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Title: Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher

Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Release date: May 24, 2008 [eBook #25585]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25585

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAKESPEARE,
BEN JONSON, BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER ***

Shakespeare

Ben Jonson

Beaumont And Fletcher
Notes and Lectures

by S. T. Coleridge
New Edition

Liverpool

Edward Howell

MDCCCLXXIV

Contents

Shakespeare
Definition Of Poetry.
Greek Drama.
Progress Of The Drama.
The Drama Generally, And Public Taste.
Shakespeare, A Poet Generally.
Shakespeare's Judgment equal to his Genius.
Recapitulation, And Summary Of the Characteristics of Shakespeare's
Dramas.
Outline Of An Introductory Lecture Upon Shakespeare.
Order Of Shakespeare's Plays.
Notes On The “Tempest.”
“Love's Labour's Lost.”
“Midsummer Night's Dream.”
“Comedy Of Errors.”
“As You Like It.”
“Twelfth Night.”
“All's Well That Ends Well.”
“Merry Wives Of Windsor.”
“Measure For Measure.”
“Cymbeline.”
“Titus Andronicus.”
“Troilus And Cressida.”
“Coriolanus.”
“Julius Cæsar.”
“Antony And Cleopatra.”
“Timon Of Athens.”
“Romeo And Juliet.”
Shakespeare's English Historical Plays.
“King John.”
“Richard II.”
“Henry IV.—Part I.”

“Henry IV.—Part II.”
“Henry V.”
“Henry VI.—Part I.”
“Richard III.”
“Lear.”
“Hamlet.”
“Macbeth.”
“Winter's Tale.”
“Othello.”
Notes on Ben Jonson.
Whalley's Preface.
“Whalley's ‘Life Of Jonson.’ ”
“Every Man Out Of His Humour.”
“Poetaster.”
“Fall Of Sejanus.”
“Volpone.”
“Apicæne.”
“The Alchemist.”
“Catiline's Conspiracy.”
“Bartholomew Fair.”
“The Devil Is An Ass.”
“The Staple Of News.”
“The New Inn.”
Notes On Beaumont And Fletcher.
Harris's Commendatory Poem On Fletcher.
Life Of Fletcher In Stockdale's Edition, 1811.
“Maid's Tragedy.”
“A King And No King.”
“The Scornful Lady.”
“The Custom Of The Country.”
“The Elder Brother.”
“The Spanish Curate.”
“Wit Without Money.”
“The Humorous Lieutenant.”
“The Mad Lover.”
“The Loyal Subject.”
“Rule A Wife And Have A Wife.”

“The Laws Of Candy.”
“The Little French Lawyer.”
“Valentinian.”
“Rollo.”
“The Wildgoose Chase.”
“A Wife For A Month.”
“The Pilgrim.”
“The Queen Of Corinth.”
“The Noble Gentleman.”
“The Coronation.”
“Wit At Several Weapons.”
“The Fair Maid Of The Inn.”
“The Two Noble Kinsmen.”
“The Woman Hater.”

[pg 001]

Shakespeare, With introductory matter on
Poetry, the Drama, and the Stage.

Definition Of Poetry.

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed
to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science
is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate
object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure. This
definition is useful; but as it would include novels and other works of
fiction, which yet we do not call poems, there must be some additional
character by which poetry is not only divided from opposites, but likewise
distinguished from disparate, though similar, modes of composition. Now
how is this to be effected? In animated prose, the beauties of nature, and the
passions and accidents of human nature, are often expressed in that natural
language which the contemplation of them would suggest to a pure and
benevolent mind; yet still neither we nor the writers call such a work a
poem, though no work could deserve that name which did not include all
this, together with something else. What is this? It is that pleasurable
emotion, that peculiar state and degree of excitement, which arises in the
poet himself in the act of composition;—and in order to understand this, we
must combine a more than ordinary sympathy [pg 002] with the objects,
emotions, or incidents contemplated by the poet, consequent on a more than
common sensibility, with a more than ordinary activity of the mind in
respect of the fancy and the imagination. Hence is produced a more vivid
reflection of the truths of nature and of the human heart, united with a
constant activity modifying and correcting these truths by that sort of
pleasurable emotion, which the exertion of all our faculties gives in a
certain degree; but which can only be felt in perfection under the full play
of those powers of mind, which are spontaneous rather than voluntary, and
in which the effort required bears no proportion to the activity enjoyed. This
is the state which permits the production of a highly pleasurable whole, of
which each part shall also communicate for itself a distinct and conscious
pleasure; and hence arises the definition, which I trust is now intelligible,
that poetry, or rather a poem, is a species of composition, opposed to
science, as having intellectual pleasure for its object, and as attaining its end

by the use of language natural to us in a state of excitement,—but
distinguished from other species of composition, not excluded by the
former criterion, by permitting a pleasure from the whole consistent with a
consciousness of pleasure from the component parts;—and the perfection of
which is, to communicate from each part the greatest immediate pleasure
compatible with the largest sum of pleasure on the whole. This, of course,
will vary with the different modes of poetry;—and that splendour of
particular lines, which would be worthy of admiration in an impassioned
elegy, or a short indignant satire, would be a blemish [pg 003] and proof of
vile taste in a tragedy or an epic poem.

It is remarkable, by the way, that Milton in three incidental words has
implied all which for the purposes of more distinct apprehension, which at
first must be slow-paced in order to be distinct, I have endeavoured to
develope in a precise and strictly adequate definition. Speaking of poetry,
he says, as in a parenthesis, “which is simple, sensuous, passionate.” How
awful is the power of words!—fearful often in their consequences when
merely felt, not understood; but most awful when both felt and understood!
—Had these three words only been properly understood by, and present in
the minds of, general readers, not only almost a library of false poetry
would have been either precluded or still-born, but, what is of more
consequence, works truly excellent and capable of enlarging the
understanding, warming and purifying the heart, and placing in the centre of
the whole being the germs of noble and manlike actions, would have been
the common diet of the intellect instead. For the first condition, simplicity,
—while, on the one hand, it distinguishes poetry from the arduous
processes of science, labouring towards an end not yet arrived at, and
supposes a smooth and finished road, on which the reader is to walk onward
easily, with streams murmuring by his side, and trees and flowers and
human dwellings to make his journey as delightful as the object of it is
desirable, instead of having to toil with the pioneers and painfully make the
road on which others are to travel,—precludes, on the other hand, every
affectation and morbid peculiarity;—the second condition, sensuousness,
[pg 004] insures that framework of objectivity, that definiteness and
articulation of imagery, and that modification of the images themselves,
without which poetry becomes flattened into mere didactics of practice, or
evaporated into a hazy, unthoughtful, day-dreaming; and the third

condition, passion, provides that neither thought nor imagery shall be
simply objective, but that the passio vera of humanity shall warm and
animate both.

To return, however, to the previous definition, this most general and
distinctive character of a poem originates in the poetic genius itself; and
though it comprises whatever can with any propriety be called a poem
(unless that word be a mere lazy synonym for a composition in metre), it
yet becomes a just, and not merely discriminative, but full and adequate,
definition of poetry in its highest and most peculiar sense, only so far as the
distinction still results from the poetic genius, which sustains and modifies
the emotions, thoughts, and vivid representations of the poem by the energy
without effort of the poet's own mind,—by the spontaneous activity of his
imagination and fancy, and by whatever else with these reveals itself in the
balancing and reconciling of opposite or discordant qualities, sameness with
difference, a sense of novelty and freshness with old or customary objects, a
more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order, self-
possession and judgment with enthusiasm and vehement feeling,—and
which, while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still
subordinates art to nature, the manner to the matter, and our admiration of
the poet to our [pg 005] sympathy with the images, passions, characters,
and incidents of the poem:—

“Doubtless, this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns—
As we our food into our nature change!

“From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things,
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light on her celestial wings!

“Thus doth she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the universal kinds,
Which then reclothed in divers names and fates
Steal access thro' our senses to our minds.”

[pg 007]

Greek Drama.

It is truly singular that Plato,—whose philosophy and religion were but
exotic at home, and a mere opposition to the finite in all things, genuine
prophet and anticipator as he was of the Protestant Christian æra,—should
have given in his Dialogue of the Banquet, a justification of our
Shakespeare. For he relates that, when all the other guests had either
dispersed or fallen asleep, Socrates only, together with Aristophanes and
Agathon, remained awake, and that, while he continued to drink with them
out of a large goblet, he compelled them, though most reluctantly, to admit
that it was the business of one and the same genius to excel in tragic and
comic poetry, or that the tragic poet ought, at the same time, to contain
within himself the powers of comedy. Now, as this was directly repugnant
to the entire theory of the ancient critics, and contrary to all their
experience, it is evident that Plato must have fixed the eye of his
contemplation on the innermost essentials of the drama, abstracted from the
forms of age or country. In another passage he even adds the reason,
namely, that opposites illustrate each other's nature, and in their struggle
draw forth the strength of the combatants, and display the conqueror as
sovereign even on the territories of the rival power.

Nothing can more forcibly exemplify the separative spirit of the Greek arts
than their comedy as opposed to their tragedy. But as the immediate [pg
008] struggle of contraries supposes an arena common to both, so both were
alike ideal; that is, the comedy of Aristophanes rose to as great a distance
above the ludicrous of real life, as the tragedy of Sophocles above its tragic
events and passions,—and it is in this one point, of absolute ideality, that
the comedy of Shakespeare and the old comedy of Athens coincide. In this
also alone did the Greek tragedy and comedy unite; in every thing else they
were exactly opposed to each other. Tragedy is poetry in its deepest earnest;
comedy is poetry in unlimited jest. Earnestness consists in the direction and
convergence of all the powers of the soul to one aim, and in the voluntary
restraint of its activity in consequence; the opposite, therefore, 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 doubtless 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 itself is whimsical; the whole work is one great jest,
comprehending a [pg 009] 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 constituents,—place, verse, characters, even single thoughts,
conceits, and allusions, each turning on the pivot of its own free will.

The tragic poet idealizes his characters by giving to the spiritual 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 dependence on our lower
nature, accompanied with a defect in true freedom of spirit and self-

subsistence, and subject to that unconnection by contradictions of the
inward being, to which all folly is owing.

[pg 010]
The ideal of earnest poetry consists in the union and harmonious 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 fixture of light, a means of
developing its beauties, and unfolding its wealth of various colours without
disturbing its unity, or causing a division of the parts. The sportive ideal, on
the contrary, consists in the perfect harmony and concord of the higher
nature with the animal, as with its ruling principle and its acknowledged
regent. The understanding and practical reason are represented 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.

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 (Shakespeare's altogether excepted) is the genuine
descendant. Euripides had already brought tragedy lower [pg 011] down
and by many steps nearer to the real world than his predecessors had ever
done, and the passionate admiration which Menander and Philemon
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 Menander distinguishing itself from tragedy, but not as the
genuine old 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 inmost heart that
their final cause is not to be discovered in the limits of mere mortal life, and
force us into a presentiment, however dim, of a state in which those
struggles of inward free will with outward necessity, which form the true
subject of the tragedian, shall be reconciled and solved;—the entertainment
or new comedy, on the other hand, remained within the circle of experience.
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
constituting the most important of all consequences—forms the ground; the
new comedy, and our modern comedy in general (Shakespeare excepted as
before) lies in prudence or imprudence, enlightened or misled self-love. The
whole moral [pg 012] system of the entertainment exactly like that of fable,
consists in rules of prudence, with an exquisite conciseness, and at the same
time an exhaustive fulness of sense. An old critic said that tragedy was the
flight or elevation of life, comedy (that of Menander) its arrangement or
ordonnance.

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 tragedy 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 indemnified 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:—“O Life and Menander! which of you two imitated the other?”
In short the form of this species of drama was poetry, the stuff 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 by Plato, were written in prose, and were
scenes out of real life conducted in dialogue. The exquisite feast of Adonis
(Συρακούσιαι ῆ Ἀδωνιάζουσαι) 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.

It will not be improper, in this place, to make a [pg 013] 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 moveable stage. This elevation was named the
thymele (θυμέλη), and served to recall the origin and original purpose of the
chorus, as an altar-song in honour of the presiding deity. Here, and on these
steps the persons of the chorus sate collectively, when they were not
singing; attending to the dialogue as spectators, and acting as (what in truth
they were) the ideal representatives of the real audience, and of the poet
himself 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
coryphæus, ascended, as some think, the level summit of the thymele in
order to command the stage, or, perhaps, the whole chorus advanced to the
front of the orchestra, and thus put themselves in ideal connection, as it
were, with the dramatis personæ there acting. This thymele was in the
centre of the whole edifice, all the measurements were calculated, and the
semi-circle of the amphitheatre was drawn from this point. It had a double
use, a twofold 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 [pg
014] the radii from the different seats or benches converged.

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 supposed improbability, which the
understanding or common sense might detect in a change of place;—but
because the senses themselves 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-
organised it with all the other parts into a living whole.

The Greek tragedy may rather be compared to our serious opera than to the
tragedies of Shakespeare; 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 instruments and
accessaries 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
[pg 015] than from any species of theatrical singing. A single flute or pipe
was the ordinary accompaniment; 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 compounds, the newest expressions, the boldest images, the
most recondite 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?

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 to this in the real mask we 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 colour was a known characteristic of the divine or heroic personage
represented.

Finally, I will note down those fundamental characteristics which
contradistinguish the ancient literature from the modern generally, but
which more especially appear in prominence in the tragic [pg 016] drama.
The ancient was allied to statuary, the modern 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
whatever, 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 sublimity.

[pg 017]

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 purpose, 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 personæ were living
characters introduced under their own names; and no doubt, their ordinary
dress, manner, person and voice were closely mimicked. In less favourable
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, and the
successive 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 essential 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, [pg 018] 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 translations of the Greek
drama. This continued till the perfect establishment 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 Χριστὸς Πάσχων,
or, “Christ in his sufferings,” by Gregory Nazianzen,—possibly written in
consequence of the prohibition of profane literature 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 distant provinces prevented the
possibility of exhibiting the engagements of wild beasts.

I pass, therefore, at once to the feudal ages which soon succeeded,
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, [pg
019] 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 continued 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
themselves 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 education 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 Shakespeare.

The drama re-commenced 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 ignorant 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 [pg 020] Roman Catholic countries by pictures. They
presented Mysteries, and often at great expense; and reliques of this system
still remain in the south of Europe, and indeed 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 præsepe or manger. But these Mysteries, in order to answer
their design, must not only be instructive, 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 sublime,
however pathetic, yet the Vice and the Devil, who are the 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 repentance of Adam, the offended Maker, as in proof of his
reconciliation, condescends to visit them, and to catechise the children,—
who with a noble contempt of chronology are all brought together from
Abel to Noah. The good children say the ten Commandments, the Belief,
and the Lord's Prayer; but Cain and his rout, after he had received a box on
the ear [pg 021] 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, I cannot without
inward fear and misgivings pronounce with my tongue.

Let me, however, be acquitted of presumption if I say that I cannot agree
with Mr. Malone, that our ancestors did not perceive the ludicrous in these
things, or that they paid no separate attention to the serious and comic parts.

Indeed his own statement contradicts it. For what purpose should the Vice
leap upon the Devil's back and belabour him, but to produce this separate
attention? The people laughed heartily, no doubt. Nor can I conceive any
meaning attached to the words “separate attention,” 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, I say, of that system to draw
the mind wholly from its own inward whispers and quiet discriminations,
and to habituate the conscience to pronounce sentence in every case
according [pg 022] to the established verdicts of the church and the casuists.
I have looked 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, who 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 the 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 Æschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides;—
and at the same time we learn to account for, and—relatively to the author

—perceive the necessity of, the Fool [pg 023] or Clown or both, as the
substitutes of the Vice and the Devil, which our ancestors had been so
accustomed to see in every exhibition 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 confidant, 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 honour of Christianity, that in its worst and most corrupted
form it cannot wholly separate itself from morality;—whereas the other
religions in their best form (I do not include Mohammedanism, which is
only an anomalous corruption of Christianity, like Swedenborgianism) have
no connection 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
metropolis on the one hand,—the residence, independently of the court and
nobles, of the most active and stirring spirits who [pg 024] had not been
regularly educated, or who, from mischance or otherwise, 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 mean
time, the popular writers, who could not and would not abandon what they
had found to delight their countrymen 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 transcendantly
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
proceeded to criticise 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, indeed, save that of their
inappropriateness to their [pg 025] own end and being, their want of
significance, as symbols or physiognomy.

O! 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 consequent 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 assimilating 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!

I have before spoken of the Romance, or the language formed out of the
decayed Roman and the Northern tongues; and comparing it with the Latin,
we find it less perfect in simplicity and relation—the privileges of a
language formed by the mere attraction 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 genuine modern
poetry the romantic; and the works of Shakespeare are romantic poetry,
revealing itself in the drama. If the tragedies of Sophocles are in the strict
sense of the word tragedies, and the comedies of Aristophanes comedies,

we must emancipate ourselves from a false association arising from
misapplied names, and find a new word for the plays of Shakespeare. 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 different in
degree. [pg 026] They may be called romantic dramas, or dramatic
romances.

A deviation from the simple forms and unities of the ancient stage is an
essential principle, and, of course, an appropriate excellence, 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 language, 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 hand, the romantic poetry—the
Shakespearian drama—appealed to the imagination rather than to the
senses, and to the reason as contemplating our inward nature, and the
workings of the passions 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 truths. 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 imagination, and obedient
only to the [pg 027] 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 dramatists, or of Shakespeare, that the very essence of the former
consists in the sternest separation of the diverse in kind and the disparate 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 ædes diabololatricæ.”
The most important and dignified species of this genus is, doubtless, the
stage (res theatralis histrionica), which, in addition to the generic definition
above given, may be 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 subordinate
and subservient,—that, namely, of imitating reality—whether external
things, actions, or passions—-under a semblance of reality. Thus, Claude
imitates a landscape at sunset, but [pg 028] only as 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 derived from the one is not 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
principle 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 illusion as its nature permits. These, and all other stage
presentations, are to produce a sort of temporary half-faith, which the
spectator encourages in himself and supports by a voluntary contribution 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 observed 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 contrary. As Sir George
Beaumont was shewing 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, [pg 029] 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
assisted 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 criticisms may arise, and indeed have arisen,
either from reasoning 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 consequences, 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 cannot affect the heart or head permanently, endeavour to
[pg 030] call forth the momentary affections. There ought never to be more
pain than is compatible with coexisting pleasure, and to be amply repaid by
thought.

Shakespeare 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 advantages 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 conversation of men under
no strong emotion. The very nakedness of the stage, too, was advantageous,
—for the drama thence became something between recitation and a
representation; 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 precluded the danger of a false ideal,
—of aiming at more than what is possible on the whole. What play of the
ancients, with reference to their ideal, does not hold out more glaring
absurdities than any in Shakespeare? On the Greek plan a man could more
easily be a poet than a dramatist; upon our plan more easily a dramatist than
a poet.

[pg 031]

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 proportion of my matter to my time,
and by bad economy and unskilful management, the several heads of my
discourse failed in making the entire performance correspond with the
promise publicly 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 announced 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 better, 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 endeavour, 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 [pg 032] to cause the production
of as great immediate pleasure in each part, as is compatible with the largest
possible sum of pleasure on the whole. Now this definition applies equally
to painting and music as to poetry; and in truth the term poetry is alike
applicable to all three. The vehicle alone constitutes the difference; 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 certain, 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
honourable enthusiasm, extolling his own art, he was so struck with their

truth, that he exclaimed, “I want no other arguments;—poetry, that is,
verbal poetry, must be the greatest; all that proves final causes in the world,
proves this; it would be shocking to think otherwise!”—And in truth,
deeply, O! far more than words can express, as I venerate the Last Judgment
and the Prophets of Michel Angelo Buonarotti,—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 capital, and that the same caprice, which made
the Neapolitan soldiery destroy all the exquisite masterpieces on the walls
of the church of Trinitado Monte, after the retreat of their antagonist
barbarians, might as easily have made vanish [pg 033] 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, Shakespeare, 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 irruption of
Goths and Vandals, in addition to many other safeguards, by the vast empire
of English language, laws, and religion 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 Homeric 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 cannot 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 immortality or
continuance: for to this tendeth generation, and raising of 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 hands. For have not

the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years, or more, without
the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time, infinite palaces, temples,
castles, cities, have been decayed and demolished? It is not possible to have
the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar; no, nor of the kings
or great personages of much later years; for the originals cannot last, and the
copies cannot but lose of the life and truth. But the images of men's wits and
knowledges [pg 034] remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time,
and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called
images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of
others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding
ages: so that, if the invention of the ship 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 feelings and thoughts! How natural! we say;—but the very
wonder that 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 pleasure! 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, notions, or
feelings, conceived as in opposition to each other;—in short, the [pg 035]
perception of identity and contrariety; the least degree of which constitutes
likeness, the greatest absolute difference; 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 principle of all things, does
distinction exist unaided by division; there are will and reason, succession
of time and unmoving eternity, infinite change and ineffable rest!—

“Return Alpheus! the dread voice is past
Which shrunk thy streams!”

——“Thou honour'd flood,
Smooth-flowing 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 reference only to those things
which are 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 inspired by the passion, and the language and the passion
modified and differenced by the character. To the production of the highest
excellencies 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.

[pg 036]
As to language;—it cannot 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 subjects, or in consequence of certain imaginations, as to make it
almost a necessity of his nature to seek for sympathy,—no doubt, with that
honourable desire of permanent action, which distinguishes genius.—
Where then is the difference?—In this that each part should be
proportionate, though the whole may be perhaps, 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 our 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
[pg 037] 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 Shakespeare'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 characteristics 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 in arm with Hygeia,
whilst pestilence, with a thousand furies running to and fro, and clashing
against each other in a complexity 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
excellencies,—such was Shakespeare. 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 [pg 038] aristocracy of intellect, and
presume to join the almost supernatural beings that stand by themselves
aloof?

Of this diseased epidemic influence there are two forms especially
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
bursts of passion will lie in wait for a jeer at any phrase, that may have an
accidental coincidence 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 sylvæ superimpendentes 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, mediocrity 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 individual
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 [pg 039] latter half of the reign of Louis XIV. to that
of Buonaparte, 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
excitement, 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 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, u, 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 Shakespeare, 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 recalling the cold notion of the thing, but
expressing the reality [pg 040] of it, and, as arbitrary language is an heir-
loom of the human race, being itself a part of that which it manifests. What
shall I deduce 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 nature, 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 absolute 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 counterfeit, by caricature of one or two features, may gain applause
as a fine likeness, yet never was the very thing rejected as a counterfeit. O!
when I think of the inexhaustible mine of virgin treasure in our
Shakespeare, 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 belle 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 acquisition
of facts from history or my own observation, and in knowledge of the
different laws of being and their apparent exceptions, [pg 041] from
accidental collision of disturbing forces,—that 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 intuition in Shakespeare;—when I know this, and
know too, that by a conceivable and possible, though hardly to be expected,
arrangement 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 for ever 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 faery 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.

[pg 043]

Shakespeare, A Poet Generally.

Clothed in radiant armour, and authorized by titles sure and manifold, as a
poet, Shakespeare came forward to demand the throne of fame, as the
dramatic poet of England. His excellences compelled even his
contemporaries to seat him on that throne, although there were giants in
those days contending for the same honour. Hereafter I would fain
endeavour to make out the title of the English drama as created by, and
existing in, Shakespeare, and its right to the supremacy of dramatic
excellence in general. But he had shown himself a poet, previously to his
appearance as a dramatic poet; and had no Lear, no Othello, no Henry IV.,
no Twelfth Night ever appeared, we must have admitted that Shakespeare
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
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 [pg 044] objects, without which no man could have observed so
steadily, or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of
the external world:—

“And when thou hast 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 the 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 harken 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 briar 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 neighbours by,
A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud,” &c.

is much more admirable, but in parts less fitted for quotation.

[pg 045]
Moreover Shakespeare had shown that he possessed fancy, considered as
the faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one

point or more of likeness, as in such a passage as this:—

“Full gently now she takes him by the hand,
A lily prisoned in a jail of snow,
Or ivory in an alabaster band:
So white a friend ingirts so white a foe!”—Ib.

And still mounting the intellectual ladder, he had as unequivocally 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 consciousness, 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
human 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 oneness, 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 Venus' eye!”

[pg 046]
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 enamoured gazer, while a shadowy ideal
character is thrown over the whole! Or this power acts by impressing the
stamp of humanity, and of human feelings, on inanimate or mere natural
objects:—

“Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest,
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,
And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast

The sun ariseth in his majesty,
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 to make him
almost lose the consciousness of words,—to make him see every thing
flashed, as Wordsworth has grandly and appropriately said:—

“Flashed upon the 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-colour'd face,
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
[pg 047]
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase:
Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-faced 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 appearance of the morning, and the two
persons distinctly characterised, and in six simple lines 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 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 representations of love or anger, or other human
affections; or imaginatively, by the different manner in which inanimate
objects, or objects 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 [pg 048] the more illustrative of Shakespeare. 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 patriotism and exultation, Deborah's Song of Victory; it is
glorious, but nature is the poet there. It is quite another matter to become all
things and yet remain the same,—to make the changeful god be felt in the
river, the lion, and the flame;—this it is, that is the true imagination.
Shakespeare 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, Shakespeare 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.

Shakespeare's Judgment equal to his Genius.

