of the first scene. The opinion once prevailed, but, happily, is now abandoned, that Fletcher alone wrote for women ;— the truth is, that with very few, and those partial exceptions, the female characters in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not decent ; when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakspeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that continuates society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by soph- istry, because it rests not in the analytic processes, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are rep- resentative of all past experience —not of the individual only, Pro. Mark his condition, and th' event ; then tell me, If this might be a brother. Mir a. I should sin, To think but nobly of my grandmother ; Good wombs have bore bad sons. Pro. Now the condition, (fee. Theobald has a note upon this passage, and suggests that Shakspeare placed it thus : — Pro. Good wombs have bore bad sons,— Now the condition. Mr. Coleridge writes in the margin : "I can not but believe that Theobald is quite right."— Ed. 76 NOTES ON THE TEMPEST. - but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their prcde* cessors even up to the first mother that lived. Shakspeare saw that the want of prominence, which Pope notices for sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman's character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite har- mony of all the parts of the moral being constituting one living total of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its dis- tinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude, — shown m all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, sees all things in and by the light of the affec- tions, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shaksperian women there is essentially the same foun- dation and principle ; the distinct individuality and variety are merely the result of the modification of circumstances, whether in Miranda the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katherine the queen. But to return. The appearance and characters of the super or ultra-natural servants are finely contrasted. Ariel has in every thing the airy tint which gives the name ; and it is worthy of remark that Miranda is never directly brought into comparison with Ariel, lest the natural and human of the one and the su- pernatural of the other should tend to neutralize each other ; Caliban, on the other hand, is all earth, all condensed and gross in feelings and images ; (p) he has the daw r nings of understand- ing without reason or the moral sense, and in him, as in some brute animals, this advance to the intellectual faculties, without the moral sense, is marked by the appearance of vice. For it is in the primacy of the moral being only that man is truly human ; in his intellectual powers he is certainly approached by the brutes, an 1, man's whole system duly considered, those powers can not be considered other than means to an end, that is, to morality. J j* (n this scene, as it proceeds, is displayed the impression made by Ferdinand and Miranda on each other ; it is love at first sight : At the first sight They have chang'd eyes : — and it appears to me, that in all cases of real love, it is at one moment that it takes place. That moment may have been pre- pared by previous esteem, admiration, or even affection, — -ye1 NOTES ON THE TEMPEST. 77 love seems to require a momentary act of volition, by which a tacit bond of devotion is imposed, — a bond not to be thereaftei broken without violating what should be sacred in our nature. How finely is the true Shaksperian scene contrasted with Dryden's vulgar alteration of it, in which a mere ludicrous psychological experiment, as it were, is tried — displaying nothing but indelicacy without passion. Prospero's interruption of the courtship has often seemed to me to have no sufficient motive ; still his alleged reason — lest too light •winning Make the prize light — is enough for the ethereal connections of the romantic imagina- tion, although it would not be so for the historical.* The whole courting scene, indeed, in the beginning of the third act, between the lovers, is a masterpiece ; and the first dawn of disobedience in the mind of Miranda to the command of her father is very finely drawn, so as to seem the working of the Scriptural com- mand, Thou shalt leave father mid mother, &c. ! with what exquisite purity this scene is conceived and executed ! Shak- speare may sometimes be gross, but I boldly say that he is always moral and modest. Alas ! in this our day decency of manners is preserved at the expense of morality of heart, and delicacies for vi.ce are allowed, whilst grossness against it is hypocritically, or at least morbidly, condemned. In this play are admirably sketched the vices generally accom- panying a low degree of civilization ; and in the first scene of the second act Shakspeare has, as in many other places, shown the tendency in bad men to indulge in scorn and contemptuous expressions, as a mode of getting rid of their own uneasy feelings of inferiority to the good, and also, by making the good ridiculous, of rendering the transition of others to wickedness easy. Shak- speare never puts habitual scorn into the mouths of other than bad men, as here in the instances of Antonio and Sebastian. The scene of the intended assassination of Alonzo and Gonzalo is * Fer. Yes, faith, and all his Lords, the Duke of Milan, And his brave son, being twain. Theobald remarks that nobody was lost in the wreck ; and yet that no such character is introduced in the fable, as the Duke of Milan's son. Mr. C. notes: "Must not Ferdinand have believed he was lost in the fleet that th* tempest scattered V — Ed. 78 NOTES ON THE TEMPEST. an exact counterpart of the scene between Macbeth and his lady, only pitched in a lower key throughout, as designed to be frus trated and concealed, and exhibiting the same profound manage- ment in the manner of familiarizing a mind, not immediately re- cipient, to the suggestion of guilt, by associating the proposed crime with something ludicrous or out of place, — something not habitually matter of reverence. By this kind of sophistry the imagination and fancy are first bribed to contemplate the sug- gested act, and at length to become acquainted with it. Observe how the effect of this scene is heightened by another counterpart of it in low life, — that between the conspirators Stephano, Cali- ban, and Trinculo in the second scene of the third act, in which there are the same essential characteristics. In this play and in this scene of it are also shown the springs of the vulgar in politics, — of that kind of politics which is in- woven with human nature. In his treatment of this subject, wherever it occurs, Shakspeare is quite peculiar. In other wri- ters we find the particular opinions of the individual ; in Massin- ger it is rank republicanism ; in Beaumont and Fletcher eve a jure divino principles are carried to excess ; — but Shakspeare never promulgates any party tenets. He is always the philoso- pher and the moralist, but at the same time with a profound veneration for all the established institutions of society, and for those classes which form the permanent elements of the state — especially never introducing a professional character, as such, otherwise than as respectable. If he must have any name, he should be styled a philosophical aristocrat, delighting in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages. Hence, again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its absurdities to its face ; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of the rogueries of a child. See the good-humored way in which he describes Stephano pass- ing from the most licentious freedom to absolute despotism over Trinculo and Caliban. The truth is, Shakspeare's characters are al] genera intensely individualized ; the results of meditation, NOTES ON LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST. 70 of which observation supplied the drapery and the colors neces- sary to combine them with each other. He had virtually sur- veyed all the great component powers and impulses of human nature, — had seen that their different combinations and subordi- nations were in fact the individualizers of men, and showed how their harmony was produced by reciprocal disproportions of excess or deficiency. The language in which these truths are expressed was not drawn from any set fashion, but from the profoundest depths of his moral being, and is therefore for all ages. LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST. The characters in this play are either impersonated out of Shakspeare's own multiformity by imaginative self-position, or out of such as a country town and school-boy's observation might supply, — the curate, the schoolmaster, the Armado (who even in my time was not extinct in the cheaper inns of North Wales), and so on. The satire is chiefly on follies of words. Biron and Rosaline are evidently the pre-existent state of Benedict and Beatrice, and so, perhaps, is Boyet of Lafeu, and Costard of the Tapster in Measure for Measure ; and the frequency of the rhymes, the sweetness as well as the smoothness of the metre, and the number of acute and fancifully illustrated aphorisms, are all as they ought to be in a poet's youth. True genius begins by generalizing and condensing ; it ends in realizing and expand- ing. It first collects the seeds. Yet if this juvenile drama had been the only one extant of our Shakspeare, and we possessed the tradition only of his riper works, or accounts of them in writers who had not even men- tioned this play, — how many of Shakspeare's characteristic fea- tures might we not still have discovered in Love's Labor's Lost, though as in a portrait taken of him in his boyhood. I can never sufficiently admire the wonderful activity of thought throughout the whole of the first scene of the play, rendered natural, as it is, by the choice of the characters, and the whimsical deter- mm&ikw. on which the drama is founded. A whimsical deter- mination certainly ; — yet not altogether so very improbable to those who are conversant in the history of the middle ages, with their Courts of Love, and all that lighter drapery of chivalry 80 NOTES ON LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST. which engaged even mighty kings with a sort of serio-comic inter est, and may well be supposed to have occupied more completely the smaller princes, at a time when the noble's or prince's court contained the only theatre of the domain or principality. This sort of story, too, was admirably suited to Shakspeare's times, when the English court was still the foster-mother of the state and the muses ; and when, in consequence, the courtiers, and men of rank and fashion, affected a display of wit, point, and sententious observation, that would be deemed intolerable at present, — but in which a hundred years of controversy, involving every great political, and every dear domestic, interest, had trained all but the lowest classes to participate. Add to this the very style of the sermons of the time, and the eagerness of the Protestants to distinguish themselves by long and frequent preach- ing, it will be found that, from the reign of Henry VIII. to the abdication of James II., no country ever received such a national education as England. Hence the comic matter chosen in the first instance is a ridic- ulous imitation or apery of this constant striving after logical precision, and subtle opposition of thoughts, together with a making the most of every conception or image, by expressing it under the least expected property belonging to it, and this, again, rendered specially absurd by being applied to the most current subjects and occurrences. The phrases and modes of combination in argument were caught by the most ignorant from the custom of the age, and their ridiculous misapplication of them is most amusingly exhibited in Costard ; whilst examples suited only to the gravest propositions and impersonations, or apostrophes to abstract thoughts impersonated, which are in fact the natural lan- guage only of the most vehement agitations of the mind, are adopt- ed by the coxcombry of Armado as mere artifices of ornament. The same kind of intellectual action is exhibited in a more serious and elevated strain in many other parts of this play. Biron's speech at the end of the fourth act is an excellent speci- men of it. It is logic clothed in rhetoric ; — but observe how Shakspeare, in his two-fold being of poet and philosopher, avails himself of it to convey profound truths in the most lively images, — the whole remaining faithful to the character supposed to utter the lines, and the expressions themselves constituting a fuither development of that character : — NOTES ON LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST, 81 Other slow arts entirely keep the brain : And therefore finding barren practisers, Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil : But love, first learned in a lady's eyes, Lives not alone immured in the brain ; But, with the motion of all elements, Courses as swift as thought in every power ; And gives to every power a double power, Above their functions and their offices. It adds a precious seeing to the eye, A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind ; A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound, When the suspicious tread of theft is stopp'd : Love's feeling is more soft and sensible, Than are the tender horns of cockled snails ; Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste For valor, is not love a Hercules, Still climbing trees in the Hesperides? Subtle as Sphinx ; as sweet and musical, As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair ; And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony. Never durst poet touch a pen to write, Until his ink were temper'd with love's sighs ; O, then his lines would ravish savage ears, And plant in tyrants mild humility. From women's eyes this doctrine I derive : They sparkle still the right Promethean fire ; They are the books, the arts, the academes, That show, contain, and nourish all the world ; Else, none at all in aught proves excellent ; Then fools you were these women to forswear ; Or, keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools. For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love ; Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men ; Or for men's sake, the authors of these women ; Or women's sake, by whom we men are men ; Let us once lose our oaths, to find ourselves, Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths: It is religion, to be thus forsworn : For charity itself fulfils the law : And who can sever love fr )m charity ? — This is quite a study ; — sometimes you see this youthful god of poetry connecting disparate thoughts purely by means of resem- blances in the words expressing them — a thing in character in lighter comedy, especially of that kind in which Shakspeare de- 32 NOTES ON LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST. lights, namely, the purposed display of wit, though, sometimes, too, disfiguring his graver scenes ; — but more often you may see him doubling the natural connection or order of logical conse- quence in the thoughts by the introduction of an artificial and sought for resemblance in the words, as, for instance, in the third line of the play — And then grace us in the disgrace of death; — this being a figure often having its force and propriety, as justi- fied by the law of passion, which, inducing in the mind an unu- sual activity, seeks for means to waste its superfluity — when in the highest degree — in lyric repetitions and sublime tautology — (at her feet he boived, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he boived > he fell ; where he bowed, there he fell down, dead) — and, in lower degrees, in making the words themselves the subjects and materials of that surplus action, and for the same cause that agi- tates our limbs, and forces our very gestures into a tempest in states of high excitement. The mere style of narration in Love's Labor's Lost, like that of JEgeon in the first scene of the Comedy of Errors, and of the Captain in the second scene of Macbeth, seems imitated with its defects and its beauties from Sir Philip Sidney ; whose Arcadia, though not then published, was already well known in manu- script copies, and couid hardly have escaped the notice and ad- miration of Shakspeare as the friend and client of the Earl of Southampton. The chief defect consists in the parentheses and parenthetic thoughts and descriptions, suited neither to the pas- sion of the speaker, nor the purpose of the person to whom the information is to be given, but manifestly betraying the author himself — not by way of continuous under-song, but — palpably, and so as to show themselves addressed to the general reader. However, it is not unimportant to notice how strong a presump- tion the diction and allusions of this play afford, that, though Shakspeare' s acquirements in the dead languages might not bo such as we suppose in a learned education, his habits had, nevertheless, been scholastic, and those of a student. For a young author's first work almost always bespeaks his recent pur- suits, and his first observations of life are either drawn from the immediate employments of his youth, and from the characters and images most deeply impressed on his mind in the situations NOTES ON LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST. 83 in which those employments had placed him ;— or else they are fixed on such objects and occurrences in the world, as are easily connected with, and seem to bear upon, his studies and the hith- erto exclusive subjects of his meditation. Just as Ben Jonson, who applied himself to the drama after having served in Flan- ders, fills his earliest plays with true or pretended soldiers, the wrongs and neglects of the former, and the absurd boasts and knavery of their counterfeits. So Lessing's first comedies are placed in the universities, and consist of events and characters conceivable in an academic life. I will only further remark the sweet and tempered gravity, with which Shakspeare in the end draws the only fitting moral which such a drama afforded. Here Rosaline rises up to°the full height of Beatrice : — Ros. Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron, Before I saw you, and the world's large tongue Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks ; Full of comparisons, and wounding flouts, Which you on all estates will execute That lie within the mercy of your wit : To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain, And therewithal, to win me, if you please, (Without the which 1 am not to be won,) You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day Visit the speechless sick, and still converse With groaning wretches ; and your talk shall be, With all the fierce endeavor of your wit, To enforce the pained impotent to smile. Biron. To move wild laughter in the throat of death f It can not be ; it is impossible ; Mirth can not move a soul in agony. Ros. Why, that's the way to choke a gibing spirit. Whose influence is begot of that loose grace, Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools : A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it : then, if sickly ears, Deaf 'd with the clamors of their own dear groans, Will hear your idle scorns, continue then, And I will have you, and that fault withal ; m But, if they will not, throw away that spirit, And I shall find you empty of that fault, Right joyful of your reformation. 84 NOTES ON MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM. Act v. sc. 2. In Biron's speech to the Princess : — and, therefore, like the eye, Full of straying shapes, of habits, and of forms— Either read stray, which I prefer ; or throw full hack to the pr* ceding lines- like the eye, full Of straying shapes, &c. lr, the same scene : Biron. And w* at to me, my love? and wh at to me ! Ros. You must he purged too, your sins are rank ; You are attaint with fault and perjury : Therefore, if you my favor mean to get, A twelvemonth shall you spend, and never rest, But seek tLe weary beds of people sick. There can he no doubt, indeed, about the propriety of expunging this speech of Rosaline's; it soils the very page that retains it. But I do not agree with Warhurtonand others m striking out the preceding line also. It is quite in Biron's character ; and Rosa- Lie not answering it immediately, Dumam takes up the ques- tion for him, and, after he and Longaville are answered, Biron with evident propriety, says : — Studies my mistress ? &c MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. Act i. sc. 1. Her. cross ! too high to be enthrall'd to low— Zys Or else misgrafted, in respect of years ; Her O spite ! too old to be engag'd to young— Lys. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends. Her. O hell! to chuse love by another's eye ! Theks is ..o authority for any alteration ;-but I never can help feeling how great an improvement it would he if the two former of Hermia's exclamations were omitted ;-the third and only appropriate one would then beeome a beauty, and most natural. * lb. Helena's speech : — I will go tell him of fair Hermia's flight, Ac NOTES ON MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 85 I am convinced that Shakspeare availed himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout, but especially, and, perhaps, unpleasingly, in this broad determination of ungrateful treachery in Helena, so undis- guisedly avowed to herself, and this, too, after the witty cool phi- losophizing that precedes. The act itself is natural, and the re- solve so to act is, I fear, likewise too true a picture of the lax hold which principles have on a woman's heart, when opposed to, or even separated from, passion and inclination. For women are less hypocrites to their own minds than men are, because in general they feel less proportionate abhorrence of moral evil in and for itself, and more of its outward consequences, as detection, and loss of character than men — their natures being almost wholly extroitive. Still, however just in itself, the representation of this is not poetical ; we shrink from it, and can not harmonize it with the ideal. Act ii. sc. 1. Theobald's edition. Through bush, through brier — - •vr -TV* *9v* "7? Through flood, through fire — "What a noble pair of ears this worthy Theobald must have had ! The eight amphimacers or cretics, — Over hill, over dale, Thoro' bush, thoro' brier, Over park, over pale, Thoro' flood, thoro fire — have a delightful effect on the ear in their sweet transition to the trochaic, — I do wander ev'ry where Swifter than the moones sphere, &c. The last words as sustaining the rhyme, must be considered, as in fact they are, trochees in time. It may be worth while to give some correct examples in Eng- lish of the principal metrical feet : Pyrrhic or Dibrach, u u = body, spirit. Tribrach, u u v = nobody, hastily pronounced. Iambus u — = delight. Trochee, — u = lightly. Spondee, = God spake. 86 NOTES ON MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. The paucity of spondees in single words in English and, indeed, in the modern languages in general, makes, perhaps, the greatest distinction, metrically considered, between them and the Greek and Latin. Dactyl, — v v = merrily. Anapaest, o u — = apropos, or the first three syllables of ceremony. * Amphibrachys, u — u = delightful. Amphimacer, — u — = over hill. Antibacchius, u = the Lord God. Bacchius, u = Helvellyn. Molossus, = John James Jones. These simple feet may suffice for understanding the metres of Shakspeare, for the greater part at least : — but Milton can not be made harmoniously intelligible without the composite feet, the Ionics, Paeons, and Epitrites. lb. sc. 2. Titania's speech : — (Theobald adopting "Warburton's reading.) Which she, with pretty and with swimming gate Folly ing (her womb then rich with my young squire) "Would imitate, (fee. Oh ! oh ! Heaven have mercy on poor Shakspeare, and also on Mr. Warburton's mind's eye ! Act v. sc. 1. Theseus' speech : — (Theobald.) And what poor [willing] duty can not do, Noble respect takes it in might, not merit. To my ears it would read far more Shaksperian thus : And what poor duty can not do, yet would Noble respect, (fee. lb. sc. 2. Puck. Now the hungry lion roars, And the wolf behowls the moon ; Whilst the heavy ploughman snores All with weary task foredone, (fee. Very Anacreon in perfectness, proportion, grace, and sponta- neity ! So far it is Greek ; — but then add, ! what wealth, what wild ranging, and yet what compression and condensation of, * Written probably by mistake for " ceremonious." NOTES ON AS YOU LIKE IT. 87 English fancy ! In truth, there is nothing in Anacreon more perfect than these thirty lines, or half so rich and imaginative. They form a speckless diamond. COMEDY OF ERRORS. The myriad-minded man, our, and all men's, Shakspeare, has in this piece presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished from comedy by the license allowed, and even required, in the fable, in order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible. A comedy would scarcely allow even the two Antipholuses ; because, although there have been instances of almost indistinguishable likeness in two persons, yet these are mere individual accidents, casus ludentis natures, and the verum will not excuse the inverisimile. But farce dares add the two Dromios, and is justified in so doing by the laws of its end and constitution. In a word, farces commence in a postulate which must be granted. AS YOU LIKE IT. Act i. sc. 1. OIL What, boy ! Orla. Come, come, elder brother, you are too young in this. OIL Wilt thou lay hands on me, villain ? There is a beauty here. The word ' boy' naturally provokes ind awakens in Orlando the sense of his manly powers ; and with the retort of ' elder brother,' he grasps him with firm hands, and makes him feel he is no boy. lb. OU. Farewell, good Charles. — Now will I stir this gamester: I hope, I shall see an end of him ; for my soul, yet I know not why, hates nothing more than him. Yet he's gentle ; never sehool'd, and yet learn'd ; full of noble device ; of all sorts enchantingly beloved ! and, indeed, so much in the heart of the world, and especially of my own people, who best know him, that I am altogether misprized : but it shall not be so long ; this wrest- ler shall clear all. g8 NOTES ON AS YOU LIKE IT. This has always appeared to me one of the most ur.