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The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 2

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Title: The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 2

Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Editor: Henry Nelson Coleridge


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITERARY REMAINS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, VOLUME 2 ***




Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Clytie Siddall and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team










THE LITERARY REMAINS

OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE



COLLECTED AND EDITED BY

HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE, ESQ. M.A.


VOLUME THE SECOND





CONTENTS


VOL. II.



LITERARY REMAINS.



Extract from a Letter written by Mr. Coleridge, in February, 1818, to a
Gentleman who attended the Course of Lectures given in the Spring of
that Year.

Extract from a Letter to J. Britton, Esq.


SHAKSPEARE, WITH INTRODUCTORY MATTER ON POETRY, THE DRAMA, AND THE STAGE
  Definition of Poetry
  Greek Drama
  Progress of the Drama
  The Drama generally, and Public Taste
  Shakspeare, a Poet generally
  Shakspeare's Judgment equal to his Genius
  Recapitulation, and Summary of the Characteristics of Shakspeare's Dramas
  Order of Shakspeare'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
  Shakspeare'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
  Notes on Macbeth
  Notes on the Winter's Tale
  Notes on Othello

NOTES ON BEN JONSON
  Whalley's Preface
  Whalley's Life of Jonson
  Every Man out of His Humour
  Poetaster
  Fall of Sejanus
  Volpone
  Epicène
  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

On the 'Prometheus' of Æschylus

Note on Chalmers's 'Life of Daniel'

Bishop Corbet Notes on Selden's 'Table Talk'

Note on Theological Lectures of Benjamin Wheeler, D.D.

Note on a Sermon on the Prevalence of Infidelity and Enthusiasm, by
Walter Birch, B. D.

Fénélon on Charity

Change of the Climates

Wonderfulness of Prose

Notes on Tom Jones

Jonathan Wild

Barry Cornwall

The Primitive Christian's Address to the Cross

Fuller's Holy State

Fuller's Profane State

Fuller's Appeal of Injured Innocence

Fuller's Church History

Asgill's Argument

Introduction to Asgill's Defence upon his Expulsion from the House of
Commons.

Notes on Sir Thomas Browne's 'Religio Medici'

Notes on Sir Thomas Browne's Garden of Cyrus

Notes on Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors





LITERARY REMAINS





Extract from a Letter written by Mr. Coleridge, in February, 1818, to a
gentleman who attended the course of Lectures given in the spring of
that year.

See the 'Canterbury Magazine', September, 1834. Ed.


My next Friday's lecture will, if I do not grossly flatter-blind myself,
be interesting, and the points of view not only original, but new to the
audience. I make this distinction, because sixteen or rather seventeen
years ago, I delivered eighteen lectures on Shakspeare, at the Royal
Institution; three-fourths of which appeared at that time startling
paradoxes, although they have since been adopted even by men, who then
made use of them as proofs of my flighty and paradoxical turn of mind;
all tending to prove that Shakspeare's judgment was, if possible, still
more wonderful than his genius; or rather, that the contradistinction
itself between judgment and genius rested on an utterly false theory.
This, and its proofs and grounds have been--I should not have said
adopted, but produced as their own legitimate children by some, and by
others the merit of them attributed to a foreign writer, whose lectures
were not given orally till two years after mine, rather than to their
countryman; though I dare appeal to the most adequate judges, as Sir
George Beaumont, the Bishop of Durham, Mr. Sotheby, and afterwards to
Mr. Rogers and Lord Byron, whether there is one single principle in
Schlegel's work (which is not an admitted drawback from its merits),
that was not established and applied in detail by me. Plutarch tells us,
that egotism is a venial fault in the unfortunate, and justifiable in
the calumniated, &c. ...






Extract from a Letter to J. Britton, Esq.


28th Feb., 1819, Highgate.

Dear Sir,

--First permit me to remove a very natural, indeed almost inevitable,
mistake, relative to my lectures; namely, that I 'have' them, or that
the lectures of one place or season are in any way repeated in another.
So far from it, that on any point that I had ever studied (and on no
other should I dare discourse--I mean, that I would not lecture on any
subject for which I had to 'acquire' the main knowledge, even though a
month's or three months' previous time were allowed me; on no subject
that had not employed my thoughts for a large portion of my life since
earliest manhood, free of all outward and particular purpose)--on any
point within my habit of thought, I should greatly prefer a subject I
had never lectured on, to one which I had repeatedly given; and those
who have attended me for any two seasons successively will bear witness,
that the lecture given at the London Philosophical Society, on the
'Romeo and Juliet', for instance, was as different from that given at
the Crown and Anchor, as if they had been by two individuals who,
without any communication with each other, had only mastered the same
principles of philosophic criticism. This was most strikingly evidenced
in the coincidence between my lectures and those of Schlegel; such, and
so close, that it was fortunate for my moral reputation that I had not
only from five to seven hundred ear witnesses that the passages had been
given by me at the Royal Institution two years before Schlegel commenced
his lectures at Vienna, but that notes had been taken of these by
several men and ladies of high rank. The fact is this; during a course
of lectures, I faithfully employ all the intervening days in collecting
and digesting the materials, whether I have or have not lectured on the
same subject before, making no difference. The day of the lecture, till
the hour of commencement, I devote to the consideration, what of the
mass before me is best fitted to answer the purposes of a lecture, that
is, to keep the audience awake and interested during the delivery, and
to leave a sting behind, that is, a disposition to study the subject
anew, under the light of a new principle. Several times, however, partly
from apprehension respecting my health and animal spirits, partly from
the wish to possess copies that might afterwards be marketable among the
publishers, I have previously written the lecture; but before I had
proceeded twenty minutes, I have been obliged to push the MS. away, and
give the subject a new turn. Nay, this was so notorious, that many of my
auditors used to threaten me, when they saw any number of written papers
on my desk, to steal them away; declaring they never felt so secure of a
good lecture as when they perceived that I had not a single scrap of
writing before me. I take far, far more pains than would go to the set
composition of a lecture, both by varied reading and by meditation; but
for the words, illustrations, &c., I know almost as little as any one of
the audience (that is, those of anything like the same education with
myself) what they will be five minutes before the lecture begins. Such
is my way, for such is my nature; and in attempting any other, I should
only torment myself in order to disappoint my auditors--torment myself
during the delivery, I mean; for in all other respects it would be a
much shorter and easier task to deliver them from writing. I am anxious
to preclude any semblance of affectation; and have therefore troubled
you with this lengthy preface before I have the hardihood to assure you,
that you might as well ask me what my dreams were in the year 1814, as
what my course of lectures was at the Surrey Institution.