Thus then Shakespeare 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 proceed to destroy, as far as may be
in my power, the popular notion that he was a great dramatist by mere
instinct, [pg 049] that he grew immortal 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 infallible 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 defiance of the
alterations of circumstances and habits, was wholly groundless,—took upon
them, as a happy medium and refuge, to talk of Shakespeare as a sort of
beautiful lusus naturæ, a delightful 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,” &c. If all this be true, we must
submit to it; though to a thinking mind it cannot but be painful to find any
excellence, merely human, 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 indignation by general
swoln panegyrics, and merely by his [pg 050] ipse dixit to treat, as
contemptible, what he has not intellect enough to comprehend, or soul to
feel, without assigning any reason, or referring his opinion to any
demonstrative principle;—thus leaving Shakespeare as a sort of grand

Lama, adored indeed, and his very excrements prized as relics, but with no
authority or real influence. I grieve that every late voluminous edition of his
works would enable me to substantiate the present charge with a variety 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 strides at once from an illustrator into a supreme
judge, and blind and deaf, fills his three-ounce phial at the waters of
Niagara; and 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
endeavour—to enforce at various times and by various 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
religion only has the power of reconciling with sincere humility;—without
this, and the modesty produced by it, I am deeply convinced that no man,
however wide his erudition, however patient his antiquarian researches, can
possibly [pg 051] understand, or be worthy of understanding, the writings
of Shakespeare.

Assuredly that criticism of Shakespeare will alone be genial which is
reverential. The Englishman who, without reverence—a proud and
affectionate reverence—can utter the name of William Shakespeare, 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 colours 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 Shakespeare were the mere
dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had not the
dimensions of the swan. In all the successive courses of lectures delivered
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 Shakespeare 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
conviction, that to judge aright, and with distinct consciousness of the
grounds of our judgment, concerning the works of Shakespeare, implies the
power and the means of judging rightly of all other works of intellect, those
of abstract science alone excepted.

[pg 052]
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 literature. Instead of deciding concerning
their own modes and customs by any rule of reason, nothing appears
rational, becoming, or beautiful to them, but what coincides with the
peculiarities 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,
must 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 despotism, but, on the
contrary, true tolerance, in the critic. He will, indeed, require, as the spirit
and substance of a work, something true in human nature itself, and
independent of all circumstances; but in the mode of applying it, he will
estimate genius and judgment according to the felicity with which the
imperishable 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 perpetual to the utter neglect of
the power which can alone animate them. For art cannot exist without, or
apart from nature; and what has man [pg 053] 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 emancipated alike
from national, or party, or sectarian prejudice:—Are the plays of
Shakespeare works of rude uncultivated genius, in which the splendour of
the parts compensates, if aught can compensate, 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:—is Shakespeare 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 honour to the full
extent of his differences from them?—Or are these very differences
additional proofs of poetic wisdom, at once results and symbols of living
power as contrasted with lifeless mechanism—of free and rival originality
as contradistinguished 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 circumscribe 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 [pg 054] 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!

No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is
there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, 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 cannot
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 his
charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakespeare's own
commentators and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous admirers. 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;—as 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 [pg 055] shapes, as it developes, itself from within, and the fulness
of its development is one and the same with the perfection 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 physiognomy 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 Shakespeare,—himself a nature
humanized, a genial understanding directing self-consciously 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 Shakespeare 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 demonstratio demonstrationum) called the conscience, the
understanding 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 realities 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 Shakespeare under each of
these heads all or any of the writers in prose and verse that have ever lived!
Who, that is competent to judge, doubts the result?—And ask your own
hearts—ask your own common-sense—to [pg 056] conceive the possibility
of this man being—I say not, the drunken savage of that wretched sciolist,
whom Frenchmen, to their shame, have honoured before their elder and
better worthies,—but the anomalous, the wild, the irregular, genius of our
daily criticism! What! are we to have miracles in sport?—Or, I speak

reverently, does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to
man?

[pg 057]

Recapitulation, And Summary Of the Characteristics
of Shakespeare'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
working of a vital principle within independent of all accidental
circumstances. And to judge with fairness of an author's works, we ought to
distinguish what is inward 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 [pg
058] 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 we consider great
exquisiteness of language and sweetness of metre alone, it is impossible to
deny to Pope the character of a delightful writer; but whether he be a poet,
must depend upon our definition of the word; and, doubtless, if everything
that pleases be poetry, Pope's satires and epistles must be poetry. This, I
must say, that poetry, as distinguished from other modes of composition,
does not rest in metre, and that it is not poetry, if it make no appeal to our
passions or our imagination. One character 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 colours soon fade, and their odour is transient
as the smile of the planter;—while the meadow may be visited again and
again with renewed delight; its beauty is innate in the soil, and its bloom is
of the freshness of nature.

The next ground of critical judgment, and point of comparison, will be as to
how far a given poet has been influenced by accidental circumstances. As a
living poet must surely write, not for the [pg 059] 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
Shakespeare leave us to regret that he was born in his particular age! The
great æra 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 vigour, 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 points of attention were
religion, morals, and taste; men of genius, 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 [pg 060] 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 ourselves.

Having intimated that times and manners lend their form and pressure to
genius, let me once more draw a slight parallel between 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. 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 proportion. 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 Westminster Abbey, so is Sophocles compared with
Shakespeare; 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, accompanied,
indeed, with the sense of a falling short of perfection, and yet, at the same
time, so promising of our social and individual progression, that we would
not, if we could, exchange it for [pg 061] that repose of the mind which
dwells on the forms of symmetry in the acquiescent admiration of grace.
This general characteristic of the ancient and modern drama might be
illustrated by a parallel of the ancient and modern music;—the one
consisting of melody arising from a succession only of pleasing sounds,—
the modern embracing harmony also, the result of combination, and the
effect of a whole.

I have said, and I say it again, that great as was the genius of Shakespeare,
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 dissimilitude of circumstances by which each was
modified and influenced. The Greek stage had its origin in the ceremonies
of a sacrifice, such as of the goat to Bacchus, whom we most erroneously

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. The heroes of
old, under the influences of this Bacchic enthusiasm, performed more than
human actions; hence tales of the favourite 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.

[pg 062]
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 pursuit of him.

In the Greek drama there were no formal divisions into scenes and acts;
there were no means, therefore, of allowing for the necessary lapse of time
between one part of the dialogue and another, and unity of time in a strict
sense was, of course, impossible. To overcome that difficulty of accounting
for time, which is effected on the modern stage by dropping a curtain, the
judgment and great genius of the ancients supplied music and measured
motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the vacuity. In the story of the
Agamemnon of Æschylus, the capture of Troy is supposed to be announced
by a fire lighted on the Asiatic shore, and the transmission of the signal by
successive beacons to Mycenæ. The signal is first seen at the 21st line, and
the herald from Troy itself enters at the 486th, and Agamemnon himself at
the 783rd line. But the practical absurdity of this was not felt by the

audience, who, in imagination stretched minutes into hours, while they [pg
063] listened to the lofty narrative odes of the chorus 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 Shakespeare's as a
trilogy connected in one single representation. Divide Lear into three parts,
and each would be a play with the ancients; or take the three Æschylean
dramas of Agamemnon, and divide them into, or call them, as many acts,
and they together would be one play. The first act would comprise the
usurpation of Ægisthus, 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;—occupying a period of twenty-two years.

The stage in Shakespeare'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 factitious necessity of custom, but in nature itself,
the unity of feeling, is everywhere and at all times observed by Shakespeare
in his plays. Read Romeo and Juliet;—all is youth and spring;—youth with
its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies;—spring with its odours, 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 Montagues, are
not common old men; they have an eagerness, a heartiness, a vehemence,
the effect of spring; with Romeo, his change of passion, his sudden
marriage, and his rash death, are all the [pg 064] 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.
This unity of feeling and character pervades every drama of Shakespeare.

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
was 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 Shakespeare generally displays
libertinism, but involves morality; and if there are exceptions to this, they
are, independently of their intrinsic value, all of them indicative of
individual character, and, like the farewell admonitions of a 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 favourite, and
soften down the point in her which Shakespeare 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 memory of wisdom no longer actually
possessed. This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage.
Shakespeare never [pg 065] intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for
although it was natural that Hamlet—a young man of fire and genius,
detesting formality, and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as
imagining that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation—should express
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 statesman somewhat past his faculties,—his recollections
of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of human nature, whilst
what immediately takes place before him, and escapes from him, is
indicative of weakness.

But as in Homer all the deities are in armour, even Venus; so in Shakespeare
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 a fool to imitate
a fool; but to be, remain, and speak like a wise man and a great wit, and yet
so as to give a vivid representation of a veritable fool,—hic 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. Shakespeare 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 Kotzebues of
the day. Shakespeare's fathers are roused by ingratitude, his husbands stung
by unfaithfulness; [pg 066] in him, in short, the affections are wounded in
those points in which all may, nay, must, feel. Let the morality of
Shakespeare 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 favour of Shakespeare;—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 warfare against
virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no wickedness, through the
medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate. In Shakespeare 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 temperate; 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 same stratagem being used in regard to Benedict and
Beatrice,—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 [pg 067] the service, when any other less ingeniously absurd
watchmen and night-constables would have answered the mere necessities
of the action;—take away Benedict, Beatrice, Dogberry, and the reaction of
the former on the character of Hero,—and what will remain? In other
writers the main agent of the plot is always the prominent character; in
Shakespeare 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 main-spring 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 Shakespeare 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 tradition,—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 Shylock, the Richard—that Shakespeare
makes us for the first time acquainted with. Omit the first scene in Lear,
and yet everything 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 Metastasio, 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 Shakespeare are introduced as songs [pg
068] 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 dramatised 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.” &c.

melts away into the lyric of Mortimer;—

“I understand thy looks: that pretty Welsh
Which thou pourest down from these swelling heavens,
I am too perfect in,” &c.

Henry IV. part i. act iii, sc. 1.

7. The characters of the dramatis personæ, like those in real life, are to be
inferred by the reader;—they are not told to him. And it is well worth
remarking that Shakespeare'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 discovered the poet's own idea, by all the speeches receiving light
from it, and attesting its reality by reflecting it.

[pg 069]
Lastly, in Shakespeare 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 Shakespeare is that by which the individual is distinguished
from others, not that which makes a different kind of him. Shakespeare
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 Shakespeare the morning star, the guide
and the pioneer, of true philosophy.

[pg 071]

Outline Of An Introductory Lecture Upon
Shakespeare.

Of that species of writing termed tragi-comedy, much has been produced
and doomed to the shelf. Shakespeare's comic are continually reacting upon
his tragic characters. Lear, wandering amidst the tempest, has all his
feelings of distress increased by the overflowings of the wild wit of the
Fool, as vinegar poured upon wounds exacerbates their pain. Thus, even his
comic humour tends to the development of tragic passion.

The next characteristic of Shakespeare is his keeping at all times in the high
road of life, &c. Another evidence of his exquisite judgment is, that he
seizes hold of popular tales; Lear and the Merchant of Venice were popular
tales, but are so excellently 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 extraordinary
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 [pg
072] be exemplified in Polonius, whose character has been often
misrepresented. Shakespeare never intended him for a buffoon, &c.

Another excellence of Shakespeare, 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 Shakespearian. In observation of living
characters—of 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 comparison with Richardson,

who perpetually places himself, as it were, in a day-dream. Shakespeare
excels in both. Witness the accuracy of character in Juliet's name; while for
the great characters of Iago, Othello, Hamlet, Richard III., to which he
could never have seen anything similar, he seems invariably to have asked
himself—How should I act or speak in such circumstances? His comic
characters are also peculiar. A drunken constable was not uncommon; but
he makes folly a vehicle for wit, as in Dogberry: everything is a sub-
stratum on which his genius can erect the mightiest superstructure.

To distinguish that which is legitimate in Shakespeare from 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 Shakespeare, his
additions may be recognised to half a line, from the metre, [pg 073] which
has the same perfection in the flowing continuity of interchangeable
metrical pauses in his earliest plays, as in Love's Labour's Lost.

Lastly, contrast his morality with the writers of his own or of the succeeding
age, &c. If a man speak injuriously of our friend, our vindication of him is
naturally warm. Shakespeare 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 Shakespeare is an author of all others the most
calculated to make his readers better as well as wiser.

*****

Shakespeare, possessed of wit, humour, 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 Falstaff are men
who reverse 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 he
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 [pg 074] of felicity,
because he was not promoted as he expected. Othello was superior in place,
but Iago felt him to be inferior in intellect, and, unrestrained by conscience,
trampled upon him. Falstaff, 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 professed 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 labour 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 inward determination with an outward show of humility.

[pg 075]

Order Of Shakespeare's Plays.

Various attempts have been made to arrange the plays of Shakespeare, each
according to its priority in time, by proofs derived from external documents.
How unsuccessful these attempts have been might easily be shewn, 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 unsatisfactory 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 honour and respectability,—
when a degree of disgrace, levior quædam infamiæ 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 expenses of the press demanded the liberality 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 [pg 076] other,—when we know that the plays of
Shakespeare, 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 conclusive evidence, that
such drama or poem had at that time been published? Or, further, can the
priority of publication itself prove anything in favour 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 years. For Mr. Malone has made it
highly probable that he had commenced as a writer for the stage in 1591,
when he was twenty-seven years old, and Shakespeare 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 writings themselves, with no other
positive data than the known facts that the Venus and Adonis was 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 Shakespeare could have remained to his twenty-ninth or [pg
077] thirtieth year without attempting poetic composition 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 possibly 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 favour 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, Uebergangswerke; not his, yet of him.

SECOND EPOCH.

All's Well that Ends Well;—but 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, Shakespeare; it was the negative
period of his perfection.

[pg 078]

Love's Labour's Lost.
Twelfth Night.
As You Like It.
Midsummer Night's Dream.
Richard 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.

FIFTH EPOCH.

The period of beauty was now past; and that of δεινότης 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
Taming of the Shrew umgearbeitet.
Measure for Measure.
Othello.
Tempest.
Winter's Tale.
Cymbeline.

[pg 079]
CLASSIFICATION ATTEMPTED, 1810.

Shakespeare's earliest dramas I take to be—

Love's Labour's Lost.
All's Well that Ends Well.
Comedy of Errors.
Romeo 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.

In the fourth, I place the plays containing the greatest characters—

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.

[pg 080]
CLASSIFICATION ATTEMPTED, 1819.

I think Shakespeare's earliest dramatic attempt—perhaps even prior in
conception to the Venus and Adonis, and planned before he left Stratford—
was Love's Labour's Lost. Shortly afterwards I suppose Pericles and certain
scenes in Jeronymo 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 Shakespeare's celebrity as poet, and his interest, no
less than his influence, as manager, enabled him to bring forward the laid-
by labours of his youth. The example of Titus Andronicus, which, as well as
Jeronymo, was most popular in Shakespeare's first epoch, had led the young
dramatist to the lawless mixture of dates and manners. In this same epoch I
should place the Comedy of Errors, remarkable as being the only specimen
of poetical farce in our language, that is, intentionally such; so that all the
distinct kinds of drama, which might be educed a priori, have their
representatives in Shakespeare'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 counterpart of Love's Labour's Lost, Taming of the Shrew,
Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and Romeo and
Juliet.

SECOND EPOCH.

Richard II.
King John.
Henry VI.,—rifacimento only.
Richard III.

[pg 081]
THIRD EPOCH.

Henry IV.
Henry V.
Merry Wives of Windsor.
Henry VIII.,—a sort of historical masque, or show play.

FOURTH EPOCH

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 EPOCH.

when the energies of intellect in the cycle of genius were, though in a rich
and more potentiated form, becoming predominant over passion and
creative self-manifestation—

Measure for Measure,
Timon of Athens.
Coriolanus.
Julius Cæsar.
Antony and Cleopatra.
Troilus and Cressida.

Merciful, wonder-making Heaven! what a man was this Shakespeare!
Myriad-minded, indeed, he was.

[pg 083]

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 the 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 decision;—the
French, which evidently presupposes that a perfect delusion is to be 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
impossibility of delusion, he makes no sufficient allowance for an
intermediate 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 negative reality, and no more. Whatever,
therefore, tends to prevent 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.

[pg 084]
Now, 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 O, 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 banishment 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 supporting this willing illusion,—yet they do not
on that account cease to be ends themselves; and we must remember that, as
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 [pg 085] particular occasions, a palpable improbability
may be hazarded by a great genius for the express purpose of keeping down
the interest of a merely instrumental scene, which would otherwise make
too great an impression for the harmony of the entire illusion. Had the
panorama been invented in the time of Pope Leo X., Raffael 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
upon 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 bearing, the spiritual
vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without will withdraw the
mind from the proper and only legitimate interest which is intended to
spring from within.

[pg 086]
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 anything from the spectators, which their previous habits
had not fitted them to understand. It is the bustle of a tempest, from which
the real horrors are abstracted;—therefore it is poetical, though not in
strictness natural—(the distinction to which I have so often alluded)—and
is purposely restrained from concentering the interest 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 putting 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
Shakespeare himself, as it were, of the tempest) to open out the truth to his
daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how completely anything that
might have been disagreeable to us in the magician, 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
[pg 087] Beaumont and Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not decent;
when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakespeare 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 sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic processes, but
in that sane equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are

representative of all past experience,—not of the individual only, but of all
those by whom she has been educated, and their predecessors, even up to
the first mother that lived. Shakespeare 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 harmony of all the parts of the moral being constituing one living
total of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive
energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude,—shown in 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 affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations
of love alone. In all the Shakespearian women there is essentially the same
foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety are merely
the result of 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 everything the airy tint [pg 088]
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 supernatural of the other should tend to neutralise each
other; Caliban, on the other hand, is all earth, all condensed and gross in
feelings and images; he has the dawnings of understanding 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,
and, man's whole system duly considered, those powers cannot be
considered other than means to an end—that is, to morality.

In 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 prepared by previous esteem,

admiration, or even affection,—yet love seems to require a momentary act
of volition, by which a tacit bond of devotion is imposed,—a bond not to be
thereafter broken without violating what should be sacred in our nature.
How finely is the true Shakespearian 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.

[pg 089]
Prospero's interruption of the courtship has often seemed to me to have had
no sufficient motive; still, his alleged reason—

... “Lest too light winning
Make the prize light”—

is enough for the ethereal connections of the romantic imagination,
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 command—“Thou shalt leave father and mother,” &c. Oh!
with what exquisite purity this scene is conceived and executed!
Shakespeare 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 vice are allowed, whilst
grossness against it is hypocritically, or at least morbidly, condemned.

In this play are admirably sketched the vices generally accompanying a low
degree of civilisation; and in the first scene of the second act Shakespeare
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.
Shakespeare never puts habitual scorn into the mouths of other than bad
men, as here in the instances of Antonio and Sebastian. The scene of [pg
090] the intended assassination of Alonzo and Gonzalo is an exact
counterpart of the scene between Macbeth and his lady, only pitched in a
lower key throughout, as designed to be frustrated and concealed, and
exhibiting the same profound management in the manner of familiarising a

mind, not immediately recipient, 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 suggested act, and at length to
become acquainted with it. Observe how the effect of this scene is
heightened by contrast with another counterpart of it in low life,—that
between the conspirators Stephano, Caliban, 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 inwoven with human nature. In
his treatment of this subject, wherever it occurs, Shakespeare is quite
peculiar. In other writers we find the particular opinions of the individual; in
Massinger it is rank republicanism; in Beaumont and Fletcher even jure
divino principles are carried to excess;—but Shakespeare never
promulgates any party tenets. He is always the philosopher 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 [pg 091] 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-humoured
way in which he describes Stephano passing from the most licentious
freedom to absolute despotism over Trinculo and Caliban. The truth is,
Shakespeare's characters are all genera intensely individualised; the results
of meditation, of which observation supplied the drapery and the colours
necessary to combine them with each other. He had virtually surveyed all
the great component powers and impulses of human nature,—had seen that
their different combinations and subordinations were in fact the
individualisers 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.

[pg 093]

“Love's Labour's Lost.”

The characters in this play are either impersonated out of Shakespeare's
own multiformity by imaginative self-position, or out of such as a country
town and schoolboy'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 generalising and condensing; it ends in realising and
expanding. It first collects the seeds.

Yet, if this juvenile drama had been the only one extant of our Shakespeare,
and we possessed the tradition only of his riper works, or accounts of them
in writers who had not even mentioned this play,—how many of
Shakespeare's characteristic features might we not still have discovered in
Love's Labour'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, [pg 094] by
the choice of the characters, and the whimsical determination on which the
drama is founded. A whimsical determination 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,
which engaged even mighty kings with a sort of serio-comic interest, 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 Shakespeare'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
preaching, and 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 ridiculous 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 [pg 095] 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 language only of the most
vehement agitations of the mind, are adopted 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 specimen of it. It is logic clothed in rhetoric;
—but observe how Shakespeare, 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 further development of
that character:—

“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 head of theft is stopp'd:
Love's feeling is more soft and sensible,
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails;
[pg 096]
Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste;
For valour, 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 tempered with love's sighs;
Oh, 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 from charity?”—

This is quite a study;—sometimes you see this youthful god of poetry
connecting disparate thoughts purely by means of resemblances in the
words expressing them,—a thing in character in lighter comedy, especially
of that kind in which Shakespeare delights, 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
consequence 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 justified by the
law of passion, which, [pg 097] inducing in the mind an unusual activity,
seeks for means to waste its superfluity,—when in the highest degree—in
lyric repetitions and sublime tautology—“At her feet he bowed, he fell, he
lay down; at her feet he bowed, 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 agitates our
limbs, and forces our very gestures into a tempest in states of high
excitement.

The mere style of narration in Love's Labour's Lost, like that of Ægeon 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 manuscript copies, and could hardly have escaped the notice and
admiration of Shakespeare 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 passion 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
undersong, but—palpably, and so as to show themselves addressed to the
general reader. However, it is not unimportant to notice how strong a
presumption the diction and allusions of this play afford, that, though
Shakespeare's acquirements in the dead languages might not be 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 [pg 098]
almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits, 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 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 hitherto exclusive subjects
of his meditation. Just as Ben Jonson, who applied himself to the drama
after having served in Flanders, 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
Shakespeare 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 I 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 endeavour of your wit,
To enforce the pained impotent to smile.

Biron. To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be; it is impossible;
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

Ros. Why, that's the way to choke a gibing spirit,
[pg 099]
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 clamours of their own dear groans,
Will hear your idle scorns, continue then,
And I will have you, and that fault withal:
But, if they will not, throw away that spirit,
And I shall find you empty of that fault,
Right joyful of your reformation.”

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 back to the preceding lines,—

“Like the eye, full
Of straying shapes,” &c,

In the same scene:—

“Biron. And what to me, my love? and what to me?

Ros. You must be purged too, your sins are rank;
You are attaint with fault and perjury:
Therefore, if you my favour mean to get,
A twelvemonth shall you spend, and never rest,
But seek the weary beds of people sick.”

There can be 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
Warburton and others in striking out the preceding line also. It is quite in
Biron's character; and Rosaline, not answering it immediately, Dumain

takes up the question for him, and, after he and Longaville are answered,
Biron, with evident propriety, says:—

“Studies my mistress?” &c.

[pg 101]

“Midsummer Night's Dream.”

Act i. sc. 1.—

“Her. O cross! too high to be enthrall'd to low—

Lys. Or else misgrafted in respect of years;

Her. O spite! too old to be engaged to young—

Lys. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends;

Her. O hell! to chuse love by another's eye!”

There is no authority for any alteration;—but I never can help feeling how
great an improvement it would be, if the two former of Hermia's
exclamations were omitted;—the third and only appropriate one would then
become a beauty, and most natural.

Ib. Helena's speech:—

“I will go tell him of fair Hermia's flight,” &c.

I am convinced that Shakespeare 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 undisguisedly avowed to herself, and this, too, after
the witty cool philosophising that precedes. The act itself is natural, and the
resolve 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 [pg 102]
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 cannot
harmonise it with the ideal.

Act ii. sc. 1. Theobald's edition—

“Through bush, through briar—

Through flood, through fire—”

What a noble pair of ears this worthy Theobald must have had! The eight
amphimacers or cretics,—

“Ovĕr hīll, ōvĕr dāle,
Thōrŏ' būsh, thōrŏ' brīar,
Ovĕr pārk, ōvĕr pāle,
Thrōrŏ' flōōd, thōrŏ' fīre”—

have a delightful effect on the ear in their sweet transition to the trochaic,—

“I dŏ wāndĕr ēv'ry whērĕ
Swīftĕr thān thĕ mōōnĕs sphērĕ,” &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 English of the
principle metrical feet:—

Pyrrhic or Dibrach, u u = bŏdy, spĭrĭt.
Tribrach, u u u = nŏbŏdy, hastily pronounced.
Iambus, u - = dĕlīght.
Trochee, - u = līghtlȳ.
Spondee, - - = Gōd spāke.

The paucity of spondees in single words in English, and indeed in the
modern languages in general, [pg 103] makes perhaps the greatest
distinction, metrically considered, between them and the Greek and Latin.

Dactyl, - u u = mērrĭlȳ.
Anapæst, u u - = ă prŏpōs, or the first three syllables of cĕrĕmōny.
Amphibrachys, u - u = dĕlīghtfŭl.
Amphimacer, - u - = ōvĕr hīll.
Antibacchius, u - = thĕ Lōrd Gōd.
Bacchius, - - u = Hēlvēllȳn.
Molossus, - - - = Jōhn Jāmes Jōnes.

These simple feet may suffice for understanding the metres of Shakespeare,
for the greater part at least;—but Milton cannot be made harmoniously
intelligible without the composite feet, the Ionics, Pæons, and Epitrites.

Ib. sc. 2. Titania's speech (Theobald, adopting Warburton's reading):—

“Which she, with pretty and with swimming gate
Follying (her womb then rich with my young squire)
Would imitate,” &c.

Oh! oh! Heaven have mercy on poor Shakespeare, and also on Mr.
Warburton's mind's eye!

Act v. sc. 1. Theseus' speech (Theobald):—

“And what poor [willing] duty cannot do,
Noble respect takes it in might, not merit.”

To my ears it would read far more Shakespearian thus:—

“And what poor duty cannot do, yet would,
Noble respect,” &c.

Ib. sc. 2.—

“Puck. Now the hungry lion roars,
And the wolf behowls the moon;
Whilst the heavy ploughman snores
All with weary task foredone,” &c.