-Shaks perian speeches in all the genuine works of our poet ; yet 1 should he nothing surprised, and greatly pleased, to find it here- after a fresh beauty, as has so often happened to me with other supposed defects of great men. 1810. It is too venturous to charge a passage in Shakspeare with warn of truth to nature ; and yet at first sight this speech of Oliver & expresses truths, which it seems almost impossible that any mind should so distinctly, so livelily, and so voluntarily, have presented to itself in connection with feelings and intentions so malignant, and so contrary to those which the qualities expressed would nat- urally have called forth. But I dare not say that this seeming unnaturalness is not in the nature of an abused wilfulness, when united with a strong intellect. In such characters there is some times a gloomy self-gratification in making the absoluteness oi the will (sit pro ratione voluntas .') evident to themselves by set ting the reason and the conscience in full array against it. 1818. lb. sc. 2. Cclia If you saw yourself with your eyes, or knew yourself with your judgment, the fear of your adventure would counsel you to a more uiual enterprise. Surely it should be ' our eyes' and ' our judgment.' lb. sc. 3. 00. But is all this for your father ? Ros. No, some of it is for my child's father. Theobald restores this as the reading of the older editions. It mavbe so: but who can doubt that it is a mistake for 'my father's child,' meaning herself? According to Theobald's note a most indelicate anticipation is put into the mouth of Rosalind without reason ;— and besides what a strange thought, and ho* out of place, and unintelligible ! Act iv. sc. 2. Take thou no scorn To wear the horn, the lusty horn ; It was a crest ere thou wast born. I question whether there exists a parallel instance of a phrase, that like this of ' horns' is universal in all languages, and yet ior which no one has discovered even a plausible origin. NOTES ON TWELFTH NIGHT. 89 TWELFTH NIGHT. Act i. sc. 1. Duke's speech : — — so full of shapes is fancy, That it alone is high fantastical. Warbue.ton's alteration of is intc in is needless. ' Fancy' may very well be interpreted ' exclusive affection,' or ' passionate pref- erence.' Thus, bird-fanciers, gentlemen of the fancy, that is, amateurs of boxing, &c. The play of assimilation, — the meaning one sense chiefly, and yet keeping both senses in view, is perfectly Shaksperian. Act ii. sc. 3. Sir Andrew's speech : — An explanatory note on Pigrogromitus- would have been more acceptable than Theobald's grand discovery that ' lemon' ought to be ' leman.' lb. Sir Toby's speech : (Warburton's note on the Peripatetic philosophy.) Shall we rouse the night-owl in a catch, that will draw three souls out of one weaver ? genuine, and inimitable (at least I hope so) "Warburton ! This note of thine, if but one in five millions, would be half a one too much. Tb. sc. 4. Duke. My life upon't, young though thou art, thine eye Hath stay'd upon some favor that it loves ; Hath it not, boy ? Vio. A little, by your favor. Duke. What kind of woman is't ? And yet Viola was to have been presented to Orsino as a eunuch ! — Act i. sc. 2. Viola's speech. Either she forgot this, or else she had altered her plan, lb. Vio. A blank, my lord ; she never told her love ! — But let concealment, &c. After the first line (of which the last five words should be spoken with, and drop down in, a deep sigh), the actress ought to make 90 NOTES ON ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. a pause ; and th3n start afresh, from the activity of thought, bora of suppressed fselings, and which thought had accumulated during the brief interval, as vital heat under the skin during a dip in cold water, lb. sc. 5. Fabian. Though our silence be drawn from us by cars, yet peace. Perhaps, ' cables.' Act iii. sc. 1. Clown. A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit. (Theobald's note.) Theobald's etymology of ' cheveril' is, of course, quite right ; — but he is mistaken in supposing that there were no such things as gloves of chicken-skin. They were at one time a main article in chirocosmetics. Act v. sc. 1. Clown's speech : — So that, conclusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives make your two affirmatives, why, then, the worse for my friends, and the better for my foes. (Warburton reads ' conclusion to be asked, is.') Surely Warburton could never have wooed by kisses and won, or he would not have flounder-flatted so just and humorous, nor less pleasing than humorous, an image into so profound a nihility. In the name of love and wonder, do not four kisses make a double affirmative ? The humor lies in the whispered ' No !' and the in- viting ' Don't !' with which the maiden's kisses are accompanied, and thence compared to negatives, which by repetition constitute an affirmative. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. Act i. sc. 1. Count If the living be enemy to the grief, the excess makeis it soon mortal. Bert. Madam, I desire your holy wishes. Laf. How understand we that ? Bertram and Lafeu, I imagine, both speak together, — Lafeu referring to the Countess's rather obscure remark. NOTES ON ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. 91 Act ii. sc. 1. (Warburton's note.) King. — let higher Italy (Those 'bated, that inherit but the fall Of the last monarchy) see, that you come Not to woo honor, but to wed it. It would be, I own, an audacious and unjustifiable change oi the text ; but yet, as a mere conjecture, I venture to suggest 'bastards,' for ''bated.' As it stands, in spite of Warburton's note, I can make little or nothing of it. Why should the king except the then most illustrious states, which, as being republics, were the more truly inheritors of the Roman grandeur ? — With my conjecture, the sense would be ; — ' let higher, or the more northern part of Italy — (unless ' higher' be a corruption for ' hir'd,' — the metre seeming to demand a monosyllable) (those bastards that inherit the infamy only of their fathers) see, &c.' The fol- lowing 'woo' and 'wed' are so far confirmative as they indi- cate Shakspeare' s manner of connection by unmarked influences of association from some preceding metaphor. This it is which makes his style so peculiarly vital and organic. Likewise ' those girls of Italy' strengthen the guess. The absurdity of Warbur- ton's gloss, which represents the king calling Italy superior, and then excepting the only part the lords were going to visit, must strike every one. lb. sc. 3. Laf. They say, miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Shakspeare, inspired, "as it might seem, with all knowledge, here uses the word ' causeless' in its strict philosophical sense ; — cause being truly predicable only of phenomena, that is, things natural, and not of noumena, or things supernatural. Act iii. sc. 5. Dia. The Count Rousillon : — know you such a one ? Hel. But by the ear that hears most nobly of him ; His face I know not. Shall we say here, that Shakspeare has unnecessarily made his loveliest character utter a lie ? — Or shall we dare think that, where to deceive was necessary, he thought a pretended verbal verity a double crime, equally with the other a lie to the hearer, and at the same time an attempt to lie to one's own conscience ? 92 NOTES ON MEASURE FOR MEASURE. . MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. Act i. sc. I. Shal. The luce is the fresh fish, the salt fish is an eld coat. I can not understand this. Perhaps there is a corruption both of words and speakers. Shallow no sooner corrects one mistake of Sir Hugh's, namely ' louse' for ' luce,' a pike, but the honest Welchman falls into another, namely, ' cod' (baccala) Cambricc ' cot' for coat. Shal. The luce is the fresh fish — Evans. The salt fish is au old cot. ' Luce is a fresh fish, and not a louse,' says Shallow. 'Aye. aye,' quoth Sir Hugh ; ' the fresh fish is the luce ; it is an old cod that is the salt fish.' At all events, as the text stands, there is no sense at all in the words, lb. sc. 3. Fal. Now, the report goes, she has all the rule of her husband's purse she hath a legion of angels. Pist. As many devils entertain ; and To her, boy, say I. Perhaps it is — As many devils enter (or enter'd) swine ; and to her, boy, say I : — a somewhat profane, but not un-Shaksperian, allusion to the 'legion' in St. Luke's 'gospel.' MEASURE FOR MEASURE. This play, which is Shakspeare's throughout, is to me the most jjainful — say rather, the only painful — part of his genuine works. The comic and tragic parts equally border on the (JuorjTbi>, — the one being disgusting, the other horrible ; and the pardon and mar- riage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claim of justice — (for cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, can not be forgiven, because we can not conceive them as being morally repented of) — but it is likewise degrading to the character of wo- NOTES ON MEASURE FOR MEASURE. 93: man, Beaumont and Fletcher, who can follow Shakspeare in his errors only, have presented a still worse, because more loath- some and contradictory, instance of the same kind in the Night- Walker, in the marriage of Alathe to Algripe. Of the counter- balancing beauties of Measure for Measure, I need say nothing ; for I have already remarked that the play is Shakspeare s throughout. Act iii. sc. 1. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where, &o. This natural fear of Claudio, from the antipathy we have to death, seems very little varied from that infamous wish of Maecenas, recorded in the 101st epistle of Seneca: Debi le?n facito manu Debilem pede, coxa, &c. — Warburton's note. I can not but think this rather an heroic resolve, than an infa mous wish. It appears to me to be the grandest symptom of ar, immortal spirit, when even that bedimmed and overwhelmed spirit recked not of its own immortality, still to seek to be, — to be a mind, a will. As fame is to reputation, so heaven is to an estate, or immedi- ate advantage. The difference is, that the self-love of the former can not exist but by a complete suppression and habitual supplan- tation of immediate selfishness. In one point of view, the miser is more estimable than the spendthrift ; — only that the miser's present feelings are as much of the present as the spendthrift's. But ceteris paribus, that is, upon the supposition that whatever is good or lovely in the one coexists equally in the other, then, doubtless, the master of the present is less a selfish being, an an- imal, than he who lives for the moment with no inheritance in the future. "Whatever can degrade man, is supposed in the lat- ter case, whatever can elevate him, in the former. And as to self; — strange and generous self! that can only be such a self by a complete divestment of all that men call self, — of all that can make it either practically to others, or consciously to the individual himself, different from the human race in its ideal. Such self is but a perpetual religion, an inalienable acknowledgment of God, the sole basis and ground of being. In this sense, how can I love God, and not love myself as far as it is of God ? 94 NOTES ON CYMBELINE. lb. sc. 2. Pattern in himself to know, Grace to stand, and virtue go. Worse metre, indeed, but better English would be, — Grace to stand, virtue to go. CYMBELINE. Act i. sc. 1. You do not meet a man, but frowns : our bloods No more obey the heavens, than our courtiers' Still seem, as does the king's. There can be little doubt of Mr. Tyrwhitt's emendations of 'courtiers' and ' king,' as to the sense ;— only it is not impossible that Shakspeare's dramatic language may allow of the word, < brows' or ' faces' being understood after the word ' courtiers, which might then remain in the genitive case plural. But the nominative plural makes excellent sense, and is sufficiently ele- gant, and sounds to my ear Shaksperian. What, however, is meant by ■ our bloods no more obey the heavens V Dr. Johnson s assertion, that ' bloods' signify ' countenances,' is, I think, mis- taken both in the thought conveyed— (for it was never a popu- lar belief that the stars governed men's countenances)— and in the usage, which requires an antithesis of the blood,— or the temperament of the four humors, choler, melancholy, phlegm, and the red globules, or the sanguine portion, which was supposed not to be in our own power, but, to be dependent on the influ- ences of the heavenly bodies,— and the countenances which are in our power really, though from flattery we bring them into a no less apparent dependence on the sovereign, than the former are in actual dependence on the constellations. I have sometimes thought that the word 'courtiers' was a mis- print for ' countenances,' arising from an anticipation, by fore- glance of the compositor's eye, of the word ' courtier' a few lines below. The written r is easily and often confounded with the written n. The compositor read the first syllable court, and —his eye at the same time catching the word courtier lowei down— he completed the word without reconsulting the copy. It is not unlikely that Shakspeare intended first to express gen- NOTES ON CYMBELINE. 