'Fuimus Troes.'






SHAKSPEARE,

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 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 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, 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, daydreaming; 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 synonyme 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 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 diverse names and fates
  Steal access thro' our senses to our minds._ [1]


[Footnote 1: Sir John Davies on the Immortality of the Soul, sect. iv.
The words and lines in italics (_between_) are substituted to apply
these verses to the poetic genius. The greater part of this latter
paragraph may be found adopted, with some alterations, in the 'Biographia
Literaria', vol. ii. c. 14; but I have thought it better in this
instance and some others, to run the chance of bringing a few passages
twice over to the recollection of the reader, than to weaken the force
of the original argument by breaking the connection. Ed.]





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
aera,--should have given in his Dialogue of the Banquet, a justification
of our Shakspeare. 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.
[1] 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
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 Shakspeare 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 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.

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 fixure of light, a mean of developing its beauties, and
unfolding its wealth of various colors without disturbing its unity, or
causing a division of the parts. The sportive ideal, on the contrary,
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 (Shakspeare's altogether excepted) is
the genuine descendant. Euripides had already brought tragedy lower down
and by many steps nearer to the real world than his predecessors had
ever done, and the passionate admiration which Menander and 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, (Shakspeare
excepted as before) lies in prudence or imprudence, enlightened or
misled self-love. The whole moral 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
([Greek (transliterated): Surakousiai ae Ad'oniazousai]) 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 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', ([Greek (transliterated):
thumelae]) 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 'coryphaeus', 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 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-organized 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 Shakspeare; nevertheless, the difference is far greater
than the likeness. In the opera all is subordinated to the music, the
dresses and the scenery;--the poetry is a mere vehicle for articulation,
and as little pleasure is lost by ignorance of the Italian language, so
is little gained by the knowledge of it. But in the Greek drama all was
but as 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 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 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.


[Footnote 1: Greek (transliterated): exegromenos de idein tous men
allous katheudontas kai oichomenous, Agath'ona de kai Aristophanaen kai
S'okratae eti monous egraegorenai, kai pinein ek phialaes megalaes
epidexia ton oun S'okratae autois dialegesthai kai ta men alla ho
Aristodaemos ouk ephae memnaesthai ton logon (oute gar ex archaes
paragenesthai, uponustazein te) to mentoi kethalaion ethae,
prosanagkazein ton S'okratae omologein autous tou autou andros einai
k'om'odian kai trag'odian epistasthai poiein, kai ton technae
trag'odopoion onta, kai k'om'odopoion einai. Symp. sub fine.]





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.

Phænomena, similar to those which accompanied the origin of tragedy and
comedy among the Greeks, would take place among the Romans much more
slowly, and the drama would, in any case, have much longer remained in
its first irregular form from the character of the people, their
continual engagements in wars of conquest, the nature of their
government, and their rapidly increasing empire. But, however this might
have been, the conquest of Greece precluded both the process and the
necessity of it; and the Roman stage at once presented imitations or
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 [Greek (transliterated): Christos Paschon],
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. [1] 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, 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 eduction of good from
evil. The ignorance of the great mass of our countrymen, was the
efficient cause of the reproduction of the drama; and the preceding
darkness and the returning light were alike necessary in order to the
creation of a Shakspeare.

The drama 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 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 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! [2]

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 then not 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 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 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 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 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 Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare. For they are, in the ancient sense, neither
tragedies nor comedies, nor both in one,--but a different 'genus',
diverse in kind, and not merely different in degree. 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 Shakspearian 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 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
Shakspeare, 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 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 principal end
is not in or for itself, as is the case in a picture, but to be an
assistance and means to an end out of itself) its very purpose is to
produce as much 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 litte boy, then about
five years old, came dancing and singing into the room, and all at once
(if I may so say) 'tumbled in' upon the print. He instantly started,
stood silent and motionless, with the strongest expression, first of
wonder and then of grief in his eyes and countenance, and at length
said, "And where is the ship? But that is sunk, and the men are all
drowned!" still keeping his eyes fixed on the print. Now what pictures
are to little children, stage-illusion is to men, provided they retain
any part of the child's sensibility; except, that in the latter
instance, the suspension of the act of comparison, which permits this
sort of negative belief, is somewhat more 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 call forth the momentary affections. There ought never to
be more pain than is compatible with co-existing pleasure, and to be
amply repaid by thought.

Shakspeare found the infant stage demanding an intermixture of ludicrous
character as imperiously as that of Greece did the chorus, and high
language accordant. And there are many 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 re-presentation; and the absence or paucity of
scenes allowed a freedom from the laws of unity of place and unity of
time, the observance of which must either confine the drama to as few
subjects as may be counted on the fingers, or involve gross
improbabilities, far more striking than the violation would have caused.
Thence, also, was 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 Shakspeare? 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.