[pg 104]

Very Anacreon in perfectness, proportion, grace, and spontaneity! So far it
is Greek;—but then add, O! what wealth, what wild ranging, and yet what
compression and condensation of, 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.

[pg 105]

“Comedy Of Errors.”

The myriad-minded man, our, and all men's Shakespeare, 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 licence 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 naturæ, 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.

[pg 107]

“As You Like It.”

Act i. sc. 1.

“Oli. What, boy!

Orla. Come, come, elder brother, you are too young in this.

Oli. Wilt thou lay hands on me, villain?”

There is a beauty here. The word “boy” naturally provokes and 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.

Ib.—

“Oli. 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 school'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 misprised: but it shall not be so long; this wrestler shall clear
all.”

This has always appeared to me one of the most un-Shakespearian speeches
in all the genuine works of our poet; yet I should be nothing surprised, and
greatly pleased, to find it hereafter 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 Shakespeare with want of truth to
nature; and yet at first sight this speech of Oliver's 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 naturally have called forth. But I dare [pg 108] 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 sometimes a
gloomy self-gratification in making the absoluteness of the will (sit pro
ratione voluntas!) evident to themselves by setting the reason and the
conscience in full array against it.—1818.

Ib. sc. 2.—

“Celia. If your saw yourself with your eyes, or knew yourself with your
judgment, the fear of your adventure would counsel you to a more equal
enterprise.”

Surely it should be “our eyes” and “our judgment.”

Ib. sc 3.—

“Cel. 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 may be 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 how 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 for which no one has
discovered even a plausible origin.

[pg 109]

“Twelfth Night.”

Act i. sc. 1. Duke's speech:—

... “So full of shapes is fancy,
That it alone is high fantastical.”

Warburton's alteration of is into in is needless. “Fancy” may very well be
interpreted “exclusive affection,” or “passionate preference.” 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 Shakespearian.

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.”

Ib. 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?”

O 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.

Ib. sc. 4.—

“Duke. My life upon't, young though thou art, thine eye
Hath stay'd upon some favour that it loves;
Hath it not, boy?

Vio. A little, by your favour.

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.

[pg 110]
Ib.—

“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 a pause; and then start
afresh, from the activity of thought, born of suppressed feelings, and which
thought had accumulated during the brief interval, as vital heat under the
skin during a dip in cold water.

Ib. 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 humour lies in
the whispered “No!” and the inviting “Don't!” with which the maiden's
kisses are accompanied, and thence compared to negatives, which by
repetition constitute an affirmative.

[pg 111]

“All's Well That Ends Well.”

Act i. sc. 1.—

“Count. If the living be enemy to the grief, the excess makes
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.

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 honour, but to wed it.”

It would be, I own, an audacious and unjustifiable change of 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 following “woo” and “wed” are so far confirmative
as they indicate Shakespeare's manner of connection by unmarked
influences of association from some preceding metaphor. [pg 112] This it is
which makes his style so peculiarly vital and organic. Likewise “those girls

of Italy” strengthen the guess. The absurdity of Warburton'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.

Ib. sc. 3.—

“Laf. They say, miracles are past; and we have our philosophical
persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural
and causeless.”

Shakespeare, 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 Shakespeare 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?

[pg 113]

“Merry Wives Of Windsor.”

Act i. sc. 1.—

“Shal. The luce is the fresh fish, the salt fish is an old coat.”

I cannot 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” (baccalà). Cambrice—“cot” for coat.

“Shal. The luce is the fresh fish—

Evans. The salt fish is an 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.

Ib. sc. 3—

“Fal. Now, the report goes, she has all the rule of her husband's
purse; He 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-Shakespearian, allusion to the “legion” in
St. Luke's “gospel.”

[pg 115]

“Measure For Measure.”

This play, which is Shakespeare's throughout, is to me the most painful—
say rather, the only painful—part of his genuine works. The comic and
tragic parts equally border on the μισητὸν,—the one being disgusting, the
other horrible; and the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles
the strong indignant claim of justice—(for cruelty, with lust and damnable
baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being
morally repented of); but it is likewise degrading to the character of woman.
Beaumont and Fletcher, who can follow Shakespeare in his errors only,
have presented a still worse, because more loathsome 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 Shakespeare's
throughout.

Act iii. sc. 1.—

“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,” &c.

“This natural fear of Claudio, from the antipathy we have to death, seems
very little varied from that infamous wish of Mæcenas, recorded in the 101st
epistle of Seneca:—

“Debilem facito manu,
Debilem pede, coxa” &c.—Warburton's note.

I cannot but think this rather a heroic resolve, than an infamous wish. It
appears to me to be the grandest symptom of an immortal spirit, when [pg
116] 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 immediate advantage.
The difference is, that the self-love of the former cannot exist but by a
complete suppression and habitual supplantation 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 cæteris 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 animal, than
he who lives for the moment with no inheritance in the future. Whatever
can degrade man, is supposed in the latter 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?

Ib. 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.”

[pg 117]

“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 Shakespeare'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 elegant, and sounds to my ear Shakespearian. What, however, is
meant by “our bloods no more obey the heavens?”—Dr. Johnson's assertion
that “bloods” signify “countenances,” is, I think, mistaken both in the
thought conveyed—(for it was never a popular 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 humours, 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 influences 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
[pg 118] the sovereign, than the former are in actual dependence on the
constellations.

I have sometimes thought that the word “courtiers” was a misprint for
“countenances,” arising from an anticipation, by foreglance 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” lower down—he completed the word without reconsulting the
copy. It is not unlikely that Shakespeare intended first to express, generally,

the same thought, which a little afterwards he repeats with a particular
application to the persons meant;—a common usage of the pronominal
“our,” where the speaker does not really mean to include himself; and the
word “you” is an additional confirmation of the “our,” being used in this
place for “men” generally and indefinitely,—just as “you do not meet” is
the same as “one does not meet.”

Act i. sc. 1 Imogen's speech:—

... “My dearest husband,
I something fear my father's wrath; but nothing
(Always reserved my holy duty) what
His rage can do on me;”

Place the emphasis on “me”; for “rage” is a mere repetition of “wrath.”

“Cym. O disloyal thing;
That should'st repair my youth; thou heapest
A year's age on me!”

How is it that the commentators take no notice of the un-Shakespearian
defect in the metre of the second line, and what in Shakespeare is the same,
[pg 119] in the harmony with the sense and feeling? Some word or words
must have slipped out after “youth,”—possibly “and see”:—

“That should'st repair my youth!—and see, thou heap'st,” &c.

Ib. sc. 3. Pisanio's speech:—

... “For so long
As he could make me with this eye or ear
Distinguish him from others,” &c.

But “this eye,” in spite of the supposition of its being used δεικτικῶς, is
very awkward. I should think that either “or” or “the” was Shakespeare's
word;—

“As he could make me or with eye or ear.”

Ib. sc. 6. Iachimo's speech:—

... “Hath nature given them eyes
To see this vaulted arch, and the rich crop
Of sea and land, which can distinguish 'twixt
The fiery orbs above, and the twinn'd stones
Upon the number'd beach.”

I would suggest “cope” for “crop.” As to “twinn'd stones”—may it not be a
bold catachresis for muscles, cockles, and other empty shells with hinges,
which are truly twinned? I would take Dr. Farmer's “umber'd,” which I had
proposed before I ever heard of its having been already offered by him: but
I do not adopt his interpretation of the word, which I think is not derived
from umbra, a shade, but from umber, a dingy yellow-brown soil, which
most commonly forms the mass of the sludge on the sea-shore, and on the
banks of tide-rivers at low water. One other possible interpretation of this
sentence has occurred to me, just barely worth mentioning;—that [pg 120]
the “twinn'd stones” are the augrim stones upon the number'd beech,—that
is, the astronomical tables of beech-wood.

Act v. sc. 5.—

“Sooth. When, as a lion's whelp,” &c.

It is not easy to conjecture why Shakespeare should have introduced this
ludicrous scroll, which answers no one purpose, either propulsive, or
explicatory, unless as a joke on etymology.

[pg 121]

“Titus Andronicus.”

Act i. sc. 1. Theobald's note:—

“I never heard it so much as intimated, that he (Shakespeare) had turned his
genius to stage-writing, before he associated with the players, and became
one of their body.”

That Shakespeare never “turned his genius to stage-writing,” as Theobald
most Theobaldice phrases it, before he became an actor, is an assertion of
about as much authority as the precious story that he left Stratford for deer-
stealing, and that he lived by holding gentlemen's horses at the doors of the
theatre, and other trash of that arch-gossip, old Aubrey. The metre is an
argument against Titus Andronicus being Shakespeare's, worth a score such
chronological surmises. Yet I incline to think that both in this play and in
Jeronymo, Shakespeare wrote some passages, and that they are the earliest
of his compositions.

Act v. sc. 2. I think it not improbable that the lines from—

“I am not mad; I know thee well enough;

to

So thou destroy Rapine, and Murder there”—

were written by Shakespeare in his earliest period. But instead of the text—

“Revenge, which makes the foul offenders quake.
Tit. Art thou Revenge? and art thou sent to me?”—

the words in italics ought to be omitted.

[pg 123]

“Troilus And Cressida.”

“Mr. Pope (after Dryden) informs us that the story of Troilus and Cressida
was originally the work of one Lollius, a Lombard: but Dryden goes yet
further; he declares it to have been written in Latin verse, and that Chaucer
translated it. Lollius was a historiographer of Urbino in Italy.”—Note in
Stockdale's edition, 1807.

“Lollius was a historiographer of Urbino in Italy.” So affirms the notary to
whom the Sieur Stockdale committed the disfaciménto of Ayscough's
excellent edition of Shakespeare. Pity that the researchful notary has not
either told us in what century, and of what history, he was a writer, or been
simply content to depose, that Lollius, if a writer of that name existed at all,
was a somewhat somewhere. The notary speaks of the Troy Boke of
Lydgate, printed in 1513. I have never seen it; but I deeply regret that
Chalmers did not substitute the whole of Lydgate's works from the MSS.
extant, for the almost worthless Gower.

The Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare can scarcely be classed with his
dramas of Greek and Roman history; but it forms an intermediate link
between the fictitious Greek and Roman histories, which we may call
legendary dramas, and the proper ancient histories,—that is, between the
Pericles or Titus Andronicus, and the Coriolanus or Julius Cæsar.
Cymbeline is a congener with Pericles, and distinguished from Lear by not
having any declared prominent object. But where [pg 124] shall we class
the Timon of Athens? Perhaps immediately below Lear. It is a Lear of the
satirical drama; a Lear of domestic or ordinary life;—a local eddy of
passion on the high road of society, while all around is the week-day goings
on of wind and weather; a Lear, therefore, without its soul-searching
flashes, its ear-cleaving thunder-claps, its meteoric splendours,—without
the contagion and the fearful sympathies of nature, the fates, the furies, the
frenzied elements, dancing in and out, now breaking through and scattering,

—now hand in hand with,—the fierce or fantastic group of human passions,
crimes, and anguishes, reeling on the unsteady ground, in a wild harmony to
the shock and the swell of an earthquake. But my present subject was
Troilus and Cressida; and I suppose that, scarcely knowing what to say of
it, I by a cunning of instinct ran off to subjects on which I should find it
difficult not to say too much, though certain after all that I should still leave
the better part unsaid, and the gleaning for others richer than my own
harvest.

Indeed, there is no one of Shakespeare's plays harder to characterise. The
name and the remembrances connected with it, prepare us for the
representation of attachment no less faithful than fervent on the side of the
youth, and of sudden and shameless inconstancy on the part of the lady.
And this is, indeed, as the gold thread on which the scenes are strung,
though often kept out of sight and out of mind by gems of greater value
than itself. But as Shakespeare calls forth nothing from the mausoleum of
history, or the catacombs of tradition, without giving, or eliciting, some [pg
125] permanent and general interest, and brings forward no subject which
he does not moralise or intellectualise,—so here he has drawn in Cressida
the portrait of a vehement passion, that, having its true origin and proper
cause in warmth of temperament, fastens on, rather than fixes to, some one
object by liking and temporary preference.

“There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirit looks out
At every joint and motive of her body.”

This Shakespeare has contrasted with the profound affection represented in
Troilus, and alone worthy the name of love;—affection, passionate indeed,
—swoln with the confluence of youthful instincts and youthful fancy, and
growing in the radiance of hope newly risen, in short, enlarged by the
collective sympathies of nature;—but still having a depth of calmer element
in a will stronger than desire, more entire than choice, and which gives
permanence to its own act by converting it into faith and duty. Hence, with
excellent judgment, and with an excellence higher than mere judgment can
give, at the close of the play, when Cressida has sunk into infamy below
retrieval and beneath hope, the same will, which had been the substance and

the basis of his love, while the restless pleasures and passionate longings,
like sea-waves, had tossed but on its surface,—this same moral energy is
represented as snatching him aloof from all neighbourhood with her
dishonour, from all lingering fondness and languishing regrets, whilst it
rushes with him into other and nobler duties, and deepens the channel,
which his heroic brother's death had left empty for its collected [pg 126]
flood. Yet another secondary and subordinate purpose Shakespeare has
inwoven with his delineation of these two characters,—that of opposing the
inferior civilisation, but purer morals, of the Trojans to the refinements,
deep policy, but duplicity and sensual corruptions of the Greeks.

To all this, however, so little comparative projection is given,—nay, the
masterly group of Agamemnon, Nestor, and Ulysses, and, still more in
advance, that of Achilles, Ajax, and Thersites, so manifestly occupying the
fore-ground, that the subservience and vassalage of strength and animal
courage to intellect and policy seems to be the lesson most often in our
poet's view, and which he has taken little pains to connect with the former
more interesting moral impersonated in the titular hero and heroine of the
drama. But I am half inclined to believe, that Shakespeare's main object, or
shall I rather say his ruling impulse, was to translate the poetic heroes of
paganism into the not less rude, but more intellectually vigorous, and more
featurely, warriors of Christian chivalry,—and to substantiate the distinct
and graceful profiles or outlines of the Homeric epic into the flesh and
blood of the romantic drama;—in short, to give a grand history-piece in the
robust style of Albert Durer.

The character of Thersites, in particular, well deserves a more careful
examination, as the Caliban of demagogic life;—the admirable portrait of
intellectual power deserted by all grace, all moral principle, all not
momentary impulse;—just wise enough to detect the weak head, and fool
enough to provoke the armed fist of his betters;—one whom malcontent
Achilles can inveigle from malcontent [pg 127] Ajax, under the one
condition, that he shall be called on to do nothing but abuse and slander,
and that he shall be allowed to abuse as much and as purulently as he likes,
that is, as he can;—in short, a mule,—quarrelsome by the original discord
of his nature;—a slave by tenure of his own baseness,—made to bray and
be brayed at, to despise and be despicable. “Aye, Sir, but say what you will,

he is a very clever fellow, though the best friends will fall out. There was a
time when Ajax thought he deserved to have a statue of gold erected to him
and handsome Achilles, at the head of the Myrmidons, gave no little credit
to his friend Thersites!”

Act iv. sc. 5. Speech of Ulysses:—

“O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,
That give a coasting welcome ere it comes”—

Should it be “accosting?” “Accost her, knight, accost!” in the Twelfth Night.
Yet there sounds a something so Shakespearian in the phrase—“give a
coasting welcome” (“coasting” being taken as the epithet and adjective of
“welcome”), that had the following words been, “ere they land,” instead of
“ere it comes,” I should have preferred the interpretation. The sense now is,
“that give welcome to a salute ere it comes.”

[pg 129]

“Coriolanus.”

This play illustrates the wonderfully philosophic impartiality of
Shakespeare's politics. His own country's history furnished him with no
matter but what was too recent to be devoted to patriotism. Besides, he
knew that the instruction of ancient history would seem more dispassionate.
In Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar, you see Shakespeare's good-natured laugh
at mobs. Compare this with Sir Thomas Brown's aristocracy of spirit.

Act i. sc. 1. Marcius' speech:—

... “He that depends
Upon your favours, swims with fins of lead,
And hews down oaks with rushes. Hang ye! Trust ye?”

I suspect that Shakespeare wrote it transposed!

“Trust ye? Hang ye!”

Ib. sc. 10. Speech of Aufidius:—

... “Mine emulation
Hath not that honour in't, it had; for where
I thought to crush him in an equal force,
True sword to sword; I'll potch at him some way
Or wrath, or craft may get him.—
... My valour (poison'd
With only suffering stain by him) for him
Shall fly out of itself: nor sleep, nor sanctuary,
Being naked, sick, nor fane, nor capitol,
The prayers of priests, nor times of sacrifices,
Embankments all of fury, shall lift up
Their rotten privilege and custom 'gainst

My hate to Marcius.”

I have such deep faith in Shakespeare's heart-lore, that I take for granted
that this is in nature, [pg 130] and not as a mere anomaly; although I cannot
in myself discover any germ of possible feeling, which could wax and
unfold itself into such sentiment as this. However, I perceive that in this
speech is meant to be contained a prevention of shock at the after-change in
Aufidius's character.

Act ii. sc. 1. Speech of Menenius:—

“The most sovereign prescription in Galen,” &c.

Was it without, or in contempt of, historical information that Shakespeare
made the contemporaries of Coriolanus quote Cato and Galen? I cannot
decide to my own satisfaction.

Ib. sc. 3. Speech of Coriolanus:—

“Why in this wolvish toge should I stand hero”

That the gown of the candidate was of whitened wool, we know. Does
“wolvish” or “woolvish” mean “made of wool?” If it means “wolfish,”
what is the sense?

Act iv. sc. 7. Speech of Aufidius:—

“All places yield to him ere he sits down,” &c.

I have always thought this, in itself so beautiful speech, the least explicable
from the mood and full intention of the speaker of any in the whole works
of Shakespeare. I cherish the hope that I am mistaken, and that, becoming
wiser, I shall discover some profound excellence in that, in which I now
appear to detect an imperfection.

[pg 131]

“Julius Cæsar.”

Act i. sc. 1.—

“Mar. What meanest thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy
fellow!”

The speeches of Flavius and Marullus are in blank verse. Wherever regular
metre can be rendered truly imitative of character, passion, or personal rank,
Shakespeare seldom, if ever, neglects it. Hence this line should be read:—

“What mean'st by that? mend me, thou saucy fellow!”

I say regular metre: for even the prose has in the highest and lowest
dramatic personage, a Cobbler or a Hamlet, a rhythm so felicitous and so
severally appropriate, as to be a virtual metre.

Ib. sc. 2.—

“Bru. A soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March.”

If my ear does not deceive me, the metre of this line was meant to express
that sort of mild philosophic contempt, characterising Brutus even in his
first casual speech. The line is a trimeter,—each dipodia containing two
accented and two unaccented syllables, but variously arranged, as thus:—

u--u|-uu-|u-u-
A soothsayer | bids you beware | the Ides of March.

Ib. Speech of Brutus:—

“Set honour in one eye, and death i' the other,
And I will look on both indifferently.”

Warburton would read “death” for “both;” but I prefer the old text. There
are here three things, [pg 132] the public good, the individual Brutus'
honour, and his death. The latter two so balanced each other, that he could
decide for the first by equipoise; nay—the thought growing—that honour
had more weight than death. That Cassius understood it as Warburton, is the
beauty of Cassius as contrasted with Brutus.

Ib. Cæsar's speech:—

... “He loves no plays
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music,” &c.

“This is not a trivial observation, nor does our poet mean barely by it, that
Cassius was not a merry, sprightly man; but that he had not a due
temperament of harmony in his disposition.”—Theobald's note.

O Theobald! what a commentator wast thou, when thou would'st affect to
understand Shakespeare, instead of contenting thyself with collating the
text! The meaning here is too deep for a line ten-fold the length of thine to
fathom.

Ib. sc. 3. Cæsar's speech:—

“Be factious for redress of all these griefs;
And I will set this foot of mine as far,
As who goes farthest.”

I understand it thus: “You have spoken as a conspirator; be so in fact, and I
will join you. Act on your principles, and realize them in a fact.”

Act ii. sc. 1. Speech of Brutus:—

“It must be by his death; and, for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crown'd:
How that might change his nature, there's the question.
... And, to speak truth of Cæsar,

I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason.
... So Cæsar may;
Then, lest he may, prevent.”

This speech is singular;—at least, I do not at [pg 133] present see into
Shakespeare's motive, his rationale, or in what point of view he meant
Brutus' character to appear. For surely—(this, I mean, is what I say to
myself, with my present quantum of insight, only modified by my
experience in how many instances I have ripened into a perception of
beauties, where I had before descried faults;) surely, nothing can seem more
discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to
the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here
attributed to him—to him, the stern Roman republican; namely,—that he
would have no objection to a king, or to Cæsar, a monarch in Rome, would
Cæsar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be! How, too,
could Brutus say that he found no personal cause—none in Cæsar's past
conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Had he not entered
Rome as a conqueror? Had he not placed his Gauls in the Senate?—
Shakespeare, it may be said, has not brought these things forward—True;—
and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What character did Shakespeare
mean his Brutus to be?

Ib. Speech of Brutus:—

“For if thou path, thy native semblance on.”

Surely, there need be no scruple in treating this “path” as a mere misprint or
mis-script for “put.” In what place does Shakespeare—where does any
other writer of the same age—use “path” as a verb for “walk?”

Ib. sc. 2. Cæsar's speech:—

“She dreamt to-night, she saw my statue.”

No doubt, it should be statua, as in the same age, they more often
pronounced “heroes” as a trisyllable [pg 134] than dissyllable. A modern
tragic poet would have written,—

“Last night she dreamt that she my statue saw.”

But Shakespeare never avails himself of the supposed license of
transposition, merely for the metre. There is always some logic either of
thought or passion to justify it.

Act iii. sc. 1. Antony's speech:—

“Pardon me, Julius—here wast thou bay'd, brave hart:
Here didst thou fall; and here thy hunters stand
Sign'd in thy spoil, and crimson'd in thy lethe.
O world! thou wast the forest to this hart,
And this, indeed, O world! the heart of thee.”

I doubt the genuineness of the last two lines;—not because they are vile; but
first, on account of the rhythm, which is not Shakespearian, but just the
very tune of some old play, from which the actor might have interpolated
them;—and secondly, because they interrupt, not only the sense and
connection, but likewise the flow both of the passion, and (what is with me
still more decisive) of the Shakespearian link of association. As with many
another parenthesis or gloss slipt into the text, we have only to read the
passage without it, to see that it never was in it. I venture to say there is no
instance in Shakespeare fairly like this. Conceits he has; but they not only
rise out of some word in the lines before, but also lead to the thought in the
lines following. Here the conceit is a mere alien: Antony forgets an image,
when he is even touching it, and then recollects it, when the thought last in
his mind must have led him away from it.

Act iv. sc. 3. Speech of Brutus:—

... “What, shall one of us,
That struck the foremost man of all this world,
But for supporting robbers.”

[pg 135]
This seemingly strange assertion of Brutus is unhappily verified in the
present day. What is an immense army, in which the lust of plunder has
quenched all the duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or

differenced only as fiends are from ordinarily reprobate men? Cæsar
supported, and was supported by, such as these;—and even so Buonaparte
in our days.

I know no part of Shakespeare that more impresses on me the belief of his
genius being superhuman, than this scene between Brutus and Cassius. In
the Gnostic heresy it might have been credited with less absurdity than most
of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed him to create, previously
to his function of representing, characters.

[pg 137]

“Antony And Cleopatra.”

Shakespeare can be complimented only by comparison with himself: all
other eulogies are either heterogeneous, as when they are in reference to
Spenser or Milton; or they are flat truisms, as when he is gravely preferred
to Corneille, Racine, or even his own immediate successors, Beaumont and
Fletcher, Massinger and the rest. The highest praise, or rather form of
praise, of this play, which I can offer in my own mind, is the doubt which
the perusal always occasions in me, whether the Antony and Cleopatra is
not, in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigour of maturity,
a formidable rival of Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. Feliciter audax
is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakespeare's other
works, even as it is the general motto of all his works compared with those
of other poets. Be it remembered, too, that this happy valiancy of style is
but the representative and result of all the material excellencies so
expressed.

This play should be perused in mental contrast with Romeo and Juliet;—as
the love of passion and appetite opposed to the love of affection and
instinct. But the art displayed in the character of Cleopatra is profound; in
this, especially, that the sense of criminality in her passion is lessened by
our insight into its depth and energy, at the very moment that we cannot but
perceive that the passion [pg 138] itself springs out of the habitual craving
of a licentious nature, and that it is supported and reinforced by voluntary
stimulus and sought-for associations, instead of blossoming out of
spontaneous emotion.

Of all Shakespeare's historical plays, Antony and Cleopatra is by far the
most wonderful. There is not one in which he has followed history so
minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic
strength so much;—perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly.
This is greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force is sustained
throughout, and to the numerous momentary flashes of nature counteracting

the historic abstraction. As a wonderful specimen of the way in which
Shakespeare lives up to the very end of this play, read the last part of the
concluding scene. And if you would feel the judgment as well as the genius
of Shakespeare in your heart's core, compare this astonishing drama with
Dryden's All For Love.

Act i. sc. 1. Philo's speech:—

... “His captain's heart
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper.”

It should be “reneagues,” or “reniegues,” as “fatigues,” &c.

Ib.—

“Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transform'd
Into a strumpet's fool.”

Warburton's conjecture of “stool” is ingenious, and would be a probable
reading, if the scene opening had discovered Antony with Cleopatra on his
lap. But, represented as he is walking and jesting with her, “fool” must be
the word. Warburton's [pg 139] objection is shallow, and implies that he
confounded the dramatic with the epic style. The “pillar” of a state is so
common a metaphor as to have lost the image in the thing meant to be
imaged.

Ib. sc. 2.—

... “Much is breeding;
Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life,
And not a serpent's poison.”

This is so far true to appearance, that a horse-hair, “laid,” as Hollinshed
says, “in a pail of water,” will become the supporter of seemingly one
worm, though probably of an immense number of small slimy water-lice.