95 eraUy, the same thought, whieh a little afterwards he repeats w.th a pabular applieation to the persons meant ;-a coS» usage of the pronommal ■ our/ where the speaker does not really mean to mclude mmself ; and the word 'yon' is an additional eonfirmataon of the ' our,' being nsed in this plaee, for men' fnSrnoTt^ *? - ' ^ * - ^ ' *° « Act i. sc. 2. Imogen's speech : T . . —My dearest husband, I something fear my father s wrath ; but nothino- (Always reserv'd my holy duty) what His rage can do on me. ^wrth.' 6 emPlMSiS °" ' me ' fW '"**' " a mere re P etit ™ of Gym. O disloyal thing That should'st repair my youth, thou heapest A year s age on me ! How is it that tie commentators take no notice of the uh- Shakspenan defect m the metre of the second line, and what m ST " the ; amC ' " ^ harm ° n ^ With th * »™ and fee" mg . Some word or words must have slipped out after « youth ' —probably 'and see:'-— ' ' That should'st repair my youth !_and see, thou heap'st, e of others, and yet to be interested ,n them.-taese and .U con gonial qualities, melting into the eommon copula o them all ite Lan of rank and the gentleman, with all its excellences and al it. weaknesses, constitute the character of Mercutio . Act i. SC. 5. Tyb. It fits when such a villain is a guest ; I'll not endure him. Cap. He shall be endur'd. " ■ What, goodman boy l-I say, he shall :-Go to ;- Am I the master here, or you ?— Go to. NOTES ON EOMEO AND JULIET. U8 You'll not endure him ! — God shall mend my soul— You'll make a mutiny among my guests ! Tou will set cock-a-hoop ! you'll be the man I Tyb. Why, uncle, 'tis a shame. Gap. Go to, go to, You are a saucy boy ! &c. — How admirable is the old man's impetuosity at once contrast- ing, yet harmonized, with young Tybalt's quarrelsome violence ! But it would be endless to repeat observations of this sort. Every leaf is different on an oak-tree ; but still we can only say — our tongues defrauding our eyes — ' This is another oak-leaf !' Act ii. sc. 2. The garden scene : Take notice in this enchanting scene of the contrast of Romeo's love with his former fancy ; and weigh the skill shown in justi- fying him from his inconstancy by making us feel the difference of his passion. Yet this, too, is a love in, although not merelv of, the imagination. lb. Jul. "Well, do not swear ; although I joy in thee, I have no joy in this contract to-night : It is too rash, too unadvis'd, too sudden, &c. "With love, pure love, there is always an anxiety for the safety of the object, a disinterestedness, by which it is distinguished from the counterfeits of its name. Compare this scene with act iii. sc. 1, of the Tempest. I do not know a more wonderful in- stance of Shakspeare's mastery in playing a distinctly remembera- ble variety on the same remembered air, than in the transporting love confessions of Romeo and Juliet and Ferdinand and Miranda. There seems more passion in the one, and more dignity in the other ; yet you feel that the sweet girlish lingering and busy movement of Juliet, and the calmer and more maidenly fondness of Miranda, might easily pass into each other. lb. sc. 3. The Friar's speech : — The reverend character of the Friar, like all Shakspeare's rep- resentations of the great professions, is very delightful and tran- quillizing, yet it is no digression, but immediately necessary to the carrying on of the plot. lb. sc. 4. Rom. Good-morrow to you both. What counterfeit did I give you ? Atbg d£ reAeiero povArj. In the drama, the will is exhibited as struggling with fate, a great and beautiful instance and illustration of which is the Pro- metheus of JEschylus ; and the deepest effect is produced, when the fate is represented as a higher and intelligent will, and the opposition of the individual as springing from a defect. HISTORICAL PLAYS. m In order that a drama maybe properly historical, it is neces- sary that it should be the history of the people to whom it is ad- dressed. In the composition, care must be taken that there appear no dramatic improbability, as the reality is taken for granted. It must, likewise, be poetical ;_that only, I me an, must be taken which la the permanent in our nature, which is com- mon, and therefore deeply interesting to all ages. The events themselves are immaterial, otherwise than as the clothing and manifestation of the spirit that is working within. In this mode the unity resulting from succession is destroyed, but is supplied bv a unity of a higher order, which connects the events by reference to the workers g.ves a reason for them in the motives, and pre- sents men -in then- causative character. It takes, therefore, that part of real history which is the least known, and infuses a prin- ciple of hfe and organization into the naked facts, and makes ttiem all the framework of an animated whole • In my happier days, while I had yet hope and onward-looking thoughts I planned an historical drama of King Stephen, in the manner of Shakspeare. Indeed it would be desirable that some man of dramatic genius should dramatize all those emitted by Shakspeare, as far down as Henry VII. Perkin Warbeck would make a most interesting drama. A few scenes of Mai-low's Ed- ward II. might be preserved. After Henry VIII., the events are oo well and distinctly known, to be, without plump iuverisimili- tude, crowded together in one night's exhibition. Whereas the history of our ancient kings,-the events of their reigns, I mean -are like stars in the sky ;_whatever the real interspaces may be, and however great, they seem close to each other. The stars -the events-strike us and remain in onr eye, little modified by the difference of dates. An historic drama is, therefore, a collec- turn of events borrowed from history, but connected together in respect of cause and time, poetically and by dramatic fiction. It would be a fine national custom to act such a series of dramatic histories in orderly succession, in the yearly Christmas holidays and could not but tend to counteract that mock cosmopolitism which under a positive term really implies nothing but a nega- t on of, or indifference to, the particular love of our country. By its nationality must every nation retain its independence -I mean a nationality quoad the nation. Better thus j-nationality ft. each individual, quoad his country, is equal to the sense of 118 SHAKSPEARE^S ENGLISH individuality quoad himself; but himself as subsensuous, and central. Patriotism is equal to the sense of individuality re- flected from every other individual. There may come a higher virtue in both-just cosmopolitism. But this latter is not possi- ble but by antecedence of the former. _ Shakspeare has included the most important part of nine reigns in his historical dramas— namely— King John, Richard L1L —Henry IV. (two)— Henry Y— Henry YI. (three) including Ed- ward Y. and Henry YI1L, in all ten plays. There remain, there- fore, to be done, with the exception of a single scene or two that should be adopted from Marlow, eleven reigns— of which the first two appear the only unpromising subjects ;— and those two dramas must be formed wholly or mainly of invented private sto- ries which, however, could not have happened except in conse- quence of the events and measures of these reigns, and which should furnish opportunity both of exhibiting the manners and oppressions of the times, and of narrating dramatically the great events ;— if possible, the death of the two sovereigns, at least ol the latter, should be made to have some influence on the finale of the story. All the rest are glorious subjects ; especially Henry I (being the struggle between the men of arms and of letters, in the persons of Henry and Becket), Stephen, Richard I., Ed- ward II. , and Henry VII. KING JOHN". l.ct i. sc. 1. Bast. James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile ? Gur. Good leave, good Philip. Bast. Philip ? sparrow I James, &c Theobald adopts Warburton's conjecture of ' spare me.' true Warburton ! and the sancta simjplicitas of honest dull Theobald's faith in him ! Nothing can be more lively or charac- teristic than 'Philip? Sparrow!' Had Warburton read old Skelton's 'Philip Sparrow,' an exquisite and original poem, and no doubt, popular in Shakspeare's time, even Warburton would scarcely have made so deep a plunge into the bathetic as to have deathified ' sparrow' into ' spare me !' HISTORICAL PLATS. U9 Act iii. sc. 2. Speech of Faulconbridge — Now, by my life, this day grows wondrous hot • borne airy devil hovers in the sky, Ac. Theobald adopts Warburton's conjecture of ' fiery ' I prefer the old text : the word ■ devil' implies < fiery.' Tor, need on y read the line, laying a fell and strong emphasis or! ton'raIterafion eiVe " SeleSSness and te stelessness of Warbur- RICHARD II. and T^f^ ^"l* 116 transitional fo* between the epic poem and the drama Js the historic drama; that in the epic poem a re-announced fate gradually adjusts and employs the wfil and *e events as lts instruments, whilst the drama on the otto .and, places fate and will in opposition to each other, and ! S then 71LZ r '• Whe " t ViCt ° ry ° f &teis ° hM -consequent >t imperfecta m the opposing will, so as to leave a final im- -pn that the fate itself is but a higher and a more inteigent From the length of the speeches, and the circumstance that, th one exception, the events are all historical, and presented .then- results, not produced by acts seen by, or takfnf Jce efore, the audrence, this tragedy is ill suited J' onr prese » t C e e tlT it !'; T? and for the closet ' z feel n ° **»*« s lac ng ,t as the first and most admirable of all Shakspeare's rely h.stoncal plays. For the two parts of Henry IvXm a •ec.es of themselves, which may be named the mfxed drama be d.stmct.on does not depend on the mere quantity of h Zl I events in the play compared with the fictions ; for there is as £ytX m ul M t aCb I th ?, " RiChard ' bUt in the rel «* ms the dot P in th , VUI ? y hiSt ° riCal P 1 ^ 8 ' tbe J*taJ W H» if n * i m ' Xed ' rt dire0ts ;t '' in the rest, as Mac- ttedTc L T M T' ?"*' * SUbSCTVeS * But however 1 it shou Id ft 1 d^d " uT a may be ' G ° d f ° Aid that e-n ae it should fall dead on the hearts of jacobinized Englishmen ' | mdeed, we might say^^W r^ndi! fTL' I wofk It e i, remi h 1SCeaC f " the aU -P e ™eating soul of tin. work. It 1S , perhaps, the most purely historical of Shak- 120 SHAKSPEARE'S ENGLISH . a ■ TV.PVP are not in it, as in the others, characters tal institutions of social life, .vhich bind men together. - This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise ; This fortress, built by nature for herself, A-ainst infection, and the hand of war • This happy breed of men, this little world ; This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a home, Ao-mnst the envv of less happier lands ; &n£rt3* this earth^his realm this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings Fear'dby their breed, and famous by their birth, &c Add the famous passage in King John :— This England never did, nor ever shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror But when it first did help to wound itself. _ Now these her princes are come home again, Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them : naught shall make us rue, If En-land to itself do rest but true. HISTORICAL PLATS 121 cealment of art, for the catastrophe. Observe how he here pre- sents the germ of all the after-events in Richard's insincerity, partiality, arbitrariness, and favoritism, and in the proud, tempes- tuous temperament of his barons. In the very beginning, also., is displayed that feature in Richard's character, which is never forgotten throughout the play — his attention to decorum, and high feeling of the kingly dignity. These anticipations show with what judgment Shakspeare wrote, and illustrate his care to con- nect the past and future, and unify them with the present by forecast and reminiscence. It is interesting to a critical ear to compare the six opening lines of the play — Old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster, Hast thou, according to thy oath and band, &c. each closing at the tenth syllable, with the rhythraless metre of the verse in Henry VI. and Titus Andronicus, in order that the difference, indeed, the heterogeneity, of the two may be felt etiam in simillimis prima superficie. Here the weight of the single words supplies all the relief afforded by intercurrent verse, while the whole represents the mood. And compare the appar- ently defective metre of Bolingbroke's first line, — Many years of happy days befall — with Prospero's, Twelve years since, Miranda! twelve years since — The actor should supply the time by emphasis, and pause on the first syllable of each of these verses. Act i. sc. 1. Bolingbroke's speech : — First (heaven be the record to my speech 1) In the devotion of a subject's love, &c. I remember in the Sophoclean drama no more striking ex- ample of the to TtQinop xai aefivbv than this speech ; and the rhymes in the last six lines well express the preconcertednsss of Bolingbroke's scheme so beautifully contrasted with the vehe- mence and sincere irritation of Mowbray. lb. Bolingbroke's speech : — Which blood, like sacriftcing Abel's, cries, vol. iv. F 122 SHAKSPEARE 7 S ENGLISH Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth, To me, for justice and rough chastisement. Note the deivbv of this ' to me,' which is evidently felt b* Richard : — How high a pitch his resolution soars ! and the affected depreciation afterwards ; — As he is but my father's brother's son. lb. Mowbray's speech : — In haste whereof, most heartily I pray Your highness to assign our trial day. The occasional interspersion of rhymes, and the more frequent winding up of a speech therewith — what purpose was this de- signed to answer ? In the earnest drama, I mean. Deliberate- ness ? An attempt, as in Mowbray, to collect himself and be cool at the close ? — I can see that in the following speeches the rhyme answers the end of the Greek chorus, and distinguishes the general truths from the passions of the dialogue ; but this does not exactly justify the practice, which is unfrequent in proportion to the excellence of Shakspeare's plays. One thing, however, is to be observed, — that the speakers are historical, known, and, so far, formal characters, and their reality is already a fact. This should be borne in mind. The whole of this scene of the quarrel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke seems introduced for the pur- pose of showing by anticipation the characters of Richard and Bolingbroke. In the latter there is observable a decorous and courtly checking of his anger in subservience to a predetermined plan — especially in his calm speech after receiving sentence of banishment — compared with Mowbray's unaffected lamentation. In the one, all is ambitious hope of something yet to come ; in the other it is desolation, and a looking backward of the heart. lb. sc. 2 Gaunt. Heaven's is the quarrel; for heaven's substitute, His deputy anointed in his right, Hath caus'd his death : the which, if wrongfully, Let heaven revenge ; for I may never lift An angry arm against his minister. Without the hollow extravagance of Beaumont and Fletcher's HISTORICAL PLAYS. 