[Footnote 1: A. D. 363. But I believe the prevailing opinion amongst
scholars now is, that the [Greek: Christos Paschon] is not genuine. Ed.]

[Footnote 2: See vol. i. p. 76, where this is told more at length and
attributed to Hans Sachs. Ed.]





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 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
Buonaroti,--yet the very pain which I repeatedly felt as I lost myself
in gazing upon them, the painful consideration that their having been
painted in 'fresco' was the sole cause that they had not been
abandoned to all the accidents of a dangerous transportation to a
distant capital, and that the same caprice, which made the Neapolitan
soldiery destroy all the exquisite master-pieces on the walls of the
church of the 'Trinitado Monte', after the retreat of their
antagonist barbarians, might as easily have made vanish the rooms and
open gallery of Raffael, and the yet more unapproachable wonders of the
sublime Florentine in the Sixtine Chapel, forced upon my mind the
reflection; How grateful the human race ought to be that the works of
Euclid, Newton, Plato, Milton, Shakspeare, are not subjected to similar
contingencies,--that they and their fellows, and the great, though
inferior, peerage of undying intellect, are secured;--secured even from
a second 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, Caesar; 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 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? [1]


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
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.

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 honorable 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 over that of the reader or spectator; but he himself,
according to his genius, elevates us, and by being always in keeping,
prevents us from perceiving any strangeness, though we feel great
exultation. Many different kinds of style may be admirable, both in
different men, and in different parts of the same poem.

See the different language which strong feelings may justify in Shylock,
and learn from Shakspeare's conduct of that character the terrible force
of very 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 and 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
Shakspeare. But alas! the exceptions prove the rule. For who will dare
to force his way out of the crowd,--not of the mere vulgar,--but of the
vain and banded aristocracy of intellect, and presume to join the almost
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 [2]; 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 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 Shakspeare, in his Lear for instance, is a something
intermediate between these two; or rather it is the former blended with
the latter,--the arbitrary, not merely recalling the cold notion of the
thing, but expressing the reality 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 Shakspeare, that I have
been almost daily reading him since I was ten years old,--that the
thirty intervening years have been unintermittingly and not fruitlessly
employed in the study of the Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish and
German '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,
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
Shakspeare;--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.


[Footnote: 'Advancement of Learning, book 1. 'sub fine.']

[Footnote 2: Confestim Peneos adest, viridantia Tempe, Tempe, quae
cingunt sylvae superimpendentes. 'Epith. Pel. et. Th.' 286.]





SHAKSPEARE, A POET GENERALLY.


Clothed in radiant armour, and authorized by titles sure and manifold,
as a poet, Shakspeare came forward to demand the throne of fame, as the
dramatic poet of England. His excellencies compelled even his
contemporaries to seat him on that throne, although there were giants in
those days contending for the same honor. Hereafter I would fain
endeavour to make out the title of the English drama as created by, and
existing in, Shakspeare, and its right to the supremacy of dramatic
excellence 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
Shakspeare possessed the chief, if not every, requisite of a poet,--deep
feeling and exquisite sense of beauty, both as exhibited to the eye in
the combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet and appropriate
melody; that these feelings were under the command of his own will; that
in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own
particular being, and felt, and made others feel, on subjects no way
connected with himself, except by force of contemplation and that
sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that, on which it
meditates. To this must be added that affectionate love of nature and
natural objects, without which no man could have observed so steadily,
or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of the
external world:--


  When them 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 a herd of deer:
  Danger deviseth shifts, wit waits on fear.

  For there his smell with others' being mingled,
  The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt,
  Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled,
  With much ado, the cold fault cleanly out,
  Then do they spend their mouths; echo replies,
  As if another chase were in the skies.

  By this poor Wat far off, upon a hill,
  Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear,
  To hearken if his foes pursue him still:
  Anon their loud alarums he doth hear,
  And now his grief may be compared well
  To one sore-sick, that hears the passing bell.

  Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch
  Turn, and return, indenting with the way:
  Each envious 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.

Moreover Shakspeare 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!


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 enamored 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 that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude;--


and this without exciting any painful or laborious attention, without
any anatomy of description, (a fault not uncommon in descriptive
poetry)-but with the sweetness and easy movement of nature. This energy
is an absolute essential of poetry, and of itself would constitute a
poet, though not one of the highest class;--it is, however, a most
hopeful symptom, and the Venus and Adonis is one continued specimen of
it.

In this beautiful poem there is an endless activity of thought in all
the possible associations of thought with thought, thought with feeling,
or with words, of feelings with feelings, and of words with words.


  Even as the sun, with purple-colour'd face,
  Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
  Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase:
  Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.
  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 characterized, and in six simple verses
puts the reader in possession of the whole argument of the poem.


  Over one arm the lusty courser's rein,
  Under the other was the tender boy,
  Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain,
  With leaden appetite, unapt to toy,
  She red and hot, as coals of glowing fire,
  He red for shame, but frosty to desire:--


This stanza and the two following afford good instances of that 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 the more illustrative of Shakspeare. 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. Shakspeare writes in this poem, as if
he were of another planet, charming you to gaze on the movements of
Venus and Adonis, as you would on the twinkling dances of two vernal
butterflies.

Finally, in this poem and the Rape of Lucrece, Shakspeare gave ample
proof of his possession of a most profound, energetic, and philosophical
mind, without which he might have pleased, but could not have been a
great dramatic poet. Chance and the necessity of his genius combined to
lead him to the drama his proper province; in his conquest of which we
should consider both the difficulties which opposed him, and the
advantages by which he was assisted.