The hair will twirl round a finger, and sensibly compress it. It is a common
experiment with school boys in Cumberland and Westmoreland.

Act ii. sc. 2. Speech of Enobarbus:—

“Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her i' th' eyes,
And made their bends adornings. At the helm
A seeming mermaid steers.”

I have the greatest difficulty in believing that Shakespeare wrote the first
“mermaids.” He never, I think, would have so weakened by useless
anticipation the fine image immediately following. The epithet “seeming”
becomes so extremely improper after the whole number had been positively
called “so many mermaids.”

[pg 141]

“Timon Of Athens.”

Act i. sc. 1.—

“Tim. The man is honest.

Old Ath. Therefore he will be, Timon.
His honesty rewards him in itself.”

Warburton's comment—“If the man be honest, for that reason he will be so
in this, and not endeavour at the injustice of gaining my daughter without
my consent”—is, like almost all his comments, ingenious in blunder; he can
never see any other writer's thoughts for the mist-working swarm of his
own. The meaning of the first line the poet himself explains, or rather
unfolds, in the second. “The man is honest!”—“True;—and for that very
cause, and with no additional or extrinsic motive, he will be so. No man can
be justly called honest, who is not so for honesty's sake, itself including its
own reward.” Note, that “honesty” in Shakespeare's age retained much of
its old dignity, and that contradistinction of the honestum from the utile, in
which its very essence and definition consist. If it be honestum, it cannot
depend on the utile.

Ib. Speech of Apemantus, printed as prose in Theobald's edition:—

“So, so! aches contract, and starve your supple joints!”

I may remark here the fineness of Shakespeare's sense of musical period,
which would almost by itself have suggested (if the hundred positive proofs
had not been extant) that the word “aches” was [pg 142] then ad libitum, a
dissyllable—aitches. For read it “aches,” in this sentence, and I would
challenge you to find any period in Shakespeare's writings with the same
musical or, rather dissonant, notation. Try the one, and then the other, by

your ear, reading the sentence aloud, first with the word as a dissyllable and
then as a monosyllable, and you will feel what I mean.

Ib. sc. 2. Cupid's speech: Warburton's correction of—

“There taste, touch, all pleas'd from thy table rise”—

into

“Th' ear, taste, touch, smell,” &c.

This is indeed an excellent emendation.

Act ii. sc. 1. Senator's speech:—

... “Nor then silenc'd with
“Commend me to your master”—and the cap
Plays in the right hand, thus.”

Either, methinks, “plays” should be “play'd,” or “and” should be changed to
“while.” I can certainly understand it as a parenthesis, an interadditive of
scorn; but it does not sound to my ear as in Shakespeare's manner.

Ib. sc. 2. Timon's speech (Theobald):—

“And that unaptness made you minister,
Thus to excuse yourself.”

Read your;—at least I cannot otherwise understand the line. You made my
chance indisposition and occasional inaptness your minister—that is, the
ground on which you now excuse yourself. Or, perhaps, no correction is
necessary, if we construe “made you” as “did you make;” “and that
unaptness did you make help you thus to excuse yourself.” But the former
seems more in Shakespeare's [pg 143] manner, and is less liable to be
misunderstood.

Act iii. sc. 3. Servant's speech:—

“How fairly this lord strives to appear foul!—takes virtuous copies to be
wicked; like those that under hot, ardent zeal would set whole realms on fire.
Of such a nature is his politic love.”

This latter clause I grievously suspect to have been an addition of the
players, which had hit, and, being constantly applauded, procured a settled
occupation in the prompter's copy. Not that Shakespeare does not elsewhere
sneer at the Puritans; but here it is introduced so nolenter volenter (excuse
the phrase) by the head and shoulders!—and is besides so much more likely
to have been conceived in the age of Charles I.

Act iv. sc. 3. Timon's speech:—

“Raise me this beggar, and deny't that lord.”

Warburton reads “denude.”

I cannot see the necessity of this alteration. The editors and commentators
are, all of them, ready enough to cry out against Shakespeare's laxities and
licenses of style, forgetting that he is not merely a poet, but a dramatic poet;
that, when the head and the heart are swelling with fulness, a man does not
ask himself whether he has grammatically arranged, but only whether (the
context taken in) he has conveyed his meaning. “Deny” is here clearly equal
to “withhold;” and the “it,” quite in the genius of vehement conversation,
which a syntaxist explains by ellipses and subauditurs in a Greek or Latin
classic, yet triumphs over as ignorances in a contemporary, refers to
accidental and artificial rank or elevation, implied in the verb “raise.”
Besides, does the word “denude” occur in any writer before, or of,
Shakespeare's age?

[pg 145]

“Romeo And Juliet.”

I have previously had occasion to speak at large on the subject of the three
unities of time, place, and action, as applied to the drama in the abstract,
and to the particular stage for which Shakespeare wrote, as far as he can be
said to have written for any stage but that of the universal mind. I hope I
have in some measure succeeded in demonstrating that the former two,
instead of being rules, were mere inconveniences attached to the local
peculiarities of the Athenian drama; that the last alone deserved the name of
a principle, and that in the preservation of this unity Shakespeare stood pre-
eminent. Yet, instead of unity of action, I should greatly prefer the more
appropriate, though scholastic and uncouth, words homogeneity,
proportionateness, and totality of interest,—expressions, which involve the
distinction, or rather the essential difference, betwixt the shaping skill of
mechanical talent, and the creative, productive, life-power of inspired
genius. In the former each part is separately conceived, and then by a
succeeding act put together;—not as watches are made for wholesale—(for
there each part supposes a pre-conception of the whole in some mind),—but
more like pictures on a motley screen. Whence arises the harmony that
strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks,
[pg 146] the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves
of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch
and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring,
—compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial
plantations?—From this, that the natural landscape is effected, as it were,
by a single energy modified ab intra in each component part. And as this is
the particular excellence of the Shakespearian drama generally, so is it
especially characteristic of the Romeo and Juliet.

The groundwork of the tale is altogether in family life, and the events of the
play have their first origin in family feuds. Filmy as are the eyes of party-
spirit, at once dim and truculent, still there is commonly some real or
supposed object in view, or principle to be maintained; and though but the

twisted wires on the plate of rosin in the preparation for electrical pictures,
it is still a guide in some degree, an assimilation to an outline. But in family
quarrels, which have proved scarcely less injurious to states, wilfulness, and
precipitancy, and passion from mere habit and custom can alone be
expected. With his accustomed judgment, Shakespeare has begun by
placing before us a lively picture of all the impulses of the play; and, as
nature ever presents two sides, one for Heraclitus, and one for Democritus,
he has, by way of prelude, shown the laughable absurdity of the evil by the
contagion of it reaching the servants who have so little to do with it, but
who are under the necessity of letting the superfluity of sensoreal power fly
off through the escape-valve of wit-combats, and of quarrelling with
weapons of sharper edge, all in [pg 147] humble imitation of their masters.
Yet there is a sort of unhired fidelity, an ourishness about all this that makes
it rest pleasant on one's feelings. All the first scene, down to the conclusion
of the Prince's speech, is a motley dance of all ranks and ages to one tune,
as if the horn of Huon had been playing behind the scenes.

Benvolio's speech:—

“Madam, an hour before the worshipp'd sun
Peer'd forth the golden window of the east”—

and, far more strikingly, the following speech of old Montague:—

“Many a morning hath he there been seen
With tears augmenting the fresh morning dew”—

prove that Shakespeare meant the Romeo and Juliet to approach to a poem,
which, and indeed its early date, may be also inferred from the multitude of
rhyming couplets throughout. And if we are right, from the internal
evidence, in pronouncing this one of Shakespeare's early dramas, it affords
a strong instance of the fineness of his insight into the nature of the
passions, that Romeo is introduced already love-bewildered. The necessity
of loving creates an object for itself in man and woman; and yet there is a
difference in this respect between the sexes, though only to be known by a
perception of it. It would have displeased us if Juliet had been represented
as already in love, or as fancying herself so;—but no one, I believe, ever
experiences any shock at Romeo's forgetting his Rosaline, who had been a

mere name for the yearning of his youthful imagination, and rushing into
his passion for Juliet. Rosaline was a mere creation of his fancy; and we
should remark the boastful positiveness [pg 148] of Romeo in a love of his
own making, which is never shown where love is really near the heart.

“When the devout religion of mine eye
Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires!

One fairer than my love! the all-seeing sun
Ne'er saw her match, since first the world begun.”

The character of the Nurse is the nearest of any thing in Shakespeare to a
direct borrowing from mere observation; and the reason is, that as in
infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class,
—just as in describing one larch tree, you generalise a grove of them,—so it
is nearly as much so in old age. The generalisation is done to the poet's
hand. Here you have the garrulity of age strengthened by the feelings of a
long-trusted servant, whose sympathy with the mother's affections gives her
privileges and rank in the household; and observe the mode of connection
by accidents of time and place, and the childlike fondness of repetition in a
second childhood, and also that happy humble, ducking under, yet constant
resurgence against, the check of her superiors!—

“Yes, madam!—Yet I cannot choose but laugh,” &c.

In the fourth scene we have Mercutio introduced to us. O! how shall I
describe that exquisite ebullience and overflow of youthful life, wafted on
over the laughing waves of pleasure and prosperity, as a wanton beauty that
distorts the face on which she knows her lover is gazing enraptured, and
wrinkles her forehead in the triumph of its smoothness! Wit ever wakeful,
fancy busy and procreative as an insect, courage, an easy mind that, without
cares of its own, is at once disposed to [pg 149] laugh away those of others,
and yet to be interested in them,—these and all congenial qualities, melting
into the common copula of them all, the man of rank and the gentleman,
with all its excellencies and all its 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!—I say, he shall:—Go to;—
Am I the master here, or you?—Go to.
You'll not endure him!—God shall mend my soul—
You'll make a mutiny among my guests!
You will set cock-a-hoop! you'll be the man!

Tyb. Why, uncle, 'tis a shame.

Cap. Go to, go to,
You are a saucy boy!” &c.

How admirable is the old man's impetuosity at once contrasting, yet
harmonised, 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 justifying him from his
inconstancy by making us feel the difference of his passion. Yet this, too, is
a love in, although not merely of, the imagination.

Ib.—

“Jul. Well, do not swear; although I joy in thee,
I have no joy in this contract to-night:
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,” &c.

With love, pure love, there is always an anxiety for the safety of the object,
a disinterestedness, by [pg 150] 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 instance of Shakespeare's mastery

in playing a distinctly rememberable 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.

Ib. sc. 3. The Friar's speech.

The reverend character of the Friar, like all Shakespeare's representations of
the great professions, is very delightful and tranquillising, yet it is no
digression, but immediately necessary to the carrying on of the plot.

Ib. sc. 4.—

“Rom. Good morrow to you both. What counterfeit did I give you?” &c.

Compare again Romeo's half-exerted, and half real, ease of mind with his
first manner when in love with Rosaline! His will had come to the
clenching point.

Ib. sc. 6.—

“Rom. Do thou but close our hands with holy words,
Then love-devouring death do what he dare,
It is enough I may but call her mine.”

The precipitancy, which is the character of the play, is well marked in this
short scene of waiting for Juliet's arrival.

Act iii. sc. 1.—

“Mer. No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but 'tis
enough: 'twill serve: ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave
man,” &c.

[pg 151]
How fine an effect the wit and raillery habitual to Mercutio, even struggling
with his pain, give to Romeo's following speech, and at the same time so
completely justifying his passionate revenge on Tybalt!

Ib. Benvolio's speech:—

... “But that he tilts
With piercing steel at bold Mercutio's breast.”

This small portion of untruth in Benvolio's narrative is finely conceived.

Ib. sc. 2. Juliet's speech:—

“For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven's back.”

Indeed the whole of this speech is imagination strained to the highest; and
observe the blessed effect on the purity of the mind. What would Dryden
have made of it?

Ib.—

“Nurse. Shame come to Romeo.

Jul. Blister'd be thy tongue
For such a wish!”

Note the Nurse's mistake of the mind's audible struggles with itself for its
decision in toto.

Ib. sc. 3. Romeo's speech:—

“'Tis torture, and not mercy: heaven's here,
Where Juliet lives,” &c.

All deep passions are a sort of atheists, that believe no future.

Ib. sc. 5.—

“Cap. Soft! take me with you, take me with you, wife—How!
will she none?” &c.

A noble scene! Don't I see it with my own eyes?—Yes! but not with Juliet's.
And observe in Capulet's last speech in this scene his mistake, [pg 152] as if
love's causes were capable of being generalised.

Act iv. sc. 3. Juliet's speech.:—

“O, look! methinks I see my cousin's ghost
Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body
Upon a rapier's point:—Stay, Tybalt, stay!—
Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee.”

Shakespeare provides for the finest decencies. It would have been too bold
a thing for a girl of fifteen;—but she swallows the draught in a fit of fright.

Ib. sc. 5.—

As the audience know that Juliet is not dead, this scene is, perhaps,
excusable. But it is a strong warning to minor dramatists not to introduce at
one time many separate characters agitated by one and the same
circumstance. It is difficult to understand what effect, whether that of pity
or of laughter, Shakespeare meant to produce;—the occasion and the
characteristic speeches are so little in harmony! For example, what the
Nurse says is excellently suited to the Nurse's character, but grotesquely
unsuited to the occasion.

Act v. sc. 1. Romeo's speech:—

... “O mischief! thou art swift
To enter in the thoughts of desperate men!
I do remember an apothecary,” &c.

This famous passage is so beautiful as to be self-justified; yet, in addition,
what a fine preparation it is for the tomb scene!

Ib. sc. 3. Romeo's speech:—

“Good gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man,
Fly hence and leave me.”

The gentleness of Romeo was shown before, as softened by love; and now
it is doubled by love and sorrow and awe of the place where he is.

[pg 153]
Ib. Romeo's speech:—--

“How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry! which their keepers call
A lightning before death. O, how may I
Call this a lightning?—--O, my love, my wife!” &c.

Here, here, is the master example how beauty can at once increase and
modify passion!

Ib. Last scene.

How beautiful is the close! The spring and the winter meet;—winter
assumes the character of spring, and spring the sadness of winter.

[pg 155]

Shakespeare's English Historical Plays.

The first form of poetry is the epic, the essence of which may be stated as
the successive in events and characters. This must be distinguished from
narration, in which there must always be a narrator, from whom the objects
represented receive a colouring and a manner;—whereas in the epic, as in
the so-called poems of Homer, the whole is completely objective, and the
representation is a pure reflection. The next form into which poetry passed
was the dramatic;—both forms having a common basis with a certain
difference, and that difference not consisting in the dialogue alone. Both are
founded on the relation of providence to the human will; and this relation is
the universal element, expressed under different points of view according to
the difference of religion, and the moral and intellectual cultivation of
different nations. In the epic poem fate is represented as overruling the will,
and making it instrumental to the accomplishment of its designs:—

... Διὸς τελείετο βονλή

In the drama, the will is exhibited as struggling with fate, a great and
beautiful instance and illustration of which is the Prometheus of Æschylus;
and the deepest effect is produced when the fate [pg 156] is represented as a
higher and intelligent will, and the opposition of the individual as springing
from a defect.

In order that a drama may be properly historical, it is necessary that it
should be the history of the people to whom it is addressed. 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 mean, must be taken which is the permanent in our
nature, which is common, 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 by a unity of a higher

order, which connects the events by reference to the workers, gives a reason
for them in the motives, and presents men in their causative character. It
takes, therefore, that part of real history which is the least known, and
infuses a principle of life and organisation into the naked facts, and makes
them 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 Shakespeare.
Indeed, it would be desirable that some man of dramatic genius should
dramatise all those omitted by Shakespeare, as far down as Henry VII.
Perkin Warbeck would make a most interesting drama. A few scenes of
Marlow's Edward II. might be preserved. After Henry VIII., the events are
too well and distinctly known, to be, without plump inverisimilitude, [pg
157] crowded together in one night's exhibition. Whereas, the history of our
ancient kings—the events of the 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 our eye, little
modified by the difference of dates. An historic drama is, therefore, a
collection 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 negation 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;—nationality in each
individual, quoad his country, is equal to the sense of individuality quoad
himself; but himself as sub-sensuous and central. Patriotism is equal to the
sense of individuality reflected from every other individual. There may
come a higher virtue in both—just cosmopolitism. But this latter is not
possible but by antecedence of the former.

Shakespeare has included the most important part of nine reigns in his
historical dramas;—namely—King John, Richard II.—Henry IV. (two)—
Henry V.—Henry VI. (three) including Edward V. and Henry VIII., in all
ten plays. There remain, therefore, to be done, with the exception of a single
scene or two that should be adopted from Marlow—eleven reigns—of

which [pg 158] the first two appear the only unpromising subjects;—and
those two dramas must be formed wholly or mainly of invented private
stories, which, however, could not have happened except in consequence 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 of 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., Edward II., and Henry VII.

[pg 159]

“King John.”

Act i. sc. 1.—

“Bast. James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?

Gur. Good leave, good Philip.

Bast. Philip? sparrow! James,” &c.

Theobald adopts Warburton's conjecture of “spare me.”

O true Warburton! and the sancta simplicitas of honest dull Theobald's faith
in him! Nothing can be more lively or characteristic than “Philip?
Sparrow!” Had Warburton read old Skelton's Philip Sparrow, an exquisite
and original poem, and, no doubt, popular in Shakespeare's time, even
Warburton would scarcely have made so deep a plunge into the bathetic as
to have deathified “sparrow” into “spare me!”

Act iii. sc. 2. Speech of Faulconbridge:—

“Now, by my life, this day grows wondrous hot;
Some airy devil hovers in the sky,” &c.

Theobald adopts Warburton's conjecture of “fiery.”

I prefer the old text: the word “devil” implies “fiery.” You need only read
the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on “devil,” to perceive the
uselessness and tastelessness of Warburton's alteration.

[pg 161]

“Richard II.”

I have stated that the transitional link between the epic poem and the drama
is the historic drama; that in the epic poem a pre-announced fate gradually
adjusts and employs the will and the events as its instruments, whilst the
drama, on the other hand, places fate and will in opposition to each other,
and is then most perfect, when the victory of fate is obtained in
consequence of imperfections in the opposing will, so as to leave a final
impression that the fate itself is but a higher and a more intelligent will.

From the length of the speeches, and the circumstance that, with one
exception, the events are all historical, and presented in their results, not
produced by acts seen by, or taking place before, the audience, this tragedy
is ill suited to our present large theatres. But in itself, and for the closet, I
feel no hesitation in placing it as the first and most admirable of all
Shakespeare's purely historical plays. For the two parts of Henry IV. form a
species of themselves, which may be named the mixed drama. The
distinction does not depend on the mere quantity of historical events in the
play compared with the fictions; for there is as much history in Macbeth as
in Richard, but in the relation of the history to the plot. In the purely
historical plays, the history forms the plot; in the mixed, it directs it; in the
rest, as Macbeth, Hamlet, Cymbeline, Lear, it subserves it. But, [pg 162]
however unsuited to the stage this drama may be, God forbid that even
there it should fall dead on the hearts of jacobinised Englishmen! Then,
indeed, we might say—præteriit gloria mundi! For the spirit of patriotic
reminiscence is the all-permeating soul of this noble work. It is, perhaps,
the most purely historical of Shakespeare's dramas. There are not in it, as in
the others, characters introduced merely for the purpose of giving a greater
individuality and realness, as in the comic parts of Henry IV., by presenting
as it were our very selves. Shakespeare avails himself of every opportunity
to effect the great object of the historic drama,—that, namely, of
familiarising the people to the great names of their country, and thereby of

exciting a steady patriotism, a love of just liberty, and a respect for all those
fundamental institutions of social life, which bind men together:—

“This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;
This fortress, built by nature for herself,
Against 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,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by 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: nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.”

[pg 163]
And it certainly seems that Shakespeare's historic dramas produced a very
deep effect on the minds of the English people, and in earlier times they
were familiar even to the least informed of all ranks, according to the
relation of Bishop Corbett. Marlborough, we know, was not ashamed to
confess that his principal acquaintance with English history was derived
from them; and I believe that a large part of the information as to our old
names and achievements even now abroad is due, directly or indirectly, to
Shakespeare.

Admirable is the judgment with which Shakespeare always in the first
scenes prepares, yet how naturally, and with what concealment of art, for
the catastrophe. Observe how he here presents the germ of all the after
events in Richard's insincerity, partiality, arbitrariness, and favouritism, and
in the proud, tempestuous, 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
Shakespeare wrote, and illustrate his care to connect the past and the 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-honour'd Lancaster,
Hast thou, according to thy oath and band,” &c.

each closing at the tenth syllable, with the rhythmless metre of the verse in
Henry VI. and Titus Andronicus, in order that the difference, [pg 164]
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 apparently defective metre of Bolingbroke's first line—

“Many years of happy days befal”—

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!),
In the devotion of a subject's love,” &c.

I remember in the Sophoclean drama no more striking example of the τὸ
πρέπον καὶ σεμνὸν than this speech; and the rhymes in the last six lines well
express the preconcertedness of Bolingbroke's scheme so beautifully
contrasted with the vehemence and sincere irritation of Mowbray.

Ib. Bolingbroke's speech:—

“Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries,
Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth,
To me, for justice and rough chastisement.”

Note the δεινὸν of this “to me,” which is evidently felt by Richard:—

“How high a pitch his resolution soars!”

and the affected depreciation afterwards;—

“As he is but my father's brother's son.”

Ib. Mowbray's speech:—

“In haste whereof, most heartily I pray
Your highness to assign our trial day.”

[pg 165]
The occasional interspersion of rhymes, and the more frequent winding up
of a speech therewith—what purpose was this designed to answer? In the
earnest drama, I mean. Deliberateness? 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 Shakespeare'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 purpose 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,

Ib. sc. 2.—

“Gaunt. God's is the quarrel; for God'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 ultra-
royalism, how carefully does Shakespeare acknowledge and reverence the
eternal distinction between the mere individual, and the [pg 166] 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.

Ib. sc. 3. In none of Shakespeare's fictitious dramas, or in those founded on
a history as unknown to his auditors generally as fiction, 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.

Ib. Mowbray's speech:—

“A dearer merit
Have I deserved at your highness' hand.”

O, the instinctive propriety of Shakespeare in the choice of words!

Ib. 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
quasi-consciences by policy, expedience, &c.

Ib. Mowbray's speech:—

... “All the world's my way.”

“The world was all before him.”—Milt.

Ib.—

“Boling. How long a time lies in one little word!
Four lagging winters, and four wanton springs,
End in a word: such is the breath of kings.”

Admirable anticipation!

Ib. 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 [pg 167] 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 he is left to himself, 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 commit, the
error. Shakespeare 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 sufferings 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 naturally, and, [pg 168] therefore, as
appropriately to drama, as by gesticulations, 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
Shakespeare's vulgarisms, as in Macbeth's—

“The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac'd loon!” &c.

This is (to equivocate on Dante's words) in truth the nobile volgare
eloquenza. Indeed it is profoundly true that there is a natural, an almost
irresistible, tendency in the mind, when immersed in one strong feeling, to
connect that feeling with every sight and object around it; especially if there
be opposition, and the words addressed to it are in any way repugnant to the
feeling itself, as here in the instance of Richard's unkind language:—

“Misery makes sport to mock itself.”

No doubt, something of Shakespeare's punning must be attributed to his
age, in which direct and formal combats of wit were a favourite pastime of
the courtly and accomplished. It was an age more favourable, upon the
whole, to vigour of intellect than the present, in which a dread of being
thought pedantic dispirits and flattens the energies of original minds. But
independently of this, I have no hesitation in saying that a pun, if it be
congruous with the feeling of the scene, is not only allowable in the
dramatic dialogue, but oftentimes one of the most effectual intensives of
passion.

Ib.—

“K. Rich. Right; you say true, as Hereford's love, so his;
As theirs, so mine; and all be as it is.”

The depth of this compared with the first scene:—

“How high a pitch,” &c.

[pg 169]
There is scarcely anything in Shakespeare in its degree, more admirably
drawn than York's character; his religious loyalty struggling with a deep
grief and indignation at the king's follies; his adherence to his word and
faith, once given in spite of all, even the most natural, feelings. You see in
him the weakness of old age, and the overwhelmingness of circumstances,
for a time surmounting his sense of duty,—the junction of both exhibited in
his boldness in words and feebleness in immediate act; and then again his
effort to retrieve himself in abstract loyalty, even at the heavy price of the
loss of his son. This species of accidental and adventitious weakness is
brought into parallel with Richard's continually increasing energy of
thought, and as constantly diminishing power of acting;—and thus it is
Richard that breathes a harmony and a relation into all the characters of the
play.

Ib. sc. 2.—

“Queen. To please the king I did; to please myself
I cannot do it; yet I know no cause
Why I should welcome such a guest as grief,
Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest
As my sweet Richard: yet again, methinks,
Some unborn sorrow, ripe in sorrow's womb,
Is coming toward me; and my inward soul
With nothing trembles: at something it grieves,
More than with parting from my lord the king.”

It is clear that Shakespeare never meant to represent Richard as a vulgar
debauchee, but a man with a wantonness of spirit in external show, a
feminine friendism, an intensity of woman-like love of those immediately
about him, and a mistaking of the delight of being loved by him for a love

of him. And mark in this scene Shakespeare's gentleness in touching the
tender superstitions, the terræ incognitæ of presentiments, in the human
mind; and [pg 170] how sharp a line of distinction he commonly draws
between these obscure forecastings of general experience in each
individual, and the vulgar errors of mere tradition. Indeed, it may be taken
once for all as the truth, that Shakespeare, in the absolute universality of his
genius, always reverences whatever arises out of our moral nature; he never
profanes his muse with a contemptuous reasoning away of the genuine and
general, however unaccountable, feelings of mankind.