123 ultra-royalism, how carefully does Shakspeare acknowledge and reverence the eternal distinction between the mere individual, and the symbolic or representative, on which all genial law, no less than patriotism, depends. The whole of this second scene commences, and is anticipative of, the tone and character of the play at large. lb. sc. 3. In none of Shakspeare's fictitious dramas, or in those founded on a history as unknown to his auditors generally as fic- tion, is this violent rupture of the succession of time found : — a proof, I think, that the pure historic drama, like Richard II. and King John, had its own laws. lb. Mowbray's speech : — A dearer merit Have I deserved at your highness' hand. 0, the instinctive propriety of Shakspeare in the choice of words ! lb. Richard's speech : — Nor never by advised purpose meet, To plot, contrive, or complot any ill 'Gainst us, our state, our subjects, or our land. Already the selfish weakness of Richard's character opens. Nothing will such minds so readily embrace, as indirect ways softened down to their gz^m'-consciences by policy, expedience, &c Tb. Mowbray's speech : — All the world's my "way. ' The world was all before him.' — Milt. lb. Boling. How long a time lies in our little word ! Four lagging winters, and four wanton springs, End in a word : such is the breath of kings. Admirable anticipation ! lb. sc. 4. This is a striking conclusion of a first act, — letting the reader into the secret ; — having before impressed us with the dignified and kingly manners of Richard, yet by well-managed anticipations leading us on to the full gratification of pleasure in our own penetration. In this scene a new light is thrown on Richard's character. Until now he has appeared in all the beauty of royalty ; but here, as soon as h« is left to himself 124 SHAKSPEARE'S ENGLISH the inherent weakness of his character is immediately shown, It is a weakness, however, of a peculiar kind, not arising from want of personal courage, or any specific defect of faculty, but rather an intellectual feminineness, which feels a necessity of ever leaning on the breasts of others, and of reclining on those who are all the while known to be inferiors. To this must be attributed as its consequences all Richard's vices, his tendency to concealment, and his cunning, the whole operation of which is directed to the getting rid of present difficulties. Richard is not meant to be a debauchee ; but we see in him that sophistry which is common to man, by which we can deceive our own hearts, and at one and the same time apologize for, and yet com- mit the error. Shakspeare has represented this character in a very peculiar manner. He has not made him amiable with counterbalancing faults ; but has openly and broadly drawn those faults without reserve, relying on Richard's disproportionate suf- ferings and gradually emergent good qualities for our sympathy ; and this was possible, because his faults are not positive vices, but spring entirely from defect of character. Act ii. sc. 1. ' K. Rich. Can sick men play so nicely with, their names ? Yes ! on a death-bed there is a feeling which may make all things appear but as puns and equivocations. And a passion there is that carries off its own excess by plays on words as natu- rally, and, therefore, as appropriately to drama, as by gesticula- tions, looks, or tones. This belongs to human nature as such, independently of associations and habits from any particular rank of life or mode of employment ; and in this consists Shakspeare's vulgarisms, as in Macbeth's — The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac'd loon ! feelings of the overwhelming and supernatural by a wild transi- tion to the ludicrous, — a sort of cunning bravado, bordering on the nights of delirium. For you may, perhaps, observe that Ham- let's wildness is but half false ; he plays that subtle trick of pretend- ing to act only when he is very near really being what he acts. The subterraneous speeches of the Ghost are hardly defensi- ble : — but I would call your attention to the characteristic differ- ence between this Ghost, as a superstition connected with the most mysterious truths of revealed religion, — and Shakspeare's consequent reverence in his treatment of it, — and the foul earthly witcheries and wild language in Macbeth. Act ii. sc. 1. Polonius and Reynaldo. In all things dependent on, or rather made up of, fine address, the manner is no more or otherwise rememberable than the light motions, steps, and gestures of youth and health. But this is al- most every thing : — no wonder, therefore, if that which can be put down by rule in the memory should appear to us as mere poring, maudlin, cunning, — slyness blinking through the watery eye of superannuation. So in this admirable scene, Polonius, who is throughout the skeleton of his own former skill and state- craft, hunts the trail of policy at a dead scent, supplied by the weak fever-smell in his own nostrils. lb. sc. 2. Speech of Polonius : — My liege, and madam, to expostulate, Ac. Warburton's note. Then as to the jingles, and play on words, let us but look into the ser- NOTES ON HAMLET. 157 mons of Dr. Donne (the wittiest man of that age), and we shall find them full of this vein. I have, and that most carefully, read Dr. Donne's sermons, and find none of these jingles. The great art of an orator — to make whatever he talks of appear of importance — this, indeed, Donne has effected with consummate skill. It Ham. Excellent well ; You are a fishmonger. Tnat is, you are sent to fish out this secret. This is Hamlet's own meaning. lb Ham. For if the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog, Being a god, kissing carrion — These purposely obscure lines, I rather think, refer to some thought in Hamlet's mind, contrasting the lovely daughter with such a tedious old fool, her father, as he, Hamlet, represents Polonius to himself : — ' Why, fool as he is, he is some degrees in rank above a dead dog's carcass ; and if the sun, being a god that kisses carrion, can raise life out of a dead dog, — why may not good fortune, that favors fools, have raised a lovely girl out of this dead-alive old fool ?' Warburton is often led astray, in his inter- pretations, by his attention to general positions without the due Shaksperian reference to what is probably passing in the mind of his speaker, characteristic, and expository of his particular character and present mood. The subsequent passage, — Jephtha, judge of Israel ! what a treasure hadst thou.'. is confirmatory of my view of these lines, lb. Ham. You can not, Sir, take from me any thing that I will more willing ly part withal ; except my life, except my life, except my life. This repetition strikes me as most admirable, lb. Ham. Then are our beggars, bodies ; and our monarchs, and out-stretched heroes, the beggars' shadows. I do not understand this ; and Shakspeare seems to have in- 158 NOTES ON HAMLET. tended the meaning not to be more than snatched at : — ' By my fay, I can not reason !' lb. The rugged Pyrrhus — be whose sable arms, &a This admirable substitution of the epic for the dramatic, giving such a reality to the impassioned dramatic diction of Shakspeare's own dialogue, and authorized too, by the actual style of the tra- gedies before his time (Porrex and Ferrex, Titus Andronicus, &c), is well worthy of notice. The fancy, that a burlesque was in- tended, sinks below criticism : the lines, as epic narrative, are superb. In the thoughts, and even in the separate parts of the diction, this description is highly poetical : in truth, taken by itself, that is its fault that it is too poetical ! — the language of lyric vehe- mence and epic pomp, and not of the drama. But if Shakspeare had made the diction truly dramatic, where would have been the contrast between Hamlet and the play in Hamlet ? (y) lb. bad seen tbe mobled queen, &c. A mob-cap is still a word in common use for a morning-cap, which conceals the whole head of hair, and passes under the chin. It is nearly the same as the night-cap, that is, it is an im- itation of it, so as to answer the purpose (' I am not drest for company'), and yet reconciling it with neatness and perfect, purity. lb. Hamlet's soliloquy : — O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I ! &c. This is Shakspeare's own attestation to the truth of the idea of Hamlet which I have before put forth, lb. Tbe spirit tbat I have seen, May be a devil : and tbe devil batb power To assume a pleasing shape ; yea, and, perhaps Out of my weakness, and my melancholy, (As he is very potent with such spirits) Abuses me to damn me. See Sir Thomas Brown : — I believe that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils, NOTES ON HAMLET. 159 prompting and suggesting us unto mischief, blood, and villany, instilling and stealing into our hearts, that the blessed spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs of the world. Relig. Med. pt. i. sec. 37. Act iii. sc. 1. Hamlet's soliloquy : — To be, or not to be, that is the question, (fee. This speech is of absolutely universal interest, —and yet to which of all Shakspeare's characters could it have been appro- priately given but to Hamlet ? For Jaques it would have been too deep, and for lago too habitual a communion with the heart ; which in every man belongs, or ought to belong, to all mankind. Tb. That undiscover'd country, from whose bourne No traveller returns. — Theobald's note in defence of the supposed contradiction of this in the apparition of the Ghost. miserable defender ! If it be necessary to remove the ap- parent contradiction, — if it be not rather a great beauty, — surely it were easy to say, that no traveller returns to this world, as to his home or abiding-place. Tb. Ham. Ha, ha ! are you honest ? Oph. My lord ? Ham. Are you fair ? Here it is evident that the penetrating Hamlet perceives, from the strange and forced manner of Ophelia, that the sweet girl was not acting a part of her own, but was a decoy ; and his after-speeches are not so much directed to her as to the listeners and spies. Such a discovery in a mood so anxious and irritable accounts for a certain harshness in him ; — and yet a wild up- working of love, sporting with opposites in a wilful self-torment- ing strain of irony, is perceptible throughout. ' I did love you once ;' — c I lov'd you not ;' — and particularly in his enumeration of the faults of the sex from which Ophelia is so free, that the mere freedom therefrom constitutes her character. Note Shak- speare's charm of composing the female character by the absence of characters, that is, marks and out-jottings. lb. Hamlet's speech : — 1 say, we will have no more marriages : those that are married already, all but one, shall live : the rest shall keep as thev are. 160 NOTES ON HAMLET. Observe this dallying with the inward purpose, characteristic of one who had not brought his mind to the steady acting point. He would fain sting the uncle's mind ;— but to stab. his body !— The soliloquy of Ophelia, which follows, is the perfection of love — so exquisitely unselfish ! lb sc. 2. This dialogue of Hamlet with the players is one ot the happiest instances of Shakspeare's power of diversifying the Bcene whilt he is carrying on the plot. lb. Ham. My lord, you play'd once i' the university, you say ? {To Polonius) To have kept Hamlet's love for Ophelia before the audience in any direct form, would have made a breach in the unity of the interest ;— but yet to the thoughtful reader it is suggested by his spite to poor Polonius, whom he can not let rest. lb. The style of the interlude here is distinguished from the real dialogue by rhyme, as in the first interview with the players by epic verse. lb. Bos. My lord, you once did love me. Ham. So I do still, by these pickers and stealers. I never heard an actor give this word 'so' its proper emphasis. Shakspeare's meaning is-' lov'd you ? Hum !