SHAKSPEARE'S JUDGMENT EQUAL TO HIS GENIUS.

Thus then Shakspeare appears, from his Venus and Adonis and Rape of
Lucrece alone, apart from all his great works, to have possessed all the
conditions of the true poet. Let me now proceed to destroy, as far as
may be in my power, the popular notion that he was a great dramatist by
mere instinct, that he grew 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 Shakspeare 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
'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
Shakspeare as a sort of grand Lama, adored indeed, arid 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 connexion 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 understand, or be
worthy of understanding, the writings of Shakspeare.

Assuredly that criticism of Shakspeare will alone be genial which is
reverential. The Englishman, who without reverence, a proud and
affectionate reverence, can utter the name of William Shakspeare, stands
disqualified for the office of critic. He wants one at least of the very
senses, the language of which he is to employ, and will discourse at
best, but as a blind man, while the whole harmonious creation of light
and shade with all its subtle interchange of deepening and dissolving
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
extravagancies of Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare is commensurate with his
genius,--nay, that his genius reveals itself in his judgment, as in its
most exalted form. And the more gladly do I recur to this subject from
the clear conviction, that to judge aright, and with distinct
consciousness of the grounds of our judgment, concerning the works of
Shakspeare, implies the power and the means of judging rightly of all
other works of intellect, those of abstract science alone excepted.

It is a painful truth that not only individuals, but even whole nations,
are ofttimes so enslaved to the habits of their education and immediate
circumstances, as not to judge disinterestedly even on those subjects,
the very pleasure arising from which consists in its disinterestedness,
namely, on subjects of taste and polite 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 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
Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare a great dramatic poet on account only of
those beauties and excellencies 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 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 [1], save as far as his
charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakspeare'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 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 Shakspeare,--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 Shakspeare
by this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human
faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the
coincidence of the two (a feeling 'sui generis et demonstratio
clemontrationum') 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 Shakspeare 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
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?


[Footnote 1: Take a slight specimen of it.

  Je suis bien loin assurément de justifier en tout la tragédie
  d'Hamlet; _c'est une pièce grossière et barbare, qui ne serait pas
  supportée par la plus vile populace de la France et de l'Italie._
  Hamlet y devient fou au second acte, et sa maîtresse folle au
  troisième; le prince tue le père de sa maîtresse, feignant de tuer un
  rat, et I'heröine se jette dans la rivière. On fait sa fosse sur le
  théâtre; des fossoyeurs disent des _quolibets_ dignes d'eux, en tenant
  dans leurs mains des têtes de morts; le prince Hamlet répond à leurs
  'grossièretés abominables par des folies non moins dégoûtantes._
  Pendant ce temps-là, un des acteurs fait la conquête de la Pologne.
  _Hamlet, sa mère, et son beau-père boivent ensemble sur le théâtre; on
  chante à table, on s'y querelle, on se bat, on se tue: on croirait que
  cet ouvrage est le fruit de I'imagination d'un sauvage ivre._

(Dissertation before Semiramis.) This is not, perhaps, very like Hamlet;
but nothing can be more like Voltaire. Ed.]






RECAPITULATION, AND SUMMARY OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF SHAKSPEARE's
DRAMAS. [1]

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 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 every thing that pleases be
poetry, Pope's satires and epistles must be poetry. This, I must say,
that poetry, as distinguished from other modes of 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 ages
past, but for that in which he lives, and those which are to follow, it
is, on the one hand, natural that he should not violate, and on the
other, necessary that he should not depend on, the mere manners and
modes of his day. See how little does Shakspeare leave us to regret that
he was born in his particular age! The great aera 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 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, fitted 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
Shakspeare; 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 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
Shakspeare, his judgment was at least equal to it. Of this any one will
be convinced, who attentively considers those points in which the dramas
of Greece and England differ, from the 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 influence of this Bacchic enthusiasm
performed more than human actions;--hence tales of the favorite
champions soon passed into dialogue. On the Greek stage the chorus was
always before the audience; the curtain was never dropped, as we should
say; and change of place being therefore, in general, impossible, the
absurd notion of condemning it merely as improbable in itself was never
entertained by any one. If we can believe ourselves at Thebes in one
act, we may believe ourselves at Athens in the next. If a story lasts
twenty-four hours or twenty-four years, it is equally improbable. There
seems to be no just boundary but what the feelings prescribe. But on the
Greek stage where the same persons were perpetually before the audience,
great judgment was necessary in venturing on any such change. The poets
never, therefore, attempted to impose on the senses by bringing places
to men, but they did bring men to places, as in the well known instance
in the 'Eumenides', where during an evident retirement of the chorus
from the orchestra, the scene is changed to Athens, and Orestes is first
introduced in the temple of Minerva, and the chorus of Furies come in
afterwards in pursuit of him. [2]

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 Mycené. The
signal is first seen at the 2lst 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 listened to the
lofty narrative odes of the chorus which almost entirely fill 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 Shakspeare'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 Shakspeare's time was a naked room with a blanket for a
curtain; but he made it a field for monarchs. That law of unity, which
has its foundations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but in
nature itself, the unity of feeling, is every where and at all times
observed by Shakspeare in his plays. Read 'Romeo and Juliet';--all is
youth and spring;--youth with its follies, its virtues, its
precipitancies;--spring with its 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 the 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 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 Shakspeare.