The amiable part of Richard's character is brought full upon us by his
queen's few words—

... “So sweet a guest
As my sweet Richard:”—

and Shakespeare has carefully shown in him an intense love of his country,
well-knowing how that feeling would, in a pure historic drama, redeem him
in the hearts of the audience. Yet even in this love there is something
feminine and personal:—

“Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,—
As a long parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears, and smiles in meeting;
So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth,
And do thee favour with my royal hands.”

With this is combined a constant overflow of emotions from a total
incapability of controlling them, and thence a waste of that energy, which
should have been reserved for actions, in the passion and effort of mere
resolves and menaces. The consequence is moral exhaustion, and rapid
alternations of unmanly despair and ungrounded hope,—every feeling being
abandoned for its direct opposite upon the pressure of external accident.
And yet when Richard's inward weakness appears to seek refuge in his
despair, and his exhaustion counterfeits repose, the old habit of kingliness,
the effect of [pg 171] flatterers from his infancy, is ever and anon producing
in him a sort of wordy courage which only serves to betray more clearly his

internal impotence. The second and third scenes of the third act combine
and illustrate all this:—

“Aumerle. He means, my lord, that we are too remiss;
Whilst Bolingbroke, through our security,
Grows strong and great, in substance, and in friends.

K. Rich. Discomfortable cousin! know'st thou not,
That when the searching eye of heaven is hid
Behind the globe, that lights the lower world,
Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen,
In murders and in outrage, bloody here;
But when, from under this terrestrial ball,
He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines,
And darts his light through every guilty hole,
Then murders, treasons, and detested sins,
The cloke of night being pluckt from off their backs,
Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves?
So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke, &c.

Aumerle. Where is the Duke my father with his power?

K. Rich. No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth, &c.

Aumerle. My father hath a power, enquire of him;
And learn to make a body of a limb.

K. Rich. Thou chid'st me well: proud Bolingbroke, I come
To change blows with thee for our day of doom.
This ague-fit of fear is over-blown;
An easy task it is to win our own.

Scroop. Your uncle York hath join'd with Bolingbroke.—

K. Rich. Thou hast said enough,

Beshrew thee, cousin, which didst lead me forth
Of that sweet way I was in to despair!
What say you now? what comfort have we now?
By heaven, I'll hate him everlastingly,
That bids me be of comfort any more.”

Act iii. sc. 3. Bolingbroke's speech:—

“Noble lord,
Go to the rude ribs of that ancient castle,” &c.

[pg 172]
Observe the fine struggle of a haughty sense of power and ambition in
Bolingbroke with the necessity for dissimulation.

Ib. sc. 4. See here the skill and judgment of our poet in giving reality and
individual life, by the introduction of accidents in his historic plays, and
thereby making them dramas, and not histories. How beautiful an islet of
repose—a melancholy repose, indeed—is this scene with the Gardener and
his Servant. And how truly affecting and realising is the incident of the very
horse Barbary, in the scene with the Groom in the last act!—

“Groom. I was a poor groom of thy stable, King,
When thou wert King; who, travelling towards York,
With much ado, at length have gotten leave
To look upon my sometimes master's face.
O, how it yearn'd my heart, when I beheld,
In London streets, that coronation day,
When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary!
That horse, that thou so often hast bestrid;
That horse, that I so carefully have dress'd!

K. Rich. Rode he on Barbary?”

Bolingbroke's character, in general, is an instance how Shakespeare makes
one play introductory to another; for it is evidently a preparation for Henry
IV., as Gloster in the third part of Henry VI. is for Richard III.

I would once more remark upon the exalted idea of the only true loyalty
developed in this noble and impressive play. We have neither the rants of
Beaumont and Fletcher, nor the sneers of Massinger;—the vast importance
of the personal character of the sovereign is distinctly enounced, whilst, at
the same time, the genuine sanctity which surrounds him is attributed to,
and grounded on, the position in which he stands as the convergence and
exponent of the life and power of the state.

[pg 173]
The great end of the body politic appears to be to humanise, and assist in
the progressiveness of, the animal man;—but the problem is so complicated
with contingencies as to render it nearly impossible to lay down rules for
the formation of a state. And should we be able to form a system of
government, which should so balance its different powers as to form a
check upon each, and so continually remedy and correct itself, it would,
nevertheless, defeat its own aim;—for man is destined to be guided by
higher principles, by universal views, which can never be fulfilled in this
state of existence,—by a spirit of progressiveness which can never be
accomplished, for then it would cease to be. Plato's Republic is like
Bunyan's Town of Man-Soul,—a description of an individual, all of whose
faculties are in their proper subordination and inter-dependence; and this it
is assumed may be the prototype of the state as one great individual. But
there is this sophism in it, that it is forgotten that the human faculties,
indeed, are parts and not separate things; but that you could never get chiefs
who were wholly reason, ministers who were wholly understanding,
soldiers all wrath, labourers all concupiscence, and so on through the rest.
Each of these partakes of, and interferes with, all the others.

[pg 175]

“Henry IV.—Part I.”

Act i. sc. 1. King Henry's speech:—

“No more the thirsty entrance of this soil
Shall daub her lips with her own children's blood.”

A most obscure passage: but I think Theobald's interpretation right, namely,
that “thirsty entrance” means the dry penetrability, or bibulous drought, of
the soil. The obscurity of this passage is of the Shakespearian sort.

Ib. sc. 2. In this, the first introduction of Falstaff, observe the consciousness
and the intentionality of his wit, so that when it does not flow of its own
accord, its absence is felt, and an effort visibly made to recall it. Note also
throughout how Falstaff's pride is gratified in the power of influencing a
prince of the blood, the heir apparent, by means of it. Hence his dislike to
Prince John of Lancaster, and his mortification when he finds his wit fail on
him:—

“P. John. Fare you well, Falstaff: I, in my condition,
Shall better speak of you than you deserve.

Fal. I would you had but the wit; 'twere better than your
dukedom.—Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth
not love me;—nor a man cannot make him laugh.”

Act ii. sc. 1. Second Carrier's speech:—

... “breeds fleas like a loach.”

Perhaps it is a misprint, or a provincial pronunciation, for “leach,” that is,
blood-suckers. Had it [pg 176] been gnats, instead of fleas, there might have
been some sense, though small probability, in Warburton's suggestion of the
Scottish “loch.” Possibly “loach,” or “lutch,” may be some lost word for

dovecote, or poultry-lodge, notorious for breeding fleas. In Stevens's or my
reading, it should properly be “loaches,” or “leeches,” in the plural; except
that I think I have heard anglers speak of trouts like a salmon.

Act iii. sc. 1.—

“Glend. Nay, if you melt, then will she run mad.”

This “nay” so to be dwelt on in speaking, as to be equivalent to a dissyllable
- u, is characteristic of the solemn Glendower; but the imperfect line

“She bids you
Upon the wanton rushes lay you down,” &c.,

is one of those fine hair-strokes of exquisite judgment peculiar to
Shakespeare;—thus detaching the Lady's speech, and giving it the
individuality and entireness of a little poem, while he draws attention to it.

[pg 177]

“Henry IV.—Part II.”

Act ii. sc. 2—

“P. Hen. Sup any women with him?

Page. None, my lord, but old mistress Quickly, and mistress
Doll Tear-sheet.

P. Hen. This Doll Tear-sheet should be some road.”

I am sometimes disposed to think that this respectable young lady's name is
a very old corruption for Tear-street—street-walker, terere stratam (viam).
Does not the Prince's question rather show this?—

“This Doll Tear-street should be some road?”

Act iii. sc. 1. King Henry's speech:—

... “Then, happy low, lie down;
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

I know no argument by which to persuade any one to be of my opinion, or
rather of my feeling; but yet I cannot help feeling that “Happy low-lie-
down!” is either a proverbial expression, or the burthen of some old song,
and means, “Happy the man, who lays himself down on his straw bed or
chaff pallet on the ground or floor!”

Ib. sc. 2. Shallow's speech:—

“Rah, tah, tah, would 'a say; bounce, would 'a say,” &c.

That Beaumont and Fletcher have more than once been guilty of sneering at
their great master, cannot, I fear, be denied; but the passage quoted by

Theobald from the Knight of the Burning Pestle is an imitation. If it be
chargeable with any fault, it is with plagiarism, not with sarcasm.

[pg 179]

“Henry V.”

Act i. sc. 2. Westmoreland's speech:—

“They know your grace hath cause, and means, and might;
So hath your highness; never King of England
Had nobles richer,” &c.

Does “grace” mean the king's own peculiar domains and legal revenue, and
“highness” his feudal rights in the military service of his nobles?—I have
sometimes thought it possible that the words “grace” and “cause” may have
been transposed in the copying or printing;—

“They know your cause hath grace,” &c.

What Theobald meant, I cannot guess. To me his pointing makes the
passage still more obscure. Perhaps the lines ought to be recited
dramatically thus:—

“They know your Grace hath cause, and means, and might:—
So hath your Highness—never King of England
Had nobles richer,” &c.

He breaks off from the grammar and natural order from earnestness, and in
order to give the meaning more passionately.

Ib. Exeter's speech:—

“Yet that is but a crush'd necessity.”

Perhaps it may be “crash” for “crass” from crassus, clumsy; or it may be
“curt,” defective, imperfect: anything would be better than Warburton's
“'scus'd,” which honest Theobald, of course, adopts. By the by, it seems

clear to me that this [pg 180] speech of Exeter's properly belongs to
Canterbury, and was altered by the actors for convenience.

Act iv. sc. 3. King Henry's speech:—

“We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.”

Should it not be “live” in the first line?

Ib. sc. 5.—

“Const. O diable!

Orl. O seigneur! le jour est perdu, tout est perdu!

Dan. Mort de ma vie! all is confounded, all!
Reproach and everlasting shame
Sit mocking in our plumes!—O meschante fortune!
Do not run away!”

Ludicrous as these introductory scraps of French appear, so instantly
followed by good, nervous mother-English, yet they are judicious, and
produce the impression which Shakespeare intended,—a sudden feeling
struck at once on the ears, as well as the eyes, of the audience, that “here
come the French, the baffled French braggards!”—And this will appear still
more judicious, when we reflect on the scanty apparatus of distinguishing
dresses in Shakespeare's tyring-room.

[pg 181]

“Henry VI.—Part I.”

Act i. sc. 1. Bedford's speech:—

“Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky;
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry's death!
Henry the fifth, too famous to live long!
England ne'er lost a king of so much worth.”

Read aloud any two or three passages in blank verse even from
Shakespeare's earliest dramas, as Love's Labour's Lost, or Romeo and
Juliet; and then read in the same way this speech, with especial attention to
the metre; and if you do not feel the impossibility of the latter having been
written by Shakespeare, all I dare suggest is, that you may have ears,—for
so has another animal,—but an ear you cannot have, me judice.

[pg 183]

“Richard III.”

This play should be contrasted with Richard II. Pride of intellect is the
characteristic of Richard, carried to the extent of even boasting to his own
mind of his villany, whilst others are present to feed his pride of superiority;
as in his first speech, act ii. sc. 1. Shakespeare here, as in all his great parts,
developes in a tone of sublime morality the dreadful consequences of
placing the moral, in subordination to the mere intellectual, being. In
Richard there is a predominance of irony, accompanied with apparently
blunt manners to those immediately about him, but formalised into a more
set hypocrisy towards the people as represented by their magistrates.

[pg 185]

“Lear.”

Of all Shakespeare's plays Macbeth is the most rapid, Hamlet the slowest,
in movement. Lear combines length with rapidity,—like the hurricane and
the whirlpool, absorbing while it advances. It begins as a stormy day in
summer, with brightness; but that brightness is lurid, and anticipates the
tempest.

It was not without forethought, nor is it without its due significance, that the
division of Lear's kingdom is in the first six lines of the play stated as a
thing already determined in all its particulars, previously to the trial of
professions, as the relative rewards of which the daughters were to be made
to consider their several portions. The strange, yet by no means unnatural,
mixture of selfishness, sensibility, and habit of feeling derived from, and
fostered by, the particular rank and usages of the individual;—the intense
desire of being intensely beloved,—selfish, and yet characteristic of the
selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone;—the self-supportless
leaning for all pleasure on another's breast;—the craving after sympathy
with a prodigal disinterestedness, frustrated by its own ostentation, and the
mode and nature of its claims;—the anxiety, the distrust, the jealousy, which
more or less accompany all selfish affections, and are amongst the surest
contradistinctions of mere fondness from true love, and which originate
Lear's eager wish to enjoy his daughter's violent professions, [pg 186]
whilst the inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and
positive right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason;—these
facts, these passions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is
founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found implied, in
these first four or five lines of the play. They let us know that the trial is but
a trick; and that the grossness of the old king's rage is in part the natural
result of a silly trick suddenly and most unexpectedly baffled and
disappointed.

It may here be worthy of notice, that Lear is the only serious performance
of Shakespeare, the interest and situations of which are derived from the
assumption of a gross improbability; whereas Beaumont and Fletcher's
tragedies are, almost all of them, founded on some out of the way accident
or exception to the general experience of mankind. But observe the
matchless judgment of our Shakespeare. First, improbable as the conduct of
Lear is in the first scene, yet it was an old story rooted in the popular faith,
—a thing taken for granted already, and consequently without any of the
effects of improbability. Secondly, it is merely the canvass for the
characters and passions,—a mere occasion for,—and not, in the manner of
Beaumont and Fletcher, perpetually recurring as the cause, and sine qua non
of,—the incidents and emotions. Let the first scene of this play have been
lost, and let it only be understood that a fond father had been duped by
hypocritical professions of love and duty on the part of two daughters to
disinherit the third, previously, and deservedly, more dear to him;—and all
the rest of the tragedy would retain its interest undiminished, and be
perfectly intelligible.

[pg 187]
The accidental is nowhere the groundwork of the passions, but that which is
catholic, which in all ages has been, and ever will be, close and native to the
heart of man,—parental anguish from filial ingratitude, the genuineness of
worth, though coffined in bluntness, and the execrable vileness of a smooth
iniquity. Perhaps I ought to have added the Merchant of Venice; but here too
the same remarks apply. It was an old tale; and substitute any other danger
than that of the pound of flesh (the circumstance in which the improbability
lies), yet all the situations and the emotions appertaining to them remain
equally excellent and appropriate. Whereas take away from the Mad Lover
of Beaumont and Fletcher the fantastic hypothesis of his engagement to cut
out his own heart, and have it presented to his mistress, and all the main
scenes must go with it.

Kotzebue is the German Beaumont and Fletcher, without their poetic
powers, and without their vis comica. But, like them, he always deduces his
situations and passions from marvellous accidents, and the trick of bringing
one part of our moral nature to counteract another; as our pity for
misfortune and admiration of generosity and courage to combat our

condemnation of guilt as in adultery, robbery, and other heinous crimes;—
and, like them too, he excels in his mode of telling a story clearly and
interestingly, in a series of dramatic dialogues. Only the trick of making
tragedy-heroes and heroines out of shopkeepers and barmaids was too low
for the age, and too unpoetic for the genius, of Beaumont and Fletcher,
inferior in every respect as they are to their great predecessor and
contemporary. How inferior would they have appeared, [pg 188] had not
Shakespeare existed for them to imitate;—which in every play, more or
less, they do, and in their tragedies most glaringly:—and yet—(O shame!
shame!)—they miss no opportunity of sneering at the divine man, and sub-
detracting from his merits!

To return to Lear. Having thus in the fewest words, and in a natural reply to
as natural a question,—which yet answers the secondary purpose of
attracting our attention to the difference or diversity between the characters
of Cornwall and Albany,—provided the prémisses and data, as it were, for
our after insight into the mind and mood of the person, whose character,
passions, and sufferings are the main subject-matter of the play;—from
Lear, the persona patiens of his drama, Shakespeare passes without delay to
the second in importance, the chief agent and prime mover, and introduces
Edmund to our acquaintance, preparing us with the same felicity of
judgment, and in the same easy and natural way, for his character in the
seemingly casual communication of its origin and occasion. From the first
drawing up of the curtain Edmund has stood before us in the united strength
and beauty of earliest manhood. Our eyes have been questioning him.
Gifted as he is with high advantages of person, and further endowed by
nature with a powerful intellect and a strong energetic will, even without
any concurrence of circumstances and accident, pride will necessarily be
the sin that most easily besets him. But Edmund is also the known and
acknowledged son of the princely Gloster: he, therefore, has both the germ
of pride, and the conditions best fitted to evolve and ripen it into a
predominant feeling. Yet hitherto no reason appears [pg 189] why it should
be other than the not unusual pride of person, talent, and birth,—a pride
auxiliary, if not akin, to many virtues, and the natural ally of honourable
impulses. But alas! in his own presence his own father takes shame to
himself for the frank avowal that he is his father,—he has “blushed so often
to acknowledge him that he is now brazed to it!” Edmund hears the

circumstances of his birth spoken of with a most degrading and licentious
levity,—his mother described as a wanton by her own paramour, and the
remembrance of the animal sting, the low criminal gratifications connected
with her wantonness and prostituted beauty, assigned as the reason why
“the whoreson must be acknowledged!” This, and the consciousness of its
notoriety; the gnawing conviction that every show of respect is an effort of
courtesy, which recalls, while it represses, a contrary feeling;—this is the
ever trickling flow of wormwood and gall into the wounds of pride,—the
corrosive virus which inoculates pride with a venom not its own, with envy,
hatred, and a lust for that power which in its blaze of radiance would hide
the dark spots on his disc,—with pangs of shame personally undeserved,
and therefore felt as wrongs, and with a blind ferment of vindictive working
towards the occasions and causes, especially towards a brother, whose
stainless birth and lawful honours were the constant remembrancers of his
own debasement, and were ever in the way to prevent all chance of its being
unknown, or overlooked and forgotten. Add to this, that with excellent
judgment, and provident for the claims of the moral sense,—for that which,
relatively to the drama, is called poetic justice, and as the fittest [pg 190]
means for reconciling the feelings of the spectators to the horrors of
Gloster's after sufferings,—at least, of rendering them somewhat less
unendurable—(for I will not disguise my conviction, that in this one point
the tragic in this play has been urged beyond the outermost mark and ne
plus ultra of the dramatic);—Shakespeare has precluded all excuse and
palliation of the guilt incurred by both the parents of the base-born Edmund,
by Gloster's confession that he was at the time a married man, and already
blest with a lawful heir of his fortunes. The mournful alienation of brotherly
love, occasioned by the law of primogeniture in noble families, or rather by
the unnecessary distinctions engrafted thereon, and this in children of the
same stock, is still almost proverbial on the continent,—especially, as I
know from my own observation, in the south of Europe,—and appears to
have been scarcely less common in our own island before the Revolution of
1688, if we may judge from the characters and sentiments so frequent in our
elder comedies. There is the younger brother, for instance, in Beaumont and
Fletcher's play of the Scornful Lady, on the one side, and Oliver in
Shakespeare's As You Like It, on the other. Need it be said how heavy an
aggravation, in such a case, the stain of bastardy must have been, were it
only that the younger brother was liable to hear his own dishonour and his

mother's infamy related by his father with an excusing shrug of the
shoulders, and in a tone betwixt waggery and shame!

By the circumstances here enumerated as so many predisposing causes,
Edmund's character might well be deemed already sufficiently explained;
and our minds prepared for it. But in [pg 191] this tragedy the story or fable
constrained Shakespeare to introduce wickedness in an outrageous form in
the persons of Regan and Goneril. He had read nature too heedfully not to
know that courage, intellect, and strength of character are the most
impressive forms of power, and that to power in itself, without reference to
any moral end, an inevitable admiration and complacency appertains,
whether it be displayed in the conquests of a Buonaparte or Tamerlane, or in
the foam and the thunder of a cataract. But in the exhibition of such a
character it was of the highest importance to prevent the guilt from passing
into utter monstrosity,—which again depends on the presence or absence of
causes and temptations sufficient to account for the wickedness, without the
necessity of recurring to a thorough fiendishness of nature for its
origination. For such are the appointed relations of intellectual power to
truth, and of truth to goodness, that it becomes both morally and poetically
unsafe to present what is admirable—what our nature compels us to admire
—in the mind, and what is most detestable in the heart, as co-existing in the
same individual without any apparent connection, or any modification of
the one by the other. That Shakespeare has in one instance, that of Iago,
approached to this, and that he has done it successfully, is perhaps the most
astonishing proof of his genius, and the opulence of its resources. But in the
present tragedy, in which he was compelled to present a Goneril and a
Regan, it was most carefully to be avoided;—and therefore the only one
conceivable addition to the inauspicious influences on the preformation of
Edmund's character is [pg 192] given, in the information that all the kindly
counteractions to the mischievous feelings of shame, which might have
been derived from co-domestication with Edgar and their common father,
had been cut off by his absence from home, and foreign education from
boyhood to the present time, and a prospect of its continuance, as if to
preclude all risk of his interference with the father's views for the elder and
legitimate son:—

“He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again.”

Act i. sc. 1.—

“Cor. Nothing my lord.

Lear. Nothing?

Cor. Nothing.

Lear. Nothing can come of nothing: speak again.

Cor. Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more, nor less.”

There is something of disgust at the ruthless hypocrisy of her sisters, and
some little faulty admixture of pride and sullenness in Cordelia's “Nothing;”
and her tone is well contrived, indeed, to lessen the glaring absurdity of
Lear's conduct, but answers the yet more important purpose of forcing away
the attention from the nursery-tale, the moment it has served its end, that of
supplying the canvas for the picture. This is also materially furthered by
Kent's opposition, which displays Lear's moral incapability of resigning the
sovereign power in the very act of disposing of it. Kent is, perhaps, the
nearest to perfect goodness in all Shakespeare's characters, and yet the most
individualised. There is an extraordinary charm, in his bluntness, which is
that only of a nobleman, arising from a contempt of overstrained courtesy,
and combined with easy [pg 193] placability where goodness of heart is
apparent. His passionate affection for, and fidelity to, Lear act on our
feelings in Lear's own favour: virtue itself seems to be in company with
him.

Ib. sc. 2. Edmund's speech:—

“Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth,” &c.

Warburton's note upon a quotation from Vanini.

Poor Vanini!—Any one but Warburton would have thought this precious
passage more characteristic of Mr. Shandy than of atheism. If the fact really
were so (which it is not, but almost the contrary) I do not see why the most
confirmed theist might not very naturally utter the same wish. But it is
proverbial that the youngest son in a large family is commonly the man of
the greatest talents in it; and as good an authority as Vanini has said
—“incalescere in venerem ardentius, spei sobolis injuriosum esse.”

In this speech of Edmund you see, as soon as a man cannot reconcile
himself to reason, how his conscience flies off by way of appeal to nature,
who is sure upon such occasions never to find fault, and also how shame
sharpens a predisposition in the heart to evil. For it is a profound moral, that
shame will naturally generate guilt; the oppressed will be vindictive, like
Shylock, and in the anguish of undeserved ignominy the delusion secretly
springs up of getting over the moral quality of an action by fixing the mind
on the mere physical act alone.

Ib. Edmund's speech:—

“This is the excellent foppery of the world! that, when we are sick in fortune
(often the surfeit of our own behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters, the
sun, the moon, and the stars,” &c.

[pg 194]
Thus scorn and misanthropy are often the anticipations and mouth-pieces of
wisdom in the detection of superstitions. Both individuals and nations may
be free from such prejudices by being below them, as well as by rising
above them.

Ib. sc. 3. The Steward should be placed in exact antithesis to Kent, as the
only character of utter irredeemable baseness in Shakespeare. Even in this
the judgment and invention of the poet are very observable;—for what else
could the willing tool of a Goneril be? Not a vice but this of baseness was
left open to him.

Ib. sc. 4. In Lear old age is itself a character,—its natural imperfections
being increased by life-long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any
addition of individuality would have been unnecessary and painful; for the
relations of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightful ingratitude,
alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the open and ample
play-room of nature's passions.

Ib.—

“Knight. Since my young lady's going into France, Sir; the
fool hath much pined away.”

The Fool is no comic buffoon to make the groundlings laugh,—no forced
condescension of Shakespeare's genius to the taste of his audience.
Accordingly the poet prepares for his introduction, which he never does
with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living
connection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a creation as
Caliban;—his wild babblings, and inspired idiocy, articulate and gauge the
horrors of the scene.

The monster Goneril prepares what is necessary, [pg 195] while the
character of Albany renders a still more maddening grievance possible—
namely, Regan and Cornwall in perfect sympathy of monstrosity. Not a
sentiment, not an image, which can give pleasure on its own account is
admitted; whenever these creatures are introduced, and they are brought
forward as little as possible, pure horror reigns throughout. In this scene and
in all the early speeches of Lear, the one general sentiment of filial
ingratitude prevails as the main-spring of the feelings;—in this early stage
the outward object causing the pressure on the mind, which is not yet
sufficiently familiarised with the anguish for the imagination to work upon
it.

Ib.—

“Gon. Do you mark that, my lord?

Alb. I cannot be so partial, Goneril,
To the great love I bear you.

Gon. Pray you content,” &c.

Observe the baffled endeavour of Goneril to act on the fears of Albany, and
yet his passiveness, his inertia; he is not convinced, and yet he is afraid of
looking into the thing. Such characters always yield to those who will take
the trouble of governing them, or for them. Perhaps the influence of a
princess, whose choice of him had royalised his state, may be some little
excuse for Albany's weakness.

Ib. sc. 5.—

“Lear. O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!
Keep me in temper! I would not be mad!”

The mind's own anticipation of madness! The deepest tragic notes are often
struck by a half sense of an impending blow. The Fool's conclusion of this
act by a grotesque prattling seems to [pg 196] indicate the dislocation of
feeling that has begun and is to be continued.

Act ii. sc. 1. Edmund's speech:—

... “He replied,
Thou unpossessing bastard!” &c.

Thus the secret poison in Edmund's own heart steals forth; and then observe
poor Gloster's—

“Loyal and natural boy!”—

as if praising the crime of Edmund's birth!

Ib. Compare Regan's—

“What, did my father's godson seek your life?
He whom my father named?”—

with the unfeminine violence of her—

“All vengeance comes too short,” &c.—

and yet no reference to the guilt, but only to the accident, which she uses as
an occasion for sneering at her father. Regan is not, in fact, a greater
monster than Goneril, but she has the power of casting more venom.

Ib. sc. 2. Cornwall's speech:—-

... “This is some fellow,
Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect
A saucy roughness,” &c.

In thus placing these profound general truths in the mouths of such men as
Cornwall, Edmund, Iago, &c., Shakespeare at once gives them utterance,
and yet shows how indefinite their application is.

Ib. sc. 3. Edgar's assumed madness serves the great purpose of taking off
part of the shock which would otherwise be caused by the true madness of
Lear, and further displays the profound difference between the two. In every
attempt at representing madness throughout the [pg 197] whole range of
dramatic literature, with the single exception of Lear, it is mere
lightheadedness, as especially in Otway. In Edgar's ravings Shakespeare all
the while lets you see a fixed purpose, a practical end in view;—in Lear's,
there is only the brooding of the one anguish, an eddy without progression.

Ib. sc. 4. Lear's speech:—

“The king would speak with Cornwall; the dear father
Would with his daughter speak, &c.

No, but not yet: may be he is not well,” &c.

The strong interest now felt by Lear to try to find excuses for his daughter is
most pathetic.

Ib. Lear's speech:—

... “Beloved Regan,
Thy sister's naught;—O Regan, she hath tied
Sharp-tooth'd unkindness, like a vulture, here.

I can scarce speak to thee;—thou'lt not believe
Of how deprav'd a quality—O Regan!

Reg. I pray you, Sir, take patience; I have hope,
You less know how to value her desert,
Than she to scant her duty.

Lear. Say, how is that?”

Nothing is so heart-cutting as a cold unexpected defence or palliation of a
cruelty passionately complained of, or so expressive of thorough hard-
heartedness. And feel the excessive horror of Regan's “O, Sir, you are
old!”—and then her drawing from that universal object of reverence and
indulgence the very reason for her frightful conclusion—

“Say, you have wrong'd her!”

All Lear's faults increase our pity for him. We refuse to know them
otherwise than as means of his sufferings, and aggravations of his
daughters' ingratitude.

[pg 198]
Ib. Lear's speech:—

“O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous,” &c.

Observe that the tranquillity which follows the first stunning of the blow
permits Lear to reason.

Act iii. sc. 4. O, what a world's convention of agonies is here! All external
nature in a storm, all moral nature convulsed,—the real madness of Lear,
the feigned madness of Edgar, the babbling of the Fool, the desperate
fidelity of Kent—surely such a scene was never conceived before or since!
Take it but as a picture for the eye only, it is more terrific than any which a
Michael Angelo, inspired by a Dante, could have conceived, and which
none but a Michael Angelo could have executed. Or let it have been uttered
to the blind, the howlings of nature would seem converted into the voice of

conscious humanity. This scene ends with the first symptoms of positive
derangement; and the intervention of the fifth scene is particularly
judicious,—the interruption allowing an interval for Lear to appear in full
madness in the sixth scene.

Ib. sc. 7. Gloster's blinding.

What can I say of this scene?—There is my reluctance to think Shakespeare
wrong, and yet—

Act iv. sc. 6. Lear's speech:—

“Ha! Goneril!—with a white beard!—They flattered me like a dog; and told
me, I had white hairs in my beard, ere the black ones were there. To say Ay
and No to every thing I said!—Ay and No too was no good divinity. When
the rain came to wet me once,” &c.

The thunder recurs, but still at a greater distance from our feelings.

[pg 199]
Ib. sc. 7. Lear's speech:—

“Where have I been? Where am I?—Fair daylight?—
I am mightily abused.—I should even die with pity
To see another thus,” &c.

How beautifully the affecting return of Lear to reason, and the mild pathos
of these speeches prepare the mind for the last sad, yet sweet, consolation of
the aged sufferer's death!

[pg 201]

“Hamlet.”

Hamlet was the play, or rather Hamlet himself was the character, in the
intuition and exposition of which I first made my turn for philosophical
criticism, and especially for insight into the genius of Shakespeare, noticed.
This happened first amongst my acquaintances, as Sir George Beaumont
will bear witness; and subsequently, long before Schlegel had delivered at
Vienna the lectures on Shakespeare, which he afterwards published, I had
given on the same subject eighteen lectures substantially the same,
proceeding from the very same point of view, and deducing the same
conclusions, so far as I either then agreed, or now agree, with him. I gave
these lectures at the Royal Institution, before six or seven hundred auditors
of rank and eminence, in the spring of the same year, in which Sir
Humphrey Davy, a fellow-lecturer, made his great revolutionary discoveries
in chemistry. Even in detail the coincidence of Schlegel with my lectures
was so extraordinary, that all who at a later period heard the same words,
taken by me from my notes of the lectures at the Royal Institution,
concluded a borrowing on my part from Schlegel. Mr. Hazlitt, whose hatred
of me is in such an inverse ratio to my zealous kindness towards him, as to
be defended by his warmest admirer, Charles Lamb—(who, God bless him!
besides his characteristic obstinacy of adherence to old friends, as long at
least as they are at all down [pg 202] in the world, is linked as by a charm to
Hazlitt's conversation)—only as “frantic;”—Mr. Hazlitt, I say, himself
replied to an assertion of my plagiarism from Schlegel in these words;
—“That is a lie; for I myself heard the very same character of Hamlet from
Coleridge before he went to Germany, and when he had neither read nor
could read a page of German!” Now Hazlitt was on a visit to me at my
cottage at Nether Stowey, Somerset, in the summer of the year 1798, in the
September of which year I first was out of sight of the shores of Great
Britain.—Recorded by me, S. T. Coleridge, 7th January, 1819.

The seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and character of Hamlet have
long exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics; and, as we are always

loth to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is in ourselves, the
mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of
setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon
into a misgrowth or lusus of the capricious and irregular genius of
Shakespeare. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent
decisions I would fain do my best to expose. I believe the character of
Hamlet may be traced to Shakespeare's deep and accurate science in mental
philosophy. Indeed, that this character must have some connection with the
common fundamental laws of our nature may be assumed from the fact, that
Hamlet has been the darling of every country in which the literature of
England has been fostered. In order to understand him, it is essential that we
should reflect on the constitution of our own minds. Man is distinguished
from the brute animals in proportion as [pg 203] thought prevails over
sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly
maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward
operations of the intellect;—for if there be an overbalance in the
contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere
meditation, and loses his natural power of action. Now one of Shakespeare's
modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one intellectual or moral
faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself, Shakespeare, thus
mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances. In Hamlet he seems to
have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our
attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the workings of
our minds,—an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In
Hamlet this balance is disturbed: his thoughts, and the images of his fancy,
are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions,
instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as
they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a
great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate
aversion to real action, consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and
accompanying qualities. This character Shakespeare places in
circumstances, under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment:
—Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility,
and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy
of resolve. Thus it is that this tragedy presents a direct contrast to that of
Macbeth; the one proceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with a
crowded and breathless rapidity.

[pg 204]
The effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully
illustrated in the everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of
Hamlet's mind, which, unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly
occupied with the world within, and abstracted from the world without,—
giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all commonplace
actualities. It is the nature of thought to be indefinite;—definiteness belongs
to external imagery alone. Hence it is that the sense of sublimity arises, not
from the sight of an outward object, but from the beholder's reflection upon
it;—not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex. Few
have seen a celebrated waterfall without feeling something akin to
disappointment: it is only subsequently that the image comes back full into
the mind, and brings with it a train of grand or beautiful associations.
Hamlet feels this; his senses are in a state of trance, and he looks upon
external things as hieroglyphics. His soliloquy—

“O! that this too too solid flesh would melt,” &c.—

springs from that craving after the indefinite—for that which is not—which
most easily besets men of genius; and the self-delusion common to this
temper of mind is finely exemplified in the character which Hamlet gives of
himself;—

... “It cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter.”

He mistakes the seeing his chains for the breaking them, delays action till
action is of no use, and dies the victim of mere circumstance and accident.

There is a great significancy in the names of Shakespeare's plays. In the
Twelfth Night, Midsummer [pg 205] Night's Dream, As You Like It, and
Winter's Tale, the total effect is produced by a co-ordination of the
characters as in a wreath of flowers. But in Coriolanus, Lear, Romeo and
Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, &c., the effect arises from the subordination of all
to one, either as the prominent person, or the principal object. Cymbeline is
the only exception; and even that has its advantages in preparing the

audience for the chaos of time, place, and costume, by throwing the date
back into a fabulous king's reign.

But as of more importance, so more striking, is the judgment displayed by
our truly dramatic poet, as well as poet of the drama, in the management of
his first scenes. With the single exception of Cymbeline, they either place
before us at one glance both the past and the future in some effect, which
implies the continuance and full agency of its cause, as in the feuds and
party-spirit of the servants of the two houses in the first scene of Romeo and
Juliet; or in the degrading passion for shows and public spectacles, and the
overwhelming attachment for the newest successful war-chief in the Roman
people, already become a populace, contrasted with the jealousy of the
nobles in Julius Cæsar;—or they at once commence the action so as to
excite a curiosity for the explanation in the following scenes, as in the storm
of wind and waves, and the boatswain in the Tempest, instead of
anticipating our curiosity, as in most other first scenes, and in too many
other first acts;—or they act, by contrast of diction suited to the characters,
at once to heighten the effect, and yet to give a naturalness to the language
and rhythm of the principal personages, either as that of Prospero and
Miranda [pg 206] by the appropriate lowness of the style, or as in King
John, by the equally appropriate stateliness of official harangues or
narratives, so that the after blank verse seems to belong to the rank and
quality of the speakers, and not to the poet;—or they strike at once the key-
note, and give the predominant spirit of the play, as in the Twelfth Night and
in Macbeth;—or finally, the first scene comprises all these advantages at
once, as in Hamlet.

Compare the easy language of common life, in which this drama
commences, with the direful music and wild wayward rhythm and abrupt
lyrics of the opening of Macbeth. The tone is quite familiar;—there is no
poetic description of night, no elaborate information conveyed by one
speaker to another of what both had immediately before their senses—(such
as the first distich in Addison's Cato, which is a translation into poetry of
“Past four o'clock and a dark morning!”);—and yet nothing bordering on
the comic on the one hand, nor any striving of the intellect on the other. It is
precisely the language of sensation among men who feared no charge of
effeminacy for feeling what they had no want of resolution to bear. Yet the

armour, the dead silence, the watchfulness that first interrupts it, the
welcome relief of the guard, the cold, the broken expressions of compelled
attention to bodily feelings still under control—all excellently accord with,
and prepare for, the after gradual rise into tragedy;—but, above all, into a
tragedy, the interest of which is as eminently ad et apud intra, as that of
Macbeth is directly ad extra.

In all the best attested stories of ghosts and visions, as in that of Brutus, of
Archbishop Cranmer, that of Benvenuto Cellini recorded by himself, [pg
207] and the vision of Galileo communicated by him to his favourite pupil
Torricelli, the ghost-seers were in a state of cold or chilling damp from
without, and of anxiety inwardly. It has been with all of them as with
Francisco on his guard,—alone, in the depth and silence of the night; “'twas
bitter cold, and they were sick at heart, and not a mouse stirring.” The
attention to minute sounds,—naturally associated with the recollection of
minute objects, and the more familiar and trifling, the more impressive from
the unusualness of their producing any impression at all—gives a
philosophic pertinency to this last image; but it has likewise its dramatic use
and purpose. For its commonness in ordinary conversation tends to produce
the sense of reality, and at once hides the poet, and yet approximates the
reader or spectator to that state in which the highest poetry will appear, and
in its component parts, though not in the whole composition, really is, the
language of nature. If I should not speak it, I feel that I should be thinking
it;—the voice only is the poet's,—the words are my own. That Shakespeare
meant to put an effect in the actor's power in the very first words—“Who's
there?”—is evident from the impatience expressed by the startled Francisco
in the words that follow—“Nay, answer me: stand and unfold yourself.” A
brave man is never so peremptory, as when he fears that he is afraid.
Observe the gradual transition from the silence and the still recent habit of
listening in Francisco's—“I think I hear them”—to the more cheerful call
out, which a good actor would observe, in the—“Stand ho! Who is there?”
Bernardo's inquiry after Horatio, and the repetition of his name and in his
own presence indicate a respect or [pg 208] an eagerness that implies him
as one of the persons who are in the foreground; and the scepticism
attributed to him,—

“Horatio says, 'tis but our fantasy;

And will not let belief take hold of him,”—

prepares us for Hamlet's after eulogy on him as one whose blood and
judgment were happily commingled. The actor should also be careful to
distinguish the expectation and gladness of Bernardo's “Welcome, Horatio!”
from the mere courtesy of his “Welcome, good Marcellus!”

Now observe the admirable indefiniteness of the first opening out of the
occasion of all this anxiety. The preparation informative of the audience is
just as much as was precisely necessary, and no more;—it begins with the
uncertainty appertaining to a question:—

“Mar. What, has this thing appear'd again to-night?”—

Even the word “again” has its credibilising effect. Then Horatio, the
representative of the ignorance of the audience, not himself, but by
Marcellus to Bernardo, anticipates the common solution—“'tis but our
fantasy!” upon which Marcellus rises into—

“This dreaded sight, twice seen of us”—

which immediately afterwards becomes “this apparition,” and that, too, an
intelligent spirit—that is, to be spoken to! Then comes the confirmation of
Horatio's disbelief;—

“Tush! tush! 'twill not appear!”—

and the silence, with which the scene opened, is again restored in the
shivering feeling of Horatio sitting down, at such a time, and with the two
eye-witnesses, to hear a story of a ghost, and that, [pg 209] too, of a ghost
which had appeared twice before at the very same hour. In the deep feeling
which Bernardo has of the solemn nature of what he is about to relate, he
makes an effort to master his own imaginative terrors by an elevation of
style,—itself a continuation of the effort,—and by turning off from the
apparition, as from something which would force him too deeply into
himself, to the outward objects, the realities of nature, which had
accompanied it:—

“Ber. Last night of all,
When yon same star, that's westward from the pole
Had made his course to illume that part of heaven
Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself,
The bell then beating one.”

This passage seems to contradict the critical law that what is told, makes a
faint impression compared with what is beholden; for it does indeed convey
to the mind more than the eye can see; whilst the interruption of the
narrative at the very moment when we are most intensely listening for the
sequel, and have our thoughts diverted from the dreaded sight in
expectation of the desired, yet almost dreaded, tale—this gives all the
suddenness and surprise of the original appearance:—

“Mar. Peace, break thee off; look, where it comes again!”

Note the judgment displayed in having the two persons present, who, as
having seen the Ghost before, are naturally eager in confirming their former
opinions,—whilst the sceptic is silent, and after having been twice
addressed by his friends, answers with two hasty syllables—“Most like,”—
and a confession of horror:—

“It harrows me with fear and wonder.”

O heaven! words are wasted on those who feel, [pg 210] and to those who
do not feel the exquisite judgment of Shakespeare in this scene, what can be
said? Hume himself could not but have had faith in this Ghost dramatically,
let his anti-ghostism have been as strong as Sampson against other ghosts
less powerfully raised.

Act i. sc. 1.—

“Mar. Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows,
Why this same strict and most observant watch,” &c.

How delightfully natural is the transition, to the retrospective narrative! And
observe, upon the Ghost's reappearance, how much Horatio's courage is
increased by having translated the late individual spectator into general

thought and past experience,—and the sympathy of Marcellus and Bernardo
with his patriotic surmises in daring to strike at the Ghost; whilst in a
moment, upon its vanishing, the former solemn awe-stricken feeling returns
upon them:—

“We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence.”

Ib. Horatio's speech:—

... “I have heard,
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of day,” &c.

No Addison could be more careful to be poetical in diction than
Shakespeare in providing the grounds and sources of its propriety. But how
to elevate a thing almost mean by its familiarity, young poets may learn in
this treatment of the cock-crow.

Ib. Horatio's speech:—

... “And, by my advice,
Let us impart what we have seen to-night
Unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life,
The spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.”

[pg 211]
Note the inobtrusive and yet fully adequate mode of introducing the main
character, “young Hamlet,” upon whom it transferred all the interest excited
for the acts and concerns of the king his father.

Ib. sc. 2. The audience are now relieved by a change of scene to the royal
court, in order that Hamlet may not have to take up the leavings of
exhaustion. In the king's speech, observe the set and pedantically antithetic
form of the sentences when touching that which galled the heels of
conscience,—the strain of undignified rhetoric,—and yet in what follows

concerning the public weal, a certain appropriate majesty. Indeed was he
not a royal brother?—

Ib. King's speech:—

“And now, Laertes, what's the news with you?” &c.

Thus with great art Shakespeare introduces a most important, but still
subordinate character first, Laertes, who is yet thus graciously treated in
consequence of the assistance given to the election of the late king's brother
instead of his son by Polonius.

Ib.—

“Ham. A little more than kin, and less than kind.

King. How is it that the clouds still hang on you?

Ham. Not so, my lord, I am too much i' the sun.”

Hamlet opens his mouth with a playing on words, the complete absence of
which throughout characterises Macbeth. This playing on words may be
attributed to many causes or motives, as either to an exuberant activity of
mind, as in the higher comedy of Shakespeare generally;—or to an
imitation of it as a mere fashion, as if it were said—“Is not this better than
groaning?”—or to a contemptuous [pg 212] exultation in minds vulgarised
and overset by their success, as in the poetic instance of Milton's Devils in
the battle;—or it is the language of resentment, as is familiar to every one
who has witnessed the quarrels of the lower orders, where there is
invariably a profusion of punning invective, whence, perhaps, nicknames
have in a considerable degree sprung up;—or it is the language of
suppressed passion, and especially of a hardly smothered personal dislike.
The first and last of these combine in Hamlet's case; and I have little doubt
that Farmer is right in supposing the equivocation carried on in the
expression “too much i' the sun,” or son.

Ib.—

“Ham. Ay, madam, it is common.”

Here observe Hamlet's delicacy to his mother, and how the suppression
prepares him for the overflow in the next speech, in which his character is
more developed by bringing forward his aversion to externals, and which
betrays his habit of brooding over the world within him, coupled with a
prodigality of beautiful words, which are the half embodyings of thought,
and are more than thought, and have an outness, a reality sui generis, and
yet retain their correspondence and shadowy affinity to the images and
movements within. Note also Hamlet's silence to the long speech of the
king which follows, and his respectful, but general, answer to his mother.

Ib. Hamlet's first soliloquy:—

“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!” &c.

This tædium vitæ is a common oppression on minds cast in the Hamlet
mould, and is caused by [pg 213] disproportionate mental exertion, which
necessitates exhaustion of bodily feeling. Where there is a just coincidence
of external and internal action, pleasure is always the result; but where the
former is deficient, and the mind's appetency of the ideal is unchecked,
realities will seem cold and unmoving. In such cases, passion combines
itself with the indefinite alone. In this mood of his mind the relation of the
appearance of his father's spirit in arms is made all at once to Hamlet:—it is
—Horatio's speech in particular—a perfect model of the true style of
dramatic narrative;—the purest poetry, and yet in the most natural language,
equally remote from the ink-horn and the plough.

Ib. sc. 3. This scene must be regarded as one of Shakespeare's lyric
movements in the play, and the skill with which it is interwoven with the
dramatic parts is peculiarly an excellence of our poet. You experience the
sensation of a pause without the sense of a stop. You will observe in
Ophelia's short and general answer to the long speech of Laertes the natural
carelessness of innocence, which cannot think such a code of cautions and
prudences necessary to its own preservation.

Ib. Speech of Polonius (in Stockdale's edition):—

“Or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase),
Wronging it thus, you'll tender me a fool.”

I suspect this “wronging” is here used much in the same sense as
“wringing” or “wrenching,” and that the parenthesis should be extended to
“thus.”

Ib. Speech of Polonius:—

... “How prodigal the soul
Lends the tongue vows:—these blazes, daughter,” &c.

[pg 214]
A spondee has, I doubt not, dropped out of the text. Either insert “Go to”
after “vows”;—

“Lends the tongue vows: Go to, these blazes, daughter”—

or read—

“Lends the tongue vows:—These blazes, daughter, mark you”—

Shakespeare never introduces a catalectic line without intending an
equivalent to the foot omitted in the pauses, or the dwelling emphasis, or
the diffused retardation. I do not, however, deny that a good actor might, by
employing the last mentioned means—namely, the retardation, or solemn
knowing drawl—supply the missing spondee with good effect. But I do not
believe that in this or any other of the foregoing speeches of Polonius,
Shakespeare meant to bring out the senility or weakness of that personage's
mind. In the great ever-recurring dangers and duties of life, where to
distinguish the fit objects for the application of the maxims collected by the
experience of a long life, requires no fineness of tact, as in the admonitions
to his son and daughter, Polonius is uniformly made respectable. But if an
actor were even capable of catching these shades in the character, the pit
and the gallery would be malcontent at their exhibition. It is to Hamlet that
Polonius is, and is meant to be, contemptible, because in inwardness and
uncontrollable activity of movement, Hamlet's mind is the logical contrary
to that of Polonius; and besides, as I have observed before, Hamlet dislikes

the man as false to his true allegiance in the matter of the succession to the
crown.

Ib. sc. 4. The unimportant conversation with which this scene opens is a
proof of Shakespeare's [pg 215] minute knowledge of human nature. It is a
well established fact, that on the brink of any serious enterprise, or event of
moment, men almost invariably endeavour to elude the pressure of their
own thoughts by turning aside to trivial objects and familiar circumstances:
thus this dialogue on the platform begins with remarks on the coldness of
the air, and inquiries, obliquely connected, indeed, with the expected hour
of the visitation, but thrown out in a seeming vacuity of topics, as to the
striking of the clock and so forth. The same desire to escape from the
impending thought is carried on in Hamlet's account of, and moralizing on,
the Danish custom of wassailing: he runs off from the particular to the
universal, and, in his repugnance to personal and individual concerns,
escapes, as it were, from himself in generalisations, and smothers the
impatience and uneasy feelings of the moment in abstract reasoning.
Besides this, another purpose is answered;—for by thus entangling the
attention of the audience in the nice distinctions and parenthetical sentences
of this speech of Hamlet's, Shakespeare takes them completely by surprise
on the appearance of the Ghost, which comes upon them in all the
suddenness of its visionary character. Indeed, no modern writer would have
dared, like Shakespeare, to have preceded this last visitation by two distinct
appearances,—or could have contrived that the third should rise upon the
former two in impressiveness and solemnity of interest.

But in addition to all the other excellences of Hamlet's speech concerning
the wassail-music—so finely revealing the predominant idealism, the
ratiocinative meditativeness, of his character—it [pg 216] has the advantage
of giving nature and probability to the impassioned continuity of the speech
instantly directed to the Ghost. The momentum had been given to his mental
activity; the full current of the thoughts and words had set in, and the very
forgetfulness, in the fervour of his argumentation, of the purpose for which
he was there, aided in preventing the appearance from benumbing the mind.
Consequently, it acted as a new impulse,—a sudden stroke which increased
the velocity of the body already in motion, whilst it altered the direction.
The co-presence of Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo is most judiciously

contrived; for it renders the courage of Hamlet, and his impetuous
eloquence, perfectly intelligible. The knowledge,—the unthought of
consciousness,—the sensation of human auditors—of flesh and blood
sympathists—acts as a support and a stimulation a tergo, while the front of
the mind, the whole consciousness of the speaker, is filled, yea, absorbed,
by the apparition. Add too, that the apparition itself has, by its previous
appearances, been brought nearer to a thing of this world. This accrescence
of objectivity in a Ghost that yet retains all its ghostly attributes and fearful
subjectivity, is truly wonderful.

Ib. sc. 5. Hamlet's speech:—

“O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell?”

I remember nothing equal to this burst, unless it be the first speech of
Prometheus in the Greek drama, after the exit of Vulcan and the two Afrites.
But Shakespeare alone could have produced the vow of Hamlet to make his
memory a blank of all maxims and generalised truths, that [pg 217]
“observation had copied there,”—followed immediately by the speaker
noting down the generalised fact,—

“That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!”

Ib.—

“Mar. Hillo, ho, ho, my lord!

Ham. Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come bird, come,” &c.

This part of the scene, after Hamlet's interview with the Ghost, has been
charged with an improbable eccentricity. But the truth is, that after the mind
has been stretched beyond its usual pitch and tone, it must either sink into
exhaustion and inanity, or seek relief by change. It is thus well known, that
persons conversant in deeds of cruelty contrive to escape from conscience
by connecting something of the ludicrous with them, and by inventing
grotesque terms, and a certain technical phraseology, to disguise the horror
of their practices. Indeed, paradoxical as it may appear, the terrible by a law

of the human mind always touches on the verge of the ludicrous. Both arise
from the perception of something out of the common order of things—
something, in fact, out of its place; and if from this we can abstract danger,
the uncommonness will alone remain, and the sense of the ridiculous be
excited. The close alliance of these opposites—they are not contraries—
appears from the circumstance, that laughter is equally the expression of
extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears
of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment. These complex
causes will naturally have produced in Hamlet the disposition to escape
from his own feelings of the overwhelming and supernatural by a wild
transition [pg 218] to the ludicrous,—a sort of cunning bravado, bordering
on the flights of delirium. For you may, perhaps, observe that Hamlet's
wildness is but half false; he plays that subtle trick of pretending to act only
when he is very near really being what he acts.

The subterraneous speeches of the Ghost are hardly defensible;—but I
would call your attention to the characteristic difference between this
Ghost, as a superstition connected with the most mysterious truths of
revealed religion,—and Shakespeare'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 notions, steps, and
gestures of youth and health. But this is almost everything:—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 statecraft, hunts the
trail of policy at a dead scent, supplied by the weak fever-smell in his own
nostrils.

Ib. sc. 2. Speech of Polonius:—

“My liege, and madam, to expostulate,” &c.

Warburton's note.

“Then as to the jingles, and play on words, let us but look into the sermons 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 [pg 219] 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.

Ib.—

“Ham. Excellent well;
You are a fishmonger.”

That is, you are sent to fish out this secret. This is Hamlet's own meaning.

Ib.—

“Ham. For if the sun breed 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 carcase; and if the sun,
being a god that kisses carrion, can raise life out of a dead dog,—why may
not good fortune, that favours fools, have raised a lovely girl out of this
dead-alive old fool?” Warburton is often led astray, in his interpretations, by
his attention to general positions without the due Shakespearian 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,—

“O Jephthah, judge of Israel! what a treasure hadst thou!”

is confirmatory of my view of these lines.

Ib.—

“Ham. You cannot, Sir, take from me any thing that I will
more willingly part withal; except my life, except my life, except
my life.”

This repetition strikes me as most admirable.

[pg 220]
Ib.—

“Ham. Then are our beggars, bodies; and our monarchs, and
out-stretched heroes, the beggars' shadows?”

I do not understand this; and Shakespeare seems to have intended the
meaning not to be more than snatched at:—“By my fay, I cannot reason!”

Ib.—

“The rugged Pyrrhus—he whose sable arms,” &c.

This admirable substitution of the epic for the dramatic, giving such a
reality to the impassioned dramatic diction of Shakespeare's own dialogue,
and authorised too, by the actual style of the tragedies before his time
(Porrex and Ferrex, Titus Andronicus, &c.)—is well worthy of notice. The
fancy, that a burlesque was intended, 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 vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the
drama. But if Shakespeare had made the diction truly dramatic, where
would have been the contrast between Hamlet and the play in Hamlet?

Ib.—

... “Had seen the 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 imitation of it, so as to answer the purpose (“I
am not drest for company”), and yet reconciling it with neatness and perfect
purity.

Ib. Hamlet's soliloquy:—

“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” &c.

[pg 221]
This is Shakespeare's own attestation to the truth of the idea of Hamlet
which I have before put forth.

Ib.—

“The spirit that I have seen,
May be a devil: and the devil hath 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, 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. part. i. sect. 37.

Act iii. sc. 1. Hamlet's soliloquy:—

“To be, or not to be, that is the question,” &c.

This speech is of absolutely universal interest,—and yet to which of all
Shakespeare's characters could it have been appropriately given but to

Hamlet? For Jaques it would have been too deep, and for Iago too habitual a
communion with the heart; which in every man belongs, or ought to belong,
to all mankind.

Ib.—

“The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns.”

Theobald's note in defence of the supposed contradiction of this in the
apparition of the Ghost.

O miserable defender! If it be necessary to remove the apparent
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.

Ib.—

“Ham. Ha, ha! are you honest?

Oph. My lord?

Ham. Are you fair?”

[pg 222]
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-tormenting strain
of irony, is perceptible throughout. “I did love you once:”—“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 Shakespeare's charm of composing the female character by
the absence of characters, that is, marks and out-juttings.

Ib. Hamlet's speech:—

“I say, we will have no more marriages: those that are married already, all but
one, shall live: the rest shall keep as they are.”

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!

Ib. sc. 2. This dialogue of Hamlet with the players is one of the happiest
instances of Shakespeare's power of diversifying the scene while he is
carrying on the plot.

Ib.—

“Ham. My lord, you played 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 [pg 223] breach in the unity of the interest;—but
yet to the thoughtful reader it is suggested by his spite to poor Polonius,
whom he cannot let rest.

Ib. 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.

Ib.—

“Ros. 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.
Shakespeare'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.

Ib. 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.

Ib. sc. 3. Speech of Polonius. Polonius's volunteer obtrusion of himself into
this business, while it is appropriate to his character, still itching after
former importance, removes all likelihood that Hamlet should suspect his
presence, and prevents us from making his death injure Hamlet in our
opinion.

Ib. The king's speech:—

“O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven,” &c.

[pg 224]
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 remarkable;—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 expiation:—not what you
have done, but what you are, must determine.

Ib. Hamlet's speech:—

“Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying:
And now I'll do't:—And so he goes to heaven:
And so am I revenged? That would be scann'd,” &c.

Dr. Johnson's mistaking of the marks of reluctance and procrastination 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.”

O what a lesson concerning the essential difference between wishing and
willing, and the folly of all motive-mongering, while the individual self
remains!

Ib. 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?”

I confess that Shakespeare has left the character of the Queen in an
unpleasant perplexity. Was she, or was she not, conscious of the fratricide?

[pg 225]
Act iv. sc. 2.—

“Ros. Take you me for a spunge, my lord?

Ham. Ay, Sir; that soaks up the King's countenance, his
rewards, his 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. O, note the conjunction here of these two
thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunction, 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 honour lay exposed. Thought, affliction, passion, murder itself—
she turns to favour and prettiness. This play of association is instanced in
the close:—

“My brother shall know of it, and I thank you for your good counsel.”

Ib. Gentleman's speech:—

“And as the world were now but to begin
Antiquity forgot, custom not known,
The ratifiers and props of every word—
They cry,” &c.

Fearful and self-suspicious as I always feel, when I seem to see an error of
judgment in Shakespeare, yet I cannot reconcile the cool, and, as Warburton
calls it, “rational and consequential,” reflection in these lines with the
anonymousness, or the alarm, of this Gentleman or Messenger, as he is
called in other editions.

Ib. King's speech:—

“There's such divinity doth hedge a king,
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will.”

[pg 226]
Proof, as indeed all else is, that Shakespeare never intended us to see the
King with Hamlet's eyes; though, I suspect, the managers have long done
so.

Ib. Speech of Laertes:—

“To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil!”

“Laertes is a good character, but,” &c.—Warburton.

Mercy on Warburton's notion of goodness! Please to refer to the seventh
scene of this act;—

“I will do't;

And for that 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 Shakespeare 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's treachery;—and
to this end he re-introduces Ophelia at the close of this scene to afford a
probable stimulus of passion in her brother.

Ib. sc. 6. Hamlet's capture by the pirates. This is almost the only play of
Shakespeare, in which mere accidents, independent of all will, form an
essential part of the plot;—but here how judiciously in keeping with the
character of the over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by accident
or by a fit of passion!

Ib. sc. 7. Note how the King first awakens Laertes's vanity by praising the
reporter, and then gratifies it by the report itself, and finally points it by—

... “Sir, this report of his
Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy!”

[pg 227]
Ib. 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 Shakespeare meant “pleurisy,” but involved in it the
thought of plethora, as supposing pleurisy to arise from too much blood;
otherwise I cannot explain the following line—

“And then this should is like a spendthrift sigh,

That hurts by easing.”

In 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 right word;
for I find that in the old medical dictionaries the pleurisy is often called the
“plethory.”

Ib.—

“Queen. Your sister's drown'd, Laertes.

Laer. Drown'd! O, 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 faery isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost
without an eddy!

Act v. sc. 1. O, 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.

Ib. sc. 1 and 2. Shakespeare seems to mean all Hamlet's character to be
brought together before [pg 228] his final disappearance from the scene;—
his meditative excess in the grave-digging, his yielding to passion with
Laertes, his love for Ophelia blazing out, his tendency to generalise on all
occasions in the dialogue with Horatio, his fine gentlemanly manners with
Osrick, and his and Shakespeare's own fondness for presentment:—

“But thou wouldst not think, how ill all's here about my heart: but it is no
matter.”

[pg 229]

“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 remaining 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
Shakespeare's plays; and hence also, with the exception of the disgusting
passage of the Porter (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. I have
previously given an answer to the thousand times repeated charge against
Shakespeare upon the subject of his punning, and I here merely mention the
fact of the absence of any puns in Macbeth, as justifying a candid doubt, at
least, whether even in these figures of speech and fanciful modifications of
language, Shakespeare may not have followed rules and principles that
merit and would stand the test of philosophic 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, [pg 230] there are 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 recoilings 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 endeavours to reconcile his and her own
sinkings 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 individual 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
generals; the instances are too notorious to need mentioning. There is so
much of chance in warfare, and such vast events are connected with the acts
of a single individual,—the [pg 231] representative, in truth, of the efforts
of myriads, and yet to the public, and doubtless to his own feelings, the
aggregate of all,—that the proper temperament for generating or receiving
superstitious impressions is naturally produced. Hope, the master element
of a commanding genius, meeting with an active and combining intellect,
and an imagination of just that degree of vividness which disquiets and
impels the soul to try to realise 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 in
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 Shakespeare's, as his Ariel and
Caliban,—fates, furies, and materialising witches being the elements. They
are wholly different from any representation of witches in the contemporary
writers, and yet presented a sufficient 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
shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, the lawless of
human nature,—elemental avengers without sex or kin:—

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

[pg 232]
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
sensuously perceptible that of Shakespeare!

The style and rhythm of the Captain's speeches in the second scene should
be illustrated by reference to the interlude in Hamlet, 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
consummation 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 will;
although, if he should yield to the temptation, and thus forfeit his 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 O! how truly Shakespearian is the opening of
Macbeth's character 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 [pg 233] himself,
directs our notice to the effect produced on Macbeth's mind, rendered
temptible 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 schoolfellow's fortune;—all perfectly general,
or rather, planless. But Macbeth, lost in thought, raises himself to speech
only by the Witches being 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 has pursued the Witches' evanishing—

“Speak, I charge you!”

with the easily satisfied mind of the self-uninterested Banquo:—

“The air hath bubbles, as the water has,
And these are of them:—Whither are they vanish'd?”

and then Macbeth's earnest reply,—

“Into the air; and what seem'd corporal, melted
As breath into the wind.—Would they had stay'd!”

Is it too minute to notice the appropriateness of the simile “as breath,” &c.,
in a cold climate?

[pg 234]
Still again Banquo goes on wondering like any common spectator,—

“Were such things here as we do speak about?”

whilst Macbeth persists in recurring to the self-concerning:—

“Your children shall be kings.

Ban. You shall be king.

Macb. 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 cool, the confirmation of the tempting
half of the prophecy arrives, and the concatenating tendency of the
imagination is fostered by 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?”

Ib. 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 sense than that of “stimulating;”
I mean of “kind” and “kin,” as when rabbits are said to “kindle.” However,
Macbeth no longer hears anything ab 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 soliloquy shows
the early birth-date of his guilt. He is all-powerful without strength; [pg
235] he wishes the end, but is irresolute as to the means; conscience
distinctly warns him, and he lulls it imperfectly:—

“If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me
Without my stir.”

Lost in the prospective of his guilt, he turns round alarmed lest others may
suspect what is passing in his own mind, and instantly vents the lie of
ambition:—

“My dull brain was wrought
With things forgotten;”—

and immediately after pours forth the promising courtesies of a usurper in
intention:—

... “Kind gentlemen, your pains
Are register'd where every day I turn
The leaf to read them.”

Ib. Macbeth's speech:—

... “Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings.”

Warburton's note, and substitution of “feats” for “fears.”

Mercy on this most wilful ingenuity of blundering, which, nevertheless, was
the very Warburton of Warburton—his inmost being! “Fears,” here, are
present fear-striking objects, terribilia adstantia.

Ib. sc. 4. O! 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—

“O worthiest cousin!”

on the entrance of the deeper traitor for whom [pg 236] Cawdor had made
way! And here in contrast with Duncan's “plenteous joys,” Macbeth has

nothing but the common-places of loyalty, in which he hides himself with
“our duties.” Note the exceeding effort of Macbeth's addresses to the king,
his reasoning on his allegiance, and then especially when a new difficulty,
the designation of a successor, suggests a new crime. This, however, seems
the first distinct notion, as to the plan of realising his wishes; and here,
therefore, with great propriety, Macbeth's cowardice of his own conscience
discloses itself. I always think there is something especially Shakespearian
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.

Ib: 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 honour 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 Miltonic Messiah and Satan.

Ib. sc. 5. Macbeth is described by Lady Macbeth so as at the same time to
reveal her own character. Could he have every thing 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 danger of indulging fancies.

[pg 237]
Lady Macbeth, like all in Shakespeare, is a class individualised:—of high
rank, left much alone, and feeding herself with day-dreams of ambition, she
mistakes the courage of fantasy for the power of bearing the consequences
of the realities of guilt. His is the mock fortitude of a mind deluded by
ambition; she shames her husband with a superhuman audacity of fancy

which she cannot support, but sinks in the season of remorse, and dies in
suicidal agony. Her speech:—

... “Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,” &c.—

is that of one who had habitually familiarised her imagination to dreadful
conceptions, and was trying to do so still more. Her invocations and
requisitions are all the false efforts of a mind accustomed only hitherto to
the shadows of the imagination, vivid enough to throw the every-day
substances of life into shadow, but never as yet brought into direct contact
with their own correspondent realities. She evinces no womanly life, no
wifely joy, 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 incentives the very
circumstances, Duncan's coming to their house, &c., which Macbeth's
conscience would most probably have adduced to her as motives of
abhorrence or repulsion. Yet Macbeth is not prepared:—

“We will speak further.”

Ib. sc. 6. The lyrical movement with which this [pg 238] 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 laboured rhythm and
hypocritical over-much of Lady Macbeth's welcome, in which you cannot
detect a ray of personal feeling, but all is thrown upon the “dignities,” the
general duty.

Ib. sc. 7. Macbeth's speech:—

“We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honour'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 another's guilty
intentions and wishes, and fear of the cursed thoughts of sensual nature.

Ib. sc. 2. Now that the deed is done or doing—now that the first reality
commences, Lady Macbeth shrinks. The most simple sound strikes terror,
the most natural consequences are horrible, whilst previously every thing,
however awful, appeared a mere trifle; conscience, which before had been
hidden to Macbeth in selfish and prudential fears, now rushes in upon him
in her own veritable person:—

“Methought I heard a voice cry—Sleep no more!
I could not say Amen,
When they did say, God bless us!”

And see the novelty given to the most familiar images by a new state of
feeling.

[pg 239]
Ib. sc. 3. This low soliloquy of the Porter and his few speeches afterwards, I
believe to have been written for the mob by some other hand, perhaps with
Shakespeare's consent; and that finding it take, he with the remaining ink of
a pen otherwise employed, just interpolated the words—

“I'll devil-porter it no further: I had thought to have let in some of all
professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.”

Of the rest not one syllable has the ever-present being of Shakespeare.

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 Wallenstein.—(Part II. act iv. sc. 2.) The comic was wholly
out of season. Shakespeare never introduces it, but when it may react on the
tragedy by harmonious contrast.

Ib. 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 conscience for fears of selfishness,
and thus as a punishment of that selfishness, plunging still deeper in guilt
and ruin.

Ib. 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 his mistaking his
wife's opposite state.

Ib. sc. 4.—

“Macb. It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood:
Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak;
Augurs, and understood relations, have
By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth
The secret'st man of blood.”

[pg 240]
The deed is done; but Macbeth receives no comfort, no additional 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 super-human
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.

Ib. 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 Macduff and her child
heightens the pathos, and is preparatory for the deep tragedy of their
assassination. Shakespeare'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 examination of
Mrs. Page's schoolboy. To the objection that Shakespeare wounds the moral
sense by the unsubdued, undisguised description of the most hateful atrocity
—that he tears the feelings without mercy, and even outrages the eye itself
with scenes of insupportable horror—I, omitting Titus Andronicus, as not
genuine, and excepting the scene of Gloster's blinding in Lear, answer
boldly in the name of Shakespeare, not guilty.

Ib. sc. 3. Malcolm's speech:—

... “Better Macbeth,
Than such an one to reign.”

[pg 241]
The moral is—the dreadful effects even on the best minds of the soul-
sickening sense of insecurity.

Ib. How admirably Macduff's grief is in harmony with the whole play! It
rends, not dissolves, the heart. “The tune of it goes manly.” Thus is

Shakespeare always master of himself and of his subject,—a genuine
Proteus:—we see all things in him, as images in a calm lake, most distinct,
most accurate,—only more splendid, more glorified. This is correctness in
the only philosophical sense. But he requires your sympathy and your
submission; you must have that recipiency of moral impression without
which the purposes and ends of the drama would be 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 in the
labours of a profession, and round the light of his own hearth, still carries 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-armour
of the wretched, and would fain think every thing shadowy and
unsubstantial, as indeed all things are to those who cannot regard them as
symbols of goodness:—

“Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

[pg 243]

“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 obscure 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 disposition, and it
should be immediately followed by the perusal of Othello, which is the
direct contrast of it in every particular. For jealousy is a vice of the mind, a
culpable tendency of the temper, having certain well-known and well-
defined effects and concomitants, 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 exhibited in a solitary moodiness of humour, and
yet from the violence of the passion forced to utter itself, and therefore
catching occasions [pg 244] to ease the mind by ambiguities, equivoques,
by talking to those who cannot, and who are known not to be able to,
understand what is said to them,—in short, by soliloquy in the form of
dialogue, and hence a confused, broken, and fragmentary, manner; fourthly,
a dread of vulgar ridicule, as distinct from a high sense of honour, or a
mistaken sense of duty; and lastly, and immediately, consequent on this, a
spirit of selfish vindictiveness.

Act i. sc. 1, 2.—

Observe the easy style of chitchat between Camillo and Archidamus as
contrasted with the elevated diction on the introduction 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 Hermione;—
which is, nevertheless, perfectly natural from mere courtesy 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 expression and
recoil of apprehension that she had gone too far.

“At my request, he would not:”—

The first working of the jealous fit;—

“Too hot, too hot:”—

[pg 245]
The morbid tendency of Leontes to lay hold of the merest trifles, and his
grossness immediately afterwards,—

“Paddling palms and pinching fingers;”—

followed by his strange loss of self-control in his dialogue with the little
boy.

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 Shakespeare's. 1. My ear feels it to be
Shakespearian; 2. The involved grammar is Shakespearian—“show thee,
being a fool naturally, to have improved thy folly by inconstancy;” 3. The
alteration is most flat, and un-Shakespearian. As to the grossness of the
abuse—she calls him “gross and foolish” a few lines below.

Act iv. sc. 3. 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 precipitated 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.”

Ib. sc. 4. Perdita's speech:—

“From Dis's waggon! daffodils.”

An epithet is wanted here, not merely or chiefly for the metre, but for the
balance, for the æsthetic [pg 246] logic. Perhaps “golden” was the word
which would set off the “violets dim.”

Ib.—

... “Pale primroses
That die unmarried.”

Milton's—

“And the rathe primrose that forsaken dies.”

Ib. Perdita's speech:—

“Even here undone:
I was not much afraid; for once or twice
I was about to speak, and tell him plainly,
The self-same sun, that shines upon his court,
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
Looks on alike. Will't 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 now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther,
But milk my ewes, and weep.”

O 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:—

... “Will't please you, Sir, be gone!”

Ib. 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 with stamped coin, not stabbing
steel;—therefore they do not give us the lie.”

As we pay them, they, therefore, do not give it us.

[pg 247]

“Othello.”

Act i. sc. 1.—

Admirable is the preparation, so truly and peculiarly Shakespearian, in the
introduction of Roderigo, 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 without the moral notions and sympathies with honour,
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, constitute 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 Roderigo'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 Roderigo's
continuation of complaint,—

“Thou told'st me, thou didst hold him in thy hate,”—

elicits at length a true feeling of Iago's mind, the dread of contempt 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 [pg 248] 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 price, 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 complaining, are made to act upon him as if they
were so many excellences, and the more appropriately, because cunning is
always admired and wished for by minds conscious of inward weakness;—
but they act only by half, like music on an inattentive auditor, swelling the
thoughts which prevent him from listening to it.

Ib.—

“Rod. What a full fortune does the thick-lips owe,
If he can carry 't thus.”

Roderigo 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 Shakespeare himself, from
want of scenes, and the experience 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 [pg 249] except as
slaves? As for Iago's language to Brabantio, it implies merely that Othello
was a Moor,—that is, black. Though I think the rivalry of Roderigo
sufficient to account for his wilful 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, 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 Shakespeare ignorant of the distinction, still why
should we adopt one disagreeable possibility instead of a ten times greater
and more pleasing probability? It is a common error to mistake the epithets
applied by the dramatis personæ to each other, as truly descriptive of what
the audience ought to see or know. No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's
visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English
audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth 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 Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the
least contemplated.

Ib. 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.

Ib. Iago's speech:—

... “For their souls,
Another of his fathom they have not,
To lead their business.”

[pg 250]
The forced praise of Othello, followed by the bitter hatred of him in this
speech! And observe how Brabantio's dream prepares for his recurrence to
the notion of philtres, and how both prepare for carrying on the plot of the
arraignment of Othello on this ground.

Ib. sc. 2.—

“Oth. 'Tis better as it is.”

How well these few words impress at the outset the truth of Othello's own
character of himself at the end—“that he was not easily wrought!” His self-
government contradistinguishes him throughout from Leontes.

Ib. Othello's speech:—

... “And my demerits
May speak, unbonneted.”

The argument in Theobald's note, where “and bonneted” is suggested, goes
on the assumption that Shakespeare 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 “my demerits” that may speak unbonneted,—without the
symbol of a petitioning inferior.

Ib. sc. 3. Othello's speech:—

“So please your grace, my ancient;
A man he is of honesty and trust:
To his conveyance I assign my wife.”

Compare this with the behaviour of Leontes to his true friend Camillo.

Ib.—

“Bra. Look to her, Moor; if thou hast eyes to see;
She has deceived her father, and may thee.

Oth. My life upon her faith.”

[pg 251]
In real life, how do we look back to little speeches as presentimental of, or
contrasted with, an affecting event! Even so, Shakespeare, as secure of
being read over and over, of becoming a family friend, provides this
passage for his readers, and leaves it to them.

Ib. Iago's speech:—

“Virtue? a fig! 'tis in ourselves, that we are thus, or thus,” &c.

This speech comprises the passionless character of Iago. It is all will in
intellect; and therefore he is here a bold partizan of a truth, but yet of a truth
converted into a falsehood by the absence of all the necessary modifications
caused by the frail nature of man. And then comes the last sentiment:—

“Our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this,
that you call—love, to be a sect or scion!”

Here is the true Iagoism of, alas! how many! Note Iago's pride of mastery in
the repetition of “Go, make money!” to his anticipated dupe, even stronger
than his love of lucre: and when Roderigo is completely won,—

“I am chang'd. I'll go sell all my land,”—

when the effect has been fully produced, the repetition of triumph:—

“Go to; farewell; put money enough in your purse!”

The remainder—Iago's soliloquy—the motive-hunting of a motiveless
malignity—how awful it is! Yea, whilst he is still allowed to bear the divine
image, it is too fiendish for his own steady view,—for the lonely gaze of a
being next to devil, and only not quite devil,—and yet a character which
Shakespeare has attempted and executed, without disgust and without
scandal!

[pg 252]
Dr. Johnson has remarked that little or nothing is wanting to render the
Othello a regular tragedy, but to have opened the play with the arrival of
Othello in Cyprus, and to have thrown the preceding act into the form of
narration. Here then is the place to determine whether such a change would
or would not be an improvement;—nay (to throw down the glove with a full
challenge), whether the tragedy would or not by such an arrangement
become more regular,—that is, more consonant with the rules dictated by
universal reason, on the true common-sense of mankind, in its application
to the particular case. For in all acts of judgment, it can never be too often
recollected, and scarcely too often repeated, that rules are means to ends,
and, consequently, that the end must be determined and understood before it
can be known what the rules are or ought to be. Now, from a certain species
of drama, proposing to itself the accomplishment of certain ends,—these
partly arising from the idea of the species itself, but in part, likewise, forced
upon the dramatist by accidental circumstances beyond his power to
remove or control,—three rules have been abstracted;—in other words, the
means most conducive to the attainment of the proposed ends have been
generalised, and prescribed under the names of the three unities,—the unity
of time, the unity of place, and the unity of action—which last would,
perhaps, have been as appropriately, as well as more intelligibly, entitled the

unity of interest. With this last the present question has no immediate
concern: in fact, its conjunction with the former two is a mere delusion of
words. It is not properly a rule, but in itself the great [pg 253] end not only
of the drama, but of the epic poem, the lyric ode, of all poetry, down to the
candle-flame cone of an epigram,—nay, of poesy in general, as the proper
generic term inclusive of all the fine arts as its species. But of the unities of
time and place, which alone are entitled to the name of rules, the history of
their origin will be their best criterion. You might take the Greek chorus to a
place, but you could not bring a place to them without as palpable an
equivoque as bringing Birnam wood to Macbeth at Dunsinane. It was the
same, though in a less degree, with regard to the unity of time:—the
positive fact, not for a moment removed from the senses, the presence, I
mean, of the same identical chorus, was a continued measure of time;—and
although the imagination may supersede perception, yet it must be granted
to be an imperfection—however easily tolerated—to place the two in broad
contradiction to each other. In truth, it is a mere accident of terms; for the
Trilogy of the Greek theatre was a drama in three acts, and notwithstanding
this, what strange contrivances as to place there are in the Aristophanic
Frogs. Besides, if the law of mere actual perception is once violated—as it
repeatedly is, even in the Greek tragedies—why is it more difficult to
imagine three hours to be three years than to be a whole day and night?

Act ii. sc. 1.—

Observe in how many ways Othello is made, first, our acquaintance, then
our friend, then the object of our anxiety, before the deeper interest is to be
approached!

[pg 254]
Ib.—

“Mont. But, good lieutenant, is your general wived?

Cas. Most fortunately: he hath achieved a maid
That paragons description, and wild fame;
One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens,
And, in the essential vesture of creation,
Does tire the ingener.”

Here is Cassio's warm-hearted, yet perfectly disengaged, praise of
Desdemona, and sympathy with the “most fortunately” wived Othello;—
and yet Cassio is an enthusiastic admirer, almost a worshipper, of
Desdemona. Oh, that detestable code that excellence cannot be loved in any
form that is female, but it must needs be selfish! Observe Othello's “honest”
and Cassio's “bold” Iago, and Cassio's full guileless-hearted wishes for the
safety and love-raptures of Othello and “the divine Desdemona.” And also
note the exquisite circumstance of Cassio's kissing Iago's wife, as if it ought
to be impossible that the dullest auditor should not feel Cassio's religious
love of Desdemona's purity. Iago's answers are the sneers which a proud
bad intellect feels towards women, and expresses to a wife. Surely it ought
to be considered a very exalted compliment to women, that all the sarcasms
on them in Shakespeare are put in the mouths of villains.

Ib.—

“Des. I am not merry; but I do beguile,” &c.

The struggle of courtesy in Desdemona to abstract her attention.

Ib.—

“(Iago aside). He takes her by the palm: Ay, well said, whisper; with as little
a web as this, will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. Ay, smile upon her, do,”
&c.

The importance given to trifles, and made fertile by the villany of the
observer.

[pg 255]
Ib. Iago's dialogue with Roderigo.

This is the rehearsal on the dupe of the traitor's intentions on Othello.

Ib. 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.

Ib. sc. 3. Othello's speech:—

“I know, Iago,
Thy honesty and love doth mince this matter,
Making it light to Cassio.”

Honesty and love! Ay, and who but the reader of the play could think
otherwise?

Ib. Iago's soliloquy:—

“And what's he then that says—I play the villain?
When this advice is free I give, and honest,
Provable 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 think himself
not so.

Act iii. sc. 3.—

“Des. Before Æmilia here,
I give thee warrant of thy place.”

The over-zeal of innocence in Desdemona.

Ib.—

“Enter Desdemona and Æmilia.

Oth. If she be false, O, then, heaven mocks itself!
I'll not believe't.”

Divine! The effect of innocence and the better genius!

Act iv. sc. 3.—

“Æmil. Why, the wrong is but a wrong i' the world; and
having the world for your labour, 'tis a wrong in your own world,
and you might quickly make it right.”

[pg 256]
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 Shakespeare 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,” &c.

Theobald's note from Warburton.

Thus it is for no-poets to comment on the greatest of poets! To make
Othello say that he, who had killed his wife, was like Herod who killed
Mariamne!—O, how many beauties, in this one line, were impenetrable to
the ever thought-swarming, but idealess, Warburton! Othello wishes to
excuse himself on the score of ignorance, and yet not to excuse himself,—
to excuse himself by accusing. This struggle of feeling is finely conveyed in
the word “base,” which is applied to the rude Indian, not in his own
character, but as the momentary representative of Othello's. “Indian”—for I
retain the old reading—means American, a savage in genere.

Finally, let me repeat that Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but
in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago, such
a conviction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed
Iago's honesty as Othello did. We, the audience, know that Iago is a villain,

from the beginning; but in considering the essence of the Shakespearian
Othello, we must perseveringly place ourselves in his situation, [pg 257]
and under his circumstances. Then we shall immediately feel the
fundamental difference between the solemn agony of the noble Moor, and
the wretched fishing jealousies of Leontes, and the morbid suspiciousness
of Leonatus, who is, in other respects, a fine character. Othello had no life
but in Desdemona:—the belief that she, his angel, had fallen from the
heaven of her native innocence, wrought a civil war in his heart. She is his
counterpart; and, like him, is almost sanctified in our eyes by her absolute
unsuspiciousness, and holy entireness of love. As the curtain drops, which
do we pity the most?

Extremum hunc——. There are three powers:—Wit, which discovers partial
likeness hidden in general diversity; subtlety, which discovers the diversity
concealed in general apparent sameness;—and profundity, which discovers
an essential unity under all the semblances of difference.

Give to a subtle man fancy, and he is a wit; to a deep man imagination, and
he is a philosopher. Add, again, pleasurable sensibility in the threefold form
of sympathy with the interesting in morals, the impressive in form, and the
harmonious in sound,—and you have the poet.

But combine all,—wit, subtlety, and fancy, with profundity, imagination,
and moral and physical susceptibility of the pleasurable,—and let the object
of action be man universal; and we shall have—O, rash prophecy! say,
rather, we have—a Shakespeare!

[pg 261]

Notes on Ben Jonson.

It would be amusing to collect out of our dramatists from Elizabeth to
Charles I. proofs of the manners of the times. One striking symptom of
general coarseness of manners, which may co-exist with great refinement of
morals, as, alas! vice versa, is to be seen in the very frequent allusions to
the olfactories with their most disgusting stimulants, and these, too, in the
conversation of virtuous ladies. This would not appear so strange to one
who had been on terms of familiarity with Sicilian and Italian women of
rank: and bad as they may, too many of them, actually be, yet I doubt not
that the extreme grossness of their language has impressed many an
Englishman of the present era with far darker notions than the same
language would have produced in the mind of one of Elizabeth's or James's
courtiers. Those who have read Shakespeare only, complain of occasional
grossness in his plays; but compare him with his contemporaries, and the
inevitable conviction, is that of the exquisite purity of his imagination.

The observation I have prefixed to the Volpone is the key to the faint
interest which these noble efforts of intellectual power excite, with the
exception of the fragment of the Sad Shepherd; because in that piece only is

there any character with whom you can morally sympathise. On the [pg
262] other hand, Measure for Measure is the only play of Shakespeare's in
which there are not some one or more characters, generally many, whom
you follow with affectionate feeling. For I confess that Isabella, of all
Shakespeare's female characters, pleases me the least; and Measure for
Measure is, indeed, the only one of his genuine works, which is painful to
me.

Let me not conclude this remark, however, without a thankful
acknowledgment to the manes of Ben Jonson, that the more I study his
writings, I the more admire them; and the more my study of him resembles
that of an ancient classic, in the minutiæ of his rhythm, metre, choice of
words, forms of connection, and so forth, the more numerous have the
points of my admiration become. I may add, too, that both the study and the
admiration cannot but be disinterested, for to expect therefrom any
advantage to the present drama would be ignorance. The latter is utterly
heterogeneous from the drama of the Shakespearian age, with a diverse
object and contrary principle. The one was to present a model by imitation
of real life, taking from real life all that in it which it ought to be, and
supplying the rest;—the other is to copy what is, and as it is,—at best a
tolerable but most frequently a blundering, copy. In the former the
difference was an essential element; in the latter an involuntary defect. We
should think it strange, if a tale in dance were announced, and the actors did
not dance at all;—and yet such is modern comedy.

[pg 263]

Whalley's Preface.

“But Jonson was soon sensible, how inconsistent this medley of names and
manners was in reason and nature; and with how little propriety it could ever
have a place in a legitimate and just picture of real life.”

But did Jonson reflect that the very essence of a play, the very language in
which it is written, is a fiction to which all the parts must conform? Surely,
Greek manners in English should be a still grosser improbability than a
Greek name transferred to English manners. Ben's personæ are too often
not characters, but derangements;—the hopeless patients of a mad-doctor
rather,—exhibitions of folly betraying itself in spite of exciting reason and
prudence. He not poetically, but painfully exaggerates every trait; that is,
not by the drollery of the circumstance, but by the excess of the originating
feeling.

“But to this we might reply, that far from being thought to build his
characters upon abstract ideas, he was really accused of representing
particular persons then existing; and that even those characters which appear
to be the most exaggerated, are said to have had their respective archetypes in
nature and life.”

This degrades Jonson into a libeller, instead of justifying him as a dramatic
poet. Non quod verum est, sed quod verisimile, is the dramatist's rule. At all
events, the poet who chooses transitory manners, ought to content himself
with transitory praise. If his object be reputation, he ought not to expect
fame. The utmost he can look forwards to, is to be quoted by, and to enliven
the [pg 264] writings of, an antiquarian. Pistol, Nym, and id genus omne, do
not please us as characters, but are endured as fantastic creations, foils to
the native wit of Falstaff.—I say wit emphatically; for this character so

often extolled as the masterpiece of humour, neither contains, nor was
meant to contain, any humour at all.

“Whalley's ‘Life Of Jonson.’ ”

“It is to the honour of Jonson's judgment, that the greatest poet of our nation
had the same opinion of Donne's genius and wit; and hath preserved part of
him from perishing, by putting his thoughts and satire into modern verse.”

Videlicet Pope!—

“He said further to Drummond, Shakespeare wanted art, and sometimes
sense; for in one of his plays he brought in a number of men, saying they had
suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where is no sea near by a hundred miles.”

I have often thought Shakespeare justified in this seeming anachronism. In
Pagan times a single name of a German kingdom might well be supposed to
comprise a hundred miles more than at present. The truth is, these notes of
Drummond's are more disgraceful to himself than to Jonson. It would be
easy to conjecture how grossly Jonson must have been misunderstood, and
what he had said in jest, as of Hippocrates, interpreted in earnest. But this is
characteristic of a Scotchman; he has no notion of a jest, unless you tell him
—“This is a joke!”—and still less of that finer shade of feeling, the half-
and-half, in which Englishmen naturally delight.

[pg 265]

“Every Man Out Of His Humour.”

Epilogue.—

“The throat of war be stopt within her land,
And turtle-footed peace dance fairie rings
About her court.”

“Turtle-footed” is a pretty word, a very pretty word: pray, what does it
mean? Doves, I presume, are not dancers; and the other sort of turtle, land
or sea, green-fat or hawksbill, would, I should suppose, succeed better in
slow minuets than in the brisk rondillo. In one sense, to be sure, pigeons
and ring-doves could not dance but with éclat—a claw!

[pg 266]

“Poetaster.”

Introduction.—

“Light! I salute thee, but with wounded nerves,
Wishing thy golden splendour pitchy darkness.”

There is no reason to suppose Satan's address to the sun in the Paradise
Lost, more than a mere coincidence with these lines; but were it otherwise,
it would be a fine instance what usurious interest a great genius pays in
borrowing. It would not be difficult to give a detailed psychological proof
from these constant outbursts of anxious self-assertion, that Jonson was not
a genius, a creative power. Subtract that one thing, and you may safely
accumulate on his name all other excellences of a capacious, vigorous,
agile, and richly-stored intellect.

Act i. sc. 1.—

“Ovid. While slaves be false, fathers hard, and bawds be
whorish.”

The roughness noticed by Theobald and Whalley, may be cured by a simple
transposition:—

“While fathers hard, slaves false, and bawds be whorish.”

Act. iv. sc. 3—

“Crisp. O—oblatrant—furibund—fatuate—strenuous.
O—conscious.”

It would form an interesting essay, or rather series of essays, in a periodical
work, were all the attempts to ridicule new phrases brought together, the
proportion observed of words ridiculed which have been adopted, and are

now common, such as [pg 267] strenuous, conscious, &c., and a trial made
how far any grounds can be detected, so that one might determine
beforehand whether a word was invented under the conditions of
assimilability to our language or not. Thus much is certain, that the
ridiculers were as often wrong as right; and Shakespeare himself could not
prevent the naturalisation of accommodation, remuneration, &c.; or Swift
the gross abuse even of the word idea.

[pg 268]

“Fall Of Sejanus.”

Act i.—

“Arruntius. The name Tiberius,
I hope, will keep, howe'er he hath foregone
The dignity and power.

Silius. Sure, while he lives.

Arr. And dead, it comes to Drusus. Should he fail,
To the brave issue of Germanicus;
And they are three: too many (ha?) for him
To have a plot upon?

Sil. I do not know
The heart of his designs; but, sure, their face
Looks farther than the present.

Arr. By the gods,
If I could guess he had but such a thought,
My sword should cleave him down,” &c.

The anachronic mixture in this Arruntius of the Roman republican, to whom
Tiberius must have appeared as much a tyrant as Sejanus, with his James-
and-Charles-the-First zeal for legitimacy of descent in this passage, is
amusing. Of our great names Milton was, I think, the first who could
properly be called a republican. My recollections of Buchanan's works are
too faint to enable me to judge whether the historian is not a fair exception.

Act ii. Speech of Sejanus:—

“Adultery! it is the lightest ill
I will commit. A race of wicked acts

Shall flow out of my anger, and o'erspread
The world's wide face, which no posterity
Shall e'er approve, nor yet keep silent,” &c.

The more we reflect and examine, examine and reflect, the more astonished
shall we be at the immense superiority of Shakespeare over his
contemporaries;—and [pg 269] yet what contemporaries!—giant minds
indeed! Think of Jonson's erudition, and the force of learned authority in
that age; and yet, in no genuine part of Shakespeare's works is there to be
found such an absurd rant and ventriloquism as this, and too, too many
other passages ferruminated by Jonson from Seneca's tragedies, and the
writings of the later Romans. I call it ventriloquism, because Sejanus is a
puppet, out of which the poet makes his own voice appear to come.

Act v. Scene of the sacrifice to Fortune.

This scene is unspeakably irrational. To believe, and yet to scoff at, a
present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been
made to suspect priestcraft and a secret conspiracy against him.

[pg 270]

“Volpone.”

This admirable, indeed, but yet more wonderful than admirable, play is,
from the fertility and vigour of invention, character, language, and
sentiment, the strongest proof how impossible it is to keep up any
pleasurable interest in a tale, in which there is no goodness of heart in any
of the prominent characters. After the third act, this play becomes not a
dead, but a painful, weight on the feelings. Zeluco is an instance of the same
truth. Bonario and Celia should have been made in some way or other
principals in the plot; which they might have been, and the objects of
interest, without having been made characters. In novels, the person in
whose fate you are most interested, is often the least marked character of
the whole. If it were possible to lessen the paramountcy of Volpone himself,
a most delightful comedy might be produced, by making Celia the ward or
niece of Corvino, instead of his wife, and Bonario her lover.

[pg 271]

“Apicæne.”

This is to my feelings the most entertaining of old Ben's comedies, and,
more than any other, would admit of being brought out anew, if under the
management of a judicious and stage-understanding playwright; and an
actor, who had studied Morose, might make his fortune.

Act i. sc. 1. Clerimont's speech:—

“He would have hang'd a pewterer's 'prentice once upon a Shrove
Tuesday's riot, for being of that trade, when the rest were quiet.”

“The old copies read quit,—i.e., discharged from working, and gone to divert
themselves.”—Whalley's note.

It should be “quit” no doubt, but not meaning “discharged from working,”
&c.—but quit, that is, acquitted. The pewterer was at his holiday diversion
as well as the other apprentices, and they as forward in the riot as he. But he
alone was punished under pretext of the riot, but in fact for his trade.

Act ii. sc. 1.—

“Morose. Cannot I, yet, find out a more compendious method than by this
trunk, to save my servants the labour of speech, and mine ears the discord of
sounds?”

What does “trunk” mean here, and in the first scene of the first act? Is it a
large ear-trumpet?—or rather a tube, such as passes from parlour to kitchen,
instead of a bell?

[pg 272]

Whalley's note at the end:—

“Some critics of the last age imagined the character of Morose to be wholly
out of nature. But to vindicate our poet, Mr. Dryden tells us from tradition,
and we may venture to take his word, that Jonson was really acquainted with
a person of this whimsical turn of mind: and as humour is a personal quality,
the poet is acquitted from the charge of exhibiting a monster, or an
extravagant unnatural caricatura.”

If Dryden had not made all additional proof superfluous by his own plays,
this very vindication would evince that he had formed a false and vulgar
conception of the nature and conditions of drama and dramatic personation.
Ben Jonson would himself have rejected such a plea:—

“For he knew, poet never credit gain'd
By writing truths, but things, like truths, well feign'd.”

By “truths” he means “facts.” Caricatures are not less so because they are
found existing in real life. Comedy demands characters, and leaves
caricatures to farce. The safest and the truest defence of old Ben would be
to call the Epicœne the best of farces. The defect in Morose, as in other of
Jonson's dramatis personæ, lies in this;—that the accident is not a
prominence growing out of, and nourished by, the character which still
circulates in it; but that the character, such as it is, rises out of, or, rather,
consists in, the accident. Shakespeare's comic personages have exquisitely
characteristic features; however awry, disproportionate, and laughable they
may be, still, like Bardolph's nose, they are features. But Jonson's are either
a man with a huge wen, having a circulation of its own, and which we
might conceive amputated, and the patient thereby losing all his character;
or they are mere wens themselves [pg 273] instead of men,—wens
personified, or with eyes, nose, and mouth cut out, mandrake-fashion.

Nota bene.—All the above, and much more, will have justly been said, if,
and whenever, the drama of Jonson is brought into comparisons of rivalry
with the Shakespearian. But this should not be. Let its inferiority to the
Shakespearian be at once fairly owned,—but at the same time as the

inferiority of an altogether different genius of the drama. On this ground,
old Ben would still maintain his proud height. He, no less than Shakespeare
stands on the summit of his hill, and looks round him like a master,—
though his be Lattrig and Shakespeare's Skiddaw.

[pg 274]

“The Alchemist.”

Act i. sc. 2. Face's speech:—

“Will take his oath o' the Greek Xenophon,
If need be, in his pocket.”

Another reading is “Testament.”

Probably, the meaning is—that intending to give false evidence, he carried a
Greek Xenophon to pass it off for a Greek Testament, and so avoid perjury
—as the Irish do, by contriving to kiss their thumb-nails instead of the
book.

Act ii. sc. 2. Mammon's speech:—

“I will have all my beds blown up; not stuft:
Down is too hard.”

Thus the air-cushions, though perhaps only lately brought into use, were
invented in idea in the seventeenth century!

[pg 275]

“Catiline's Conspiracy.”

A fondness for judging one work by comparison with others, perhaps
altogether of a different class, argues a vulgar taste. Yet it is chiefly on this
principle that the Catiline has been rated so low. Take it and Sejanus, as
compositions of a particular kind, namely, as a mode of relating great
historical events in the liveliest and most interesting manner, and I cannot
help wishing that we had whole volumes of such plays. We might as
rationally expect the excitement of the Vicar of Wakefield from Goldsmith's
History of England, as that of Lear, Othello, &c., from the Sejanus or
Catiline.

Act i. sc. 4.—

“Cat. Sirrah, what ail you?

(He spies one of his boys not answer.)

Pag. Nothing.

Best. Somewhat modest.

Cat. Slave, I will strike your soul out with my foot,” &c.

This is either an unintelligible, or, in every sense, a most unnatural, passage,
—improbable, if not impossible, at the moment of signing and swearing
such a conspiracy, to the most libidinous satyr. The very presence of the
boys is an outrage to probability. I suspect that these lines down to the
words “throat opens,” should be removed back so as to follow the words
“on this part of the house,” in the speech of Catiline soon after the [pg 276]
entry of the conspirators. A total erasure, however, would be the best, or,
rather, the only possible, amendment.

Act ii. sc. 2. Sempronia's speech:—

...“He is but a new fellow,
An inmate here in Rome, as Catiline calls him.”

A “lodger” would have been a happier imitation of the inquilinus of Sallust.

Act iv. sc. 6. Speech of Cethegus:—

“Can these or such be any aids to us,” &c.

What a strange notion Ben must have formed of a determined, remorseless,
all-daring, foolhardiness, to have represented it in such a mouthing
Tamburlane, and bombastic tonguebully as this Cethegus of his!

[pg 277]

“Bartholomew Fair.”

Induction. Scrivener's speech:—

“If there be never a servant-monster in the Fair, who can help it
he says, nor a nest of antiques?”

The best excuse that can be made for Jonson, and in a somewhat less degree
for Beaumont and Fletcher, in respect of these base and silly sneers at
Shakespeare is, that his plays were present to men's minds chiefly as acted.
They had not a neat edition of them, as we have, so as, by comparing the
one with the other, to form a just notion of the mighty mind that produced
the whole. At all events, and in every point of view, Jonson stands far
higher in a moral light than Beaumont and Fletcher. He was a fair
contemporary, and in his way, and as far as Shakespeare is concerned, an
original. But Beaumont and Fletcher were always imitators of, and often
borrowers from him, and yet sneer at him with a spite far more malignant
than Jonson, who, besides, has made noble compensation by his praises.

Act ii. sc. 3.—

“Just. I mean a child of the horn-thumb, a babe of booty, boy, a
cut purse.”

Does not this confirm, what the passage itself cannot but suggest, the
propriety of substituting “booty” for “beauty” in Falstaff's speech, Henry IV.
part i. act i. sc. 2. “Let not us, &c.?”

[pg 278]
It is not often that old Ben condescends to imitate a modern author; but
Master Dan. Knockhum Jordan, and his vapours are manifest reflexes of
Nym and Pistol.

Ib. sc. 5.—

“Quarl. She'll make excellent geer for the coachmakers here in
Smithfield, to anoint wheels and axletrees with.”

Good! but yet it falls short of the speech of a Mr. Johnes, M.P., in the
Common Council, on the invasion intended by Buonaparte:—“Houses
plundered—then burnt;—sons conscribed—wives and daughters ravished,”
&c., &c.—“But as for you, you luxurious Aldermen! with your fat will he
grease the wheels of his triumphant chariot!”

Ib. sc. 6.—

“Cok. Avoid in your satin doublet, Numps.”

This reminds me of Shakespeare's “Aroint thee, witch!” I find in several
books of that age the words aloigne and eloigne—that is,—“keep your
distance!” or “off with you!” Perhaps “aroint” was a corruption of “aloigne”
by the vulgar. The common etymology from ronger to gnaw seems
unsatisfactory.

Act iii. sc. 4.—

“Quarl. How now, Numps! almost tired in your protectorship?
overparted, overparted?”

An odd sort of propheticality in this Numps and old Noll!

Ib. sc. 6. Knockhum's speech:—

“He eats with his eyes, as well as his teeth.”

A good motto for the Parson in Hogarth's Election Dinner,—who shows
how easily he might be reconciled to the Church of Rome, for he worships
what he eats.

[pg 279]
Act v. sc. 5.—

“Pup. Di. It is not profane.

Lan. It is not profane, he says.

Boy. It is profane.

Pup. It is not profane.

Boy. It is profane.

Pup. It is not profane.

Lan. Well said, confute him with Not, still.”

An imitation of the quarrel between Bacchus and the Frogs in Aristophanes:
—

“Χορός.
ἀλλὰ μὴν κεκραξόμεσθά γ',
ὁπόσον ἡ φάρυνξ ἂν ἡμῶν
χανδάνη δι' ἡμέρας,
βρεκεκεκὲξ, κοὰξ, κοὰξ.

Διόνυσος.
τούτω γὰρ οὐ νικήσετε.

Χορός.
οὐδὲ μὴν ἡμᾶς σὺ τάντως.

Διόνυσος.
οὐδὲ μὴν ὑμεῖς γε δή μ' οὐδέποτε.”

[pg 280]

“The Devil Is An Ass.”

Act i. sc. 1.—

“Pug. Why any: Fraud,
Or Covetousness, or lady Vanity,
Or old Iniquity, I'll call him hither.”

“The words in italics should probably be given to the master-devil, Satan.”—
Whalley's note.

That is, against all probability, and with a (for Jonson) impossible violation
of character. The words plainly belong to Pug, and mark at once his
simpleness and his impatience.

Ib. sc. 4. Fitz-dottrel's soliloquy.

Compare this exquisite piece of sense, satire, and sound philosophy in 1616
with Sir M. Hale's speech from the bench in a trial of a witch many years
afterwards.

Act ii. sc. 1. Meercraft's speech:—

“Sir, money's a whore, a bawd, a drudge.”

I doubt not that “money” was the first word of the line, and has dropped
out:—

“Money! Sir, money's a,” &c.

[pg 281]

“The Staple Of News.”

Act iv. sc. 3. Pecunia's speech:—

“No, he would ha' done,
That lay not in his power: he had the use
Of your bodies, Band and Wax, and sometimes Statute's.”

Read (1815)—

... “he had the use of
Your bodies,” &c.

Now, however, I doubt the legitimacy of my transposition of the “of” from
the beginning of this latter line to the end of the one preceding;—for though
it facilitates the metre and reading of the latter line, and is frequent in
Massinger, this disjunction of the preposition from its case seems to have
been disallowed by Jonson. Perhaps the better reading is—

“O' your bodies,” &c.—

the two syllables being slurred into one, or rather snatched, or sucked, up
into the emphasised “your.” In all points of view, therefore, Ben's judgment
is just; for in this way, the line cannot be read, as metre, without that strong
and quick emphasis on “your” which the sense requires;—and had not the
sense required an emphasis on “your,” the tmesis of the sign of its cases
“of,” “to,” &c., would destroy almost all boundary between the dramatic
verse and prose in comedy:—a lesson not to be rash in conjectural
amendments.—1818.

[pg 282]
Ib. sc. 4.—

“P. jun. I love all men of virtue, frommy Princess.”

“Frommy,” fromme—pious, dutiful, &c.

Act v. sc. 4. Penny-boy, sen., and Porter.

I dare not, will not, think that honest Ben had Lear in his mind in this mock
mad scene.

[pg 283]

“The New Inn.”

Act i. sc. 1. Host's speech:—

“A heavy purse, and then two turtles, makes.”

“Makes,” frequent in old books, and even now used in some counties for
mates, or pairs.

Ib. sc. 3. Host's speech:—

...“And for a leap
Of the vaulting horse, to play the vaulting house.”

Instead of reading with Whalley “ply” for “play,” I would suggest “horse”
for “house.” The meaning would then be obvious and pertinent. The punlet,
or pun-maggot, or pun intentional, “horse and house,” is below Jonson. The
jeu-de-mots just below—

...“Read a lecture
Upon Aquinas at St. Thomas à Waterings”—

had a learned smack in it to season its insipidity.

Ib. sc. 6. Lovel's speech:—

“Then shower'd his bounties on me, like the Hours,
That open-handed sit upon the clouds,
And press the liberality of heaven
Down to the laps of thankful men!”

Like many other similar passages in Jonson, this is εῖδος χαλεπὸν ἰδεῖν—a
sight which it is difficult to make one's self see,—a picture my fancy cannot
copy detached from the words.