— so I do still,' &c. There has been no change in my opinion :— I think as ill of you as I did. Else Hamlet tells an ignoble falsehood, and a useless one, as the last speech to Guildenstern— ' Why, look you now,' &c. — proves. lb. Hamlet's soliloquy : — Now could I drink hot blood, And do such business as the bitter day Would quake to look on. The utmost at which Hamlet arrives, is a disposition, a mood, to do something ;— but what to do, is still left undecided, while every word he utters tends to betray his disguise. Yet observe how perfectly equal to any call of the moment is Hamlet, let it only not be for the future. lb. sc. 4. Speech of Polonius. Polonius's volunteer obtrusion of himself into this business, while it is appropriate to his char- acter, still itching after former importance, removes all likehhocd NOTES ON HAMLET. 101 that Hamlet should suspect his presence, and jrevents us from making his death injure Hamlet in. our opinion, lb. The king's speech : — O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven, &c. This speech well marks the difference between crime and guilt of habit. The conscience here is still admitted to audience. Nay, even as an audible soliloquy, it is far less improbable than is supposed by such as have watched men only in the beaten road of their feelings. But the final — ' all may be well !' is re- markable ; — the degree of merit attributed by the self-flattering soul to its own struggle, though baffled, and to the indefinite half-promise, half-command, to persevere in religious duties. The solution is in the divine medium of the Christian doctrine of ex- piation : — not what you have done, but what you are, must de- termine. lb. Hamlet's speech : — Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying : And now I'll do it : — And so he goes to heaven : And so am I reveuged ? That would be scann'd, &o. Dr. Johnson's mistaking of the marks of reluctance and procras- tination for impetuous, horror-striking fiendishness ! — Of such importance is it to understand the germ of a character. But the interval taken by Hamlet's speech is truly awful ! And then — My words fly up, my thoughts remain below : Words, without thoughts, never to heaven go, — what a lesson concerning the essential difference between wishing and willing, and the folly of all motive-mongering, while the individual self remains ! Tb. sc. 4. Ham. A bloody deed ; — almost as bad, good mother, As kill a king, and marry with his brother. Queen. As kill a king ? 1 confess that Shakspeare has left the character of the Queen in- an unpleasant perplexity. "Was she, or was she not, conscious of the fratricide ? Act iv. sc. 2. Ros. Take you me for a sponge, my lord ? 162 NOTES ON HAMLET. Ham. Ay, Sir ; that soaks up the King's countenance, his rewards, hia authorities, &c. Hamlet's madness is made to consist in the free utterance of all the thoughts that had passed through his mind before ; — in fact, in telling home-truths. Act iv. sc. 5. Ophelia's singing. 0, note the conjunction here of these two thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunc- tion, the love for Hamlet, and her filial love, with the guileless floating on the surface of her pure imagination of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not too delicately avowed, by her father and brother, concerning the dangers to which her honor lay exposed. Thought, affliction, passion, murder itself — she turns to favor and prettiness. This play of association is instan- ced in the close : — » My brother shall know of it, and I thank you for your good counsel . Tb. Gentleman's speech : — And as the world were now but to begin Antiquity forgot, custom not known, The ratifiers and props of every ward — They cry, (fee. Fearful and self-suspicious as I always feel, when I seem to set an error of judgment in Shakspeare, yet I can not reconcile tin cool, and, as Warburton calls it, ' rational and consequential,' re- flection in these lines with the anonymousness, or the alarm, of this Gentleman or Messenger, as he is called in other editions. Tb. King's speech : — There's such divinity doth hedge a king, That treason can but ] Acts little of his will. That treason can but peep to what it would, Proof, as indeed all else is, that Shakspeare never intended us to see the King with Hamlet's eyes ; though, I suspect, the managers have long done so lb. Speech of Laertes : — To hell, allegiance ! vows, to the blackest devil ! Laertes is a good character, but, &c. Warbukton. Mercy on Warburton's notion of goodness ! Please to refer tc the seventh scene of this act : — NOTES ON HAMLET. 1G3 I will do it ; And for this purpose I'll anoint my sword, &c. uttered by Laertes after the King's description of Hamlet ;- He being remiss, Most generous, and free from all contriving, Will not peruse the foils. Yet I acknowledge that Shakspeare evidently wishes, as much as possible to spare the character of Laertes.-to break the extreme turpitude of his consent to become an agent and accomplice of the .King, treachery ;_and to this end he re-introduces Ophelia at the close of this scene to afford a probable stimnlus of passion in her brother. r lb. sc. 6 Hamlet's capture by the pirates. This is almost the only play of Shakspeare, in which mere accidents, independent of all will, form an essential part of the plot ;_but here how ju- dicious y m keeping with the character of the over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by accident or by a fit of passion * lb. sc. 7. JNTote how the Kuig first awakens Laertes's vanity by prating the reporter, and then gratifies it by the report itself a- i finally points it by Sir, this report of his Bid Hamlet so envenom with his envy lb. King's speech : For goodness, growing to a pleurisy, Dies in his own too much. Theobald's note from Warburton, who conjectures • plethory.' I rather think that Shakspeare meant .pleurisy,' but involved Bit the thought of plethora, as supposing pleurisy to arise from too much blood ; otherwise I can not explain the following line- And then this should is like a spendthrift sigh That bin ts by easing. I a stitch in the side every one must have heaved a sigh that hurt by easing. . & Since writing the above I feel confirmed that 'pleurisy' is the •ight word; for I find that in the old medical dictionaries the ileunsy is often called the ' plethory.' 164 NOTES ON MACBETH. Hi. Queen. Your sister's drown'd, Laertes. Laer. Drown'd ! 0, where ? That Laertes might be excused in some degree for not cooling", the Act concludes with the affecting death of Ophelia, — who in the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-flowers, quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a fairy isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy ! Art v. sc. 1. 0, the rich contrast between the Clowns and Hamlet, as two extremes ! You see in the former the mockery of logic, and a traditional wit valued, like truth, for its antiquity, and treasured up, like a tune, for use. lb. sc. 1 and 2. Shakspeare seems to mean all Hamlet's char- acter to be brought together before his final disappearance from the scene ; — his meditative excess in the grave-digging, his yield- ing to passion with Laertes, his love for Ophelia blazing out, his tendency to generalize on all occasions in the dialogue with Horatio, his fine gentlemanly manners with Osrick, and his and Shakspeare's own fondness for presentiment : But thou would'st not think, how ill all's here about my heart : but it is no matter. NOTES ON MACBETH. Macbeth stands in contrast throughout with Hamlet ; in the manner of opening more especially. In the latter, there is a gradual ascent from the simplest forms of conversation to the language of impassioned intellect, — yet the intellect still remain- ing the seat of passion : in the former, the invocation is at once made to the imagination and the emotions connected therewith. Hence the movement throughout is the most rapid of all Shak- speare' s plays ; and hence also, with the exception of the disgust- ing passage of the Porter (z) (Act ii. sc. 3), which I dare pledge myself to demonstrate to be an interpolation of the actors, there is not, to the best of my remembrance, a single pun or play on- words in the whole drama, (aa) I have previously given an an- swer to the thousand times repeated charge against Shakspeare upon the subject of his punning, and I here merely mention the NOTES ON MACBETH. 165 fact of the absence of any puns in Macbeth, as justifying a candid doubt at least, whether even in these figures of speech and fanci- ful modifications of language, Shakspeare may not have followed rules and principles that merit and would stand the test of philo- sophic examination. And hence, also, there is an entire absence of comedy, nay., even of irony and philosophic contemplation in Macbeth,— the play being wholly and purely tragic. For the same cause, there arc no reasonings of equivocal morality, which would have required a more leisurely state and a consequently greater activity of mind ;— no sophistry of self-delusion,— except only that previously to the dreadful act, Macbeth mistranslates the recoilmgs and ominous whispers of conscience into prudential and selfish reasonings, and, after the deed done, the terrors of remorse into fear from external dangers,— like delirious men who run away from the phantoms of their own brains, or, raised by terror to rage, stab the real object that is within their reach :— whilst Lady Macbeth merely endeavors to reconcile his and her own iinkmgs of heart by anticipations of the worst, and an affected bravado in confronting them. In all the rest, Macbeth's language is the grave utterance of the very heart, conscience-sick, even to the last faintings of moral death. It is the same in all the other characters. The variety arises from rage, caused ever and anon by disruption of anxious thought, and the quick transition of fear into it. In Hamlet and Macbeth the scene opens with superstition ; but in each it is not merely different, but opposite. In the first it is connected with the best and holiest feelings ; in the second with the shadowy, turbulent, and unsanctified cravings of the individ- ual will. Nor is the purpose the same ; in the^one the object is to excite, whilst in the other it is to mark a mind already excited. Superstition, of one sort or another, is natural to victorious gen- erals ; the instances are too notorious to need mentioning. There is so much of chance in warfare, and such vast events" are con- nected with the acts of a single individual,— the representative, m truth, of the efforts of myriads, and yet to the public, and,' doubtless, to his own feelings, the aggregate of all,— that the Iproper temperament for generating or receiving superstitious im- pressions is naturally produced. Hope, the master element of a commanding genius, meeting with an active and combining in- tellect, and an imagination of just that degree of vividness which 166 NOTES UN MACBETH. disquiets and impels the soul to try to realize its images, greatly increases the creative power of the mind ; and hence the images become a satisfying world of themselves, as is the case in every poet and original philosopher : — but hope fully gratified, and yet the elementary basis of the passion remaining, becomes fear ; and, indeed, the general, who must often feel, even though he may hide it from his own consciousness, how large a share chance had m his successes, may very naturally be irresolute in a new scene, where he knows that all will depend on his own act and election. The Weird Sisters are as true a creation of Shakspeare's, as his Ariel and Caliban, — fates, furies, and materializing witches being the elements. They are wholly different from any representation of witches in the contemporary writers, and yet presented a suf- ficient external resemblance to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to act immediately on the audience. Their character consists in the imaginative disconnected from the good ; they are the shad- owy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, the law- less of human nature, — elemental avengers without sex or kin Fair is foul, and foul is fair ; Hover thro' the fog and filthy air. How much it were to be wished in playing Macbeth, that an attempt should be made to introduce the flexile character-mask of the ancient pantomime ; — that Flaxman would contribute his genius to the embodying and making seifsuously perceptible that of Shakspeare ! The style and rhythm of the Captain's speeches in the second scene should be illustrated by reference to the interlude in Ham- let, in which the epic is substituted for the tragic, in order to make the latter be felt as the real-life diction. In Macbeth, the poet's object was to raise the mind at once to the high tragic tone, that the audience might be ready for the precipitate con- summation of guilt in the early part of the play. The true reason for the first appearance of the Witches is to strike the key- note of the character of the whole drama, as is proved by their re-appearance in the third scene, after such an order of the king's as establishes their supernatural power of information. I say information, — for so it only is as to Glamis and Cawdor ; the ' king hereafter' was still contingent, — still in Macbeth's moral j vi ill ; although, if he shcild yield to the temptation, and thus I NOTES ON MACBETH. 