It seems to me that his plays are distinguished from those of all other
dramatic poets by the following characteristics:

1. Expectation in preference to surprise. It is like the true reading of
the passage;--'God said, Let there be light, and there was
_light_;'--not there _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 Shakspeare 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 favorite, and soften down the point in her
which Shakspeare does not mean us not to see, but to see and to forgive,
and at length to justify. And so it is in Polonius, who is the
personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This
admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakspeare
never 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
Shakspeare all the characters are strong. Hence real folly and dullness
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. Shakspeare has no
innocent adulteries, no interesting incests, no virtuous vice;--he never
renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest,
or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher,
the Kotzebues of the day. Shakspeare's fathers are roused by
ingratitude, his husbands stung by unfaithfulness; in him, in short, the
affections are wounded in those points in which all may, nay, must,
feel. Let the morality of Shakspeare be contrasted with that of the
writers of his own, or the succeeding, age, or of those of the present
day, who boast their superiority in this respect. No one can dispute
that the result of such a comparison is altogether in favour of
Shakspeare;--even the letters of women of high rank in his age were
often coarser than his writings. If he occasionally disgusts a keen
sense of delicacy, he never injures the mind; he neither excites, nor
flatters, passion, in order to degrade the subject of it; he does not
use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carries on warfare
against virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no wickedness,
through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate. In
Shakspeare vice never walks as in twilight; nothing is purposely out of
its place;--he inverts not the order of nature and propriety,--does not
make every magistrate a drunkard or glutton, nor every poor man meek,
humane, and 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 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 Shakspeare it is so, or is not so,
as the character is in itself calculated, or not calculated, to form the
plot. Don John is the 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 Shakspeare never took the trouble of inventing stories. It
was enough for him to select from those that had been already invented
or recorded such as had one or other, or both, of two recommendations,
namely, suitableness to his particular purpose, and their being parts of
popular 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
Shakspeare makes us for the first time acquainted with. Omit the first
scene in Lear, and yet every thing will remain; so the first and second
scenes in the Merchant of Venice. Indeed it is universally true.

6. Interfusion of the lyrical--that which in its very essence is
poetical--not only with the dramatic, as in the plays of 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 Shakspeare
are introduced as songs only, just as songs are in real life,
beautifully as some of them are characteristic of the person who has
sung or called for them, as Desdemona's 'Willow,' and Ophelia's wild
snatches, and the sweet carollings in As You Like It. But the whole of
the Midsummer Night's Dream is one continued specimen of the dramatized
lyrical. And observe how exquisitely the dramatic of Hotspur;--

  Marry, and I'm glad on't with all my heart;
  I had 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. i.


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 Shakspeare's characters, like those in real
life, are very commonly misunderstood, and almost always understood by
different persons in different ways. The causes are the same in either
case. If you take only what the friends of the character say, you may be
deceived, and still more so, if that which his enemies say; nay, even
the character himself sees himself through the medium of his character,
and not exactly as he is. Take all together, not omitting a shrewd hint
from the clown or the fool, and perhaps your impression will be right;
and you may know whether you have in fact discovered the poet's own
idea, by all the speeches receiving light from it, and attesting its
reality by reflecting it.

Lastly, in Shakspeare the heterogeneous is united, as it is in nature.
You must not suppose a pressure or passion always acting on or in the
character;--passion in Shakspeare is that by which the individual is
distinguished from others, not that which makes a different kind of him.
Shakspeare followed the main march of the human affections. He entered
into no analysis of the passions or faiths of men, but assured himself
that such and such passions and faiths were grounded in our common
nature, and not in the mere accidents of ignorance or disease. This is
an important consideration, and constitutes our Shakspeare the morning
star, the guide and the pioneer, of true philosophy.


[Footnote 1: For the most part communicated by Mr. Justice Coleridge.
Ed.]

[Footnote 2: Æsch. Eumen. v. 230-239. 'Notandum est, scenam jam Athenas
translatam sic institui, ut primo Orestes solus conspiciatur in templo
Minerva: supplex ejus simulacrum venerans; paulo post autem eum
consequantur Eumenides, &c.' Schiitz's note. The recessions of the
chorus were termed 'peravaoraneu'. There is another instance in the
Ajax, v. 814. Ed.]




ORDER OF SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS.

Various attempts have been made to arrange the plays of Shakspeare, each
according to its priority in time, by proofs derived from external
documents. How unsuccessful these attempts have been might easily be
shown, not only from the widely different results arrived at by men, all
deeply versed in the black-letter books, old plays, pamphlets,
manuscript records and catalogues of that age, but also from the
fallacious and 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 other,--when
we know that the plays of Shakspeare, both during and after his life,
were the property of the stage, and published by the players, doubtless
according to their notions of acceptability with the visitants of the
theatre,--in such an age, and under such circumstances, can an allusion
or reference to any drama or poem in the publication of a contemporary
be received as conclusive evidence, that such drama or poem had at that
time been published? Or, further, can the priority of publication itself
prove any thing 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 a writer for
the stage in 1591, when he was twenty seven years old, and Shakspeare
himself assures us that the Venus and Adonis was the first heir of his
invention.[1]

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 Shakspeare could have remained to
his twenty-ninth or 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.

[Footnote 1: But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I
shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, &c.

Dedication of the V. and A. to Lord Southampton.]




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, 'Uebergangs-werke'; 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, Shakspeare; it was the negative
period of his perfection.

  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 [GREEK (transliterated):
deinotaes] 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.   }'umgearbeitet'
  Taming of the Shrew.      }
  Measure for Measure.
  Othello.
  Tempest.
  Winter's Tale.
  Cymbeline.



CLASSIFICATION ATTEMPTED, 1810.


Shakspeare'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.




CLASSIFICATION ATTEMPTED, 1819.

I think Shakspeare's earliest dramatic attempt--perhaps even prior in
conception to the Venus and Adonis, and planned before he left
Stratford--was Love's 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 Shakspeare'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 Shakspeare'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 Shakspeare's works. I say intentionally such; for
many of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, and the greater part of Ben
Jonson's comedies are farce-plots. I add All's Well that Ends Well,
originally intended as the 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.


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 Shakspeare!
Myriad-minded, indeed, he was.






NOTES ON THE TEMPEST.

There is a sort of improbability with which we are shocked in dramatic
representation, not less than in a narrative of real life. Consequently,
there must be rules respecting it; and as rules are nothing but means to
an end previously ascertained--(inattention to which simple truth has
been the occasion of all 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.

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 ground-work 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 excellencies 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
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 connexion of events,--but is a birth of the imagination,
and rests only on the coaptation and union of the elements granted to,
or assumed by, the poet. It is a species of drama which owes no
allegiance to time or space, and in which, therefore, errors of
chronology and geography--no mortal sins in any species--are venial
faults, and count for nothing. It addresses itself entirely to the
imaginative faculty; and although the illusion may be assisted by the
effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of
modern times, yet this sort of assistance is dangerous. For the
principal and only genuine excitement ought to come from within,--from
the moved and sympathetic imagination; whereas, where so much is
addressed to the mere external senses of seeing and hearing, the
spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without
will withdraw the mind from the proper and only legitimate interest
which is intended to spring from within.

The romance opens with a busy scene admirably appropriate to the kind of
drama, and giving, as it were, the key-note to the whole harmony. It
prepares and initiates the excitement required for the entire piece, and
yet does not demand any thing from the spectators, which their previous
habits had not fitted them to understand. It is the bustle of a tempest,
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.[1] Observe, too, the perfect probability of the moment chosen by
Prospero (the very Shakspeare himself, as it were, of the tempest) to
open out the truth to his daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how
completely any thing that might have been disagreeable to us in the
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 Beaumont and
Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not decent; when heroic, complete
viragos. But in Shakspeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and
there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that 'continuates'
society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by
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. Shakspeare saw that the want of
prominence, which Pope notices for sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of
the woman's character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency,
but from the more exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being
constituting 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 Shakspearian women there is essentially the same
foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety are
merely the result of the modification of circumstances, whether in
Miranda the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katharine the queen.

But to return. The appearance and characters of the super- or
ultra-natural servants are finely contrasted. Ariel has in every thing
the airy tint which gives the name; and it is worthy of remark that
Miranda is never directly brought into comparison with Ariel, lest the
natural and human of the one and the supernatural of the other should
tend to neutralize each other; Caliban, on the other hand, is all earth,
all condensed and gross in feelings and images; 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 Shakspearian
scene contrasted with Dryden's vulgar alteration of it, in which a mere
ludicrous psychological experiment, as it were, is tried--displaying
nothing but indelicacy without passion. Prospero's interruption of the
courtship has often seemed to me to have no sufficient motive; still his
alleged reason--

  lest too light winning Make the prize light--

is enough for the ethereal connexions of the romantic imagination,
although it would not be so for the historical. [2] 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 shall leave father and mother',
&c. O! with what exquisite purity this scene is conceived and executed!
Shakspeare 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 civilization; and in the first scene of the second act
Shakspeare has, as in many other places, shown the tendency in bad men
to indulge in scorn and contemptuous expressions, as a mode of getting
rid of their own uneasy feelings of inferiority to the good, and also,
by making the good ridiculous, of rendering the transition of others to
wickedness easy. Shakspeare never puts habitual scorn into the mouths of
other than bad men, as here in the instances of Antonio and Sebastian.
The scene of the intended assassination of Alonzo and Gonzalo is 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
familiarizing 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,
Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare 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 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, Shakspeare's characters are all 'genera'
intensely individualized; the results of meditation, of which
observation supplied the drapery and the colors 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 individualizers of men,
and showed how their harmony was produced by reciprocal disproportions
of excess or deficiency. The language in which these truths are
expressed was not drawn from any set fashion, but from the profoundest
depths of his moral being, and is therefore for all ages.

[Footnote 1:

  'Pro'.  Mark his condition, and th' event; then tell me, If this might
          be a brother.

  'Mira'. I should sin, To think but nobly of my grandmother; Good wombs
          have bore bad sons.

  'Pro'.  Now the condition, &c.

Theobald has a note upon this passage, and suggests that Shakspeare
placed it thus:--

  'Pro'.  Good wombs have bore bad sons,--Now the condition.

Mr. Coleridge writes in the margin: 'I cannot but believe that Theobald
is quite right.'--Ed.]

[Footnote 2:

  'Fer'. Yes, faith, and all his Lords, the duke of Milan, And his brave
         son, being twain.

Theobald remarks that no body was lost in the wreck; and yet that no
such character is introduced in the fable, as the Duke of Milan's son.
Mr. C. notes: 'Must not Ferdinand have believed he was lost in the fleet
that the tempest scattered?--Ed.]





LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

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

Yet if this juvenile drama had been the only one extant of our
Shakspeare, and we possessed the tradition only of his riper works, or
accounts of them in writers who had not even mentioned this play,--how
many of Shakspeare'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, 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
Shakspeare's times, when the English court was still the foster-mother
of the state and the muses; and when, in consequence, the courtiers, and
men of rank and fashion, affected a display of wit, point, and
sententious observation, that would be deemed intolerable at
present,--but in which a hundred years of controversy, involving every
great political, and every dear domestic, interest, had trained all but
the lowest classes to participate. Add to this the very style of the
sermons of the time, and the eagerness of the Protestants to distinguish
themselves by long and frequent 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
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 Shakspeare, in his two-fold being
of poet and philosopher, avails himself of it to convey profound truths
in the most lively images,--the whole remaining faithful to the
character supposed to utter the lines, and the expressions themselves
constituting a further developement of that character:--

Other slow arts entirely keep the brain: And therefore finding barren
practisers, Scarce shew a harvest of their heavy toil: But love, first
learned in a lady's eyes, Lives not alone immured in the brain; But,
with the motion of all elements, Courses as swift as thought in every
power; And gives to every power a double power, Above their functions
and their offices. It adds a precious seeing to the eye, A lover's eyes
will gaze an eagle blind; A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound, When
the suspicious tread of theft is stopp'd: Love's feeling is more soft
and sensible, Than are the tender horns of cockled snails; Love's tongue
proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste; For 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
temper'd with love's sighs; O, then his lines would ravish savage ears,
And plant in tyrants mild humility. From women's eyes this doctrine I
derive: They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; They are the
books, the arts, the academes, That shew, 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 fulfills 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 Shakspeare 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, 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 Shakspeare as the friend and
client of the Earl of Southampton. The chief defect consists in the
parentheses and parenthetic thoughts and descriptions, suited neither to
the 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 Shakspeare'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 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
Shakspeare in the end draws the only fitting moral which such a drama
afforded. Here Rosaline rises up to the full height of Beatrice:--

'Ros'. Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron, Before I saw you, and the
world's large tongue Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks; Full of
comparisons, and wounding flouts, Which you on all estates will execute
That lie within the mercy of your wit: To weed this wormwood from your
fruitful brain, And therewithal, to win me, if you please, (Without the
which 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,
  Whose influence is begot of that loose grace,
  Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools:
  A jest's prosperity lies in the ear
  Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
  Of him that makes it: then, if sickly ears,
  Deaf'd with the clamors of their own dear groans,
  Will hear your idle scorns, continue then,
  And I will have you, and that fault withal;
  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.





MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

Act i. sc. 1.


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

  'Lys'. Or else misgraffed, in respect of years;

  'Her'. O spite! too old to be engag'd to young--

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

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


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 wilt go tell him of fair Hermia's flight, &c.

I am convinced that Shakspeare availed himself of the title of this play
in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout, but
especially, and, perhaps, unpleasingly, in this broad determination of
ungrateful treachery in Helena, so undisguisedly avowed to herself, and
this, too, after the witty cool philosophizing 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 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 harmonize 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,--

  Ovër hîll, ôvër dâle,
  Thôrö' bûsh, thôrö' brîar,
  Ovër pârk, ôvër pâle,
  Thôrö' flôôd, thôrö' fîre--

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

  Î dô wândër êv'ry whêrë
  Swîftër thân thë môônës sphêrë, &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
principal metrical feet:--

Pyrrhic or Dibrach,    u u =_body,    spirit_.
Tribrach,            u u u =_nobody_, (hastily pronounced).
Iambus                 u ' =_deli'ght_.
Trochee,               ' u =_li'ghtly_.
Spondee,               ' ' =_Go'd spa'ke_.

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

Dactyl,              ' u u = _me'rrily._
Anapæst,             u u ' = _a propo's,_ or the first three syllables
                              of _ceremo'ny_.
Amphibrachys,        u ' u = _deli'ghtful_.
Amphimacer,          ' u ' = _o'ver hi'll_.
Antibacchius,        u ' ' = _the Lo'rd Go'd_.
Bacchius,            ' ' u = _He'lve'llyn_.
Molossus,            ' ' ' = _Jo'hn Ja'mes Jo'nes._


These simple feet may suffice for understanding the metres of
Shakspeare, 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 Shakspeare, 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 Shakspearian 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.


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.






COMEDY OF ERRORS.

The myriad-minded man, our, and all men's, Shakspeare, has in this piece
presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the
philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from
comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished
from comedy by the license allowed, and even required, in the fable, in
order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be
probable, it is enough that it is possible. A comedy would scarcely
allow even the two Antipholises; 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.





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 misprized: but it
  shall not be so long; this wrestler shall clear all.


This has always appeared to me one of the most un-Shakspearian speeches
in all the genuine works of our poet; yet I should be nothing surprized,
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 Shakspeare 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 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 you 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.





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 Shakspearian.

Act ii. sc. 3. Sir Andrew's speech:--

An explanatory note on _Pigrogromilus_ 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.

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.






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 honor, 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
Shakspeare's manner of connexion by unmarked influences of association
from some preceding metaphor. This it is which makes his style so
peculiarly vital and organic. Likewise 'those girls of Italy' strengthen
the guess. The absurdity of 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_.


Shakspeare, inspired, as it might seem, with all knowledge, here uses
the word 'causeless' in its strict philosophical sense;--cause being
truly predicable only of 'phenomena', that is, things natural, and not
of 'noumena', or things supernatural.

Act iii. sc. 5.


  'Dia'. The Count Rousillon:--know you such a one?

  'Hel'. But by the ear that hears most nobly of him;
         His face I know not.


Shall we say here, that Shakspeare has unnecessarily made his loveliest
character utter a lie?--Or shall we dare think that, where to deceive
was necessary, he thought a pretended verbal verity a double crime,
equally with the other a lie to the hearer, and at the same time an
attempt to lie to one's own conscience?





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; she hath a legion of angels.

  'Pist'. As many devils entertain; and 'To her, boy', say I.


Perhaps it is--


  As many devils enter (or enter'd) swine; and _to her, boy_, say I:--


a somewhat profane, but not un-Shakspearian, allusion to the 'legion' in
St. Luke's 'gospel.'





MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

This play, which is Shakspeare'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 [Greek (transliterated):
misaeteon],--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 Shakspeare 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 counterbalancing beauties of Measure for Measure, I
need say nothing; for I have already remarked that the play is
Shakspeare's throughout.

Act iii. sc. 1.


  Ay, but to die, and go we know not where, &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 an heroic resolve, than an infamous wish.
It appears to me to be the grandest symptom of an immortal spirit, when
even that bedimmed and overwhelmed spirit recked not of its own
immortality, still to seek to be,--to be a mind, a will.

As fame is to reputation, so heaven is to an estate, or 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 'caeteris 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.





CYMBELINE.


Act I. sc. 1.


  You do not meet a man, but frowns: our bloods
  No more obey the heavens, than our courtiers'
  Still seem, as does the king's.


There can be little doubt of Mr. Tyrwhitt's emendations of 'courtiers'
and 'king,' as to the sense;--only it is not impossible that
Shakspeare's dramatic language may allow of the word, 'brows' or 'faces'
being understood after the word 'courtiers',' which might then remain in
the genitive case plural. But the nominative plural makes excellent
sense, and is sufficiently elegant, and sounds to my ear Shakspearian.
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 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 Shakspeare 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. 2. Imogen's speech:--

                           --My dearest husband,
  I something fear my father's wrath; but nothing
  (Always reserv'd 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-Shakspearian
defect in the metre of the second line, and what in Shakspeare is the
same, 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. 4. 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 [Greek
(transliterated): deiktik_os], is very awkward. I should think that
either 'or'--or 'the' was Shakspeare's word;--


  As he could make me or with eye or ear.


'Ib.' sc. 7. 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 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 Shakspeare should have introduced this
ludicrous scroll, which answers no one purpose, either propulsive, or
explicatory, unless as a joke on etymology.






TITUS ANDRONICUS.

Act I. sc. 1. Theobald's note:


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


That Shakspeare 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 deerstealing, 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
Shakspeare's, worth a score such chronological surmises. Yet I incline
to think that both in this play and in Jeronymo, Shakspeare 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;--
  ...
  So thou destroy Rapine, and
  Murder there.


were written by Shakspeare in his earliest period. But instead of the
text--


         Revenge, _which makes the foul offender quake.

  'Tit.' Art thou_ Revenge? and art thou sent to me?--


the words in italics [between underscores] ought to be omitted.





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 _disfacimento_ of
Ayscough's excellent edition of Shakspeare. 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_ or 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 Shakspeare 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 Caesar.
Cymbeline is a _congener_ with Pericles, and distinguished from Lear by
not having any declared prominent object. But where 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 thunderclaps, its meteoric
splendors,--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 Shakspeare's plays harder to characterize.
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 Shakspeare calls forth nothing from
the mausoleum of history, or the catacombs of tradition, without giving,
or eliciting, some permanent and general interest, and brings forward no
subject which he does not moralize or intellectualize,--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 spirits look out
  At every joint and motive of her body.


This Shakspeare 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 flood. Yet another secondary and
subordinate purpose Shakspeare has inwoven with his delineation of these
two characters,--that of opposing the inferior civilization, 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 occupy the
foreground, 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
Shakspeare'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 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 Shakspearian 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.'





CORIOLANUS.

This play illustrates the wonderfully philosophic impartiality of
Shakspeare'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 Caesar, you see Shakspeare's
good-natured laugh at mobs. Compare this with Sir Thomas Brown's
aristocracy of spirit.

Act i. sc. 1. Coriolanus' 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 Shakspeare wrote it transposed;


  Trust ye? Hang ye!


Ib. sc. 10. Speech of Aufidius:--


                               Mine emulation
  Hath not that honor 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 valor (poison'd
  With only suffering stain by him) for him
  Shall fly out of itself: not 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 Shakspeare's heart-lore, that I take for
granted that this is in nature, 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' 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
Shakspeare 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 gown should I stand here--


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 Shakspeare. 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.





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, Shakspeare 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, characterizing 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;--


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


Ib. Speech of Brutus:


  Set honor 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, the public good, the individual Brutus'
honor, and his death. The latter two so balanced each other, that he
could decide for the first by equipoise; nay--the thought growing--that
honor had more weight than death. That Cassius understood it as
Warburton, is the beauty of Cassius as contrasted with Brutus.

Ib. Caesar'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 Shakspeare, 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. Caesar'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 present see into
Shakspeare'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?--Shakspeare, it may be said, has not brought these
things forwards.--True;--and this is just the ground of my perplexity.
What character did Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare,--where
does any other writer of the same age--use 'path' as a verb for 'walk?'

Ib. sc. 2. Caesar's speech:--


  She dreamt last night, she saw my _statue_--


No doubt, it should be _statua_, as in the same age, they more often
pronounced 'heroes' as a trisyllable than dissyllable. A modern tragic
poet would have written,--


  Last night she dreamt, that she my statue saw--


But Shakspeare 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 death.
  _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 Shakspearian,
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 Shakspearian 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 Shakspeare 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_.


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? Caesar
supported, and was supported by, such as these;--and even so Buonaparte
in our days.

I know no part of Shakspeare 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.





ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.

Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare'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
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 Shakspeare'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 Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare 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 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
Westmorland.

Act ii. sc. 2. Speech of Enobarbus:--


  Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids,
  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 Shakspeare 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.'





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 exp

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