16 7 forfeit Ins free agency, the link of cause and effect more physico would then commence. I need not say, that the general idea is all that can be required from the poet,— not a scholastic logical consistency in all the parts so as to meet metaphysical objectors. But ! how truly Shaksperian is the opening of Macbeth's char- acter given in the unpossessedness of Banquo's mind, wholly present to the present object,— an unsullied, unscarified mirror ! —And how strictly true to nature it is, that Banquo, and not Macbeth himself, directs our notice to the effect produced on Macbeth's mind, rendered temptable by previous dalliance of the fancy with ambitious thoughts : Good Sir, why do you start ; and seem to fear Things that do sound so fair ? And then, again, still unintroitive, addresses the Witches :— I' the name of truth, Are ye fantastical, or that indeed Which outwardly ye show ? Banquo's questions are those of natural curiosity,— such as a girl would put after hearing a gipsy tell her school-fellow's for- tune ;— all perfectly general, or rather planless. But Macbeth, lost in thought, raises himself to speech only by the Witches bein* about to depart : — Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more :— and all that follows is reasoning on a problem already discussed in his mind,— on a hope which he welcomes, and the doubts concerning the attainment of which he wishes to have cleared up. Compare his eagerness —the keen eye with which he few pursued the Witches' evanishing — Speak, I charge you ! with the easily satisfied mind of the self-uninterested Banguo _ The air hath bubbles, as the water has, And these are of them :— Whither are' they vanish'd ? aad then Macbeth's earnest reply, Into the air ; and what seem'd corporal, melted As breath into the wind — ' Would they had stayed! NOTES ON MACBETH. Is it too minute to notice the appropriateness of the simile 4 hrpatli ' fee, in a cold climate ? StiU .gain Ban^uo goes on wondering, like any eommen spec tat ° r : Were such things here as we do speak ahout i whilst Maoheth persists in recurring to the self-concerning :- Your children shall be kings. Ban. You shall be kiag. ......_, , Mack And thane of Cawdor too : went it not so ! So surely is the guilt in its germ anterior to the supposed cause, and immediate temptation! Before he can coo^ the Ra- tion of the tempting half of the prophecy arrives and the con catenating tendency of the imagination is fostered hy the sudden coincidence : — Glamis and thane of Cawdor : The greatest is behind. Oppose this to Banquo's simple surprise :— What, can the devil speak true I [b. Banquo's speech : — That, trusted home, Might yet enkindle you unto the crown, Besides the thane of Cawdor. I doubt whether ' enkindle' has not another ^ th ^ *** J • stimulating ;' I mean of ' kind" and ' km,' as when rabbits a« said to kindle.' However, Macbeth no longer hears any th.nf ah extra : — Two truths are told, As happy prologues to the swelling act Of the imperial theme. Then in the necessity of recollecting himself— I thank you, gentlemen. Then he relapses into himself again, and every word of his soli* ly shows the early birth-date of his gu.lt. He is all-pow| wiLut strength ; he wishes the end but is irresolute ^ tot means ; conscience distinctly warns him, and he lulls it impj fectly :— NOTES ON MACBETH 169 Lost in the prospective of his guilt, he turns round alarmed lest others may suspect what is passing in his own mind "nd in stantly invents the lie of ambition : My dull brain was wrought With things forgotten;— I And immediately after pours forth the promising courtesies of a usurper in intention :— s 0I d Kind gentlemen, your pains Are regiater'd where every day I turn The leaf to read them. lb. Macbeth's speech : Present/ear.s Are less than horrible imaginings. Warburton's note, and substitution of ' feats' for ' fears ' Mercy on this most wilful ingenuity of blundering, which nev- Teit-Z 8 I ^ WarbUrt ° n ° f Wa ^onlhis mmolt lb. sc. 4 ! the affecting beauty of the death of Cawdor and the presentimental speech of the king :— There's no art To find the mind's construction in the face: He was a gentleman on whom I built An absolute trust — Interrupted by — worthiest cousin 1 way 1 ' TndT f ^ *"*" trait ° rf ° r Wll0m G ™*<*^ made MaebethW ^• 1 \ C ° n f St ^ DunCan ' s ' P^eous joys,' Macbeth has nothing but the eommon-places of loyalty, in which S then ' T ^^ k ' ng ' MS reaSOnin & ™ his a » We, accessor, suggests a new enme. This, however, seems the first SSfS as 4 : the plau of reaIizmg his wishes ; -*£ herefore, with great propnety, Maebeth's cowardioe of his own 170 NOTES ON MACBETH. conscience discloses itself. I always think there is something especially Shaksperian in Duncan's speeches throughout this scene, such pourings forth, such abandonments, compared with the language of vulgar dramatists, whose characters seem to have made their speeches as the actors learn them, lb. Duncan's speech : — Sons, kinsmen, thanes, And you whose places are the nearest, know, We will establish our estate upon Our eldest Malcolm, whom we name hereafter The Prince of Cumberland : which honor must Not unaccompanied, invest him only ; But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine On all deservers. It is a fancy ;— but I can never read this and the following speeches of Macbeth, without involuntarily thinking of the Mil- tonic Messiah and Satan. lb. sc. 5. Macbeth is described by Lady Macbeth so as at the same time to reveal her own character. Could he have every thino- he wanted, he would rather have it innocently ;— ignorant, as alas ! how many of us are, that he who wishes a temporal end for itself, does in truth will the means ; and hence the dan- ger of indulging fancies. Lady Macbeth, like all in Shakspeare is a class individualized:— of high rank, left much alone, and feedino- herself with day-dreams of ambition, she mistakes the j courage of fantasy for the power of bearing the consequences of the realities of guilt. Hers is the mock fortitude of a mind de- luded by ambition ; she shames her husband with a superhumai audacity of fancy which she can not support, but sinks in th season of remorse, and dies in suicidal agony. Her speech -- Come, all you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, &c. a to He is that of one who had habitually familiarized her imagination dreadful conceptions, and was trying to do so still more. I invocations and requisitions are all the false efforts of a mind ac customed only hitherto to the shadows of the imagination, vvf enough to throw the every-day substances of life into shadow, b never as yet brought into direct contact with their own corre pondent realities. She evinces no womanly life, no wifely jo; NOTES ON MACBETH. 17l at the return of her husband, no pleased terror at the thought of his past dangers, whilst Macbeth bursts forth naturally— My dearest love — and shrinks from the boldness with which she presents his own thoughts to him. With consummate art she at first uses as in- centives the very circumstances, Duncan's coming to their house &c. which Macbeth's conscience would most probably have ad- duced to her as motives of abhorrence or repulsion. Yet Mac- beth is not prepared : We will speak further. lb. sc. 6. The lyrical movement with which this scene opens and the free and unengaged mind of Banquo, loving nature, and rewarded in the love itself, form a highly dramatic contrast with the labored rhythm and hypocritical over-much of Lady Mac- beth's welcome, in which you can not detect a ray of personal ieeiing, but all is thrown upon the ■ dignities,' the general duty lb. sc. 7. Macbeth's speech :— We will proceed no further in this business : He hath honor'd me of late; and I have bought Golden opinions from all sorts of people, Which would be worn now in their newest gloss, Not cast aside so soon. Note the inward pangs and warnings of conscience interpreted into prudential reasonings. Act ii. sc. 1. Banquo's speech : — A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers ! Restrain in me the cursed thoughts, that nature Gives way to in repose. The disturbance of an innocent soul by painful suspicions of mother's guilty intentions and wishes, and fear of the cursed noughts of sensual nature. > lb. sc. 2. Now that the deed is done or doing— now that the irst reality commences, Lady Macbeth shrinks. The most sim- ) e sound strikes terror, the most natural consequences are horri- )le, whilst previously every thing, however awful, appeared a Qere trifle ; conscience, which before had been hidden to Mac- 172 NOTES ON MACBETH. beth in selfish and prudential fears, now rushes in upon him in her own veritable person : Methouglit I heard a voice cry— Sleep no more 1 I could not say Amen, When they did say, God bless us 1 And see the novelty given to the most familiar images by a new ^tb l^f This low soliloquy of the Porter and his few speeches 1 afterwards, I believe to have been written for the mob by some other hand, perhaps with Shakspeare's consent ; and that finding it take, he with the remaining ink of a pen otherwise employed, just interpolated the words- Ill devil-porter it no further: I had thought tohavelet in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to th everlasting bonfire. Of the rest not one syllable has the ever-present being of Shak- SP Act'iii sc. 1. Compare Macbeth's mode of working on the murderers in this place with Schiller's mistaken scene between Butler, Devereux, and Macdonald in Wallenstem (Part n. act iv sc 2) The comic was wholly out of season. Shakspeare never introduces it, but when it may react on the tragedy by harmo- nious contrast. lb. sc. 2. Macbeth's speech : — But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, . Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep In the affliction of these terrible dreams % That shake us nightly. Ever and ever mistaking the anguish of ^^^^1 selfishness, and thus as a punishment of that selfishness, plungj ing still deeper in guilt and ruin, lb. Macbeth's speech : — Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, Till thou applaud the deed. This is Macbeth's sympathy with his own feelings, and hii mistaking his wife's opposite state. lb. sc. 4. Macb. It irill have blood, they Bay ; blood will have blood: NOTES ON. MACBETH. 173 Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak; Augurs and understood relations, have By maggot-pies, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth The secret'st man of blood. The deed is done: but Macbeth receives no comfort, no addi- tional security. He has by guilt torn himself live-asunder from nature, and is, therefore, himself in a preternatural state : no wonder, then, that he is inclined to superstition, and faith in the unknown of signs and tokens, and superhuman agencies. Act iv. sc. 1. Len. 'Tis two or three, my lord, that bring you word, Macduff is fled to England. Macb. Fled to England ? The acme of the avenging conscience. lb. sc. 2. This scene, dreadful as it is, is still a relief, because a variety, because domestic, and therefore soothing, as associated with the only real pleasures of life. The conversation' between Lady Macdufi and her child heightens the pathos, and is prepar- atory for the deep tragedy of their assassination. Shakspeare's fondness for children is everywhere shown ;— in Prince Arthur, in King John ; in the sweet scene in the Winter's Tale between Hermione and her son; nay, even in honest Evans's examina- tion of Mrs. Page's school-boy. To the objection that Shakspeare wounds the moral sense by the unsubdued, undisguised description of the most hateful atrocity— that he tears the feeling without mercy, and even outrages the eye itself with scenes oflnsupport- ible horror— I, omitting Titus Andronicus, as not genuine, and excepting the scene of Gloster's blinding in Lear, answer boldly n the name of Shakspeare, not guilty. (M) lb. sc. 3. Malcolm's speech : Better Macbeth, Than such a one to reign. The moral is— the dreadful effects even on the best minds of ie soul-sickening sense of insecurity. lb. How admirably Macduff's grief is in harmony with the 'hole play !^ It rends, not dissolves, the heart. < The tune of it aes manly.' Thus is Shakspeare always master of himself and his subject,— a genuine Proteus :— we see all things in him, aa 3L74 NOTES ON THE .WINTER'S TALE. images in a calm lake, most distinct, most accurate,— only more splendid, more glorified. This is correctness in the only philo- sophical sense. But he requires your sympathy and your sub- mission ; you must have that recipiency of moral impression without which the purposes and ends of the drama would he frustrated, and the absence of which demonstrates an utter want of all imagination, a deadness to that necessary pleasure of being innocently°— shall I say, deluded ;— or rather, drawn away from ourselves to the music of noblest thought in harmonious sounds. Happy he, who not only in the public theatre, but m the labors of a profession, and round the light of his own hearth, still car- ries a heart so pleasure- fraught ! Alas for Macbeth! now all is inward with him; he has no more prudential prospective reasonings. His wife, the only being who could have had any seat in his affections, dies ; he puts on despondency, the final heart-armor of the wretched, and would fain think every thing shadowy and unsubstantial, as indeed all things are to those who can not regard them as symbols of good- ness : — -. ' ... Out, out, brief candle I 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. NOTES ON THE WINTER'S TALE. Although, on the whole, this play is exquisitely respondent to its title, and even in the fault I am about to mention, still a winter's tale ; yet it seems a mere indolence of the great bard not to have provided in the oracular response (Act ii. sc. 2) some ground for Hermione's seeming death and fifteen years' voluntary concealment. This might have been easily effected by some ob- scure sentence of the oracle, as for example :— ' Nor shall he ever recover an heir, if he have a wife before that recovery.' The idea of this delightful drama is a genuine jealousy of dis- position, and it should be immediately followed by the perusal of Othello, which is the direct contrast of it in every particular. Fox JN r OTES ON THE WINTER'S TALE. 175 jealousy is- a vice of the mind, a culpable tendency of the tem- per, having certain well-known and well-defined effects and con- comitants, all of which are visible in Leontes, and, I boldly say, not one of which marks its presence in Othello ;— such as, first, an excitability by the most inadequate causes, and an eagerness to snatch at proofs ; secondly, a grossness of conception, and a disposition to degrade the object of the passion by sensual fancies and images, thirdly, a sense of shame of his own feelings exhib- ited in a solitary moodiness of humor, and yet from the violence of the passion forced to utter itself, and therefore catching occa- sions to ease the mind by ambiguities, equivoques, by talking to those who can not, and who are known not to be able to, under- stand what is said to them,— in short, by soliloquy in the form of dialogue, and hence a confused, broken, and fragmentary man- ner ; fourthly, a dread of vulgar ridicule, as distinct from a high sense of honor, or a mistaken sense of duty ; and lastly, and im- mediately, consequent on this, a spirit of selfish vindictiveness. Act i. sc. 1-2. Observe the easy style of chitchat between Carnillo and Arch idamus as contrasted with the elevated diction on the introduc- tion of the kings and Hermione in the second scene : and how admirably Polixenes' obstinate refusal to Leontes to stay There is no tongue that moves ; none, none i' the world So soon as yours, could win me ; — prepares for the effect produced by his afterwards yielding to Her mione ;— which is, nevertheless, perfectly natural from mere cour- tesy of sex, and the exhaustion of the will by former efforts of denial, and well calculated to set in nascent action the jealousy of Leontes. This, when once excited, is unconsciously increased by Hermione : — Yet, good deed, Leontes, I love thee not a jar o' the clock behind What lady she her lord ; — accompanied, as a good actress ought to represent it, by an ex- pression and recoil of apprehension that she had gone too far. At my request, he would not : — Hie first working of the jealous fit ; — Too hot. too hot : — 176 NOTES ON THE WINTER'S TALE. The morbid tendency of Leontes to lay hold of the merest tn fles, and his grossness immediately afterwards — Paddling palms and pinching fingers ; — followed by his strange loss of self-control in his dialogue with the .little hoy. Act iii. sc. 2. Paulina's speech . That thou betray'dst Polixenes, 'twas nothing; That did but show thee, of a fool, inconstant, And damnable ingrateful. — Theobald reads ' soul.' I think the original word is Shakspeare's. 1. My ear feels it to be Shaksperian ; 2. The involved grammar is Shaksperian ; — ■ show thee, being a fool naturally, to have improved thy folly by inconstancy ;' 3. The alteration is most flat, and un-Shaks- perian. As to the grossness of the abuse — she calls him ' gross and foolish' a few lines below. Act iv. sc. 2. Speech of Autolycus : — For the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it. Fine as this is, and delicately characteristic of one who had lived and been reared in the best society, and had been precipi- tated from it by dice and drabbing ; yet still it strikes against my feelings as a note out of tune, and as not coalescing with that pastoral tint which gives such a charm to this act. It is too Macbeth-like in the ' snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.' lb. sc. 3. Perdita's speech : — From Dis's wagon ! daffodils. An epithet is wanted here, not merely or chiefly for the metre, but for the balance, for the aesthetic logic. Perhaps, ' golden' was the word which would set off the ' violets dim.' lb. Pale primroses That die unmarried. — Milton's— And the rathe primrose that forsaken dies. lb. Perdita's speech : — Even here undone : I was not inuc]/ afraid ; for once or twice NOTES ON OTHELLO. 177 I was about to speak, and tell him plainly, The selfsame sun, that shines upon his court, Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on alike. Wilt please you, Sir, be gone ! {To Florizel) I told you, what would come of this. Beseech you, Of your own state take care : this dream of mine, Being awake, I'll queen it no inch farther, But milk my ewes, and weep. how more than exquisite is this whole speech ! — And that profound nature of noble pride and grief venting themselves in a momentary peevishness of resentment toward Florizel : — Wilt please you, Sir, be gone ! lb. Speech of Autolycus : — Let me have no lying ; it becomes none but tradesmen, and they often give us soldiers the lie ; but we pay them for it in stamped coin, not stab- bing steel ; — therefore they do not give us the lie. As we ]oay them, they, therefore, do not give it us. NOTES ON OTHELLO. Act i. sc. 1. Admirable is the preparation, so truly and peculiarly Shak- sperian, in the introduction of Hoderigo, as the dupe on whom Iago shall first exercise his art, and in so doing display his own character. Roderigo, without any fixed principle, but not with- out the moral notions and sympathies with honor, which his rank and connections had hung upon him, is already well fitted and predisposed for the purpose ; for very want of character and strength of passion, like wind loudest in an empty house, consti- tute his character. The first three lines happily state the nature and foundation of the friendship between him and Iago, — the purse, — as also the contrast of Hoderigo's intemperance of mind with Iago's coolness, — the coolness of a preconceiving experimenter. The mere language of protestation — If ever I did dream of such a matter, abhor me, — ■ which falling in with the associative link, determines Hoderigo's continuation of complaint — H* 178 NOTES ON OTHELLO. Thou told'st me, thou didst hold him in thy hate — elicits at length a true feeling of Iago's mind, the dread of con- tempt habitual to those, who encourage in themselves, and have their keenest pleasure in, the expression of contempt for others. Observe Iago's high, self-opinion, and the moral, that a wicked man will employ real feelings, as well as assume those most alien from his own, as instruments of his purposes : — And, by the faith of man, I know my place, I am worth no worse a place. I think Tyrwhitt's reading of ' life' for ' wife' — A fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife — the true one, as fitting to Iago's contempt for whatever did not display power, and that intellectual power. In what follows, let the reader feel how by and through the glass of two passions, disappointed vanity and envy, the very vices of which he is com- plaining, are made to act upon him as if they were so many excellences, and the more appropriately, because cunning is al- ways admired and wished for by minds conscious of inward weakness ; — but they act only by half, like music on an inatten- tive auditor, swelling the thoughts which prevent him from lis- tening to it. lb. Rod. "What a full fortune does the thick-lips owe, If he can carry 't thus. Hoderigo turns off to Othello ; and here comes one, if not the only, seeming justification of our blackamoor or negro Othello. Even if we supposed this an uninterrupted tradition of the theatre, and that Shakspeare himself, from want of scenes, and the ex- perience that nothing could be made too marked for the senses of his audience, had practically sanctioned it, — would this prove aught concerning his own intention as a poet for all ages ? Can we imagine him so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth, — at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves ? — As for Iago's language to Brabantio, it im- plies merely that Othello was a Moor, that is, black. Though I think the rivalry of Hoderigo sufficient to account for his wil- ful confusion of Moor and Negro, — yet, even if compelled to give this up, I should think it only adapted for the acting of the day, NOTES ON OTHELLO. I79 and should complain of an enormity built on a single word, in direct contradiction to Iago's ' Barbary horse.' Besides, if we could in good earnest believe Shakspeare ignorant of the distinc- tion, still why should we adopt one disagreeable possibility in- stead of a ten times greater and more pleasing probability ? It is a common error to mistake the epithets applied by the dramatis personce to each other, as truly descriptive of what the audience ought to see or know. No* doubt Desdemona saw Othello's vis- age in his mind ; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seven- teenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desde- mona, which Shakspeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated. lb. Brabantio's speech : — This accident is not unlike my dream : — The old careful senator, being caught careless, transfers his caution to his dreaming power at least. lb. Iago's speech : — — For their souls, Another of his fathom they have not, To lead their business : — The forced praise of Othello followed by the bitter hatred of lim in this speech ! And observe how Brabantio's dream pre- pares for his recurrence to the notion of philters, and how both )repare for carrying on the plot of the arraignment of Othello on his ground. lb. sc. 2. Oth. 'Tis better as it is. I How well these few words impress at the outset the truth of theilo's own character of himself at the end — < that he was not ksily wrought !' ' His self-go vernmeiYt contra-distinguishes him fcroughout from Leontes. lb. Othello's speech : — — And my demerits May speak, unbonnetted — The argument in Theobald's note, where ' and bonnetted' is 180 NOTES ON OTHELLO. suggested, goes on the assumption that Shakspeare could not use the same word differently in different places ; whereas I should conclude, that as in the passage in Lear the word is employed in its direct meaning, so here it is used metaphorically ; and this is confirmed by what has escaped the editors, that it is not ' I,' but 1 my demerits' that may speak unbonnetted, — without the sym- bol of a petitioning inferior. lb. Othello's speech : — Please your grace, my ancient ; A man he is of honesty and trust : To his conveyance I assign my wife. Compare this with the behavior of Leontes to his true friend Camillo. lb. sc. 3. Bra. Look to her, Moor ; have a quick eye to see : She h-s rieceiv'd her father, and may thee. Oth. My life uppn her faith. In real life, how do we look back to little speeches as presenti- mental of, or contrasted with, an affecting event ! Even so Shakspeare, as secure of being read over and over, of becoming family-friend, provides this passage for his readers, and leaves it to them. lb. Iago's speech : — Virtue ? a fig 1 'tis in ourselves, that we are thus, or thus, **-W with upoa t: J?£ thlS ' WlU * GnSnare as ^ ■ % - Cassio. V smile of 2 e oZ7r e given t0 trifleSj and made fertile b ^ the vil w lb. Iago's dialogue with Roderigo : OtheUo ^ tUe r6hearSal ° n the dUPe ° f the traiWs intent!o ^ »« lb. Iago's soliloquy : — But partly led to diet my revenge, For that I do suspect the lusty Moor Hath leap'd into my seat. This thought, originally by Iago's own confession a mere suspicion, is now ripening, and gnaws his base nature as his own 'poisonous mineral' is about to gnaw the noble heart of his general. lb. sc. 3. Othello's speech : I know, Iago, Thy honesty and love doth mince this matter, Making it light to Cassio. fcis ! Ay ' and who but the reader ° f *• ^ -" lb. Iago's soliloquy : — -And what > s he theQ that sayg _ r pl ^ the viiia . a ? When this advice is free I give, and honest, Probable to thinking, and, indeed, the course To win the Moor again. He is not you see, an absolute fiend ; or, at least, he wishes to unk himself not so. I84 NOTES ON OTHELLO. Act iii. sc. 3. Des. Before ^Emilia here, 1 give the warrant of this place. The over-zeal of innocence in Desdemona. Enter Desdemona and JEmilia. Oth. If she be false, 0, then, heaven mocks itself ! I'll not believe it. Divine ! The effect of innocence and the better genius ! Act v. sc. 3. Mmil, Why, the wrong is but a wrong i' the world; and having the world for your labor, 'tis a wrong in your own world, and you nnght quickly make it right. Warburton' s note. . _ What any other man, who had learning enough, might have quoted as a playful and witty illustration of his remarks against the Calvinistic thesis, Warburton gravely attributes to Shakspeare as intentional ; and this, too, in the mouth of a lady's woman , Act v. last scene. Othello's speech :— Of one, whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe,