ftbe World's Classics
ill's) .
CCKU
SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM
A SELECTION
PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
r
SAKESPEARE CRITICISM
A SELECTION
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
D. NICHOL SMITH
HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW
NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY
This volume of ' Shakespeare Criticism ' was first published in 'The World's Classics' in 1916.
.
JAN 3 IE
1036158
INTRODUCTION
THERE have been many collections of criticisms on Shakespeare. They begin with the verses which were contributed by friends, seven years after his death, to the first complete volume of his plays, the ' First Folio ' of 1623 ; and they vary in char- acter with the times in which they were published. At the end of the century Sir Thomas Pope Blount attempted to represent contemporary opinion on Shakespeare in his De Re Poetica, or Remarks upon Poetry (1694). In the eighteenth century, when the text of the plays came to be examined and explained, the prefaces or introductory essays of the different editors were sometimes printed in a body', as in the edition of Samuel Johnson ; and the first critical anthology was produced by David Garrick under the title ' Testimonies to the Genius and Merits of Shakespeare ' — a short selection of notable statements which was added to his Ode for the Stratford celebration in 1769. In the nine- teenth century the continued growth of scholarly and methodical study gave us in such a book as Ingleby's Shakespeare's Centurie ofPrayse the kind of compilation that aims at being an exhaustive record of allusions.
vi INTRODUCTION
This little volume has thus many predecessors. It does not, however, as far as the editor is aware, follow directly in the tracks of any of them. While it claims to give the greatest pieces of Shakespeare criticism from his death till the middle of the nine- teenth century, it also tries to represent the general movement in critical opinion and method. Occa- sionally an extract has been included mainly be- cause the views it expresses were novel or important at the time of publication, or because it helps to place the work of subsequent critics in truer perspective.
No good writer, as Landor says, was ever long neglected ; no great man overlooked by men equally great. There is abundant proof of the esteem in which Shakespeare was held in his own day. He was recognized as the greatest of them all. His writings were confessed to be
such As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much ;
and this was ' all men's suffrage '. His contem- poraries had never any doubt of his greatness. But, as contemporaries always do, they knew wherein he faulted. He was not always a care- ful writer ; sometimes his unapproachable facility carried him into error, or gave too free play to his wit. Ben Jonson, who lacked this facility, spoke of it with something of the consolation that comes
INTRODUCTION vii
from superior scholarship ; -just as the sense of contrast with Shakespeare also made him pride himself on the originality and construction of his plots. But no nobler tribute will ever be paid to a friend than the verses of this warm-hearted burly rival ' to the memory of my beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us '. Shakespeare is admitted to have surpassed the Greek and Latin dramatists, Jonson's own masters ; he was not of an age, but for all time ; and he had excelled not merely because he was the poet of nature, but by reason of his art. In private conversation Jonson is known to have said that Shakespeare ' wanted art ', meaning thereby that he did not always take sufficient care ; and Jonson has some responsibility for the statement to be found again and again, in varied words, in later critics, that there was more art in his work and more nature in Shakespeare's. It is therefore important to note that in his most deliberate testi- mony to the genius of Shakespeare he acknow- ledged him to have been master of an art which no one else could reach. With all his faults Shake- speare was to Jonson the greatest of dramatists. This was the contemporary view, and it was never seriously challenged throughout the seventeenth century.1 Though the claims of Jonson were
1 In a poem prefixed to the edition of Shakespeare's Poems published in 1640, Leonard Digges bore remarkable
viii INTRODUCTION
occasionally urged by his ' sons ', though after the Restoration Fletcher was for some time more fre- quently acted, and though the vagaries of theatri- cal taste, then as now, called for alterations or adaptations, Shakespeare did not lose his hold on the national pride and affection.
The extracts in this volume from the seventeenth century may appear to occupy comparatively little space. But the mere bulk of criticism on any author is never to be taken as the measure of his fame. It is one thing to admire an author ; it is quite another thing to publish the reasons of that
testimony to the popularity of Shakespeare's plays, •especially in comparison with the plays of Jonson :
So have I seene, when Cesar would appeare,
And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were
Brutiis and Cassius : oh how the Audience
Were ravish'd, with what wonder they went thence,
When some new day they would not brooke a line
Of tedious (though well laboured) Catiline ;
Sejanus too was irkesome, they priz'de more
Honest logo, or the jealous Moore.
And though the Fox and subtill Alchimist,
Long intermitted, could not quite be mist,
Though these have sham'd all the Ancients, and might
raise
Their Authours merit with a crowne of Bayes, Yet these sometimes, even at a friends desire Acted, have scarce defrai'd the Seacoale fire And doore-keepers : when let but Falstaffe come, Hall, Poines, the rest, you scarce shall have a roome, All is so pester'd : let but Beatrice And Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes, all are full To heare Malvoglio, that crosse garter'd GulL
INTRODUCTION ix
admiration. In the seventeenth century criticism had not yet become an organized industry. There were no editions to be furnished with critical pre- faces ; the periodicals did not print literary essays ; and many years had to pass before the public discovered a taste for lectures.
The criticism of Shakespeare which deliberately discusses principles and determines merits begins with Dryden. A dramatist himself, with a happy faculty of meeting and guiding the public taste, he was compelled to review the many problems of dramatic art that had been forced into pro- minence since Shakespeare's death. The Eliza- bethans, by the mere lapse of half a century, had come to appear somewhat antiquated ; and pride in the great national tradition could not conceal its exhaustion. The old life had gone from it at the very time when the French drama, following other methods, was attaining its highest perfection. There were scholars who, like Milton in Samson Agonistes, favoured neither English nor French methods, but held that Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were ' the best rule to all who endeavour to write tragedy '. Yet other methods were found in the Spanish plays, which were well known and even occasionally acted. The very stage had altered, with the introduction of movable scenery and the substitution of women for the Eliza- bethan boy actors. The whole theory of the drama a 3
x INTRODUCTION
demanded scrutiny by dramatist and critic alike ; and Shakespeare had to be tested by what had been achieved under different conditions else- where. If in other countries plays were written on principles which theoretically appeared more reasonable, were the English to persist in shelter- ing their extravagances under Shakespeare's name? Or, while continuing to boast of him as a great irregular genius, should they adopt the simpler and severer style of the classical and the French drama ? It was not a new problem, and it was not a question of submitting to foreign fashion : Ben Jonson had championed stricter methods, and was he not a safer guide than a genius who had triumphed in spite of his irregularities ?
In general Shakespeare was considered to have reached his goal by dangerous routes which he need not have taken. But the construction of his plays was not the only point at issue. The lan- guage of the Elizabethans was old-fashioned, and the men of the Restoration were too ready to dis- cover in it impropriety or meanness of expression. They also made the common mistake of assuming that the changes in the modes of wit were refine- ments. ' The wit of the last age ', said Dryden, ' was yet more incorrect than their language.' Of Shakespeare, who had not neglected the taste of his audience and was always a rapid writer, he had to say that ' he is many times flat, insipid ;
INTRODUCTION xi
his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast '.
Censures such as these must be viewed in relation to Dryden's enthusiastic praise of Shakespeare's genius. Nor is it to be thought that a critic like Thomas Eymer represented a large body of opinion.1 The whole spirit of his attack on Shakespeare shows that he was leading a forlorn hope. All his life he was entirely out of sympathy with the modern drama, in France as well as in England. His Short View of Tragedy (1693) repeated with emphasis the views which he had expressed in The Tragedies of the last Age Considered and Examined by the Practice of the Ancients, and by the Common sense of all Ages (1678). He held that the English should have built on the same founda- tion as Sophocles and Euripides, or after their model, and that the chorus is the most necessary part of tragedy. He was a learned man, clever, and boisterously witty, but when he attacked Othello with ridicule he knew that it was his last weapon. He called it the ' Tragedy of the Hand- kerchief ', he found in it the moral that wives should look well to their linen, and he summed up his censures thus : ' There is in this Play, some burlesk, some humour, and ramble of Comical Wit, some shew, and some Mimickry to divert the spec- tators : but the tragical part is plainly none other than a Bloody Farce, without salt or savour.' This
xii INTRODUCTION
is not the language of a man who thought he could win his cause. His own tragedy, Edgar, had shown that to be a successful dramatist it was not suffi- cient to be a learned critic. Dryden expressed the general verdict when he said in the Prologue to Love Triumphant that
To Shakespear's Critic he bequeaths the Curse, To find his faults, and yet himself make worse ; A precious Reader in Poetic Schools, Who by his own Examples damns his Rules.
There was much talk about the ' rules ' at this time, and for many years to come ; but the impor- tance attached to them can easily be overstated. The greater critics never laid stress on the rules : neglect of text-book methods can always be justi- fied by success. ' Better a mechanic rule were stretched or broken than a great beauty were omitted,' said Dryden. ' There is more beauty ', said Addison, ' in the works of a great genius who is ignorant of the rules of art, than in those of a little genius who knows and observes them.' Pope said much the same in his Essay on Criticism, and said it at length in the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare.
Dryden was so fully representative of his age that the public debate on the methods of the drama is adequately reflected in the debate in his own mind. At times he conformed to ' the exactest rules by which a play is wrought ' ; at others, he
INTRODUCTION xiii
ignored them. His apparent inconsistencies are only proof of a live intelligence open to new im- pressions, and ready for new ventures. Amid all his doubts, he was guided and controlled by tastes and sympathies that were proudly English. Some of his statements, if taken out of their setting, may suggest scant respect for the Elizabethans. In self-defence he enlarged on the failings of the ' last age ' ; and he never hesitated to speak of Shakespeare's faults. But he also said that Shakespeare's critics
in the attempt are lost, When most they rail, know then they envy most.
His belief in the unmatched greatness of Shake- speare was stated deliberately, once and for all, in the glowing tribute in the early Essay of Dramatic Poesy.
This ' model of encomiastic criticism ', this ' epitome of excellence.', as SamuelJohnson called it, introduced the clearly marked type of appre- ciation which prevailed till the third quarter of the eighteenth century and is excellently repre- sented by the Preface of Pope. Progress of- far- reaching importance was made in other directions. This period gave us, in the Introduction to Howe's edition, the first biography of Shakespeare ; it discussed the extent of his learning and the sources of his plots, notably in Whalley's Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare (1748), Farmer's Essay on
xiv INTRODUCTION
the Learning of Shakespeare (1767), and Charlotte Lennox's Shakespear Illustrated (1753) ; above all, it began the examination of the texts of the plays and the explanation of their difficulties. But in the more general criticism that deals with merits and characteristics — the kind of criticism that is the matter of this volume — there is one prevailing manner during the hundred years from Dryden's Essay (1668) to Johnson's Preface (1765).
Johnson set himself to review the common topics of Shakespeare criticism, and to give his judgement on the points at issue. There is little new matter in his Preface, except where he deals with his work as an editor. Its importance lies mainly in its being a conclusive summing up, by a strong, wise, and impartial mind, of a prolonged discussion. The question of Shakespeare's irregu- larities, though it had been losing interest, still required to be settled. They were felt to be right, and argued to be wrong. Learned opinion was as a whole against them, and it had an ally in timidity. Johnson's own Irene was regular to dullness, but in The Rambler he showed that he recognized the weight of the arguments on either side. He now set himself to reason out the whole question, and settled it for good. Henceforth no writer of any standing expressed his doubts on Shakespeare's irregularities, or had any doubts to express ; and when a change of fashion in criticism had turned
INTRODUCTION xv
these very irregularities into a stock theme oi praise, the arguments which Johnson had advanced were used by a generation which did him too little justice. It misunderstood the impartiality with which he spoke of Shakespeare's faults. ' We must confess the faults of our favourite ', he ex- plained in a letter to Charles Burney, ' to gain credit to our praise of his excellencies.' The passage on the carelessnesses and inequalities, the quibbles and idle conceits, is remarkably searching, and may here and there be too strongly worded. Perhaps it errs through the fear of betraying what he called ' superstitious veneration '. It gives the impression that Johnson, in his scrupulous regard for truth, had tried to say the very worst that a judicious admirer could ever be forced to admit. No one who understands it, however unwelcome he may find it, will allow it to cast doubt on Johnson's admiration. Such faults, says Johnson, were ' sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit '. But they did not affect the real greatness of Shakespeare. The same reasoned impartiality which led him to describe the faults also compelled him to pronounce as high a eulogy as has ever been written on this side idolatryj: ' This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life ; "that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here
xvi INTRODUCTION
be cured of his delirious ecstasies by reading human sentiments in human language ; by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transac- tions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.' Or again : ' The stream of time, which is continually washing the dis- soluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.'
I Johnson is the last great representative of what may be called the judicial manner. He is the true successor of Dryden, who looked upon Shakespeare as a brother dramatist, certainly of surpassing genius, but not therefore beyond the pale of censure. Johnson never ran any risk of forgetting that Shakespeare was an author who had to write for his living. We may apply to him a sentence which he himself wrote about Shake- speare : ' Among his other excellencies it ought to t be remarked that his Heroes are Men.' To Johnson, •. Shakespeare was always a man among men. The • later critics sometimes seem to treat him as if he , belonged to a different order of beings.
Nothing could have been better than Johnson's Preface as a balanced estimate. The new triumphs were to be won in other ways. There had been many signs of the coming change. Joseph Warton had contributed to The Adventurer in 1753-4 five papers on The Tempest and King Lear, in one of which he had said that ' general criticism is on
all subjects useless and unentertaining, but is more than commonly absurd with respect to Shake- speare, who must be accompanied step by step, and scene by scene, in his gradual developments of characters and passions, and whose finer features must be singly pointed out, if we would do com- plete justice to his genuine beauties ' ; and he carried these views into practice in his analysis of the two plays, not with remarkable ability, it must be admitted, but with sufficient competence to make his work historically important. Attention came to be centred more and more on the charac- ters. Henry Home (better known as Lord Kames) pointed out in his Elements of Criticism that Shakespeare's method was not descriptive, as was Corneille's and the later dramatists', but directly imitative or representative, the sentiments being ' the legitimate offspring of passion, and therefore j in themselves expressive of personality '. Lyttelton, I in his Dialogues of the Dead, said that Shakespeare's knowledge of the passions, the humours, and the sentiments of mankind was so perfect, and so per- fectly expressed, that ' if human nature were destroyed, and no monument were left of it except his works, other beings might know what man was from those writings '. The periodical essays show that a public which was more familiar than we are now with Shakespeare's characters as seen on the stage was also interested in discussing
xviii INTRODUCTION
them. The change which becomes marked after Johnson's Preface was far from being a revolution. It was in fact only a natural and even an unavoid- able sequel. The older criticism had accepted Shakespeare as the ' mirror of life ', and the newer criticism now proceeded to supply the exposition. Johnson himself had heralded it in the notes to the various plays, where he introduced descriptive comments on the characters, such as those on Falstaff and Polonius. Pope had said that Shake- speare's characters are ' so much nature herself that 'tis a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as copies of her '. The time had come when a couplet in his Essay on Criticism that has often been quoted against him could be applied with literal truth to the student of Shakespeare :
But when t' examine every part he came, Nature and Shakespeare were, he found, the same.
Henceforth to study the one was to study the other. It is further proof of the steady and full pre- paration for the new criticism that three writers should have been engaged independently about the same time on essays which, taken together, mark its real beginning. Thomas Whately, an active politician, William Richardson, a young Professor of Latin in the University of Glasgow, and Maurice Morgann, a government official with a special knowledge of American affairs, all wrote
' INTRODUCTION xix
on Shakespeare by way of relaxation from their main duties, and all could claim for their work the credit of novelty. Whately expressly stated that ' the distinction and preservation of character ' was ' a subject for criticism more worthy of atten- tion than the common topics of discussion ', and produced the first elaborate analysis of two of Shakespeare's characters in his comparison of Macbeth and Richard III. He intended to have J dealt with others in the same manner, but his scheme was cut short by his death in 1772. What he left had been written before 1770, but was not published till 1785, under the title Remarks on some of the Characters of Shakespeare. Richardson was the first of the three writers to get into print, his Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of some of Shakespeare's Remarkable Characters appearing in 1774. His work had an ethical aim ; he had indulged in what he described as an exercise no less adapted to improve the heart, than to inform the understanding. ' My intention', he says, ' is \ to make poetry subservient to philosophy, and to j employ it in tracing the principles of human con- \ duct.' The main interest of this work is that it took Shakespeare's characters as examples for moral disquisitions.1 Morgann's much greater
1 A substantial volume entitled The Morality of Shake- speare's Drama Illustrated was brought out by Elizabeth Griffith in 1775 (the dedication is dated November 1,
xx INTRODUCTION
Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Fal- staff was written about the same time, though it was not published till 1777. He knew neither Richardson nor Whately, and believed that in considering Shakespeare in detail he was under- taking ' a task hitherto unattempted '. The book grew under his hands till it became more than its title promised — not merely a vindication of Fal- staff's courage, but an enthusiastic exposition of the genius of Shakespeare as revealed in the minute examination of a single character. No title could have been more misleading in its modesty. ' Falstafl is the word only, Shakespeare is the theme.' The passage where he breaks away exultantly from his main subject to write in sheer delight of Shakespeare's essential difference from all other writers and his imperishable gifts, is one of the great things in the whole range of English criticism. There is nothing greater — perhaps nothing so great — in Coleridge or Hazlitt. Forty years were to pass before they gave us the new criticism in all its strength, and they, to their loss, did not know Morgann. In the interval the best work on Shakespeare was done by the scholars,
1774). It must have been in preparation at the same time as Richardson's Philosophical Analysis, of which it is wholly independent, though its purpose is similar. It expounds Johnson's statement (infra, p. 102) that from Shakespeare's writings 'a system of social duty may be selected '.
INTRODUCTION xxi
such as Steevens and Malone, who contributed to the elucidation of the text so great a wealth of linguistic, antiquarian, and bibliographical know- ledge that later research has done little more than supplement it ; too frequently it has been used without due acknowledgement.
When Hazlitt published his Characters of Shake- speaks Plays in 1817 he spoke of it in his Preface as if it were a new venture in criticism, and the novelty of its manner was remarked on by Jeffrey in an article in The Edinburgh Review. It was the first book in which the criticism of the nineteenth century spoke clearly and confidently. But Cole- ridge had already been lecturing on Shakespeare for several years ; and Lamb had written his magazine article ' On the Tragedies of Shake- speare '. When Hazlitt brought out his book the new criticism was thus in all its vigour. Unfor- tunately little is preserved of Coleridge's early lectures. His most important course was not delivered till 1818.1
1 See the footnote on p. 255. Coleridge regarded himself as the leader of the new critics, and resented the suggestion that he was in any way indebted to the Germans. Words- worth had said in 1815 ('Essay Supplementary to Preface ') that ' the Germans only, of foreign nations, are approaching towards a knowledge and feeling of what he (Shakespeare) B. In some respects they have acquired a superiority over the fellow countrymen of the Poet. . . . How long may it be before ... it becomes universally acknowledged that the
xxii INTRODUCTION
These critics were possessed with all the joy of a discovery. They thought that they understood Shakespeare as he had never been understood
judgment of Shakespeare in the selection of his materials, and in the manner in which he has made them, hetero- geneous as they often are, constitute a unity of their own, and contribute all to one great end, is not less admirable than his imagination, his invention, and his intuitive knowledge of human nature ? ' Hazlitt also had neglected Coleridge's lectures when he said in 1817 that ' some little jealousy of the character of the national understanding was not without its share in producing ' his Characters of Shakespear's Plays, ' for we were piqued that it should be reserved for a foreign critic to give reasons for the faith which we English have in Shakespear '. Coleridge was moved to make an indignant protest. In a private letter written in 1819 he pointed out that, in a course of lectures which he assigned to 1802, he had argued ' that Shakespeare's judgment was, if possible, still more wonderful than his genius, or rather, that the contradis- tinction itself between judgment and genius rested on an utterly false theory ' ; and he also expressed the regret that the idea should have been produced by other English writers [e. g. Wordsworth] as if it were their own, or that the merit of it should be given to ' a foreign writer [i.e. A. W. Schlegel] whose lectures were not given orally till two years after mine '. He believed that there was not ' one single principle in SchlegePs work (which is not an admitted drawback from its merits), that was not estab- lished and applied in detail by me '. This letter was first printed in The Canterbury Magazine for September 1834, pp. 125-6 ; cf. Biographia Epistolaris, ed. A. Turnbull, vol. ii, pp. 168-9. The priority of Coleridge or Schlegel is a matter of little importance. The main fact is that no German influence is necessary to account for the character
INTRODUCTION xxiii
before. They liked to show how they differed from the older critics ; in their pride in their new power they did not feel their relationship. Like Coriolanus, they would ' stand as if a man were author of himself and knew no other kin '.
The differences are obvious at a glance. There is the greater freedom of movement, the clearer signs of real pleasure in writing or speaking about Shakespeare. Enthusiasm is not checked by the desire to strike a just balance ; there is no longer any fear of being misled by ' superstitious venera- tion '. These critics did not hold with Johnson that it was necessary to confess faults in order to gain credit to their praise of excellences. Their purpose was to explain these excellences. They did not pass judgement ; they gave an interpretation. They held, in Hazlitt's words, that ' a genuine criticism should reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work '. The great question they set themselves to answer was not how far has Shakespeare succeeded, but how is Shakespeare to be understood. The plays are regarded as embodiments of real life ; the characters are treated as fellow beings of whom the plays preserve our only record. There is none
of English criticism on Shakespeare at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The criticism of Coleridge and Hazlitt is a natural and direct development from earlier English criticism.
xxiv INTRODUCTION
of the aloofness which must accompany the judicial attitude of watching the craftsman at his work and noting the varying results. Johnson's main interest was in Shakespeare the man ; the business- of nineteenth-century critics was with the world of his creation. When they studied the ordered development of his art and demonstrated its unity, their attitude was the philosopher's in describing the phases of a great phenomenon in nature. ' The Englishman ', said Coleridge, ' who without reverence, a proud and affectionate rever- ence, can utter the name of William Shakespeare, stands disqualified for the office of critic.' ' It may be said of Shakespeare ', said Hazlitt, ' that " those who are not for him are against him ". An overstrained enthusiasm is more pardonable with respect to Shakespeare than the want of it.'
Taken as a whole the criticism of Shakespeare in the first half of the nineteenth century is our greatest, alike in range and insight and in stimulus. As an aid to the appreciation of the plays, it has no equal. It opens new vistas and communicates a sense of exaltation and wonder. It is nothing if not reverential and intuitively sympathetic. But the imaginative freedom which it derives from contact with Shakespeare's mind some- times renders it an unsafe guide. A critic who sets out to give an interpretation of a work of art is always beset by the danger of reading himself
INTRODUCTION xxv
into it, and the danger is the greater if he is himself an artist — a poet or a brilliant essayist. He may begin to create a new work on the basis of the original. The impression derived from a passage may be expounded out of proportion to the im- pression derived from the play as a whole. A wealth of subtle meaning may be extracted from what cooler judgements will not regard as specially significant, sometimes even from a rhyming tag. Or if the critic have an ethical bias, he may regard the play as a statement of a moral doctrine, and find in it the illustration of his own preposses- sions. Those who aim at giving an interpretation intend to subject themselves to their author ; but the results show that there is no kind of criticism in which the personality of the critic is allowed freer scope.
It was Maurice Morgann who first said that Shakespeare's characters may be considered ' rather as historic than dramatic beings '. We are more familiar with some of them than with most of our everyday acquaintances, and it is the easiest illusion to think of them as having an existence in real life. The criticism of the nine- teenth century as a whole owes some of its finest qualities to its habit of forgetting that they are the creatures of art. But it has also been led by the same cause into much needless discussion. Shake- speare expects us to think of his characters as they
xxvi INTRODUCTION
are shown within the limits of the plays. We gain nothing by asking what was Hamlet's history before we first meet him ; and when we trouble ourselves with the problem of his exact age we forget that if the matter were of any importance, we should not have been left in doubt. Such in- quiries are irrelevant to the impression derived |l from the drama, and in the drama, as Morgann V said, ' the impression is the fact '. It is a supreme testimony to Shakespeare that the life which he gave to his characters should be treated as if it carried them beyond the dramatic conditions in which alone they have their existence. But it is a testimony which may not give due recogni- tion to the genius' of the craftsman. In his own eyes Shakespeare was a craftsman ; and so he was to his contemporaries and the earlier critics.
Carlyle's paean is a fitting climax to the passages in this volume. Subsequent criticism to the end of the century shows no conspicuous change in attitude and purpose. The three books which stand out prominently are Edward Dowden's Shakspere, His Mind and Art (1874) ; Swinburne's Study of Shakespeare (1880) ; and A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy. Though not published till 1904, Mr. Bradley's penetrative analysis of the four chief tragedies is the last great representa- tive of nineteenth-century criticism, and nothing
:;ODUCTION
better in ita kind need be expected. It con- J tinues the traditions inaugurated by Whately and j Morgann, and established by Coleridge and Hazlitt. j A clear break with these traditions is to be found J already in the criticism of the twentieth century.
CONTENTS
PAGE
N HEMINGB (d. 1630)
»RY CO.SDELL (d, 1627)
Preface to the first •
Plays, 1623 ... 1
BEK JONSON (1673-1637)—
To the memory of my beloved, the Author , ! (••! 3
De Shakespeare Nostrati, 1641 .6
JOH.N ; 1608-74) — '
On Shakespear, 1630 . . 7
L M. S.—
On Worthy Master Shakeaoeare and hie Poems 1632
" • • . O
- • . .11
HAKGAE*-I ,F NJEWCASTJ-E
(1624-71
Letter CA - ... 13
foHN DKYDBK
Froni O/ Dra^-Ki? 1668 .
\rio\iB frnfaces and Prologues <:DWA ra (1630-96>--
•Fl1'1 ' * Poetarum, 1&75 ... 28
HIOHOI '.1674-1718)—
--Prom -.-tint of th, /. if Mr. Wii
1709
xxx CONTENTS
PAGE
JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719) RICHARD STEELE (1672-1729)—
From The Spectator, 1711-14 . . 42
ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744)—
From the Preface to Shakespear's Works, 1725 47 From the Epistle To Awjustus, 1737 . . 57
THOMAS GRAY (1716-71) —
From a Letter to Richard West, 1742 . 58
From The Progress of Poesy, 1757 ... 58
JOSEPH VV.»K-fo> (1.
From The Adventurer, 17j3 ,>4 . . 60
HENRY HOME, LORD KAMES (1696-17^.!) —
From Elements of Criticism, 1762 ... 80
EORGE, LORD LYTTELTON (1709-73) —
From Dialogues of the Dead, 1765 ... 84
SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-84) —
From the Prolog uf a: 'rury-Lan&
Theatre 1747 . . . 87
From the Dedication to Shakespear Illustrated,
1753 87
From the Edition of Shakespeare's Works, 1765 89
THOMAS WHATELY (d. 1772) —
Frc«». Remarks on some of the Characters of
' Hcespeare, 1785 ... .143
WlLLI ''RICHARDSON (1743-1814)—
J.
From the Introduction to A
Analysis and [li^stratio.i of aome of Shake- speare's Remarkable Characters, ' 774 . . 170 MAURICE MORGANN (1726-1802; —
From An Essay on the JL'ram:ttic Cl iracter of Sir John Falstaff, 1777 . . . .173
ijlll
CONTENTS xxxi
CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834)
/ On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, 1811 . . 215
•/SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)
From Biographia Literaria, 1817 . . 241
From the Lectures . . . 249
From Table-Talk .... 296
WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830)—
From Characters of Shakespear's Plays, 1817 . 307 From Lectures on the English Poets, 1818 343
From Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, 1820. . 360
FRANCIS JEFFREY (1773-1850)
From Review of Hazlitt's Characters of Shake- spear's Plays, 1817 .... 363
THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859)—
•"""On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, 1823 372
From the article on Shakespeare in the Encyclo- paedia Britannica (7th edition), 1838 . 379 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (1775-1864)—
From Imaginary Conversations, 1846 , 395
THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881)—
The Hero as Poet, 1840 . . . 493
JOHN HEMINGE AND HENRY CONDELL
PREFACE TO THE FIRST COLLECTION OP SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS
To ike great Variety of Readers.
FROM the most able, to him that can but spell : There you are number'd. We had rather you were weighd. Especially, when the fate of all Bookes depends vpon your capacities : and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well ! It is now publique, & you wil stand for your priuiledges wee know : to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first. That doth best commend a Booke, the Stationer saies. Then, how odde soeuer your braines be, or your wisedomes, make your licence the same, and spare not. ludge your sixe-pen'orth, your shillings worth, your fiue shillings worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the iust rates, and welcome. But, what euer you do, Buy. Censure will not driue a Trade, or make the lacke go. And though you be a Magistrate of wit, and sit on the Stage at Black-Friers, or the Cock-pit, to arraigne Playes dailie, know, these Playes haue had their triall alreadie, and stood out all Appeales ; and do now come forth quitted rather by a Decree of Court, then any purchas'd Letters of commendation.
It had bene a thing, we confesse, worthie to haue bene wished, that the Author himselfe had
212 T>
2 HEMINGE AND CONDELL
liu'd to haue set forth, and ouerseen his owne writings; But since it hath bin ordain'd other- wise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envie his Friends, the office of their care, and paine, to haue collected & publish'd them ; and so to haue publish'd them, as where (before) you were abus'd with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and de- formed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors, that expos'd them: euen those, are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes ; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he concerned them. Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together : And what he thought, he vttered with that easi- nesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our prouince, who onely gather his works, and giue them you, to praise him. It is yours that reade him. And there we hope, to your diuers capacities, you will finde enough, both to draw, and hold you : for his wit can no more lie hid, then it could be lost. Reade him, therefore ; and again'e, and againe : And if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to vnderstand him. And so we leaue you to other of his Friends, whom if you need, can bee your guides : if you neede them not, you can leade your selues, and others. And such Readers we wish him.
lohn Heminge.
Henrie Condett.
Prefixed to the First Folio, 1623.
BEN JONSON
To the memory of my beloued,
The AVTHOR
MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE:
AND
what he hath left vs.
To draw no enuy (Shakespeare) on thy name, Am I thus ample to thy Booke, and Fame': While I confesse thy writings to be such, ,„ A8 neitner Man, nor Muse, can praise too much. Tis true, and all mens suffrage. But these wayes
Were not the paths I meant vnto thy praise : For seeliest Ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but' eccho's
right ; Or blinde Affection, which doth ne're aduance
The truth, but gropes, and vrgeth all by chance • Or crafty Malice, might pretend this praise,
And thmke to ruine, where it seem'd to raise. These are, as some infamous Baud, or Whore Should praise a Matron. What could hurt her
more ? But thou art proofe against them, and indeed
Aboue th' ill fortune of them, or the need I, therefore will begin. Soule of the Age !
The applause! delight! the wonder of our
Stage ! My Shakespeare, rise ; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye A little further, to make thee a roome : Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,
4 JONSON
And art aliue still, while thy Booke doth Hue,
And we haue wits to read, and praise to giue. That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses ;
I meane with great, but disproportion' d Muses : For, if I thought my iudgement were of yeeres, I 'should commit thee surely with thy peeres, And tell, how farre thou didst our Lily out-shine,
Or sporting Kid, or Marlowes mighty line. And though thou hadst small Latine, and less
Greeke,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke For names ; but call forth thund'ring Mschilus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to vs, Paccuuius, Accius, him of Cordoua dead,
To life againe, to heare thy Buskin tread, And shake a Stage : Or, when thy Sockes were on,
Leaue thee alone, for the comparison Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. Triumph, my Britwne, thou hast one to showe,
To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time !
And all the M uses still were in their prime, When like Apollo he came forth to warme Our eares, or like a Mercury to charme ! Nature her selfe was proud of his designes.
And ioy'd to weare the dressing of his lines Which were so richly spun, and wouen so fit, As, since, she will vouchsafe no other Wit. The merry Greece, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please ; But antiquated, and deserted lye
As they were not of Natures family. Yet must I not giue Nature all : Thy Art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enioy a part.
IN MEMORY OF SHAKESPEARE 5
For though the Poets matter, Nature be,
His Art doth giue the fashion. And, that he, Who casts to write a liuing line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Vpon the Muses anuile : turne the same,
(And himselfe with it) that he thinkes to frame ; Or for the lawrell, he may gaine a scorne,
For a good Poet's made, as well as borne. And such wert thou. Looke how the fathers face
Liues in his issue, euen so, the race Of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines
In his well torned, and true-filed lines : In each of which, he seemes to shake a Lance,
As brandish't at the eyes of Ignorance. Sweet Swan of Auon ! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appeare, And make those flights vpon the bankes of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our lames ! But stay, I see thee in the Hemisphere
Aduanc'd, and made a Constellation there ! Shine forth, thou Starre of Poets, and with rage,
Or influence, chide, or cheere the drooping
Stage ;
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd like night,
And despaires day, but for thy Volumes light.
BEN: IONSON. Prefixed to the First Folio, 1623.
6 JONSON
De Shakespeare nostrati.
I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn'd) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevo- lent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justifie mine owne candor, (for I lov'd the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any.) Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature : had an excellent Phantsie ; brave notions, and gentle expressions : wherein hee flow'd with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop'd : Sufflaminandus erat ; as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his owne power ; would the rule of it had beene so too. Many times hee fell into those things, could not escape laughter : As when hee said in the person of Ccesar, one speaking to him ; Ccesar thou dost me wrong. Hee replyed : Ccesar did never wrong, but with just cause : and such like ; which were ridiculous. But hee redeemed his vices, with his vertues. There was ever more in him to be praysed, then to be pardoned.
From Timber : or, Discoveries ; Made upon Men and Matter, published 1641, pp. 97, 98.
The passage in Julius Ccesar to which Jonson refers (m. i. 47, 48) stands thus in the First Folio :
Know, Ccesar doth not wrong, nor without cause Will he be satisfied.
JOHN MILTON
On ShaJcespear. 1630.
WHAT needs my Shakespear for his honour' d Bones,
The labour of an age in piled Stones,
Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid
Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid ?
Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame,
"What need'st thou such weak witnes of thy name ?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thy self a live-long Monument.
For whilst to th' shame of slow-endeavouring artr
Thy easie numbers flow, and that each heart,
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalu'd Book,
Those Delphick lines with deep impression tookr
Then thou our fancy of it self bereaving,
Dost make us Marble with too much conceaving ;
And so Sepulcher'd in such pomp dost lie,
That Kings for such a Tomb would wish to die.
This, the first of Milton's poems to be published, appeared originally at the beginning of the Second Folio of Shake- speare's plays, 1632. It there had the title ' An Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare ', and was anonymous. Milton acknowledged his authorsh p by including it in the collected edition of his poems published by Humphrey Moseley in 1645, — Poems of Mr. John Milton, . . . Printed by his true Copies • and he also stated, in the new and shorter title, that it had been written as early as 1630. The poem is here reprinted from the text of 1645. There are a few variant readings in the text of 1632, and several differences in spelling.
I. M. S.
On Worthy Master SJiakespeare and his Poems.
A MIND reflecting ages past, whose cleere
And equall surface can make things appeare
Distant a Thousand yeares, and represent
Them in their lively colours just extent.
To out rim hasty time, retrive the fates,
Bowie backe the heavens, blow ope the iron gates
Of death and Lethe, where (confused) lye
Great heapes of ruinous mortalitie.
In that deepe duskie dungeon to discerne
A royall Ghost from Churles ; By art to learne
The Physiognomic of shades, and give
Them suddaine birth, wondring how oft they live.
What story coldly tells, what Poets faine
At second hand, and picture without braine
Senselesse and soulelesse showes. To give a Stage
(Ample and true with life) voyce, action, age,
As Plato's yeare and new Scene of the world
Them unto us, or us to them had hurld.
To raise our auncient Soveraignes from their herse
Make Kings his subjects, by exchanging verse
Enlive their pale trunkes, that the present age
loyes in their joy, and trembles at their rage :
Yet so to temper passion, that our eares
Take pleasure in their paine ; And eyes in teares
Both weepe and smile ; fearefull at plots so sad,
Then laughing at our feare ; abus'd, and glad
SHAKESPEAEE'S FREEHOLD 9
To be abus'd, affected with that truth Which we perceive is false ; pleas'd in that ruth At which we start ; and by elaborate play Tortur'd and tickled ; by a crablike way Time past made pastime, and in ugly sort
Disgorging up his ravaine for our sport
While the Plebeian Impe from lofty throne,
Creates and rules a world, and workes upon
Mankind by secret engines ; Now to move
A chilling pitty, then a rigorous love :
To strike up and stroake downe, both joy and ire ;
To steere th' affections ; and by heavenly fire
Mould us anew. Stolne from our selves
This and much more which cannot bee exprest But by himselfe, his tongue and his owne brest, Was SJiakespeares freehold, which his cunning
braine
Improv'd by favour of the nine fold traine. The buskind Muse, the Commicke Queene, the
graund
And lowder tone of Clio ; nimble hand, And nimbler foote of the melodious paire, The Silver voyced Lady ; the most faire Calliope, whose speaking silence daunts : And she whose prayse the heavenly body chants.
These joyntly woo'd him, envying one another (Obey'd by all as Spouse, but lov'd as brother) And wrought a curious robe of sable grave Fresh greene, and pleasant yellow, red most brave, And constant blew, rich purple, guiltlesse white The lowly Russet, and the Scarlet bright ; Branch't and embroydred like the painted Spring Each leafe match't with a flower, and each string Of golden wire, each line of silke ; there run Italian workes whose thred the Sisters spun : B3
10 I.M.S.
And there did sing, or seeme to sing, the choyce Birdes of a forraine note and various voyce. Here hangs a mossey rocke ; there playes a faire But chiding fountaine purled : Not the ayre Nor cloudes nor thunder, but were living drawne Not out of common Tiffany or Lawne. But fine materialls, which the Muses know And onely know the countries where they grow.
Now when they could no longer him enjoy In mortall garments pent ; death may destroy They say his body, but his verse shall live And more then nature takes, our hands shall give. In a lesse volumne, but more strongly bound Shakespeare shall breath and speake, with Laurell
crown' d
Which never fades. Fed with Ambrosian meate In a well-lyned vesture rich and neate
So with this robe they cloath him, bid him weare it
For time shall never staine, nor envy teare it. The friendly admirer of his Endowments. I. M. 8.
Prefixed to the Second Folio, 1632.
There is no satisfactory explanation of ' I. M. S.' Malone suggested ' Jasper Mayne, Student ' (Mayne was elected a ' student ' of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1627), and Cole- ridge made the strange statement that internal evidence was decisive for 'John Milton, Student'. C. M. Ingleby was inclined, with little reason, to favour ' In Memoriam Scriptoris '. The position of the letters makes it probable that they are a signature ; but in a seventeenth-century signature of this kind only two letters are to be taken as the initials of the writer's name.
11
THOMAS FULLER
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was born at Stratford on Avon in this County, in whom three eminent Poets may seem in some sort to be compounded, 1. Martial in the Warlike sound of his Sur-name, (whence some may conjecture him of a Military extraction,} Hasti-vibrans or ShaJce-speare. 2. Ovid, the most naturall and witty of all Poets, and hence it was that Queen Elizabeth coming into a Grammar- School made this extemporary verse,
Persius a Crab-staffe, Bawdy Martial, Ovid a
fine Wag.
3. Plautus, who was an exact Comsedian, yet never any Scholar, as our Shake-speare (if alive) would confess himself. Adde to all these, that though his Genius generally was jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet he could (when so disposed) be solemn and serious, as appears by his Tragedies, so that Heraclitus himself (I mean if secret and unseen) might afford to smile at his Comedies, they were so merry, and Democritus scarce forbear to sigh at his Tragedies they were so mournfull.
He was an eminent instance of the truth of that Rule, Poeta non fit, sed nascitur, one is not made but born a Poet. Indeed his Learning was very little, so that as Cornish diamonds are not polished by any Lapidary, but are pointed and smoothed
12 THOMAS FULLER
even as they are taken out of the Earth, so nature it self was all the art which was used upon him.
Many were the wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Johnson, which two I behold like a Spanish great Gallion, and an English man of War ; Master Johnson (like the former) was built far higher in Learning ; Solid, but Slow in his performances. Shake-spear with the English-man of War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention. He died Anno Domini 16 . . and was buried at Stratford upon Avon, the Town of his Nativity.
From The History of the Worthies of England, 1662,— Warwickshire, p. 126.
The Worthies of England appeared posthumously, Fuller having died in 1661. He had long been engaged on it, and the above passage should be dated considerably earlier than the year of publication.
13
MARGARET CAVENDISH,
MARCHIONESS (AFTERWARDS DUCHESS) OF NEWCASTLE
MADAM,
I Wonder how that Person you mention in your Letter, could either have the Conscience, or Confidence to Dispraise Shakespear's Playes, as to say they were made up onely with Clowns, Fools, Watchmen, and the like ; But to Answer that Person, though Shakespear's Wit will Answer for himself, I say, that it seems by his Judging, or Censuring, he Understands not Playes, or Wit ; for to Express Properly, Rightly, Usually, and Naturally, a Clown's, or Fool's Humour, Expres- sions, Phrases, Garbs, Manners, Actions, Words, and Course of Life, is as Witty, Wise, Judicious, Ingenious, and Observing, as to Write and Express the Expressions, Phrases, Garbs, Manners, Actions, Words, and Course of Life, of Kings and Princes ; and to Express Naturally, to the Life, a Mean Country Wench, as a Great Lady, a Courtesan, as a Chast Woman, a Mad man, as a Man in his right Reason and Senses, a Drunkard, as a Sober man, a Knave, as an Honest man, and so a Clown, as a Well-bred man, and a Fool, as a Wise man ; nay, it Expresses and Declares a Greater Wit, to Express, and Deliver to Posterity, the Extrava- gancies of Madness, the Subtilty of Knaves, the Ignorance of Clowns, and the Simplicity of Naturals, or the Craft of Feigned Fools, than to
U MARGARET CAVENDISH
Express Regularities, Plain Honesty, Courtly Garbs, or Sensible Discourses, for 'tis harder to Express Nonsense than Sense, and Ordinary Conversations, than that which is Unusual ; and 'tis Harder, and Requires more Wit to Express a Jester, than a Grave Statesman ; yet Shakespear did not want Wit, to Express to the Life all Sorts of Persons, of what Quality, Profession, Degree, Breeding, or Birth soever; nor did he want Wit to Express the Divers, and Different Humours, or Natures, or Several Passions in Mankind ; and so Well he hath Express'd in his Playes all Sorts of Persons, as one would think he had been Transformed into every one of those Persons he hath Described ; and as sometimes one would think he was Really himself the Clown or Jester he Feigns, so one would think, he was also the King, and Privy Counsellor ; also as one would think he were Really the Coward he Feigns, so one would think he were the most Valiant, and Experienced Souldier ; Who would not think he had been such a man as his Sir John Falstajf! and who would not think he had been Harry the Fifth ? & certainly Julius Ccesar, Augustus Ccesar, and Antonius, did never Really Act their parts Better, if so Well, as he hath Described them, and I believe that Antonius and Brutus did not Speak Better to the People, than he hath Feign'd them ; nay, one would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman, for who could Describe Cleopatra Better than he hath done, and many other Females of his own Creating, as Nan Page, Mrs. Page, Mrs. Ford, the Doctors Maid, Bettrice, Mrs. Quickly, Doll Tear sheet, and others, too many to Relate ? and in his Tragick
A LETTER ABOUT SHAKESPEARE 15
Vein, he Presents Passions so Naturally, and Misfortunes so Probably, as he Peirces the Souls of his Readers with such a True Sense and Feeling thereof, that it Forces Tears through their Eyes, and almost Perswades them, they are Really Actors, or at least Present at those Tragedies. Who would not Swear he had been a Noble Lover, that could Woo so well ? and there is not any person he hath Described in his Book, but his Readers might think they were Well acquainted with them ; indeed ShaJcespear had a Clear Judg- ment, a Quick Wit, a Spreading Fancy, a Subtil Observation, a Deep Apprehension, and a most Eloquent Elocution ; truly, he was a Natural Orator, as well as a Natural Poet, and he was not an Orator to Speak Well only on some Sub- jects, as Lawyers, who can make Eloquent Orations at the Bar, and Plead Subtilly and Wittily in Law-Cases, or Divines, that can Preach Eloquent Sermons, or Dispute Subtilly and Wittily in Theology, but take them from that, and put them to other Subjects, and they will be to seek ; but Shakespear's Wit and Eloquence was General, for, and upon all Subjects, he rather wanted Subjects for his Wit and Eloquence to Work on, for which he was Forced to take some of his Plots out of History, where he only took the Bare Designs, the Wit and Language being all his Own ; and so much he had above others, that those, who Writ after him, were Forced to Borrow of him, or rather to Steal from him ; I could mention Divers Places, that others of our Famous Poets have Borrow' d, or Stoln, but lest I should Dis- cover the Persons, I will not Mention the Places, or Parts, but leave it to those that Read his
16 MARGARET CAVENDISH
Playes, and others, to find them out. I should not have needed to Write this to you, for his Works would have Declared the same Truth : But I believe, those that Dispraised his Playes, Dispraised them more out of Envy, than Sim- plicity or Ignorance. . . . But leaving Shakespear's Works to their own Defence, and his Detractors to their Envy, and you to your better Imploy- ments, than Reading my Letter, I rest,
Madam,
Your faithful Friend and humble Servant.
CCXI. Sociable Letters, written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, The Lady Marchioness of New- castle. 1664.— Letter CXXHI, pp. 244-248.
17
JOHN DRYDEN
To begin then with Shakespeare ; he was the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily : when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commenda- tion : he was naturally learn'd ; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature ; he look'd inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike ; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of Mankind. He is many times flat, insipid ; his Comick wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into Bombast. But he is alwayes great, when some great occasion is presented to him : no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of Poets,
Quantum lento, solent inter viburna cupressi. The consideration of this made Mr. Hales of Eaton say, That there was no subject of which any Poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better treated of in Shakespeare ; and however others are now generally prefer' d before him, yet the
18 DRYDEN
Age wherein he liv'd, which had contemporaries with him Fletcher and Johnson, never equall'd them to him in their esteem : And in the last Kings Court, when Ben's reputation was at its highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater part of the Courtiers, set our Shakespeare far above him.1
Shakespeare was the Homer, or Father of our Dramatick Poets ; Johnson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing ; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.
From Of Dramatick Poesie, An Essay, 1668.
IN my Stile I have profess'd to imitate the Divine Shakespeare ; which that I might perform more freely, I have dis-incumber'd my self from Rhyme. Not that I condemn my former way, but that this is more proper to my present purpose. I hope I need not to explain my self, that I have not Copy'd my Author servilely : Words and Phrases must of necessity receive a change in succeeding Ages : but 'tis almost a Miracle that much of his Language remains so pure ; and that he who began Dramatique Poetry amongst us,
1 Other accounts of the conversation in which Hales made his famous statement are found in Charles Gildon's Reflections on Mr. Rymer's Short View of Tragedy, 1694, and in Nicholas Howe's Account of the Life <fcc. of Mr. William Shakespear, 1709. The conversation appears to have taken place between 1633 and 1637. Dryden probably derived his knowledge of it from Sir William Davenant, who is said by Rowe to have been one of the company.
SHAKESPEAEE'S STYLE 19
untaught by any, and, as Ben Johnson tells us, without Learning, should by the force of his own Genius perform so much, that in a manner he has left no praise for any who come after him. The occasion is fair, and the subject would be pleasant to handle the difference of Stiles betwixt him and Fletcher, and wherein, and how far they are both to be imitated. But since I must not be over-confident of my own performance after him, it will be prudence in me to be silent. Yet I hope I may affirm, and without vanity, that by imitating him, I have excell'd my self throughout the Play.
From the Preface to All for Love: or, The World well Lost, 1678.
IF Shakespear be allow'd, as I think he must, to have made his Characters distinct, it will easily be infer' d that he understood the nature of the" Passions : because it has been prov'd already, that confus'd passions make undistinguishable Characters : yet I cannot deny that he has his failings ; but they are not so much in the passions themselves, as in his manner of expression : he often obscures his meaning by his words, and some- times makes it unintelligible. I will not say of so great a Poet, that he distinguish'd not the blown puffy stile, from true sublimity ; but I may venture to maintain that the fury of his fancy often transported him, beyond the bounds of Judgment, either in coyning of new words and phrases, or racking words which were in use, into
20 DRYDEN
\
the violence of a Catachresis : 'Tis not that I would explode the use of Metaphors from passions, for Longinus thinks 'em necessary to raise it ; but to use 'em at every word, to say nothing without a Metaphor, a Simile, an Image, or description, is I doubt to smell a little too strongly of the Buskin. I must be forc'd to give an example of expressing passion figuratively ; but that I may do it with respect to ShaJcespear, it shall not be taken from any thing of his : 'tis an exclamation against Fortune, quoted in his Hamlet, but written by some other Poet.
Out, aid, thou strumpet fortune, ; att you Gods, In general Synod, take away her Power, Break att the spokes and fallyes from her Wheel, And bowl the round Nave down the hill of Heav'n As low as to the Fiends.
And immediately after, speaking of Hecuba, when Priam was kill'd before her eyes :
The mobbled Queen ran up and down,
Threatning the flame with bisson rheum : a clout about
that head,
Where late the Diadem stood ; and for a Robe About her lank and all o're-teemed loyns, A blanket in th' alarm of fear caught up. Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steep'd 'Gainst Fortune's state would Treason have pronounc'd ; But if the Qods themselves did see her then, When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport In mincing with his sword her Husband's Limbs, The instant burst of clamor that she made ( Unless things mortal meant them not at att) Would have made milch the burning eyes of Heav'n, And passion in the Oods.
What a pudder is here kept in raising the expres- sion of trifling thoughts. Would not a man have thought that the Poet had been bound Prentice
SHAKESPEAEE'S STYLE 21
to a Wheel-wright, for his first Kant ? and had follow' d a Eagman, for the clout and blanket, in the second ? Fortune is painted on a wheel ; and therefore the writer in a rage, will have Poetical Justice done upon every member of that Engin : after this execution, he bowls the Nave downhill, from Heaven, to the Fiends : (an unreasonable long mark a man would think ;) 'tis well there are no solid Orbs to stop it in the way, or no Element of fire to consume it : but when it came to the earth, it must be monstrous heavy, to break ground as low as the Center.- His making milch the burning eyes of Heaven, was a pretty tollerable flight too ; and I think no man ever drew milk out of eyes before him : yet to make the wonder greater, these eyes were burn- ing. Such a sight indeed were enough to have rais'd passion in the Gods, but to excuse the effects of it, he tells you perhaps they did not see it. Wise men would be glad to find a little sence couch' d under all those pompous words ; for Bombast is commonly the delight of that Audience, which loves Poetry, but understands it not : and as commonly has been the practice of those Writers, who not being able to infuse a natural passion into the mind, have made it their business to ply the ears, and to stun their Judges by the noise. But Shakespear does not often thus ; for the passions in his Scene between Brutus and Cassius are extreamly natural, the thoughts are such as arise from the matter, and the expression of 'em not viciously figurative. I cannot leave this Subject before I do justice to that Divine Poet, by giving you one of his pas- sionate descriptions : 'tis of Richard the Second
22 DRYDEN
when he was depos'd, and led in Triumph through the Streets of London by Henry of Bullingbrook : the painting of it is so lively, and the words so moving, that I have scarce read any thing com- parable to it, in any other language. Suppose you have seen already the fortunate Usurper passing through the croud, and follow'd by the shouts and acclamations of the people ; and now behold King Richard entring upon the Scene : consider the wretchedness of his condition, and his carriage in it ; and refrain from pitty if you can.
As in a Theatre, the eyes of men
After a well-grac'd Actor leaves the Stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious :
Even so, or with much more contempt, mens eyes
Did scowl on Richard : no man cry d God save him :
No joyful tongue gave him his welcom home,
But dust was thrown upon his Sacred head,
Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off,
His face still combating with tears and smiles
(The badges of his grief and patience)
That had not God (for some strong purpose) steeFd
The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted,
And Barbarism it self have pity'd him.
To speak justly of this whole matter ; 'tis neither height of thought that is discommended, nor pathetic vehemence, nor any nobleness of expression in its proper place ; but 'tis a false measure of all these, something which is like 'em, and is not them : 'tis the Bristol-stone, which appears like a Diamond ; 'tis an extravagant thought, instead of a sublime one ; 'tis roaring madness instead of vehemence ; and a sound of words, instead of sence. If ShaJcespear were stript of all the Bombast in his passions, and dress'd in the most vulgar words, we should find the
HIS UNIVERSAL MIND 23
beauties of his thoughts remaining; if his embroide- ries were burnt down, there would still be silver at the bottom of the melting-pot : but I fear (at least, let me fear it for my self) that we who Ape his sounding words, have nothing of his thought, but are all out-side ; there is not so much as a dwarf within our Giants cloaths. Therefore, let not Shakespear suffer for our sakes ; 'tis our fault, who succeed him in an Age which is more refin'd, if we imitate him so ill, that we coppy his failings only, and make a virtue of that in our Writings, which in his was an imperfection.
For what remains, the excellency of that Poet was, as I have said, in the more manly passions ; Fletcher's in the softer : Shakespear writ better betwixt man and man ; Fletcher, betwixt man and woman : consequently, the one describ'd friendship better ; the other love : yet Shakespear taught Fletcher to write love ; and Juliet, and Desdemona, are Originals. 'Tis true, the Scholar had the softer soul ; but the Master had the kinder. Friendship is both a virtue, and a Passion essentially ; love is a passion only in its nature, and is not a virtue but by Accident : good nature makes Friendship ; but effeminacy Love. Shake- spear had an Universal mind, which comprehended all Characters and Passions ; Fletcher a more confin'd, and limited : for though he treated love in perfection, yet Honour, Ambition, Revenge, and generally all the stronger Passions, he either touch' d not, or not Masterly. To conclude all ; he was a Limb of Shakespear.
From the Preface, ' Containing the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,' to Troilus and Cressida, 1679.
24 DEYDEN
As when a Tree's cut down the secret root Lives under ground, and thence new Branches
shoot,
So, from old Shakespear's honour'd dust, this day Springs up and buds a new reviving Play. Shakespear, who (taught by none) did first impart To Fletcher Wit, to labouring Johnson Art ; He Monarch-like gave those his subjects law, And is that Nature which they paint and draw. Fletcher reach'd that which on his heights did grow, Whilst Johnson crept and gather 'd all below. This did his Love, and this his Mirth digest : One imitates him most, the other best. If they have since out-writ all other men, 'Tis with the drops which fell from Shakespear' s
Pen.
The Storm which vanish'd on the Neighb'ring shore, Was taught by ShaJcespear' s Tempest first to roar. That innocence and beauty, which did smile In Fletcher, grew on this Enchanted Isle. But Shakespear's Magick could not copy'd be ; Within that Circle none durst walk but he. I must confess 'twas bold, nor would you now That liberty to vulgar Wits allow, Which works by Magick supernatural things : But Shakespear's pow'r is sacred as a King's.
From the Prologue to The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island, 1667, published 1670.
PROLOGUES 25
OUR Author by experience finds it true, "Tis much more hard to please himself than you : And out of no feign' d modesty, this day, Damns his laborious Trifle of a Play : Not that its worse than what before he writ, But he has now another taste of Wit ; And to confess a truth, (though out of Time) Grows weary of his long-lov'd Mistris, Rhyme. Passion's too fierce to be in Fetters bound, And Nature flies him like Enchanted Ground. What Verse can do, he has performed in this, Which he presumes the most correct of his : But spite of all his pride, a secret shame Invades his breast at Shakespear's sacred name : Aw'd when he hears his Godlike Romans rage, He, in a just despair, would quit the Stage, And to an Age less polish'd, more unskill'd, Does with disdain the foremost Honours yield.
From the Prologue to Aureng-Zebe, 1675, published 1676.
SEE, my lov'd Britons, see your Shakespeare rise, An awfull ghost confess'd to human eyes ! Unnam'd, methinks, distinguish'd I had been From other shades, by this eternal green, About whose wreaths the vulgar Poets strive, And with a touch, their wither'd Bays revive.
26 DKYDEN
Untaught, unpractis'd, in a barbarous Age, I found not. but created first the Stage. And, if I drain'd no Greek or Latin store, 'Twas, that my own abundance gave me more.
From the Prologue, ' Spoken by Mr. Betterton, representing the Ghost of Shakespear,' to Troilus and Cressida, 1679.
IN Country Beauties as we often see
Something that takes in their simplicity,
Yet while they charm, they know not they are fair,
And take without their spreading of the snare ;
Such Artless beauty lies in Shakespears wit,
'Twas well in spight of him what ere he writ.
His Excellencies came and were not sought,
His words like casual Atoms made a thought :
Drew up themselves in Bank and File, and writ,
He wondring how the Devil it were such wit.
Thus like the drunken Tinker, in his Play,
He grew a Prince, and never knew which way.
He did not know what trope or Figure meant,
But to perswade is to be eloquent.
So in this Caesar which this day you see,
Tully ne'r spoke as he makes Anthony.
Those then that tax his Learning are too blame,
He knew the thing, but did not know the Name :
Great lohnson did that Ignorance adore,
And though he envi'd much, admir'd him more
The faultless lohnson equally writ well,
Shakespear made faults ; but then did more excel.
One close at Guard like some old Fencer lay,
Tother more open, but he shew'd more play.
In Imitation lohnsons wit was shown,
ANONYMOUS 27
Heaven made his men but ShaJcespear made his
own.
Wise lohnsorfs talent in observing lay, But others follies still made up his play He drew the like in each elaborate line, But ShaJcespear like a Master did design. lohnson with skill dissected humane land, And show'd their faults that they their faults
might find,
But then as all Anatomists must do, He to the meanest of mankind did go, And took from Gibbets such as he would show. Both are so great that he must boldly dare, Who both of 'em does judge and both compare. If amongst Poets one more bold there be, The man that dare attempt in either way, is he.
Prologue, to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, printed without the name of the writer in Covent Garden Drolery, 1672, pp. 9, 10.
The only evidence for Dryden's authorship of this anonymous prologue is the style. It was attributed to Dryden by Bolton Corney, Notes and Queries, 1854, 1st Series, ix, pp. 95, 96. Though portions are clearly in Dryden's manner, the evidence for attributing the whole prologue to him is far from conclusive.
28 EDWARD PHILLIPS
William Shakespear, the Glory of the English Stage ; whose nativity at Stratford upon Avon, is the highest honour that Town can boast of : from an Actor of Tragedies and Comedies, he became a Maker ; and such a Maker, that though some others may perhaps pretend to a more exact Decorum and osconomie, especially in Tragedy, never any express't a more lofty and Tragic heighth ; never any represented nature more purely to the life, and where the polishments of Art are most wanting, as probably his Learning was not extraordinary, he pleaseth with a certain wild and native Elegance ; and in all his Writings hath an unvulgar style, as well in his Venus and Adonis, his Rape of Lucrece and other various Poems, as in his Dramatics.1
From Theatrum Poetarum, Or A Compleat
Collection of the Poets ... By Edward
Phillips. M.DC.LXXV.
1 This is the first account of Shakespeare in a dictionary of authors. In the preface it is said that ' Shakespear, in spight of all his unfiled expressions, his rambling and indigested Fancys, the laughter of the Critical, yet must be confess't a Poet above many that go beyond him in Litera- ture some degrees.' Edward Phillips was Milton's nephew.
The account in William Winstanley's Lives Of the most Famous English Poets (1687) is based on what had been said by Fuller and Phillips. The longer and more valuable account in Gerard Langbaine's Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691) is mainly a descriptive catalogue of the plays.
29
NICHOLAS HOWE
His Plays are properly to be distinguish' d only into Comedies and Tragedies. Those which are called Histories, and even some of his Comedies, are really Tragedies, with a run or mixture of Comedy amongst 'em. That way of Trage-Comedy was the common Mistake of that Age, and is indeed become so agreeable to the English Tast, that tho' the severer Critiques among us cannot bear it, yet the generality of our Audiences seem to be better pleas' d with it than with an exact Tragedjr. The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Comedy of Errors, and The Taming of the Shrew, are all pure Comedy ; the rest, however they are call'd, have something of both Kinds. 'Tis not very easie to determine which way of Writing he was most Excellent in. There is certainly a great deal of Entertainment in his Comical Humours ; and tho' they did not then strike at all Ranks of People, as the Satyr of the present Age has taken the Liberty to do, yet there is a pleasing and a well-distinguish'd Variety in those Characters which he thought fit to meddle with. Falstaff is allow'd by every body to be a Master-piece ; the Character is always well-sustain'd, tho' drawn out into the length of three Plays ; and even the Account of his Death, given by his Old Landlady Mrs. Quickly, in the first Act of Henry V, tho' it
30 ROWE
be extremely Natural, is yet as diverting as any Part of his Life. If there be any Fault in the Draught he has made of this lewd old Fellow, it is, that tho' he has made him a Thief, Lying, Cowardly, Vainglorious, and in short every way Vicious, yet he has given him so much Wit as to make him almost too agreeable ; and I don't know whether some People have not, in remem- brance of the Diversion he had formerly afforded 'em, been sorry to see his Friend Hal use him so scurvily, when he comes to the Crown in the End of the Second Part of Henry the Fourth. Amongst other Extravagances, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he has made him a Dear-stealer, that he might at the same time remember his Warwifa shire Prosecutor, under the Name of Justice Shallow ; he has given him very near the same Coat of Arms which Dugdale, in his Antiquities of that County, describes for a Family there, and makes the Welsh Parson descant very pleasantly upon 'em. That whole Play is admirable ; the Humours are various and well oppos'd ; the main Design, which is to cure Ford of his unreasonable Jealousie, is extremely well conducted. Falstaff's Billet-doux, and Master Slender' s
Ah ! Sweet Ann Page !
are very good Expressions of Love in their Way. In Twelfth-Night there is something singularly Ridiculous and Pleasant in the fantastical Steward Malvolio. The Parasite and the Vain-glorious in Parolles, in All's Well that ends Well, is as good as any thing of that Kind in Plautus or Terence. Petruchio, in The Taming of the Shrew, is an
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 31
uncommon Piece of Humour. The Conversation of Benedick and Beatrice, in Much ado about Nothing, and of Rosalind in As you like it, have much Wit and Sprightliness all along. His Clowns, without which Character there was hardly any Play writ in that Time, are all very entertain- ing: And, I believe, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, and Apemantus in Timon, will be allow'd to be Master-Pieces of ill Nature, and satyrical Snarling. To these I might add; that incom- parable Character of Shylock the Jew, in The Merchant of Venice ; but tho' we have seen that Play Receiv'd and Acted as a Comedy, and the Part of the Jew perform'd by an Excellent Comedian, yet I cannot but think it was design'd Tragically by the Author. There appears in it such a deadly Spirit of Revenge, such a savage Fierceness and Fellness, and such a bloody designation of Cruelty and Mischief as cannot agree either with the Stile or Characters of Comedy. The Play it self, take it all together, seems to me to be one of the most finish'd of any of Shakespear'a. The Tale indeed, in that Part relating to the Caskets, and the extravagant and unusual kind of Bond given by Antonio, is a little too much remov'd from the Rules of Probability : But taking the Fact for granted, we must allow it to be very beautifully written. There is something in the Friendship of Antonio to Bassanio very Great, Generous and Tender. The whole fourth Act, supposing, as I said, the Fact to be probable, is extremely Fine. But there are two Passages that deserve a particular Notice. The first is, what Portia says in praise of Mercy, [Act. iv] ; and the other on the Power of Musick, [Act. v].
32 KOWE
The Melancholy of Jaques, in As you like it, is as singular and odd as it is diverting. And if what Horace says
Difficile est proprie communia Dicere,
'Twill be a hard Task for any one to go beyond him in the Description of the several Degrees and Ages of Man's Life, tho' the Thought be old, and common enough.
-All the World's a Stage,
And all the Men and Women meerly Players ;
They have their Exits and their Entrances,
And one Man in his time plays many Parts,
His Acts being seven Ages. At first the Infant
Mewling and puking in the Nurse's Arms :
And then, the whining School-boy with his Satchel,
And shining Morning-face, creeping like Snail
Vnwillingly to School. And then the Lover
Sighing like Furnace, with a woful Ballad
Made to his Mistress' Eye-brow. Then a Soldier
Full of strange Oaths, and bearded like the Pard,
Jealous in Honour, sudden and quick in Quarrel,
Seeking the bubble Reputation
Ev'n in the Cannon's Mouth. And then the Justice
In fair round Betty, with good Capon lin'd,
With Eyes severe, and Beard of formal Cut,
Full of wise Saws and modern Instances ;
And so he plays his Part. The sixth Age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd Pantaloon,
With Spectacles on Nose, and Pouch on Side ;
His youthful Hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk Shank ; and his big manly Voice
Turning again tow'rd childish treble Pipes,
And Whistles in his Sound. Last Scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful History,
Is second Childishness and meer Oblivion,
Sans Teeth, sans Eyes, sans Tost, sans ev'ry thing.
[Act II, Sc. vii,]
His Images are indeed ev'ry where so lively, that the Thing he would represent stands full
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 33
before you, and you possess ev'ry Part of it. I will venture to point out one more, which is, I think, as strong and as uncommon as any thing I ever saw ; 'tis an Image of Patience. Speaking of a Maid in Love, he says,
She never told her Love,
But let Concealment, like a Worm i'th' Bud Feed on her Damask Cheek : She pin'd in Thought, And sate like Patience on a Monument, Smiling at Grief.
What an Image is here given ! and what a Task would it have been for the greatest Masters of Greece and Rome to have express 'd the Passions design'd by this Sketch of Statuary ? The Stile of his Comedy is, in general, Natural to the Characters, and easie in it self ; . and the Wit most commonly sprightly and pleasing, except in those places where he runs into Dogrel Rhymes, as in The Comedy of Errors, and a Passage or two in some other Plays. As for his Jingling sometimes, and playing upon Words, it was the common Vice of the Age he liv'd in : And if we find it in the Pulpit, made use of as an Ornament to the Sermons of some of the Gravest Divines of those Times ; perhaps it may not be thought too light for the Stage.
But certainly the greatness of this Author's Genius do's no where so much appear, as where he gives his Imagination an entire Loose, and raises his Fancy to a flight above Mankind and the Limits of the visible World. Such are his Attempts in The Tempest, Midsummer-Night's Dream, Macbeth and Hamlet. Of these, The Tempest, however it comes to be plac'd the first
' 212 r<
34 HOWE
by the former Publishers of his Works, can never have been the first written by him : It seems to me as perfect in its Kind, as almost any thing we have of his. One may observe, that the Unities are kept here with an Exactness uncommon to the Liberties of his Writing : Tho' that was what, I suppose, he valu'd himself least upon, since his Excellencies were all of another Kind. I am very sensible that he do's, in this Play, depart too much from that likeness to Truth which ought to be observ'd in these sort of Writings ; yet he do's it so very finely, that one is easily drawn in to have more Faith for his sake, than Eeason does well allow of. His Magick has something in it very Solemn and very Poetical : And that extravagant Character of Caliban is mighty well sustain'd, shews a wonderful Invention in the Author, who could strike out such a particular wild Image, and is certainly one of the finest and most uncommon Grotesques that was ever seen. The Observation, which I have been inform'd x three very great Men concurr'd in making upon this Part, was extremely just. That Shakespear had not only found out a new Character in his Caliban, but had also devis'd and adapted a new manner of Language for that Character. Among the particular Beauties of this Piece, I think one may be allow'd to point out the Tale of Prospero in the First Act ; his Speech to Ferdinand in the Fourth, upon the breaking up the Masque of Juno and Ceres ; and that in the Fifth, where he dis- solves his Charms, and resolves to break his Magick Eod. . . .
It is the same Magick that raises the Fairies in 1 LA. Falkland, Ld. C. J. Vaughan, and Mr. Selden.
PKEFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 35
Midsummer Night's Dream, the Witches in Macbeth, and the Ghost in Hamlet, with Thoughts and Language so proper to the Parts they sustain, and so peculiar to the Talent of this Writer. But of the two last of these Plays I shall have occasion to take notice, among the Tragedies of Mr. Shakespear. If one undertook to examine the greatest part of these by those Rules which are establish'd by Aristotle, and taken from the Model of the Grecian Stage, it would be no very hard Task to find a great many Faults : But as Shakespear liv'd under a kind of mere Light of Nature, and had never been made acquainted with the Regularity of those written Precepts, so it would be' hard to judge him by a Law he knew nothing of. We are to consider him as a Man that liv'd in a State of almost universal License and Ignorance : There was no establish'd Judge, but every one took the liberty to Write according to the Dictates of his own Fancy. When one considers, that there is not one Play before him of a Reputation good enough to entitle it to an Appearance on the present Stage, it cannot but be a Matter of great Wonder that he should advance Dramatick Poetry so far as he did. The Fable is what is generally plac'd the first, among those that are reckon'd the constituent Parts of a Tragick or Heroick Poem ; not, perhaps, as it is the most Difficult or Beautiful, but as it is the first properly to be thought of in the Contrivance and Course of the whole; and with the Fable ought to be consider'd, the fit Disposition, Order and Conduct of its several Parts. As it is not in this Province of the Drama that the Strength and Mastery of Shakespear lay, so I shall not undertake
36 KOWE
the tedious and ill-natur'd Trouble to point out the several Faults he was guilty of in it. His Tales were seldom invented, but rather taken either from true History, or Novels and Komances : And he commonly made use of 'em in that Order, with those Incidents, and that extent of Time in which he found 'em in the Authors from whence he borrow'd them. So The Winter's Tale, which is taken from an old Book, call'd, The Delectable History of Dorastus and Faunia, contains the space of sixteen or seventeen Years, and the Scene is sometimes laid in Bohemia, and some- times in Sicily, according to the original Order of the Story. Almost all his Historical Plays com- prehend a great length of Time, and very different and distinct Places : And in his Antony and Cleopatra, the Scene travels over the greatest Part of the Roman Empire. But in Kecompence for his Carelessness in this Point, when he comes to another Part of the Drama, The Manners of his Characters, in Acting or Speaking what is proper for them, and fit to be shown by the Poet, he may be generally justify'd, and in very many places greatly commended. For those Plays which he has taken from the English or Roman History, let any Man compare 'em, and he will find the Character as exact in the Poet as the Historian. He seems indeed so far from pro- posing to himself any one Action for a Subject, that the Title very often tells you, 'tis The Life of King John, King Eichard, &c. What can be more agreeable to the Idea our Historians give of Henry the Sixth, than the Picture Shakespear has drawn of him ! . His Manners are every where exactly the same with the Story ; one finds him
PEEFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 37
still deserib'd with Simplicity, passive Sanctity, want of Courage, weakness of Mind, and easie ^submission to the Governance of an imperious Wife, or prevailing Faction : Tho' at the same time the Poet do's Justice to his good Qualities, and moves the Pity of his Audience for him, by * showing him Pious, Disinterested, a Contemner of the Things of this World, and wholly resign'd to the severest Dispensations of God's Providence. There is a short Scene in the Second Part of Henry VI. [Act m, Sc. iii.] which I cannot but think admirable in its Kind. Cardinal Beau- fort, who had murder'd the Duke of Gloucester, is shewn in the last Agonies on his Death-Bed,' with the good King praying over him. There is so much Terror in one, so much Tenderness and V; moving Piety in the other, as must touch any one who is capable either of Fear or Pity In his Henry VIII. that Prince is drawn with that Grreatness of Mind, and all those good Qualities which are attributed to him in any Account of his Reign. If his Faults are not shewn in an equal degree, and the Shades in this Picture do not bear a just Proportion to the Lights, it is not that the Artist wanted either Colours or Skill in the Disposition of 'em ; but the truth, I believe, might be, that he forbore doing it out of regard to Queen Elizabeth, since it could have been no very great Respect to the Memory of his Mistress, to have expos'd some certain Parts of her Father's Life upon the Stage. He has dealt much -more freely with the Minister of that Great King, and certainly nothing was ever more justly written, than the Character of Cardinal Wolsey. He has shewn him Tyrannical, Cruel, and Insolent in his
38 KOWE
Prosperity ; and yet, by a wonderful Address, he makes his Fall and Kuin the Subject of general Compassion. The whole Man, with his Vices and Virtues, is finely and exactly describ'd in the second Scene of the fourth Act. The Distresses likewise of Queen Katherine, in this Play, are very movingly touch'd ; and tho' the Art of the Poet has skreen'd King Henry from any gross Imputa- tion of Injustice, yet one is inclin'd to wish, the Queen had met with a Fortune more worthy of her Birth and Virtue. Nor are the Manners, proper to the Persons represented, less justly observ'd, in those Characters taken from the Roman History ; and of this, the Fierceness and Impatience of Coriolanus, his Courage and Disdain of the common People, the Virtue and Philo- sophical Temper of Brutus, and the irregular Greatness of Mind in M. Antony, are beautiful Proofs. For the two last especially, you find 'em exactly as they are describ'd by Plutarch, from whom certainly Shakespear copy'd 'em. He has indeed followed his Original pretty close, and taken in several little Incidents that might have been spar'd in a Play. But, as I hinted before, his Design seems most commonly rather to describe those great Men in the several Fortunes and Accidents of their Lives, than to take any single great Action, and form his Work simply upon that. However, there are some of his Pieces, where the Fable is founded upon one Action only. Such are more especially, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello. The Design in Romeo and Juliet, is plainly the Punishment of their two Families, for the unreasonable Feuds and Animosities that had been so long kept up
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 39
between 'em, and occasion'd the Effusion of so much Blood. In the management of this Story, he has shewn something wonderfully Tender and Passionate in the Love-part, and very Pitiful in the Distress. Hamlet is founded on much the same Tale with the Electro, of Sophocles. In each of 'em a young Prince is engag'd to Revenge the Death of his Father, their Mothers are equally Guilty, are both concern'd in the Murder of their Husbands, and are afterwards married to the Murderers. There is in the first Part of the Greek Trajedy, something very moving in the Grief of Electro, ; but as Mr. D'Acier has observ'd, there is something very unnatural and shocking in the Manners he has given that Princess and Orestes in the latter Part. Orestes embrues his Hands in the Blood of his own Mother ; and that barbarous Action is perform'd, tho' not immediately upon the Stage, yet so near, that the Audience hear Clytemnestra crying out to Mgysihus for Help, and to her Son for Mercy : While Electro,, her Daughter, and a Princess, both of them Characters that ought to have appear'd with more Decency, stands upon the Stage and encourages her Brother in the Parricide. What Horror does this not raise ! Clytemnestra was a wicked Woman, and had deserv'd to Die ; nay, ' in the truth of the Story, she was kill'd by her own Son ; but to represent an Action of this Kind on the Stage, is certainly an Offence against those Rules of Manners proper to the Persons that ought to be observ'd there. On the contrary, let us only look a little on the Conduct of Shakespear. Hamlet is represented with the same Piety towards his Father, and Resolution to Revenge his Death, as
40 ROWE
Orestes ; he has the same Abhorrence for his Mother's Guilt, which, to provoke him the more, is heighten' d by Incest : But 'tis with wonderful Art and Justness of Judgment, that the Poet restrains him from doing Violence to his Mother. To prevent any thing of that Kind, he makes his Father's Ghost forbid that part of his Vengeance. .'- . • ^
But howsoever thou pursu'st this Act, Taint not thy Mind ; nor let thy Soul contrive Against thy Mother ought ; leave her to Heatfn, And to those Thorns that in her Bosom lodge, To prick and sting her.
[Act i, Sc. v.]
This is to distinguish rightly between Honor and Terror. The latter is a proper Passion of Tragedy, but the former ought always to be carefully avoided. And certainly no Dramatick Writer ever succeeded better in raising Terror in the Minds of an Audience than Shakespear has done. The whole Tragedy of Macbeth, but more especially the Scene where the King is murder'd, in the second Act, as well as this Play, is a noble Proof of that manly Spirit with which he writ ; and both shew how powerful he was, in giving the strongest Motions to our Souls that they are capable of. I cannot leave Hamlet, without taking notice of the Advantage with which we have seen this Master-piece of Shakespear dis- tinguish it self upon the Stage, by Mr. Betterton's fine Performance of that Part. A Man, who tho' he had no other good Qualities, as he has a great many, must have made his way into the Esteem of all Men of Letters, by this only Excellency. No Man is better acquainted with Shakespear'a
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 41
manner of Expression, and indeed he has study 'd him so well, and is so much a Master of him, that whatever Part of his he performs, he does it as if it had been written on purpose for him, and that the Author had exactly conceiv'd it as he plays it.
From 'Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear,' prefixed to Rowers edition of The Works of Mr. William Shakes- pear, 1709.
03
42
THE SPECTATOR
THE Age in which the Punn chiefly flourished, was the Reign of King James the First. . . . The greatest Authors, in their most serious Works, made frequent use of Punns. The Sermons of Bishop Andrews, and the Tragedies of Shakespear, are full of them. The Sinner was punned into Kepentance by the former, as in the latter nothing is more usual than to see a Hero weeping and quibbling for a dozen Lines together.
No. 61— May 10, 1711— by Addison.
The Gentleman who writ this Play [Shadwell's Lancashire Witches], and has drawn some Charac- ters in it very justly, appears to have been mis-led in his Witchcraft by an unwary following the inimitable Shakespear. The Incantations in Mack- beth have a Solemnity admirably adapted to the Occasion of that Tragedy, and fill the Mind with a suitable Horror ; besides, that the Witches are a part of the Story itself, as we find it very par- ticularly related in Hector Boetius, from whom he seems to have taken it. This therefore is a proper Machine where the Business is dark, horrid and bloody ; but is extreamly foreign from the Affair of Comedy. Subjects of this kind, which are in themselves disagreeable, can at no
THE SPECTATOR 43
time become entertaining, but by passing thro' an Imagination like Shakespear'a to form them; for which Reason Mr. Dryden wou'd not allow even Beaumont and Fletcher capable of imitating him.
But Shakespear's Magick cou'd not copy'd be, Within that Circle none durst Walk but He.
No. 141— August 11, 1711— bySteele.
Among great Genius's, those few draw the Admiration of all the World upon them, and stand up as the Prodigies of Mankind, who by the meer Strength of natural Parts, and without any Assistance of Art or Learning, have produced Works that were the Delight of their own Times and the Wonder of Posterity. There appears some- thing nobly wild and extravagant in these great natural Genius's, that is infinitely more beautiful than all the Turn and Polishing of what the French call a Bel Esprit, by which they would express a Genius refined by Conversation, Reflec- tion, and the Reading of the most polite Authors. The greatest Genius which runs through the Arts and Sciences, takes a kind of Tincture from them, and falls unavoidably into Imitation.
Many of these great natural Genius's that were never disciplined and broken by Rules of Art, are to be found among the Ancients, and in particular among those of the more Eastern Parts of the World. Homer has innumerable Flights that Virgil was not able to reach, and in the Old Testament we find several Passages more elevated and sublime than any in Homer. At the same Time that we allow a greater and more daring Genius to the Ancients, we must own that the
44 THE SPECTATOR
greatest of them very much failed in, or, if you will, that they were much above the Nicety and Correctness of the Moderns. . . . Our Countryman Shakespear was a remarkable Instance of this first kind of great Genius's.
No. 160— September 3, 1711— by Addison.
IT shews a greater Genius in Shakespear to have drawn his Galyban, than his Hotspur or Julius Ccesar : The one was to be supplied out of his own Imagination, whereas the other might have been formed upon Tradition, History and Observa- tion.
No. 279— January 19, 1712— by Addison.
THERE is a kind of Writing, wherein the Poet quite loses sight of Nature, and entertains his Reader's Imagination with the Characters and Actions of such Persons as have many of them no Existence, but what he bestows on them. Such are Fairies, Witches, Magicians, Demons, and departed Spirits. This Mr. Dryden calls the Fairy way of Writing, which is, indeed, more difficult than any other that depends on the Poet's Fancy, because he has no Pattern to follow in it, and must work altogether out of his own Invention.
There is a very odd turn of Thought required for this sort of Writing, and it is impossible for a Poet to succeed in it, who has not a particular Cast of Fancy, and an Imagination naturally fruitful and superstitious. . . .
Among the English, Shakespear has incomparably excelled all others. That noble Extravagance of Fancy, which he had in so great Perfection,
THE SPECTATOR 45
throughly qualified him to touch this weak superstitious Part of his Reader's Imagination ; and made him capable of succeeding, where he had nothing to support him besides the Strength of his own Genius. There is something so wild and yet so solemn in the Speeches of his Ghosts, Fairies, Witches and the like Imaginary Persons, that we cannot forbear thinking them natural, tho' we have no Rule by which to judge of them, and must confess, if there are such Beings in the World, it looks highly probable they should talk and act as he has represented them.
No. 419— July 1, 1712— by Addison.
OUR Criticks do not seem sensible that there is more Beauty in the Works of a great Genius who is ignorant of the Rules of Art, than in those of a little Genius who knows and observes them. It is of these Men of Genius that Terence speaks, in opposition to the little artificial Cavillers of his Time;
Quorum cemulari exoptat negligentiam Potiiis, quam istorum obscurant diligentiam.
A Critick may have the same Consolation in the ill Success of his Play, as Dr. South tells us a Physician has at the Death of a Patient, That he was killed secundum artem. Our inimitable Shakespear is a Stumbling-block to the whole Tribe of these rigid Criticks. Who would not rather read one of his Plays, where there is not a single Rule of the Stage observed, than any Production of a modern Critick, where there is
46 THE SPECTATOR
not one of them violated ? Shakespear was indeed born with all the Seeds of Poetry, and may be compared to the Stone in Pyrrhus's Ring, which, as Pliny tells us, had the Figure of Apollo and the Nine Muses in the Veins of it, produced by the spontaneous Hand of Nature, without any Help from Art.1
No. 592 — September 10, 1714 — by Addison.
1 The views expressed by Addison in this passage had been frequently expressed by Dryden. For example, in the ' Dedication of the ^Eneis,' 1697, he said ' better a Mechanick Rule were stretch' d or broken, than a great Beauty were omitted ' ; and in the Prologue to Love Triumphant, 1694, he referred thus to Thomas Bymer, who had attacked Shakespeare's art in A Short View of Tragedy, 1693, and had himself written a tragedy entitled Edgar : —
To Shakespear's Critique he bequeaths the Curse, To find his faults ; and yet himself make worse ; A precious Reader in Poetique Schools, Who by his own Examples damns his Rules.
ALEXANDER POPE
IT is not my design to enter into a Criticism upon this Author ; tho' to do it effectually and not superficially, would be the best occasion that any just Writer could take, to form the judgment and taste of our nation. For of all English Poets, Shakespear must be confessed to be the Jairest ancl iullest subject lor Criticism, and to afford the most numerous, as well as most conspicuous instances, both of Beauties and Faults of all sorts. But this far exceeds the bounds of a Pre- face, the business of which is only to give an account of the fate of his Works, and the dis- advantages under which they have been trans- mitted to us. We shall hereby extenuate many faults which are his, and clear him from the imputation of many which are not : A design, which tho' it can be no guide to future Criticks to do him justice in one way, will at least be sufficient to prevent their doing him an injustice in the other.
I cannot however but mention some of his principal and characteristic Excellencies, for which (notwithstanding his defects) he is justly and universally elevated above all other Dramatic Writers. Not that this is the proper place of praising him, but because I would not omit any occasion of doing it.
f ever any Author deserved the name of an
I Original, it was Shakespear. Homer himself drew | not his art so immediately from the fountains of •' Nature, HT'proceeded thro' ^Egyptian strainers
and channels, and came to him not without some tincture of the learning, or some cast of the models, of those before him. The Poetry _of Shakespear was Inspiration indeed": he is npt_so much an Imitator, as an Instrument, of Nature ; and 'tis not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks thro' him.
His Characters are so much Nature her self, that 'tis a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as Copies of her. Those of other Poets have a constant resemblance, which shews that they receiv'd them from one another, and were but multiplyers of the same image : each picture like a mock-rainbow is but the reflexion of a re- (, flexion. But every single character in Shakespear
II is as much an Individual, as those in Life itself ; it is as impossible to find any two alike ; and such as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be Twins, will upon comparison be found remarkably distinct. To this life and variety of Character, we must add the wonderful Preservation of it ; which is such throughout his plays, that had all the Speeches been printed without the very names of the Persons, I believe one might have apply'd them with certainty to every speaker.
The Power over our Passions was never possess'd in a more eminent degree, or display 'd in so different instances. Yet all along, there is seen no laBour, no pains to raise them ; no preparation to guide our guess to the effect, or be perceiv'd
K*_ frttxtvu^Jut *•
(r-et^v^f
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE
•0*
to lead toward it : But the heart swel]s, and the tears burst out, just atjthe proper places : We are surpriz'd, the moment we weep ; and yet upon reflection find the passion so just, that we shou'd be surpriz'd if we had not wept, and wept at that very moment.
How astonishing is it again, that the passions directly opposite to these, Laughter and Spleen, are no less at his command ! that he is not more a master of the Great, than of the Ridiculous in human nature ; of our noblest tendernesses, than of our vainest foibles ; of our strongest emotions, than of our idlest sensations !
Nor does he only excell in the Passions : In the coolness of Reflection and Reasoning he is full as admirable. His Sentiments are not only in general the most pertinent and judicious upon every subject ; but by a talent very peculiar, something between Penetration and Felicity, he hits upon that particular point on which the bent of each argument turns, or the force of each motive depends. This is perfectly amazing, from a man of no education or experience in those great and publick scenes of life which are usually the subject of his thoughts : So that he seems to have known j ! the world by Intuition, to have look'd thro' ', humane nature at one glance, and to be the onlyf! Author that gives ground for a very new opinion, That the Philosopher and even the Man of the , world, may be Born, as well as the Poet.
It must be own'd that with all these great excellencies, he has almost as great defects ; and that as he has certainly written better, so he has perhaps written worse, than any other. But I think I can in some measure account for these
vv<4*
defects, from several causes and accidents ; with- out which it is hard to imagine that so large and so enlighten'd a mind could ever have been susceptible of them. That all these Contingencies should unite to his disadvantage seems to me almost as singularly unlucky, as that so many various (nay contrary) Talents should meet in one man, was happy and extraordinary.
It must be allowed that Stage-Poetry of all other, is more particularly levelFd to please the Populace, and its success more immediately depend- ing upon the Common Suffrage. One cannot therefore wonder, if Shakespear having at his first appearance no other aim in his writings than to procure a subsistance, directed his endeavours solely to hit the taste and humour that then prevailed. The Audience was generally composed of the meaner sort of people ; and therefore the Images of Life were to be drawn from those of their own rank : accordingly we find, that not our Author's only but almost all the old Comedies have their Scene among Tradesmen and Mechanicks : And even their Historical Plays strictly follow the common Old Stories or Vulgar Traditions of that kind of people. In Tragedy, nothing was so sure to Surprize and cause Admira- tion, as the most strange, unexpected, and con- sequently most unnatural, Events and Incidents ; the most exaggerated Thoughts ; the most verbose and bombast Expression ; the most pompous Rhymes, and thundering Versification. In Comedy, nothing was so sure to please, as mean buffoonry, vile ribaldry, and unmannerly jests of fools and clowns. Yet even in these, our Author's Wit buoys up, and is born above his subject : his
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE
Genius in those low parts is like some Prince of a Romance in the disguise of a Shepherd or Peasant ; a certain Greatness and Spirit now and then break out, which manifest his higher extrac- tion and qualities.
It may be added, that not only the common Audience had no notion of the rules of writing, but few even of the better sort piqu'd themselves upon any great degree of knowledge or nicety \ that way ; till Ben Johnson getting possession of the Stage, brought critical learning into vogue : And that this was not done without difficulty, may appear from those frequent lessons (and indeed almost Declamations) which he was forced to prefix to his first plays, and put into the mouth of his Actors, the Grex, Chorus, &c. to remove the prejudices, and inform the judgment of his hearers. Till then, our Authors had no thoughts I of writing on the model of the Ancients : their | Tragedies were only Histories in Dialogue ; and their Comedies follow'd the thread of any Novel as they iound it, no less implicitly than if it had been true History.
To judge therefore of Shakespear by Aristotle's 1 rules, is like trying a man by the Laws of one ! Country, who acted under those of another. He \ writ to the People ; and writ at first without l patronage from the better sort, and therefore without aims of pleasing them : without assist- ance or advice from the Learned, as without the advantage of education or acquaintance among them: without that knowledge of the best ' models, the Ancients, to inspire him with an emulation of them ; in a word, without any views * of~Reputation, and of what Poets are pleas'd to
52 POPE
call Immortality : Some or all of which have encourag'd the vanity, or animated the ambition, of other writers.
Yet it must be observ'd, that when his perform- ances had merited the protection of his Prince, and when the encouragement of the Court had succeeded to that of the Town ; the works of his riper years are manifestly raised above those of his former. The Dates of his plays sufficiently evidence that his productions improved, in pro- portion to the respect he had for his auditors. And I make no doubt this observation would be found true in every instance, were but Editions extant from which we might learn the exact time when every piece was composed, and whether writ for the Town, or the Court.
Another Cause (and no less strong than the former) may be deduced from our Author's being a Player, and forming himself first upon the judgments of that body of men whereof he was a member. They have ever had a Standard to themselves, upon other principles than -those of Aristotle. As they live by the Majority, they know no rule but that of pleasing the present humour, and complying with the wit in fashion ; a consideration which brings all their judgment to a short point. Players are just such judges of what is right, as Taylors are of what is graceful. And in this view it will be but fair to allow, that most of our Author's faults are less to be ascribed to his wrong judgment as a Poet, than to his right judgment as a Player.
By these men it was thought a praise to ShaJce- spear, that he scarce ever blotted a line. This they industriously propagated, as appears from what
PEEFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 53
we are told by Ben Johnson in his Discoveries, and from the preface of Heminges and Condell to the first folio Edition. But in reality (however it has prevailed) there never was a more ground- less report, or to the contrary of which there are more undeniable evidences. As, the Comedy of the Merry Wives of Windsor, which he entirely new writ ; the History of Henry the 6th, which was first published under the Title of the Con- tention of York and Lancaster ; and that of Henry the 5th, extreamly improved ; that of Hamlet enlarged to almost as much again as at first, and many others. I believe the common opinion of his want of Learning proceeded from no better ground. This too might be thought a Praise by some ; and to this his Errors have as injudiciously been ascribed by others. For 'tis certain, were it true, it could concern but a small part of them ; the most are such as are not properly Defects, but Superfoetations : and arise not from want of learning or reading, but from want of thinking or judging : or rather (to be more just to our Author) from a compliance to those wants in others. As to a wrong choice of the subject, a wrong conduct of the incidents, false thoughts, forc'd expressions, dec. if these are not to be ascrib'd to the foresaid accidental reasons, they must be charg'd upon the Poet himself, and there is no help for it. But I thyik the two Disadvantages which I have mentioned (to be obliged to please the lowest of people, and to keep the worst of company) if the considera- tion be extended as far as it reasonably may, will appear sufficient to mis-lead and depress the greatest Genius upon earth. Nay the more
modesty witli which such a one is endued, the more he is in danger of submitting and conforming to others, against his own better judgment.
But as to his Want of Learning, it may be neces- sary to say something more : There is certainly a vast difference between Learning an9 Languages. How far he was ignorant of the latter, I cannot determine ; but 'tis plain he had much Eeading at least, if tney will not call it Learning. Nor is it any great matter, if a man has Knowledge, whether he has it from one language or from another. Nothing is more evident than that he had a taste of natural Philosophy, Mechanicks, ancient and modern History, Poetical learning and Mythology : We find him very knowing in the customs, rites, and manners of Antiquity. In Coriolanus and Julius Ccesar, not only the Spirit, but Manners, of the Romans are exactly drawn ; and still a nicer distinction is shown, between the manners of the Romans in the time of the former, and of the latter. His reading in the ancient Historians is no less conspicuous, in many references to particular passages : and the speeches copy'd from Plutarch in Coriolanus may, I think, as well be made an instance of his learning, as those copy'd from Cicero in Catiline, of Ben John- son's. The manners of other nations in general, the Egyptians, Venetians, French, &c. are drawn with equal propriety. Whatever object of nature, or branch of science, he either speaks of or des- cribes ; it is always with competent, if not extensive knowledge : his descriptions are still exact ; all his metaphors appropriated, and remarkably drawn from the true nature and inherent qualities of each subject. When he treats of Ethic or
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 55
Politic, we may constantly observe a wonderful justness of distinction, as well as extent of com- prehension. No one is more a master of the Poetical story, or has more frequent allusions to the various parts of it : Mr. Waller (who has been celebrated for this last particular) has not shown more learning this way than Shakespear. We have Translations from Ovid published in his name, among those Poems which pass for his, and for some of which we have undoubted authority, (being published by himself, and dedicated to his noble Patron the Earl of Southampton :) He appears also to have been conversant in Plautus, from whom he has taken the plot of one of his plays : he follows the Greek Authors, and particularly Dares Phrygius, in another : (altho' I will not pretend to say in what language he read them.) The modern Italian writers of Novels he was manifestly acquainted with ; and we may con- clude him to be no less conversant with the Ancients of his own country, from the use he has made of Chaucer in Troilus and Cressida, and in the Two Noble Kinsmen, if that Play be his, as there goes a Tradition it was, (and indeed it has little resemblance of Fletcher, and more of our Author than some of those which have been received as genuine.)
I am inclined to think, this opinion proceeded originally from the zeal of the Partizans of our Author and Ben Johnson ; as they endeavoured to exalt the one at the expence of the other. It is ever the nature of Parties to be in extremes ; and nothing is so probable, as that because Ben Johnson had much the most learning, it was said on the one hand that Shakespear had none at all ;
56 POPE
and because Shakespear had much the most wit and fancy, it was retorted on the other, that Johnson wanted both. Because Shakespear bor- rowed nothing, it was said that Ben Johnson borrowed every thing. Because Johnson did not write extempore, he was reproached with being a year about every piece ; and because Shakespear wrote with ease and rapidity, they cryed, he never once made a blot. Nay the spirit of opposi- tion ran so high, that whatever those of the one side objected to the other, was taken at the rebound, and turned into Praises ; as injudiciously, as their antagonists before had made them Objec- tions. . . .
I will conclude by saying of Shakespear, that ' , with all his faults, and with all the irregularity of his Drama, one may look upon his works, in comparison of those that are more finish'd and regular, as upon an ancient majestick piece ofN Gothick Architecture, compar'd with a neat Modern , building : The latter is more elegant and glaring,'^ but the former is more strong and more solemn. It must be allow'd, that in one of these there are materials enough to make many of the other. It has much the greater variety, and much the nobler apartments ; tho' we are often conducted to them by dark, odd, and uncouth passages. Nor does the Whole fail to strike us with greater reverence, tho' many of the Parts are childish, • ill-plac'd, and unequal to its grandeur.
From the Preface to Pope's edition of The Works of Shakespear, 1725.
SHAKESPEARE 57
SHAKESPEAR, (whom you and ev'ry Play-house bill Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight, And grew Immortal in his own despight.
Late, very late, correctness grew our care,
When the tir'd nation breath' d from civil war.
Exact Racine, and Corneille's noble fire
Show'd us that France had something to admire.
Not but the Tragic spirit was our own,
And full in Shakespear, fair in Otway shone :
But Otway fail'd to polish or refine,
And fluent Shakespear scarce eflac'd a line.
Ev'n copious Dryden wanted, or forgot,
The last and greatest Art, the Art to blot.
From the Epistk ' To Augustus,' 1737, 11. 69-72, 272-281.
58
THOMAS GRAY
IN truth, Shakespear's language is one of his principal beauties ; and he has no less advantage over your Addisons and Rowes in this, than in those other great excellencies you mention. Every word in him is a picture. Pray put me the follow- ing lines into the tongue of our modern Dramatics :
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass :
I, that am rudely stampt, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph :
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up —
And what follows. To me they appear untrans- latable ; and if this be the case, our language is greatly degenerated.
From a Letter to Richard West, April 1742 (first published in Mason's ' Memoirs of Gray,' 1775).
FAR from the sun and summer-gale, In thy l green lap was Nature's Darling laid, What time, where lucid Avon stray'd, To Him the mighty Mother did unveil Her aweful face : The dauntless Child Stretch'd forth his little arms, and smiled.
1 Albion's.
THOMAS GRAY 59
This pencil take (she said) whose colours clear
Richly paint the vernal year :
Thine too these golden keys, immortal Boy !
This can unlock the gates of Joy ;
Of Honour that, and thrilling Fears,
Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic Tears.
From The Progress of Poesy, 1757.
60
JOSEPH WARTON
The Tempest.1
WRITERS of a mixed character, that abound in transcendent beauties and in gross imperfections, are the most proper and most pregnant subjects for criticism. The regularity and correctness of a Virgil or Horace, almost confine their commen- tators to perpetual panegyric, and afford them few opportunities of diversifying their remarks by the detection of latent blemishes. For this reason, I am inclined to think, that a few observa- tions on the writings of Shakespeare, will not be deemed useless or unentertaining, because he exhibits more numerous examples of excellencies and faults, of every kind, than are, perhaps, to be discovered in any other author. I shall, therefore, from time to time, examine his merit as a poet, without blind admiration, or wanton invective.
As Shakespeare is sometimes blameable for the conduct of his fables, which have no unity ; and sometimes for his diction, which is obscure and
1 Warton's five papers in The Adventurer on The Tempest and King Lear have the historical interest of being the first pieces of Shakespeare criticism to form a series in a periodi- cal. In this respect they correspond to Addison's papers on Milton in The Spectator.
In 1715 Lewis Theobald had contributed to The Censor two papers (Nos. 7 and 10) on King Lear. The first of them gives ' an abstract of the real story,' and only the second is critical.
THE TEMPEST 61
turgid; so his characteristical excellencies may possibly be reduced to these three general heads : ' his lively creative imagination ; his strokes of nature and passion ; and his preservation of the consistency of his characters.' These excellencies, particularly the last, are of so much importance in the drama, that they amply compensate for his transgressions against the rules of Time and Place, which being of a more mechanical nature, are often strictly observed by a genius of the lowest order ; but to portraye characters naturally, and to preserve them uniformly, requires such an intimate knowledge of the heart of man, and is so rare a portion of felicity, as to have been enjoyed, perhaps, only by two writers, Homer and Shake- speare.
Of all the plays of Shakespeare, the Tempest is the most striking instance of his creative power. He has there given the reins to his boundless imagination, and has carried the romantic, the wonderful, and the wild, to the most pleasing extravagance. The scene is a desolate island ; and the characters the most new and singular that can well be conceived ; a prince who practises magic, an attendant spirit, a monster the son of a witch, and a young lady who had been brought to this solitude in her infancy, and had never beheld a man except her father.
As I have affirmed that Shakespeare's chief excellence is the consistency of his characters, I will exemplify the truth of this remark, by pointing out some master-strokes of this nature in the drama before us. ...
From The Adventurer, No. 93. September 25, 1753.
62 JOSEPH WAKTON
' Whoever ventures,' says Horace, ' to form a character totally original, let him endeavour to preserve it with uniformity and consistency ; but the formation of an original character is a work of great difficulty and hazard.' In this arduous and uncommon task, however, Shakespeare has wonderfully succeeded inhis Tempest : the monster Calyban is the creature of his own imagination, in the formation of which he could derive no assist- ance from observation or experience.
Calyban is the son of a witch begotten by a demon : the sorceries of his mother were so terrible, that her countrymen banished her into this desart island as unfit for human society : in conformity, therefore, to this diabolical propaga- tion, he is represented as a prodigy of cruelty, malice, pride, ignorance, idleness, gluttony, and lust. He is introduced with great propriety, cursing Prospero and Miranda whom he had endeavoured to defile ; and his execrations are artfully contrived to have reference to the occupa- tions of his mother :
As wicked dew, as e'er my mother brush'd With raven's feather from unwholesome fen,
Drop on you both !
All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you !
His kindness is, afterwards, expressed as much in character, as his hatred, by an enumeration of offices, that could be of value only in a desolate island, and in the estimation of a savage :
I pr'ythee, let me bring thee where crabs grow ; And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts ; Shew thee a jay's nest ; and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmazet. I'll bring thee
THE TEMPEST 63
To clust'ring filberds ; and sometimes I'll get thee
Young sea-malls from the rock
I'll shew thee the best springs ; I'll pluck thee berries ; I'll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough.
Which last is, indeed, a circumstance of great use in a place, where to be defended from the cold was neither easy nor usual ; and it has a farther peculiar beauty, because the gathering wood was the occupation to which Calyban was subjected by Prospero, who, therefore, deemed it a service of high importance.
The gross ignorance of this monster is repre- sented with delicate judgment : he knew not the names of the sun and moon, which he calls the bigger light and the less ; and he believes that Stephano was the man in the moon, whom his mistress had often shewn him : and when Prospero reminds him that he first taught him to pronounce articulately, his 'answer is full of malevolence and Tage :
You taught me language ; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse :
the properest return for such a fiend to make for such a favour. The spirits whom he supposes to be employed by Prospero perpetually to torment him, and the many forms and different methods they take for this purpose, are described with the utmost liveliness and force of fancy :
Sometimes like apes, that moe and chatter at me, And after bite me ; then like hedge-hogs, which Lie tumbling in my bare-foot way, and mount Their pricks at my foot-fall : sometimes am I All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues Do hiss me into madness.
It is scarcely possible for any speech to be more
64 JOSEPH WARTON
expressive of the manners and sentiments, than that in which our poet has painted the brutal barbarity and unfeeling savageness of this son of Sycorax, by making him enumerate, with a kind of horrible delight, the various ways in which it was possible for the drunken sailors to surprize and, kill his master :
-There thou may'st brain him,
Having first seiz'd his books ; or with a log Batter his skull ; or paunch him with a stake ; Or cut his wezand with thy knife
He adds, in allusion to his own abominable attempt, ' above all be sure to secure the daughter ; whose beauty, he tells them, is incomparable.' The charms of Miranda could not be more exalted, than by extorting this testimony from so insensible a monster.
Shakespeare seems to be the only poet who possesses the power of uniting poetry with pro- priety of character ; of which I know not an instance more striking, than the image Calyban makes use of to express silence, which is at once highly poetical and exactly suited to the wildness of the speaker :
Pray you tread softly, that the blind mole may not Hear a foot-fall.
I always lament that our author has not pre- served this fierce and implacable spirit in Calyban, to the end of the play ; instead of which, he has, I think, injudiciously put into his mouth, words that imply repentance and understanding :
I'll be wise hereafter
And seek for grace. What a thrice double ass Was I, to take this drunkard for a God, And worship this dull fool !
THE TEMPEST 65
It must not be forgotten, that Shakespeare has artfully taken occasion from this extraordinary character, which is finely contrasted to the mild- ness and obedience of Ariel, obliquely to satirize the prevailing passion for new and wonderful sights, which has rendered the English so ridiculous. ' Were I in England now,' says Trinculo, on first discovering Calyban, ' and had but this fish painted, not an holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. — When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame begger, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.'
Such is the inexhaustable plenty of our poet's nvention, that he has exhibited another character n this play, entirely his own ; that of the lovely and innocent Miranda.
When Prospero first gives her a sight of Prince Ferdinand, she eagerly exclaims,
What is't ? a spirit ?
Lord, how it looks about ! Believe me, Sir, It carries a brave form. But 'tis a spirit.
ler imagining that as he was so beautiful he nust necessarily be one of her father's aerial ,gents, is a stroke of nature worthy admiration : ,s are likewise her entreaties to her father not to ise him harshly, by the power of his art ;
Why speaks my father so ungently ? This Is the third man that e'er I saw ; the first That e'er I sigh'd for !
Here we perceive the beginning of that passion, rhich Prospero was desirous she should feel for he prince ; and which she afterwards more fully xpresses upon an occasion which displays at nee the tenderness, the innocence, and the
212 T>
66 JOSEPH WARTON
simplicity of her character. She discovers her lover employed in the laborious task of carrying wood, which Prospero had enjoined him to perform. ' Would/ says she, ' the lightning had burnt up those logs that you are enjoined to pile ! '
If you'll sit down
I'll bear your logs the while. Pray give me that,
I'll carry't to the pile.
You look wearily.
It is by selecting such little and almost imper- ceptible circumstances, that Shakespeare has more truly painted the passions than any other writer : affection is more powerfully expressed by this simple wish and otter of assistance, than by the unnatural eloquence and witticisms of Dryden, or the amorous declamations of Kowe.
The resentment of Prospero for the matchless cruelty and wicked usurpation of his brother ; his parental affection and solicitude for the welfare of his daughter, the heiress of his dukedom ; and .the awful solemnity of his character, as a skilful magician ; are all along preserved with equal consistency, dignity, and decorum. One part of his behaviour deserves to be particularly pointed out : during the exhibition of a mask with which he had ordered Ariel to entertain Ferdinand and Miranda, he starts suddenly from the recollection of the conspiracy of Calyban and his confederates against his life, and dismisses his attendant spirits, who instantly vanish to a hollow and confused noise. He appears to be greatly moved ; and suitably to this agitation of mind,i which his danger has excited, he takes occasion, from the sudden disappearance of the visionary
THE TEMPEST 67
scene, to moralize on the dissolution of all
things :
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits ; and Are melted into air, into thin air. And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve ; And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind
To these noble- images he adds a short but com- prehensive observation on human life, not excelled by any passage of the moral and 'sententious Euripides :
• We are such stuff
As dreams are made on ; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep !
Thus admirably is an uniformity of character, that leading beauty in dramatic poesy, preserved throughout the Tempest. And it may be farther remarked, that the unities of action, of place, and of time, are in this play, though almost constantly violated by Shakespeare, exactly observed. The action is one, great, and entire, the restoration of Prospero to his dukedom ; this business is trans- acted in the compass of a small island, and in or aear the cave of Prospero ; though, indeed, it had been more artful and regular to have confined it ;o this single spot ; and the time which the action ifckes up, is only equal to that of the represents ;ion ; an excellence which ought always to be umed at in every well-conducted fable, and for :he want of which a variety of the most entertain- ng incidents can scarcely atone.
The Adventurer, No. 97. October 9, 1753.
68 JOSEPH WAETON
King Lear.
ONE of the most remarkable differences betwixt ancient and modern tragedy, arises from the prevailing custom of describing only those dis- tresses that are occasioned by the passion of love ; a passion which, from the universality of its dominion, may doubtless justly claim a large share in representations of human life ; but which, by totally engrossing the theatre, hath contributed to degrade that noble school of virtue into an academy of effeminacy.
When Kacine persuaded the celebrated Arnauld to read his Phcedra, ' Why,' said that severe critic to his friend, ' have you falsified the manners of Hippolitus, and represented him, in love ? '• ' Alas ! ' replied the poet, ' without that circum- stance, how would the ladies and the beaux have received my piece ? ' And it may well be imagined, that to gratify so considerable and important a part of his audience, was the powerful motive that induced Corneille to enervate even the matchless and affecting story of (Edipus, by the frigid and impertinent episode of Theseus's passion for Dirce.
Shakespeare has shewn us, by his Hamlet, Macbeth, and Ccesar, and above all by his Lear, that very interesting tragedies may be written, that are not founded on gallantry and love ; and that Boileau was mistaken, when he affirmed,
— de Tamour la sensible peinture,
Est pour atter au cceur la route lu plus sure.
Those tender scenes that pictur'd love impart, Insure success and best engage the heart.
KING LEAR 69
The distresses in this tragedy are of a very ncommon nature, and are not touched upon by ny othei dramatic author. They are occasioned y a rash resolution of an aged monarch of strong assions and quick sensibility, to resign his crown nd to divide his kingdom amongst his three aughters ; the youngest of whom, who was his avourite, not answering his sanguine expectations i expressions of affection to him, he for ever anishes, and endows her sisters with her allotted lare. Their unnatural ingratitude, the intoler- ble affronts indignities and cruelties he suffers rom them, and the remorse he feels from his mprudent resignation of his power, at first nflame him with the most violent rage, and by egrees drive him to madness and death. This
the outline of the fable.
I shall confine myself at present to consider ngly the judgment and art of the poet, in describ- ig the origin and progress of the distraction of ear ; in which, I think, he has succeeded better lan any other writer ; even than Euripides imself, whom Longinus so highly commends for lis representation of the madness of Orestes.
It is well contrived, that the first affront that is ffered Lear, should be a proposal from Gonerill, is ejdest daughter, to lessen the number of his nights, which must needs affect and irritate a per- on so jealous of his rank and the respect due to it. le is at first astonished at the complicated impu- ence and ingratitude of this design ; but quickly indies into rage, and resolves to depart instantly :
Darkness and devils ! —
Saddle my horses, call my train together — Degen'rate bastard, I'll not trouble thee. —
70 JOSEPH WAETON
This is followed by a severe reflection upon his own folly for resigning his crown ; and a solemn invocation to Nature, to heap the most horrible curses on the head of Gonerill, that her own off- spring may prove equally cruel and unnatural ;
-That she may feel,
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is, To have a thankless child !
When Albany demands the cause of this passion, Lear answers, ' I'll tell thee ! ' but immediately cries out to Gonerill,
-Life and death ! I am asham'd,
That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus.
Blasts and fogs upon thee !
Th' untented woundings of a father's curse Pierce every sense about thee !
He stops a little and reflects :
Ha ! is it come to this ? Let it be so ! I have another daughter, Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable. When she shaft hear this of thee, with her nails She'll flea thy wolfish visage
He was, however, mistaken ; for the first object he encounters in the castle of the Earl of Gloucester, whither he fled to meet his other daughter, was his servant in the stocks ; from whence he may easily conjecture what reception he is to meet with:
-Death on my state ! Wherefore
Should he sit here ? He adds immediately afterwards,
0 me, my heart ! my rising heart ! — but down. By which single line, the inexpressible anguish of
KING LEAK 71
his mind, and the dreadful conflict of opposite passions with which it is agitated, are more forcibly expressed, than by the long and laboured speech, enumerating the causes of his anguish, that Kowe and other modern tragic writers would certainly have put into his mouth. But Nature, Sophocles, and Shakspeare, represent the feelings of the heart in a different manner ; by a broken hint, a short exclamation, a word, or a look :
They mingle not, 'mid deep-felt sighs and groans,
Descriptions gay, or quaint comparisons.
No flowery far-fetch'd thoughts their scenes admit -
Ul suits conceit with passion, woe with wit.
Here passion prompts each short, expressive speeih •
Or silence paints what words can never reach. J. W.
When Jocasta, in Sophocles, has discovered that (Edipus was the murderer of her husband, she immediately leaves the stage ; but in Corneille and Dryden, she continues on it during a whole scene, to bewail her destiny in set speeches. I should be guilty of insensibility and injustice, I did not take this occasion to acknowledge, that I have been more moved and delighted, by hearing this single line spoken by the only actor of the age who understands and relishes these little touches of nature, and therefore the only one qualified to personate this most difficult character of Lear, than by the most pompous declaimer of the most pompous speeches in Cato
Tamerlane.
From The Adventurer, No. 113. December 4 1753.
72 JOSEPH WARTON
THUNDER and a ghost have been frequently introduced into tragedy by barren and mechanical play- wrights, as proper objects to impress terror and astonishment, where the distress has not been important enough to render it probable that nature would interpose for the sake of the sufferers, and where these objects themselves have not been supported by suitable sentiments. Thunder has, however, been made use of with great judgment and good effect by Shakespeare, to heighten and impress the distresses of Lear.
The venerable and wretched old king is driven out by both his daughters, without necessaries and without attendants, not only in the night, but in the midst of a most dreadful storm, and on a bleak and barren heath. On his first appear- ance in this situation, he draws an artful and pathetic comparison betwixt the severity of the tempest and of his daughters :
Bumble thy belly full ! spit, fire ! spout, rain ! Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters. I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness ; I never gave you kingdom, called you children ; You owe me no subscription. Then let fall Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave ; A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man !
The storm continuing with equal violence, he drops for a moment the consideration of his own miseries, and takes occasion to moralize on the terrors which such commotions of nature should raise in the breast of secret and unpunished villainy :
Tremble thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged crimes Unwhipt of justice ! Hide thee, thou bloody hand ; Thou perjur'd, and thou simular of virtue
KING LEAK 73
That art incestuous ! —
— Close pent-up guilts Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace ! —
He adds, with, reference to his own case,
-I am a man
More sinn'd against, than sinning.
Kent most earnestly entreats him to enter a hovel which he had discovered on the heath ; and on pressing him again and again to take shelter there, Lear exclaims,
Wilt break my heart ?
Much is contained in these four words ; as if he had said, ' the kindness and the gratitude of this servant exceeds that of my own children. Tho' I have given them a kingdom, yet have they basely discarded me, and suffered a head so old and white as mine to be exposed to this terrible tempest, while this fellow pities and would protect me from its rage. I cannot bear tnis kindness from a perfect stranger ; it breaks my heart.' All this seems to be included in that short exclama- tion, which another writer, less acquainted with nature, would have displayed at large : such a suppression of sentiments plainly implied, is judicious and affecting. The reflections that follow are drawn likewise from an intimate know- ledge of man :
When the mind's free,
The body's delicate : the tempest in my mind Doth from my senses take all feeling else, Save what beats there.
Here the remembrance of his daughters behaviour D3
74 JOSEPH WARTON
rushes upon him, and he exclaims, full of the idea of its unparalleled cruelty,
Filial ingratitude !
Is it not, as this mouth should tear this hand For lifting food to it ! —
He then changes his stile, and vows with impotent menaces, as if still in possession of the power he had resigned, to revenge himself on his oppressors, and to steel his breast with fortitude :
-But I'll punish home.
No, I will weep no more ! —
But the sense of his sufferings returns again, and he forgets the resolution he had formed the moment before :
In such a night,
To shut me out ? — Pour on, I will endure —
In such a night as this ?
At which, with a beautiful apostrophe, he sud- denly addresses himself to his absent daughters, tenderly reminding them of the favours he had so lately and so liberally conferred upon them :
0 Regan, Gonerill,
Your old kind father ; whose frank heart gave all ! — 0 that way madness lies ; let me shun that ; U^'n ' No more of that ! —
The turns of passion in these few lines are so quick and so various, that I thought they merited to be minutely pointed out by a kind of perpetual commentary.
The mind is never so sensibly disposed to pity the misfortunes of others, as when it is itself subdued and softened by calamity. Adversity diffuses a kind of sacred calm over the breast, that is the parent of thoughtfulness and medita-
KING LEAR 75
tion. The following reflections of Lear in his next speech, when his passion has subsided for a short interval, are equally proper and striking :
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er ye are, That bide the pelting of this pityless storm ! How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these !
He concludes with a sentiment finely suited to his condition, and worthy to be written in characters of gold in the closet of every monarch upon earth :
0 ! I have ta'en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp ! Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel ; That thou may'st shake the superflux to them, And shew the Heav'ns more just !
Lear being at last persuaded to take shelter in the hovel, the poet has artfully contrived to lodge there Edgar, the discarded son of Gloucester, who counterfeits the character and habit of a mad begger, haunted by an evil demon, and whose supposed sufferings are enumerated with an inimitable wildness of fancy ; ' Whom the foul fiend hath led thro' fire,' and thro' flame, thro' ford and whirlpool, o'er bog and quagmire ; that hath laid knives under his pillow, and halters in his pew ; set ratsbane by his porridge ; made him proud of heart, to ride on a bay trotting horse over four inch'd bridges, to course his own shadow for a traitor. — Bless thy five wits, Tom's a cold ! ' The assumed madness of Edgar and the zeal distraction of Lear, form a judicious contrast.
Upon perceiving the nakedness and wretched-
76 JOSEPH WARTON
ness of this figure, the poor king asks a question that I never could read without strong emotions of pity and admiration :
What ! have his daughters brought him to this pass ? Couldst thou save nothing ? Didst thou give them all ?
And when Kent assures him, that the begger hath no daughters, he hastily answers ;
Death, traitor, nothing could have subdued nature To such a lowness, but his unkind daughters.
Afterwards, upon the calm contemplation of the misery of Edgar, he breaks out into the following serious and pathetic reflection : ' Thou wert better in thy grave, than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this ? Consider him well. Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha ! here's three of us are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself : unaccommodated man is no more than such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings ! Come, unbutton here.'
Shakespeare has no where exhibited more inimi- table strokes of his art, than in this uncommon scene ; where he has so well conducted even the natural jargon of the begger, and the jestings of the fool, which in other hands must have sunk into burlesque, that they contribute to heighten the pathetic to a very high degree.
The heart of Lear having been agitated and torn by a conflict of such opposite and tumul- tuous passions, it is not wonderful that his ' wits should now begin to unsettle.' The first plain indication of the loss of his reason, is his calling Edgar a ' learned Theban ; ' and telling Kent,
KING LEAR 77
that ' he will keep still with his philosopher.' When he next appears, he imagines he is punish- ing his daughters. The imagery is extremely strong, and chills one with horror to read it.
To have a thousand with red burning spits Come hizzing in upon them !
As the fancies of lunatics have an extraordinary force and liveliness, and render the objects of their frenzy as it were present to their eyes, Lear actually thinks himself suddenly restored to his kingdom, and seated in judgment to try his daugh ters for their cruelties :
I'll see their trial first ; bring in the evidence. Thou robed man of justice take thy place ; And thou, his yoke -fellow of equity, Bench by his side. You are of the commission,
Sit you too. Arraign her first, 'tis Gonerill-
,And here's another, whose warpt looks proclaim What store her heart is made of.
Here he imagines that Regan escapes out of his hands, and he eagerly exclaims,
• Stop her there.
Arms, arms, sword, fire—Corruption in the place ! False justicer, why hast thou let her 'scape ?
A circumstance follows that is strangely moving indeed ; for he fancies that his favouirte domestic creatures, that used to fawn upon and caress him, and of which he Avas eminently fond, have now their tempers changed, and joined to insult him :
The little dogs and all,
Tray, Blanch, and Sweet -heart, see ! they bark at me.
He again resumes his imaginary power, and orders them to anatomize Regan ; ' See what breeds about her heart — Is there any cause in nature
78 JOSEPH WAKTON
that makes these hard hearts ? You, Sir,' speak- ing to Edgar, ' I entertain for one of my Hun- dred ; ' a circumstance most artfully introduced to remind us of the first affront he received, and to fix our thoughts on the causes of his distrac- tion.
General criticism is on all subjects' useless and unentertaining ; but is more than commonly absurd with respect to Shakespeare, who must be accompanied step by step, and scene by scene, in his gradual developements of characters and passions, and whose finer features must be singly pointed out, if we would do compleat justice to his genuine beauties. It would have been easy to have declared, in general terms, ' that the mad- ness of Lear was very natural and pathetic ; ' and the reader might then have escaped, what he may, perhaps, call a multitude of well known quotations : but then it had been impossible to exhibit a perfect picture of the secret workings and changes of Lear's mind, which vary in each succeeding passage, and which render an allega- tion of each particular sentiment absolutely necessary.
The Adventurer, No. 116. December 15, 1753.
I SHALL transiently observe, in conclusion of these remarks, that this drama is chargeable with considerable imperfections. The plot of Edmund against his brother, which distracts the attention, and destroys the unity of the fable ; the cruel and horrid extinction of Glo'ster's eyes, which ought not to be exhibited on the stage ; the utter improbability of Glo'ster's imagining, though blind,
KING LEAR 79
that he had leaped down Dover cliff ; and some passages that are too turgid and full of strained metaphors ; are faults which the warmest admirers of Shakespeare will find it difficult to excuse. I know not, also, whether the cruelty of the daughters is not painted with circumstances too savage and unnatural ; for it is not sufficient to say, that this monstrous barbarity is founded on historical truth, if we recollect the just observation of Boileau,
Le vray pent quelquefois n'Gtre pas vraisemblable.
Some truths may be too strong to be believed. — SOMES.
From The Adventurer, No. 122. January 5, 1754.
80
Dramatic Representation of Passion.
THIS descriptive manner of representing passion, is a very cold entertainment : our sympathy is not raised by description ; we must first be lulled into a dream of reality, and every thing must appear as passing in our sight. Unhappy is the player of genius who acts a capital part in what may be termed a descriptive tragedy : after assuming the very passion that is to be represented, how is he cramped in action, when he must utter, not the sentiments of the passion he feels, but a cold description in the language of a bystander ? It is this imperfection, I am persuaded, in the bulk of our plays, that confines our stage almost entirely to Shakespear, notwithstanding his many irregu- larities. In our late English tragedies, we some- times find sentiments tolerably well adapted to
1 Henry Home of Kames (1696-1782) was generally known as ' Lord Kames ', the judicial title which he took when raised to the Scottish bench in 1752.
Elements of Criticism was published in Edinburgh in 1762. It went into many editions, the fifth, 1774 (which has been used for the above extracts), being the last to appear in the author's lifetime. Benjamin Heath in the Dedication of A Bevisal of Shakespear 's Text, published in 1765 before Johnson's edition, describes Kames as ' the truest judge and most intelligent admirer of Shakespear'.
REPRESENTATION OF PASSION 81
a plain passion : but we must not, in any of them, expect a sentiment expressive of character ; and, upon that very account, our late performances of the dramatic kind are for the most part intolerably insipid. Elements of Criticism, chap. XVI.
[Kames proceeds to illustrate the difference between ; sentiments that appear the legitimate offspring of passion ' and sentiments that are ' descriptive only, and illegitimate ', by instances from Shakespeare and Corneille.]<
SHAKESPEAR is superior to all other writers in delineating passion. It is difficult to say in what part he most excels, whether in moulding every passion to peculiarity of character, in discovering tht sentiments that proceed from various tones of passion., or in expressing properly every different sentiment : he disgusts not his reader with general declamation and unmeaning words, too common in other writers : his sentiments are adjusted to the peculiar character and circumstances of the speaker ; and the propriety is not less perfect between his sentiments and his diction. That this is no exaggeration, will be evident to every one of taste, upon comparing Shakespear with other writers in similar passages. If upon any occasion he fall below himself, it is in those scenes where passion enters not : by endeavouring in that case to raise his dialogue above the style of ordinary conversation, he sometimes deviates into intricate thought and obscure expression : sometimes, to throw his language out of the familiar, he employs rhyme. But may it not in some measure excuse Shakespear, I shall not say his works, that he had no pattern, in his own or in any living language, of dialogue fitted for the theatre ? At the same time, J
82 HENRY HOME, LORD KAMES
it ought not to escape observation, that the stream clears in its progress, and that in his later plays he has attained the purity and perfection of dialogue ; an observation that, with greater certainty than tradition, will direct us to arrange his plays in the order of time. This ought to be considered, by those who rigidly exaggerate every blemish of the finest genius for the drama ever the world enjoy'd : they ought also for their own sake to consider, that it is easier to discover his blemishes, which lie generally at the surface, than his beauties, which cannot be truly relished but by those who dive deep into human nature. One thing must be evident to the meanest capacity, that where-ever passion is to be display'd, Nature shows its%lf mighty in him, and is conspicuous by the most delicate propriety of sentiment and expression.1
Chap. XVII.
Shakespeare's Style.
ABSTRACT or general terms have no good effect in any composition for amusement ; because it is only of particular objects that images can be formed. Shakespear's style in that respect is
1 The critics seem not perfectly to comprehend the genius of Shakespear. His plays are defective in the mechanical part, which is less the work of genius than of experience ; and is not otherwise brought to perfection but by diligently observing the errors of former composi- tions. Shakespear excels all the ancients and moderns, in knowledge of human nature, and in unfolding even the most obscure and refined emotions. This is a rare faculty, and of the greatest importance in a dramatic author ; and it is that faculty which makes him surpass all other writers in the comic as well as tragic vein.
SHAKESPEAEE'S STYLE 83
excellent : every article in his descriptions is particular, as in nature ; and if accidentally a vague expression slip in, the blemish is discernible by the bluntness of its impression. ... It was one of Homer's advantages, that he wrote before general terms were multiplied : the superior genius of Shakespear displays itself in avoiding them after they were multiplied.
Chap. XXI.
84
GEORGE, LORD LYTTELTON
DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD Boileau — Pope.
Boileau. . . . But I am still more angry with you for your edition of Shakespear. The office of an editor was below you, and your mind was unfit for the drudgery it requires. Would any body think of employing a Raphael to clean an old picture ?
Pope. The principal cause of my undertaking that task was zeal for the honour of Shakespear : and, if you knew all his beauties as well as I, you would not wonder at this zeal. No other author had ever so copious, so bold, so creative an imagina- tion, with so perfect a knowledge of the passions, the humours, and sentiments of mankind. He painted all characters, from kings down to pea- sants, with equal truth and equal force. If human nature were destroyed, and no monument were left of it except his works, other beings might know what man was from those writings.
Boileau. You say he painted all characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal force. I can't deny that he did so : but I wish he had not jumbled those characters together, in the composition of his pictures, as he has frequently done.
Pope. The strange mixture of tragedy, comedy.
THE NATIONAL KELIGION 85
and farce, in the same play, nay sometimes in the same scene, I acknowledge to be quite inexcusable. But this was the taste of the times when Shake- spear wrote.
Boileau. A great genius ought to guide, not servilely follow, the taste of his contemporaries.
Pope. Consider from how thick a darkness of barbarism the genius of Shakespear broke forth ! What were the English, and what (let me ask you) were the French dramatic performances, in the age when he flourished ? The advances he made towards the highest perfection both of tragedy and comedy are amazing ! In the principal points, in the power of exciting terror and pity, or raising laughter in an audience, none yet has excelled him, and very few have equalled.
Boileau. Do you think that he was equal in comedy to Moliere ?
Pope. In comic force I do : but in the fine and delicate strokes of satire, and what is called genteel comedy, he was greatly inferior to that admirable writer. There is nothing in him to compare with the Misanthrope, the Ecole des Femmes, or Tartuffe.
Boileau. This, Mr. Pope, is a great deal for an Englishman to acknowledge. A veneration for Shakespear seems to be a part of your national religion, and the only part in which even your men of sense are fanatics.
Pope. He who can read Shakespear, and be cool enough for all the accuracy of sober criticism, has more of reason than taste.
Boileau. I join with you in admiring him as a prodigy of genius, though I find the most shock- ing absurdities in his plays ; absurdities which no critic of my nation can pardon.
86 GEOKGE, LOED LYTTELTON
Pope. We will be satisfied with your feeling the excellence of his beauties.
From Dialogues of the Dead, Dialogue XIV.
1 Only the opening remarks of Boileau and Pope in this extract are found in the first edition of the Dialogues of the Dead, 1760. The greater part of it was added in the! ourth edition, 1765.
87
SAMUEL JOHNSON
WHEN Learning's Triumph o'er her barb'rous
Foes First rear'd the Stage, immortal SHAKESPEAK
rose ;
Each Change of many-colour'd Life he drew, Exhausted Worlds, and then imagin'd new : Existence saw him spurn her bounded Reign, And panting Time toil'd after him in vain : His pow'rful Strokes presiding Truth im-
press'd, And unresisted Passion storm'd the Breast.
From the Prologue spoken by Mr. Garrick at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane, 1747.
But the Truth is, that a very small Part of the Reputation of this mighty Genius depends upon the naked Plot, or Story of his Plays. He lived in an Age when the Books of Chivalry were yet popular, and when therefore the Minds of his Auditors were not accustomed to balance Pro- babilities, or to examine nicely the Proportion between Causes and Effects. It was sufficient to recommend a Story, that it was far removed from common Life, that its Changes were frequent, and its Close pathetic.
This Disposition of the Age concurred so happily with the Imagination of ShaJcespear that he had no
88 JOHNSON
Desire to reform it, and indeed to this he was indebted for the licentious Variety, by which he has made his Plays more entertaining than those of any other Author.
He had looked with great Attention on the Scenes of Nature ; but his chief Skill was in Human Actions, Passions, and Habits ; he was therefore delighted with such Tales as afforded numerous Incidents, and exhibited many Characters, in many Changes of Situation. These Characters are so copiously diversified, and some of them so justly pursued, that his Works may be considered as a Map of Life, a faithful Miniature of human Transactions, and he that has read Shalcespean with Attention, will perhaps find little new in the crouded World.
Among his other Excellencies it ought to be remarked, because it has hitherto been unnoticed, that his Heroes are Men, that the Love and Hatred, the Hopes and Fears of his chief Personages are such as are common to other human Beings, and not like those which later Times have exhibited, peculiar to Phantoms that strut upon the Stage.
It is not perhaps very necessary to enquire whether the Vehicle of so much Delight and Instruction be a Story probable, or unlikely, native, or foreign. Shakespear's Excellence is not the Fiction of a Tale, but the Kepresentation of Life ; and his Reputation is therefore safe, till Human Nature shall be changed.
From the Dedication to Shakespear Illustrated : or the Novels and Histories, On which the Plays of Shakespear Are Founded, 1753, written by Johnson for the authoress, Mrs. Charlotte Lennox.1 1 The quotations from the Drury-Lane Prologue and the
PKEFACE TO SHAKESPEAEE 89
Preface to Shakespeare.1 (1765)
THAT praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox ; or those, who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time.
Antiquity, like every other quality that attracts the notice of mankind, has undoubtedly votaries
Dedication to Shakespear Illustrated are given as represen- tative of Johnson's criticism before the publication of his deliberate and mature opinions in his edition of Shake- speare (October, 1765). In 1745 he had brought out Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth . . . To which is affix 'd, Proposals for a New Edition of Shake- spear, with a Specimen ; and in 1756 he issued his new Proposals for Printing the Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare. There is a notable paragraph on Shake- speare, ' that transcendent and unbounded genius,' in the essay on tragi-comedy in The Rambler, No. 156 (September 14, 1751) ; and Shakespeare's diction, with illustrations from Macbeth, is the main topic of No. 168. Later criticisms, made in conversation, are recorded by Boswell. 1 Portions of this Preface dealing with the editors of Shakespeare and the history of the text of the plays are here omitted. Recent reprints of the complete Preface will be found in Sir Walter Raleigh's Johnson on Shake- speare, 1908, and in the editor's Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 1903.
90 JOHNSON
that reverence it, not from reason, but from pre- judice. Some seem to admire indiscriminately whatever has been long preserved, without con- sidering that time has sometimes co-operated with chance ; all perhaps are more willing to honour past than present excellence ; and the mind contemplates genius through the shades of age, as the eye surveys the sun through artificial opacity. The great contention of criticism is to find the faults of the moderns, and the beauties of the ancients. While an authour is yet living we esti- mate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best. ,
To works, however, of which the excellence is not absolute and definite, but gradual and compara- tive ; to works not raised upon principles demon- strative and scientifick, but appealing wholly to observation and experience, no other test can be applied than length of duration and continuance of esteem. What mankind have long possessed they have often examined and compared, and if they persist to value the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour. As among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains and many rivers ; so in the productions of genius, nothing can be stiled excellent till it has been com- pared with other works of the same kind. Demon- stration immediately displays its power, and has nothing to hope or fear from the flux of years ; but works tentative and experimental must be esti- mated by their proportion to the general and collective ability of 'man, as it is discovered in a long succession of endeavours. Of the first
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEAKE 91
building that was raised, it might be with certainty determined that it was round or square, but whether it was spacious or lofty must have been referred to time. The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once discovered to be perfect ; but the poems of Homer we yet know not to transcend the common limits of human intelligence, but by remarking, that nation after nation, and century after century, has been able to do little more than transpose his incidents, new name his characters, and paraphrase his sentiments.
The reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arises therefore not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the consequence of acknowledged and in- dubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood.
The Poet, of whose works I have undertaken the revision, may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration. He has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit. Whatever advantages he might once derive from personal allusions, local customs, or temporary opinions, have for many years been lost ; and every topick of merriment or motive of sorrow, which the modes of artificial life afforded him, now only obscure the scenes which they once illuminated. The effects of favour and competition are at an end ; the tradition of his friendships and his enmities has perished ; his works support no opinion with arguments, nor supply any faction with invectives ; they can
JOHNSON
neither indulge vanity nor gratify malignity, but are read without any other reason than the desire of pleasure, and are therefore praised only as plea- sure is obtained ; yet, thus unassisted by interest or passion, they have past through variations of taste and changes of manners, and, as they devolved from one generation to another, have received new honours at every transmission.
But because human judgment, though it be gradually gaining upon certainty, never becomes infallible ; and approbation, though long continued , may yet be only the approbation of prejudice or fashion ; it is proper to inquire, by what pecu- liarities of excellence Shakespeare has gained and kept the favour of his countrymen.
Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest ; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of ,truth.
~ Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature ; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world ; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers ; or by the acci- dents of transient fashions or temporary opinions : they are the genuine progeny of common humanity,
/V . PREFACE TO .SHAKESPE
T™ Y **• *A**X%A4jh ££•+&&*
such as the world win always supply, and observa- tion will always find. His persons act and speak \ by the influence of those general passions andj principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual ; in those of Shakespeare it is com- monly a species.
It is from this wide extension of design that so much instruction is derived. It is this which fills thTpIays of ISfiakespeare with practical axioms and domestick wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept ; and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected_ a system of civil and oeconomical prudence. Yet \ his real power is not she'wn in the splendour of] particular passages, but by the progress of his' fable, and the tenour of his diaTogue"; and lie "that! tries to recommend him by select quotations, will j succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he • offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his } pocket as a specimen.
It will not easily be imagined how much Shake- speare excells in accommodating his sentiments to real life, but by comparing him with other authours. It was observed of the ancient schools of declama- tion, that the more diligently they were frequented, the more was the student disqualified for the world, because he found nothing there which he should ever meet in any other place. The same remark may be applied to every stage but that of Shake- speare. The theatre, when it is under any other direction, is peopled by such characters as were never seen, conversing in a language which was never heard, upon topicks which will never arise
commerce of mankind. But the dialogue of this authour is often so evidently determined by the incident which produces it, and is pursued with so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of common conversation, and common occurrences.
Upon every other stage the universal agent is love, by whose power all good and evil is dis- tributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To bring a lover, a lady and a rival into the fable ; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, per- plex them with oppositions of interest, and harrass them with violence of desires inconsistent with each other ; to make them meet in rapture and part in agony ; to fill their mouths with hyper- bolical joy and outrageous sorrow ; to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed ; ' to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered, is the business of a modern dramatist. For this probability is violated, life is misrepresented, and language is depraved. But love is only one of many passions ; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him. He knew, that any other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happi- ness or calamity.
Characters thus ample and general were not easily discriminated and preserved, yet perhaps no poet ever kept his personages more distinct from each other. I will not say with Pope, that every speech may be assigned to the proper speaker, because many speeches there are which have
nothing characteristical ; but pefnaps, though some may be equally adapted to every person, it will be difficult to find, any that can be properly transferred from the present possessor to another claimant. The choice is right, when there is reason for choice.
Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a dwarf ; and he that should form his expectations of human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakespeare has no heroes ; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion : Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life. Other writers disguise the most natural passions and most frequent incidents ; so that he who contem- plates them in the book will not know them in the world : Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful ; the event which he represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned ; and it may be said, that he has not only shewn human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials, to which it cannot be exposed.
This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour of life ; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious extasies, by reading human sentiments in human language ; by scenes from
96 JOHNSON
which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.
I His adherence to general nature has exposed I him to jthe^jcen.suie..,Qf criticks, who form their fCdgmentsTupon narrower principles. Dennis and Rhymer think his Romans not sufficiently Roman ; and Voltaire censures his kings as not completely I royjil. Dennis is offeflded, that Menenius, a senator of Rome, should play the buffoon ; and Voltaire perhaps thinks decency violated when the Danish Usurper is represented as a drunkard. But Shakespeare always makes nature predominate over accident ; and if he preserves the essential character, is not very careful of distinctions super- induced and adventitious. His story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on men. He knew that Rome, like every other city, had men of all dispositions ; and wanting a buffoon, he went into the senate-house for that which the senate- house would certainly have afforded him. He was inclined to shew an usurper and a murderer not only odious but despicable, he therefore added drunkenness to his other qualities, knowing that kings love wine like other men, and that wine exerts its natural power upon kings. These are \\ the petty cavils of petty minds ; a poet*overlook"s 1 \ the T3aBUal"distlH5tioTr"of"c"6uiltry and condition, as a painter, satisfied with the figure, neglects the drapery.
The censure which he has incurred by mixing
comick and tragick scenes, as it extends to all his
works, deserves more consideration. Let the fact
be first stated, and then examined.
"ti Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous and
"] ' ^
PKEFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 97
critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but com- positions of a distinct kind ; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good aficl "evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination ; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another ; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting tgTils _wjne, and the mourner burying, his friend ; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another ; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.
Out of this chaos of mingled purposes and casualties the ancient poets, according to the laws which custom had prescribed, selected some the crimes of men, and some their absurdities ; some the momentous vicissitudes of life, and some the lighter occurrences ; some the terronrs of distress, "" and some the gayeties of prosperity. Thus rose the two modes of imitation, known by the names of tragedy and comedy, compositions intended to promote different ends by contrary means, and considered as so little allied, that I do not recollect among the Greeks or Romans a single writer who attempted both.
Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and ludicrous characters, and, in the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity and laughter.
That this is a practice contrary to the. rules, of criticism will be readily allowed ; but there is
212 E
always an appeal open from criticism to nature. . TEe end of writing is to instruct ; the end of !/ poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the >' mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alterations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by shewing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation. It is objected, that by this change of scenes the passions are interrupted in their progression, and that the principal event, being not advanced by a due gradation of preparatory incidents, wants at last the power to move, which constitutes the per- fection of dramatick poetry. This reasoning is so specious, that it is received as true even by those who in daily experience feel it to be false. The interchanges of mingled scenes seldom fail to pro- duce the intended vicissitudes of passion. Fiction cannot move so much, but that the attention may be easily transferred ; and though it must be allowed that pleasing melancholy be sometimes interrupted by unwelcome levity, yet let it be con- sidered likewise, that melancholy is often not pleasing, and that the disturbance of one man may be the relief of another ; that different auditors have different habitudes ; and that, upon the whole, all pleasure consists in variety.
The players, who in their edition divided our authour's works into comedies, histories, and tragedies, seem not to have distinguished the three • kinds, by any very exact or definite ideas.
An action which ended happily to the principal
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 99
persons, however serious or distressful through its intermediate incidents, in their opinion constituted a comedy. This idea of a comedy continued long amongst us, and plays were written, which, by changing the catastrophe, were tragedies to-day and comedies to-morrow.
Tragedy was not in those times a poem of more general dignity or elevation than comedy ; it required only a calamitous conclusion, with which the common criticism of that age was satisfied, whatever lighter pleasure it afforded in its progress.
History was a series of actions, with no other » ' ;han chronological succession, independent on • ;ach other, and without any tendency to introduce | or regulate the conclusion. It is not always very nicely distinguished from tragedy. There is not much nearer approach to unity of action in the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, than in the his- tory of Richard the Second. But a history might continued through many plays ; as it had no plan, it had no limits.
Through all these denominations of the drama, Shakespeare' § mode of composition is the same ; an interchange of seriousness and merriment, by which the mind is softened at one time, and ex- hilarated at another. But whatever be his purpose, whether to gladden or depress, or to conduct the story, without vehemence or emotion, through tracts of easy and familiar dialogue, he never fails bo attain his purpose ; as he commands us, we laugh or mourn, or sit silent with quiet expectation, n tranquillity without indifference.
When Shakespeare's plan is understood, most of the criticisms of Rhymer and Voltaire vanish away. The play of Hamlet is opened, without impro-
priety, by two sentinels ; logo bellows at Bra- bantio's window, without injury to the scheme of the play, though in terms which a modern audience would not easily endure ; the character of Polonius is seasonable and useful ; and the Grave-diggers themselves may be heard with applause.
Shakespeare engaged in dramatick poetry with the world open before him ; the rules of the ancients were yet known to few ; the publick judgment was unformed ; he had no example ol such fame as might force him upon imitation, nor criticks of such authority as might restrain his extravagance : He therefore indulged his natura i disposition, and his disposition, as Rhymer has I remarked, led him to comedy: In tragedy he oiten writes with "great "appearance of toil and study, what is written at last with little felicity but in his comick scenes, he seems to produce with- out labour, what no labour can improve. In tragedy he is always struggling after some occasion to be comick, but in comedy he seems to repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of thinking congenial — to his nature. In his tragick scenes there is : always something wanting, but his comedy often I surpasses expectation or desire. His comedy - pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his ^ tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be .instinct.
The force of his comick scenes has suffered little diminution from the changes made by a century and a half, in manners or in words. As his per- f sonages act upon principles arising from genuine passion, very little modified by particular forms, their pleasures and vexations are communicable tc
all times and to all places ; they are natural, and \ therefore durable ; the adventitious peculiarities of personal habits, are only superficial dies, bright and pleasing for a little while, yet soon fading to a dim tinct, without any remains of former lustre ; but the discriminations of true passion are the colours of nature ; they pervade the whole mass, and can only perish with the body that exhibits them. The accidental compositions of hetero- geneous modes are dissolved by the chance which . combined them ; but the uniform simplicity of primitive qualities neither admits increase, nor • suffers decay. The sand heaped by one flood is scattered by another, but the rock always continues in its place. The stream of time, which is con- tinually washing the dissoluble fabricks of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.
If there be, what I believe there is, in every nation, a stile which never becomes obsolete, a cer- tain mode of phraseology so consonant and con- genial to the analogy and principles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered ; this style is probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance. The polite are always catching modish innovations, and the learned depart from established forms of speech, in hope of finding or making better ; those who wish for distinction forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right ; but there is a conversation -^ above grossness and below refinement, where pro-~"^ priety resides, and where this poet seems to have gathered his comick dialogue. He is therefore more agreeable to the ears of the present age than 'f1
102 JOHNSON
any other authour equally remote, and among his other excellencies deserves to be studied as one of the original masters of our language.
These observations are to be considered not as unexceptionably constant, but as containing general and predominant truth. Shakespeare's familiar dialogue is affirmed to be smooth and clear, yet not wholly without ruggedness or difficulty ; as a country maybe eminently fruitful, though it has spots unfit for cultivation : His characters are praised as natural, though their sentiments are sometimes forced, and their actions improbable ; as the earth upon the whole is spherical, though its surface is varied with protuberances and cavities.
Shakespeare with his excellencies has likewise faults, and faults sufficient to obscure and over- whelm any other merit. I shall shew them in the proportion in which they appear to me, without envious malignity or superstitious veneration. No question can be more innocently discussed than a dead poet's pretensions to renown ; and little regard is due to that bigotry which sets candour higher than truth.
His first defect is that to which may be imputed
- most of the evil in books or in men. He sacrifices I virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful
To please than to instruct, that he seems to write i without any moral purpose. From his writings
- indeed a system of social duty may be selected, for
} 1 hfJJTg^JlinksieaSOTia-bly rmiflti t-^inlr Trim-ally ; but
his precepts and axioms drop casually from him ; • he makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor , is always careful to shew in the virtuous a disap- ' probation of the wicked ; he carries his persons
indifferently through right and wrong, and at the
' ,£BEFACE TO ^SHAKESPEARE 103 ( /~££«x. yj>t&\jLW- rK^ii^^ / Y f J^
close dismisses them without further care, and I leaves their examples to operate by chance. This J . fault thejbaxbarity of his age cannot extenuate ; • for it is always a writer's duty to make the world [' better, and justice is a virtue independant on time or place.
The plots are often so loosely formed, that a very slight consideration may improve them, and so carelessly pursued, that he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design. He omits oppor- tunities of instructing or delighting which the train of his story, seems to force upon him, and apparently rejects those exhibitions which would be more affecting, for the sake of those which are more easy.
It may be observed, that in many of his plays - the latter part is evidently neglected. When he \ found himself near the end of his work, and in ] view of his reward, he shortened the labour, to • snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts ~" where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imper- fectly represented.
He had no regard to distinction of time or place, but gives to one age or nation, without scruple, the customs, institutions, and opinions of another, at the expence not only of likelihood, but of possi- bility. These faults Pope has endeavoured, with more zeal than judgment, to transfer to his imagined interpolators. We need not wonder to find Hector quoting Aristotle, when we see the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothick mythology of fairies. Shakespeare, indeed, was not the only violator of chronology, for in the same age Sidney, who wanted not the advantages of learning, has, in his Arcadia, confounded the
104 JOHNSON
pastoral with the feudal times, the days of inno- cence, quiet and security, with those of turbulence, violence, and adventure.
In his comick scenes he is seldom very successful, when he engages his characters in reciprocations of smartness and contests of sarcasm ; their jests are commonly gross, and their pleasantry licentious ; neither his gentlemen nor his ladies have much delicacy, nor are sufficiently distinguished from his clowns by any appearance of refined manners. Whether he represented the real conversation of his time is not easy to determine ; the reign of Eliza- beth is commonly supposed to have been a time of stateliness, formality and reserve, yet perhaps the relaxations of that severity were not very elegant. There must, however, have been always some modes of gayety preferable to others, and a writer ought to chuse the best.
In tragedy his performance seems constantly to be worse, as his labour is more. The effusions of passion which exigence forces out are for the most part striking and energetick ; but whenever he solicits his invention, or strains his faculties, the offspring of his throes is tumour, meanness, tedious- A ness, and obscurity.
»l - In narration he affects a disproportionate pomp
¥»*5f djction and a wearisome train of circumlocu-
^ tion. and tells the incident imperfectly in many
words,, which might have been more plainly
delivered in few. Narration in dramatick poetry
is naturally tedious, as it is unanimated and
inactive, and obstructs the progress of the action ;
it should therefore always be rapid, and enlivened
I by frequent interruption. Shakespeare found it an
I encumbrance, and instead of lightening it by
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 105
brevity, endeavoured to recommend it by dignity | and splendour. /
His declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak, for his power was the power of nature ; when he endeavoured, like other tragick writers, to catch opportunities of amplification, and instead of inquiring what the occasion demanded, to show how much his stores of knowledge could supply, he seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of his reader.
It is incident to him to be now and then en- tangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject ; he struggles with it a while, and if it continues stub- born, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it.
Not that always where the language is intricate the thought is subtle, or the image always great where the line is bulky ; the equality of words to things is. very often neglected, and trivial senti- ments and vulgar ideas disappoint the attention, to which they are recommended by sonorous epithets and swelling figures.
But the admirers of this, great poet have never less reason to indulge their hopes of supreme excellence, than when he seems fully resolved to sink them in dejection, and mollify them with tender emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of innocence, or the crosses of love. He is not long soft and pathetick without some idle conceit^ or contemptiole equivocation. He no sooner begins to move, than he counteracts himself ; and terrour and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by sudden frigidity. E3
106 JOHNSON
A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller ; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or pro- fundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.
It will be thought strange, that, in enumerating the defects of this writer, I have not yet mentioned his neglect of the unities ; his violation of those laws which have been instituted and established by the joint authority of poets and of criticks.
For his other deviations from the art of writing I resign him to critical justice, without making any other demand in his favour, than that which must be indulged to all human excellence ; that his virtues be rated with his failings : But, from the censure which this irregularity may bring upon him, I shall, with due reverence to that learning which I must oppose, adventure to try how I can defend him.
His histories, being neither tragedies nor come- dies, are not subject to any of their laws ; nothing more is necessary to all the praise which they
HAJL XjO PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE , 107
expect, than that the chaflgesjfof action be so prepared as to be understood, that the incidents be various and affecting, and the characters con- sistent, natural and distinct. No other unity is intended, and therefore none is to be sought.
In jiis other works he has well enough preserved the unity of action. He has not, indeed, an intrigue^fegularly^^perplexed and regularly un- ravelled ; he does not endeavour to hide his design only to discover it, for this is seldom the order of real events, and Shakespeare is the poet of nature : r But his plan has commonly what Aristotle requires, * a beginning, a middle, and an end ; one event is concatenated with another, and the conclusion follows by easy consequence. There are perhaps some incidents that might be spared, as in other poets there is much talk that only fills up time ' upon the stage ; but the general system makes gradual advances, and the end of the play is the end of expectation.
To the unities of time and place he has shewn no regard, and perhaps a nearer view of the prin- ciples on which they stand will diminish their value, and withdraw from them the veneration which, from the time of Corneille, they have very generally received, by discovering that they have given more trouble to the poet, than pleasure to the auditor. 1
The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making '; the drama credible. The criticks hold it impos-i. sTb~le, that an action of months or years can be possibly believed to pass in three hours ; or that the spectator can suppose himself to sit in the theatre, while ambassadors go and return between distant kings, while armies are levied and towns
108 JOHNSON
besieged, while an exile wanders and returns, or till he whom they saw courting his mistress, shall
^lament the untimely fall of his son. The mind revolts from evident falsehood, and fiction loses
lits force when it departs from the resemblance of
j reality.
I J'rom the narrow limitation of time necessarily arises the contraction of placed The spectator, who knows that he saw the first act at Alexandria, cannot suppose that he sees the next at Rome, at a distance to which not the dragons of Medea could, in so short a time, have transported him ; he knows with certainty that he has not changed his place ; and he knows that place cannot change itself ; that what was a house cannot become a plain ; that what was Thebes can never be Persepolis.
Such is the triumphant language with which a ." critick exults over the misery of an irregular poet, 1 and exults commonly without resistance or reply. - It is time therefore to tell him, by the authority of Shakespeare, that he assumes, as an unquestionable principle, a position, which, while his breath is form- ing it into words, his understanding pronounces
,jbo be false. Itjs false, that any representation is mistaken for~reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single
_moment, was ever credited.
The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the play opens the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria,
, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been
\ a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra.^S\}.iely he that imagines
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEAKE 109
this may imagine more. He that can take the stage at one time for the palace of the Ptolemies, may take it in half an hour for the promontory of I Actium. Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation ; if the spectator can be once persuaded, that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Ccesar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may despise the circumscriptions of ter- restrial nature. There is no reason why a mind thus wandering in extasy should count the clock, or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the stage a field.
The truth is, that the spectators are always in», their senses, and know, from the first act to the } last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. They came to hear a certain number of lines recited with just gesture and elegant modulation. The lines relate to some action, and an action must be in some place ; but \ the different actions that compleat a story may be •' in places very remote from each other ; and where is the absurdity of allowing that space to represent first Athens, and then Sicily, which was always known to be neither Sicily nor Athens, but a modern theatre ?
By supposition, as place is introduced, time may be extended ; the time required by the fable elapses for the most part between the acts ; for, of so much of the action as is represented, the real and poetical duration is the same. If, in the first act, preparations for war against Miihridates are
(I.
s6>.
represented to be made in Rome, the event of the war may, without absurdity, be represented, in the catastrophe, as happening in Pontus ; we know that there is neither war, nor preparation for war ; we know that we are neither in Rome nor Pontus ; that neither Mithridates nor Lucullus are before us. The drama exhibits successive imitations of suc- cessive actions, and why may not the second imitation represent an action that happened years after the first ; if it be so connected with it, that nothing but time can be supposed to intervene. Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination ; a lapse of years is as easily conceived as a passage of hours. In contemplation we easily contract the time of real actions, and therefore willingly permit it to be contracted when we only see their imitation.
It will be asked, how the drama moves, if it is
/T not credited. It is credited with all the credit due to a drama. It is credited, whenever it moves, as a just picture of a real original ; as representing to the auditor what he would himself feel, if he were to do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered
J y j or to be done. The reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed. If there be any fallacy, it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves
J£ unhappy for a moment ; but we rather lament the possibility than suppose the presence of misery, as a mother weeps over her babe, when she remembers that death may take it from her. The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction ; if we thought murders and treasons real, they Ji. would please no more.
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 111
Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind. When the imagination is recreated by a painted landscape, the trees are not supposed capable to give us shade, or the fountains coolness; but we consider, how we should be pleased with such fountains playing beside us, and such woods waving over us. We are agitated in reading the history of Henry the Fifth, yet no man takes his book for the field of Agencourt. A dramatick exhibition is a book recited with con- comitants that encrease or diminish its effect. Familiar comedy is often more powerful on the theatre, than in the page ; imperial tragedy is always less. The humour of Petruchio may be — heightened by grimace ; but what voice or what gesture can hope to add dignity or force to the soliloquy of Cato.
A play read, affects the mind like a play acted. It is therefore evident, that the action is not sup- posed to be real, and it follows that between the acts a longer or shorter time may be allowed to pass, and that no more account of space or dura- ' tion is to be taken by the auditor of a drama, than by the reader of a narrative, before whom may pass in an hour the life of a hero, or the revolutions of an empire.
Whether Shakespeare knew the unities, and re- jected them by design, or deviated from them by happy ignorance, it is, I think, impossible to decide, and useless to enquire. We may reasonably sup- pose, that, when he rose to notice, he did not want the counsels and admonitions of scholars and criticks, and that he at last deliberately persisted in a practice, which he might have begun by
chance. As nothing is essential to the fable, but unity olafitiop^ and as the unifies of time and place arise evidently from false assumptions, and, by circumscribing the extent of the drama, lessen its variety, I cannot think it much to be lamented, that they were not known by him, or not observed : Nor, if such another poet could arise, should I very vehemently reproach him, that his first act passed at Venice, and his next in Cyprus. Such violations of rules merely positive, become the comprehensive 'genius of Shakespeare, and such censures are suit-
• able to the minute and slender criticism of Voltaire:
Non usque adeo permiscuit imis Longus summa dies, ut non, si voce Metelli Serventur leges, malint a Ccesare tolli.
• Yet when I speak thus slightly of dramatick rules, I cannot but recollect how much wit and learning may be produced against me ; before such authorities I am afraid to stand, not that 1^ think the present question one of those that are to be decided by mere authority, but because it is to be s"uspected, that these precepts have not been so easily received but for better reasons than I have yet been able to find. The result of my enquiries, in wliich it would be ludicrous to boast of impar-
• tiality, is, that the unities of time and place are not 1 essential to a just drama, that though they may
i sometimes conduce to pleasure, they are always to I be sacrificed to the nobler beauties of variety and instruction ; and that a play, written with nice observation of critical rules, is to be contemplated as an elaborate curiosity, as the product of super- fluous and ostentatious art, by which is shewn, rather what is possible, than what is necessary.
X
114 JOHNSON
casual and adventitious help. The palaces of Peru or Mexico were certainly mean and incommodious habitations, if compared to the houses of European monarchs ; yet who could forbear to view them with astonishment, who remembered that they were built without the use of iron ?
The English nation, in the time of Shakespeare, was yet struggling to emerge from barbarity. The philology of Italy had been transplanted hither in the reign of Henry the Eighth ; and the learned languages had been successfully cultivated by Lilly, Linacer, and More ; by Pole, Cheke, and Gardiner ; and afterwards by Smith, Clerk, Haddon, and Ascham. Greek was now taught to boys in the principal schools ; and those who united elegance with learning, read, with great diligence, the Italian and Spanish poets. But literature was yet confined to professed scholars, or to men and women of high rank. The publick was gross and dark ; and to be able to read and write, was an accomplishment still valued for its rarity.
Nations, like individuals, have their infancy. A people newly awakened to literary curiosity, being yet unacquainted with the true state of things, knows not how to judge of that which is proposed as its resemblance. Whatever is remote from common appearances is always welcome to vulgar, as to childish credulity ; and of a country unen- lightened by learning, the whole people is the vulgar. The study of those who then aspired to plebeian learning was laid out upon adventures, giants, dragons, and enchantments. The Death of Arthur was the favourite volume.
The mind, which has feasted on the luxurious wonders of fiction, has no taste of the insipidity of
PKBFACE TO SHAKESPEAEE 115
truth. A play which imitated only the common occurrences of the world, would, upon the admirers of Palmerin and Guy of Warwick, have made little impression ; he that wrote for such an audience was under the necessity of looking round for strange events and fabulous transactions, and that incredi- bility, by which maturer knowledge is offended, was the chief recommendation of writings, to unskilful curiosity.
Our authour's plots are generally borrowed from novels, and it is reasonable to suppose, that he chose the most popular, such as were read by many, and related by more ; for his audience could not have followed him through the intricacies of the drama, had they not held the thread of the story in their hands.
The stories, which we now find only in remoter authours, were in his time accessible and familiar. The fable of As you like it, which is supposed to be copied from Chaucer's Gamelyn, was a little pamphlet of those times ; and old Mr. Cibber remembered the tale of Hamlet in plain English prose, which the criticks have now to seek in Saxo Grammaticus.
His English histories he took from English chronicles and English ballads ; and as the ancient writers were made known to his countrymen by versions, they supplied him with new subjects ; he dilated some of Plutarch's lives into plays, when they had been translated by North.
His plots, whether historical or fabulous, are always crouded with incidents, by which the atten- tion of a rude people was more easily caught than by sentiment or argumentation ; and such is the power of the marvellous even over those who
116 JOHNSON
despise it, that every man finds his mind more strongly seized by the tragedies of Shakespeare than of any other writer ; others please us by particular speeches, but he always makes us anxious for the event, and has perhaps excelled all but Homer in securing the first purpose of a writer, by exciting restless and unquenchable curiosity, and compelling him that reads his work to read it through.
The shows and bustle with which his plays abound have the same original. As knowledge advances, pleasure passes from the eye to the ear, but returns, as it declines, from the ear to the eye. Those to whom our authour's labours were ex- hibited had more skill in pomps or processions than in poetical language, and perhaps wanted some visible and discriminated events, as comments on the dialogue. He knew how he should most please ; and whether his practice is more agreeable to nature, or whether his example has prejudiced the nation, we still find that on our stage something must be done as well as said, and inactive declama- tion is very coldly heard, however musical or elegant, passionate or sublime.
Voltaire expresses his wonder, that our authour's extravagances are endured by a nation, which has seen the tragedy of Cato. Let him be answered, that Addison speaks the language of poets, and Shakespeare, of men. We find in Cato innumer- able beauties which enamour us of its authour, but we see nothing that acquaints us with human sentiments or human actions ; we place it with the fairest and the noblest progeny which judgment propagates by conjunction with learning, but Othello is the vigorous and vivacious offspring of
PKEFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 117
observation impregnated by genius. Cato affords a splendid exhibition of artificial and fictitious manners, and delivers just and noble sentiments, n diction easy, elevated and harmonious, but its lopes and fears communicate no vibration to the leart ; the composition refers us only to the writer ; we pronounce the name of Cato, but we think on Addison.
The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers ; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in ;he air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and jrambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses ; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely inished, wrought into shape, and polished unto arightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which con- ;ains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impuri- bies, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.
It has been much disputed, whether Shakespeare owed his excellence to his own native force, or whether he had the common helps of scholastick education, the precepts of critical science, and the sxamples of ancient authours.
There has always prevailed a tradition, that Shakespeare wanted learning, that he had no regular education, nor much skill in the dead languages. Johnson, his friend, affirms, that he had small Latin, and no1 Greek ; who, besides that he had no imaginable temptation to falsehood, 1 Corrected to 'less ' in the edition of 1773.
118 JOHNSON
wrote at a time when the character and acquisi- tions of Shakespeare were known to multitudes. His evidence ought therefore to decide the contro- versy, unless some testimony of equal force could be opposed.
Some have imagined, that they have discovered deep learning in many imitations of old writers ; but the examples which I have known urged, were drawn from books translated in his time ; or were such easy coincidencies of thought, as will happen to all who consider the same subjects ; or such remarks on life or axioms of morality as float in conversation, and are transmitted through the world in proverbial sentences.
I have found it remarked, that, in this important sentence, Go before, I'll follow, we read a translation of, / prae, sequar. I have been told, that when Caliban, after a pleasing dream, says, / cry'd to sleep again, the authour imitates Anacreon, who had, like every other nian, the same wish on the same occasion.
There are a few passages which may pass for imitations, but so few, that the exception only con- firms the rule ; he obtained them from accidental quotations, or by oral communication, and as he used what he had, would have used more if he had obtained it.
The Comedy of Errors is confessedly taken from the MencBchmi of Plautus ; from the only play of •Plautus which was then in English. What can be more probable, than that he who copied that, would have copied more ; but that those which were not translated were inaccessible ?
Whether he knew the modern languages is uncer- tain. That his plays have some French scenes
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 119
H'oves but little ; lie might easily procure them to written, and probably, even though he had mown the language in the common degree, he could not have written it without assistance. In ;he story of Romeo and Juliet he is observed to have Allowed the English translation, where it deviates rom the Italian ; but this on the other part proves nothing'against his knowledge of the original. He was to copy, not what he knew himself, but what was known to his audience.
It is most likely that he had learned Latin suffi- ciently to make him acquainted with construction,
t that he never advanced to an easy perusal of the Roman authours. Concerning his skill in modern languages, I can find no sufficient ground of determination ; but as no imitations of French or Italian authours have been discovered, though ;he Italian poetry was then high in esteem, I am nclined to believe, that he read little more than English, and chose for his fables only such tales as he found translated.
That much knowledge is scattered over his works s very justly observed by Pope, but it is often such knowledge as books did not supply. He that will understand Shakespeare, must not be content to study him in the closet, he must look for his meaning sometimes among the sports of the field, ind sometimes among the manufactures of the shop.
There is however proof enough that he was a very diligent reader, nor was our language then so .ndigent of books, but that he might very liberally ndulge his curiosity without excursion into foreign iterature. Many of the Roman authours were translated, and some of the Greek ', the reformation
120 JOHNSON
; • . . -
ad filled the kingdom with theological learning ; most of the topicks of human disquisition had found English writers ; and poetry had been culti- vated, not only with diligence, but success. This was a stock of knowledge sufficient for a mind so capable of appropriating and improving it.
But the greater part of his excellence was the product of his own genius. He found the English stage in a state of the utmost rudeness ; no essays either in tragedy or comedy had appeared, from which it could be discovered to what degree of delight either one or other might be carried. Neither character nor dialogue were yet under- stood. Shakespeare may be truly said to have introduced them both amongst us, and in some of his happier scenes to have carried them both to the utmost height.
By what gradations of improvement he pro- ceeded, is not easily known ; for* the chronology of his works is yet unsettled. Rowe is of opinion, that perhaps we are not to look for his beginning, like those of other writers, in his least perfect works ; art had so little, and nature so large a share in what he did, that for aught I know, says he, the performances of his youth, as they were the most vigorous, were the best. But the power of nature is only the power of using to any certain purpose the materials which diligence procures, or opportunity supplies. Nature gives no man knowledge, and when images are collected by study and experience, can only assist in combining or applying them. Shakespeare, however favoured by nature, could impart only what he had learned ; and as he must increase his ideas, like other mortals, by gradual acquisition, he, like them, grew wiser as he grew older, could
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 121
display life better, as he knew it more, and instruct 1 with more efficacy, as he was himself more amply instructed.
There js_a_yjgilaiicfi_of-xihserYation and accuracy of distinction which books and precepts cannot confer ; from this almost all original and na- tive excellence proceeds. Shakespeare must have looked upon mankind with perspicacity, in the highest degree curious and attentive. Other writers borrow their characters from preceding writers, and diversify them only by the accidental appendages of present manners ; the dress is a little varied, but the body is the same. Our authour had both matter and form to provide ; for except the characters of Chaucer, to whom I think he is not much indebted, there were no writers in English, and perhaps not many in other modern languages, which shewed life in its native colours.
The contest about the original benevolence or | malignity of man had not yet commenced. Specu- | lation had not yet attempted to analyse the mind, to trace the passions to their sources, to unfold the seminal principles of vice and virtue, or sound the depths of the heart for the motives of action. All those enquiries, which from that time that human nature became the fashionable study, have been made sometimes with nice discernment, but often with idle subtilty, were yet unattempted. The tales, with which the infancy of learning was satisfied, exhibited only the superficial appearances of action, related the events but omitted the causes, and were formed for such as delighted in wonders rather than in truth. Mankind was not then to be studied in the closet : he that would know the
122 JOHNSON
world, was under the necessity of gleaning his own remarks, by mingling as he could in its business and amusements.
Boyle congratulated himself upon his high birth, because it favoured his curiosity, by facilitating his access. Shakespeare had no such advantage ; he came to London a needy adventurer, and lived for a time by very mean employments. Many works of genius and learning have been performed in states of life, that appear very little favourable to thought or to enquiry ; so many, that he who con- siders them is inclined to think that he sees enter- prise and perseverance predominating over all external agency, and bidding help and hindrance vanish before them. The genius of Shakespeare was not to be depressed by the weight of poverty, nor limited by the narrow conversation to which men in want are inevitably condemned ; the incum- brances of his fortune were shaken from his mind, as dewdrops from a lion's mane.
Though he had so many difficulties to encounter, and so little assistance to surmount them, he has been able to obtain an exact knowledge of many modes of life, and many casts of native disposi- tions ; to vary them with great multiplicity ; to mark them by nice distinctions ; and to shew them in full view by proper combinations. In this part of his performances he had none to imitate, but has himself been imitated by all succeeding writers ; and it may be doubted, whether from all his successors more maxims of theoretical knowledge, or more rules of practical prudence, can be col- lected, than he alone has given to his country.
Nor was his attention confined to the actions of men ; he was an exact surveyor of the inanimate
123
world ; his descriptions have always some pecu- iarities, gathered by contemplating things as they __ really exist. It may be observed, that the_oldest j wets of many nations preserve their reputation, / andTthat the following generations of wit, after -^ a short celebrity, sink into oblivion. The first, whoever they be, miiat_take_their sentiments andT descriptions immediately from knowledge ; tEe I resemblance is therefore just, their descriptions are verified by every eye, and their sentiments acknow- edgecl by every breast. Those whom their fame nvites to the_£ame studies, copy partly them, and
partly nature, till the books of one age gain such authority, as to stand in the place of nature to another, and imitation, always deviating a little,
. J
- L &
aecomes at last capricious and casual. Shake- speare, whether life or nature be his subject, shews plainly, that he has seen with his own eyes ; he _vj
ives the image which lie receives, not weakened or distorted by the intervention of any other mind ;,! he ignorant feel his representations to be just, and the learned see that they are compleat.
Perhaps it would not be easy to find any authour, xcept Homer, who invented so much as Shake- peare, who so much advanced the studies which he cultivated, or effused so much novelty upon his age or country. The form, the characters, the anguage, and the shows of the English drama are his. He seems, says Dennis, to have been the very original of our English tragical harmony, that is, the harmony of blank verse, diversified often by dissyllable and trissyllable terminations. For the diversity dis- tinguishes it from heroick harmony, and by bringing ' nearer to common use makes it more proper to gain "Mention, and more jit for action and dialogue. Such
124 JOHNSON
verse we make when we are writing prose ; we make such verse in common conversation.
I know not whether this praise is rigorously just. The dissyllable termination, which the critick rightly appropriates to the drama, is to be found, though, I think, not in Gorboduc which is confes- sedly before our authour ; yet in Hieronnymo, of which the date is not certain, but which there is reason to believe at least as old as his earliest plays. This however is certain, that he is the first who taught either tragedy or comedy to please, there being no theatrical piece of any older writer, of which the name is known, except to antiquaries and collectors of books, which are sought because they are scarce, and would not have been scarce had they been much esteemed.
To him we must ascribe the praise, unless Spenser may divide it with him, of having first discovered to how much smoothness and harmony the Eng- lish language could be softened. He has speeches, perhaps sometimes scenes, which have all the delicacy of Rowe, without his effeminacy. He endeavours indeed commonly to strike by the force and vigour of his dialogue, but he never executes his purpose better, than when he tries to sooth by softness.
Yet it must be at last confessed, that as we owe every thing to him, he owes something to us ; that, if much of his praise is paid by perception and judgement, much is likewise given by custom and veneration. We fix our eyes upon his graces, and turn them from his deformities, and endure in him what we should in another loath or despise. If we endured without praising, respect for the father of our drama might excuse us ; but I have seen, in
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 125
the book of some modern critick, a collection of anomalies, which shew that he has corrupted language by every mode of depravation, but which his admirer has accumulated as a monument of honour.
He has scenes of undoubted and perpetual excel- lence, but perhaps not one play, which, if it were now exhibited as the work of a contemporary writer, would be heard to the conclusion. I am ' indeed far from thinking, that Ms works were wrought to his own ideas of perfection ; when they were such as would satisfy the audience, they satisfied the writer. It is seldom that authours, J though more studious of fame than Shakespeare, rise much above the standard of their own age ; to add a little of what is best will always be suffi- cient for present praise, and those who find them- selves exalted into fame, are willing to credit their encomiasts, and to spare the labour of contending with themselves.
It does not appear, that Shakespeare thought his works worthy of posterity, that he levied any ideal tribute upon future times, or had any further pros- pect, than of present popularity and present profit. When his plays had been acted, his hope was at an end ; he solicited no addition of honour from the reader. He therefore made no scruple to repeat the same jests in many dialogues, or to entangle different plots by the same knot of perplexity, which may be at least forgiven him, by those who recollect, that of Congreve's four comedies, two are concluded by a marriage in a mask, by a decep- tion, which perhaps never happened, and which, whether likely or not, he did not invent.
So careless was this great poet of future fame,
126 JOHNSON
that, though he retired to ease and plenty, while he was yet little declined into the vale of years, before he could be disgusted with fatigue, or disabled by infirmity, he made no collection of his works, nor desired to rescue those that had been already pub- lished from the depravations that obscured them, or secure to the rest a better destiny, by giving them to the world in their genuine state.
Of the plays which bear the name of Shakespeare in the late editions, the greater part were not published till about seven years after his death, and the few which appeared in his life are appar- ently thrust into the world without the care of the authour, and therefore probably without his knowledge.
Of all the publishers, clandestine or professed, their negligence and unskilfulness has by the late revisers been sufficiently shown. The faults of all are indeed numerous and gross, and have not only corrupted many passages perhaps beyond recovery, but have brought others into suspicion, which are only obscured by obsolete phraseology, or by the writer's unskilfulness and affectation. To alter is more easy than to explain, and temerity is a more common quality than diligence. Those who saw that they must employ conjecture to a certain degree, were willing to indulge it a little further. Had the authour published his own works, we should have sat quietly down to disentangle his intricacies, and clear his obscurities ; but now we tear what we cannot loose, and eject what we happen not to understand.
The faults are more than could have happened without the concurrence of many causes. The stile of Shakespeare was in itself ungrammatical,
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 127
perplexed and obscure ; his works were transcribed for the players by those who may be supposed to have seldom understood them ; they were transmitted by copiers equally unskilful, who still multiplied errours ; they were perhaps sometimes mutilated by the actors, for the sake of shortening the speeches ; and were at last printed without correction of the press. . . .
After the labours of all the editors, I found many passages which appeared to me likely to obstruct the greater number of readers, and thought it my duty to facilitate their passage. It is impossible for an expositor not to write too little for some, and too much for others. He can only judge what is necessary by his own experience ; and how long soever he may deliberate, will at last explain many lines which the learned will think impossible to be mistaken, and omit many for which the ignorant will want his help. These are censures merely relative, and must be quietly endured. I have endeavoured to be neither superfluously copious, nor scrupulously reserved, and hope that I have made my authour's meaning accessible to many who before were frighted from perusing him, and contributed something to the publick, by diffusing innocent and rational pleasure.
The compleat explanation of an authour not systematick and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and light hints, is not to be expected from any single scho- liast. All personal reflections, when names are suppressed, must be in a few years irrecoverably obliterated ; and customs, too minute to attract the notice of law, such as modes of dress, formali- ties of conversation, rules of visits, disposition of
128 JOHNSON
furniture, and practices of ceremony, which naturally find places in familiar dialogue, are so fugitive and unsubstantial, that they are not easily retained or recovered. What can be known, will be collected by chance, from the recesses of obscure and obsolete papers, perused commonly with some other view. Of this knowledge every man has some, and none has much ; but when an authour has engaged the publick attention, those who can add any thing to his illustration, communicate their discoveries, and time produces what had eluded diligence.
To time I have been obliged to resign many passages, which, though I did not understand them, will perhaps hereafter be explained, having, I hope, illustrated some, which others have neglected or mistaken, sometimes by short remarks, or mar- ginal directions, such as every editor has added at his will, and often by comments more laborious than the matter will seem to deserve ; but that which is most difficult is not always most impor- tant, and to an editor nothing is a trifle by which his authour is obscured.
The poetical beauties or defects I have not been very diligent to observe. Some plays have more, and some fewer judicial observations, not in pro- portion to their difference of merit, but because I gave this part of my design to chance and to caprice. The reader, I believe, is seldom pleased to find his opinion anticipated ; it is natural to delight more in what we find or make, than in what we receive. Judgement, like other faculties, is improved by practice, and its advancement is hindered by submission to dictatorial decisions, as the memory grows torpid by the use of a table
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 129
book. Some initiation is however necessary ; of
all skill, part is infused by precept, and part is
obtained by habit ; I have therefore shewn so
uch as may enable the candidate of criticism to
scover the rest.
To the end of most plays, I have added short rictures, containing a general censure of faults, • praise of excellence ; in which I know not how uch I have concurred with the current opinion ; ut I have not, by any affectation of singularity, viated from it. Notning is minutely and parti - ularly examined, and therefore it is to be sup- osed, that in the plays which are condemned lere is much to be praised, and in these which are raised much to be condemned. Conjecture, though it be sometimes unavoidable, have not wantonly nor licentiously indulged. It as been my settled principle, that the reading of le ancient books is probably true, and therefore not to be disturbed for the sake of elegance, erspicuity, or mere improvement of the sense, 'or though much credit is not due to the fidelity, or any to the judgement of the first publishers, et they who had the copy before their eyes were aore likely to read it right, than we who read it nly by imagination. But it is evident that they ave often made strange mistakes by ignorance or egligence, and that therefore something may be roperly attempted by criticism, keeping the liddle way between presumption and timidity. Such criticism I have attempted to practise, and here any passage appeared inextricably per- lexed, have endeavoured to discover how it may e recalled to sense, with least violence. But my rst labour is, always to turn the old text on every
212 IT
130 JOHNSON
side, and try if there .be any interstice, through which light can find its way ; nor would Huetius himself condemn me, as refusing the trouble of research, for the ambition of alteration. In this modest industry I have not been unsuccessful. I have rescued many lines from the violations of temerity, and secured many scenes from the in- roads of correction. I have adopted the Roman sentiment, that it is more honourable to save a citizen, than to kill an enemy, and have been more careful to protect than to attack. . . .
As I practised conjecture more, I learned to trust it less ; and after I had printed a few plays, resolved to insert none of my own readings in the text. Upon this caution I now congratulate myself, for every day encreases my doubt of my emendations. . . .
Perhaps I may not be more censured for doing wrong, than for doing little ; for raising in the publick expectations, which at last I have not answered. The expectation of ignorance is inde- finite, and that of knowledge is often tyrannical. It is hard to satisfy those who know not what to demand, or those who demand by design what they think impossible to be done. I have indeed dis- appointed no opinion more than my own ; yet i I have endeavoured to perform my task with no slight solicitude. Not a single passage in the; whole work has appeared to me corrupt, which I have not attempted to restore ; or obscure, which I have not endeavoured to illustrate. In many I have failed like others ; and from many, after all my efforts, I have retreated, and confessed the repulse. I have not passed over, with affected superiority, what is equally difficult to the reader
PKEFACB TO SHAKESPEARE 131
and to myself, but where I could not instruct him, lave owned my ignorance. I might easily have .ccumulated a mass of seeming learning upon easy cenes ; but it ought not to be imputed to negli- ence, that, where nothing was necessary, nothing las been done, or that, where others have said enough, I have said no more.
Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary | evils. Let him, that is yet unacquainted with the >owers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the ighest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play from the first scene to the last, with itter negligence of all his commentators. When lis fancy is once on the wirig, let it not stoop at correction or explanation. (When his attention is trongly engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside o the name of Theobald and of Pope. Let him •ead on through brightness and obscurity, through ntegrity and corruption ; let him preserve his lomprehension of the dialogue and his interest in ;he fable. And when the pleasures of novelty lave ceased, let him attempt exactness, and read the commentators.
Particular passages are cleared by notes, but the eneral effect of the work is weakened. The mind s refrigerated by interruption ; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject ; the reader is weary, he suspects not why ; and at last throws away the book, which ke has too diligently studied.
Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed ; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any ;reat work in its full design and its true propor- ;ions ; a close approach shews the smaller niceties, the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer.
132 JOHNSON
It is not very grateful to consider how little the succession of editors has added to this authour's power of pleasing. He was read, admired, studied, and imitated, while he was yet deformed with all the improprieties which ignorance and neglect could accumulate upon him ; while the reading was yet not rectified, nor his allusions understood ; yet then did Dryden pronounce ' that Shakespeare was the man, who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most compre- hensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily : When he describes any thing, you more than see it, you»feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation : he was naturally learned : he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature ; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike ; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat and insipid ; his comick wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him: No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,
' Quantum lento, solent inter viburna cupressi.'
It is to be lamented, that such a writer should want a commentary ; that his language should become obsolete, or his sentiments obscure. But it is vain to carry wishes beyond the condition of human things ; that which must happen to all, has happened to Shakespeare, by accident and time ;
PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE 133
and more than has been suffered by any other writer since the use of types, has been suffered by him through his own negligence of fame, or perhaps by that superiority of mind, which despised its own performances, when it compared them with its powers, and judged those works unworthy to be preserved, which the criticks of following ages were to contend for the fame of restoring and explaining. Among these candidates of inferiour fame, I am now to stand the judgment of the publick ; and wish that I could confidently produce my com- mentary as equal to the encouragement which I lave had the honour of receiving. Every work of this kind is by its nature deficient, and I should 'eel little solicitude about the sentence, were it to pronounced only by the skilful and the learned.
Henry IV.
None of Shakespeare's plays are more read than the first and second parts of Henry the fourth. Perhaps no authour has ever in two plays afforded so much delight. The great events are interesting, for the fate of kingdoms depends upon them ; the slighter occurrences are diverting, and, except one or two, sufficiently probable ; the incidents are multiplied with wonderful fertility of invention, and the characters diversified with the utmost nicety of discernment, and the profoundest skill in the nature of man.
The prince, who is the hero both of the comick and tragick part, is a young man of great abilities and violent passions, whose sentiments are right, though his actions are wrong ; whose virtues are obscured by negligence, and whose understanding
134 JOHNSON
is dissipated by levity. In his idle hours he is rather loose than wicked, and when the occasion forces out his latent qualities, he is great without effort, and brave without tumult. The trifler is roused into a hero, and the hero again reposes in the trifler. This character is great, original , and just.
Piercy is a rugged soldier, cholerick, and quarrel- some, and has only the soldier's virtues, generosity and courage.
But ^a^o^unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee ? Thou compound of sense and vice ; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested. Falstaff is a character loaded with faults, and with those faults which naturally produce contempt. He is a thief, and a glutton, a coward, and a boaster, always ready to cheat the weak, and prey upon the poor ; to terrify the timorous and insult the defenceless. At once obsequious and malignant, he satirises in their absence those whom he lives by flattering. He is familiar with the prince only as an agent of vice, but of this familiarity he is so proud as not only to be supercilious and haughty with common men, but to think his interest of importance to the duke of Lancaster. Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid or ambi- tious kind, but consists in easy escapes and sallies of levity, which make sport but raise no envy. It must be observed that he is stained with no enorm- ous or sanguinary crimes, so that his licentiousnes
HENRY IV 135
s not so offensive but that it may be borne for his mirth.
The moral to be drawn from this representation s, that no man is more dangerous than he that with a will to corrupt, hath the power to please ; and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think them- selves safe with such a companion when they see ¥enry seduced by Falstaff.
Edition of Shakespeare, 1765, vol. iv, pp. 355-6.
King Lear.
The Tragedy of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare. There is Derhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed ; which so much agitates our pas- dons and interests our curiosity. The artful nvolutions of distinct interests, the striking opposition of contrary characters, the sudden hanges of fortune, and the quick succession of events, fill the mind with a perpetual tumult of ndignation, pity, and hope. There is no scene which does not contribute to the aggravation of the distress or conduct of the action, and scarce a line which does not conduce to the progress of the scene. So powerful is the current of the poet's magination, that the mind, which once ventures within it, is hurried irresistibly along.
On the seeming improbability of Lear's conduct t may be observed, that he is represented accord- ng to histories at that time vulgarly received as ;rue. And perhaps if we turn our thoughts upon ihe barbarity and ignorance of the age to which this story is. referred, it will appear not so unlikely as while we estimate Lear's manners by our own.
136 JOHNSON
Such preference of one daughter to another, or resignation of dominion on such conditions, would be yet credible, if told of a petty prince of Guinea or Madagascar. Shakespeare, indeed, by the mention of his Earls and Dukes, has given us the idea of times more civilised, and of life regulated by softer manners ; and the truth is, that though he so nicely discriminates, and so minutely de- scribes the characters of men, he commonly neglects and confounds the characters of ages, by mingling customs ancient and modern, English and foreign.
My learned friend Mr. Warton, who has in the Adventurer very minutely criticised this play, remarks, that the instances of cruelty are too savage and shocking, and that the intervention of Edmund destroys the simplicity of the story. These objections may, I think, be answered, by repeating, that the cruelty of the daughters is an historical fact, to which the poet has added little, having only drawn it into a series by dialogue and action. But I am not able to apologise with equal plausibility for the extrusion of Gloucester's eyes, which seems an act too horrid to be endured in dramatick exhibition, and such as must always compel the mind to relieve its distress by incredu- lity. Yet let it be remembered that our authour well knew what would please the audience for which he wrote.
The injury done by Edmund to the simplicity of the action is abundantly recompensed by the addition of variety, by the art with which he is jnade to co-operate with the chief design, and the v$pportunity which he gives the poet of combining perfidy with perfidy, and connecting the wickec
KING LEAR 137
son with the wicked daughters, to impress this important moral, that villany is never at a stop, that crimes lead to crimes; and at last terminate in ruin.
But though this moral be incidentally enforced, Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles. Yet this conduct is justified by the Spectator, who blames Tote for giving Cordelia success and happi- ness in his alteration, and declares, that, in his opinion, the tragedy has lost half its beauty. Dennis has remarked, whether justly or not, that, to secure the favourable reception of Goto, the town was poisoned with much false and abominable criticism, and that endeavours had been used to discredit and decry poetical justice. A play in which the wicked • prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the ;ommon events of human life : but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot sasily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse ; or, that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue.
In the present case the publick has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever sndured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.
There is another controversy among the criticks F3
138 JOHNSON
concerning this play. It is disputed whether the predominant image in Lear's disordered mind be the loss of his kingdom or the cruelty of his daugh- ters. Mr. Murphy, a very judicious critick, has evinced by induction of particular passages, that the cruelty of his daughters is the primary source of his distress, and that the loss of royalty affects him only as a secondary and subordinate evil ; He observes with great justness, that Lear would move our compassion but little, did we not rather con- sider the injured father than the degraded king.1 . . .
Vol. vi, pp. 158-60. Hamlet.
Polonius is a man bred in courts, exercised in business, stored with observation, confident of his knowledge, proud of his eloquence, and declining into dotage. His mode of oratory is truly repre- sented as designed to ridicule the practice of those times, of prefaces that made no introduction, and of method that embarrassed rather than explained. This part of his character is accidental, the rest is natural. Such a man is positive and confident, because he knows that his mind was once strong, and knows not that it is become weak. Such a man excels in general principles, but fails in the
1 Arthur Murphy had made King Lear the subject of his Gray's-Inn Journal for January 12, 1754. ' I am really surprized,' he said, ' that the Critic in the Adventurer should impute the Madness of Lear to the Loss of Royalty. The Behaviour of his Children is always uppermost in his Thoughts, and we perceive it working upon his Passions, till at Length his Mind settles into a fixt Attention to that single Object. This, I think, will appear in a critical Examination of the Play.'
HAMLET 139
>articular application. He is knowing in retro-
pect, and ignorant in foresight. While he
depends upon his memory, and can draw from his
epositories of knowledge, he utters weighty sen-
;ences, and gives useful counsel ; but as the mind
n its enfeebled state cannot be kept long busy and
ntent, the old man is subject to sudden dereliction
of his faculties, he loses the order of his ideas, and
entangles himself in his own thoughts, till he
ecovers the leading principle, and falls again into
iis former train. This idea of dotage encroaching
upon wisdom, will solve all the phenomena of the
haracter of Polonius.
\ ol. viu, p. 183.
If the dramas of Shakespeare were to be charac- ;erised, each by the particular excellence which istinguishes it from the rest, we must allow to ;he tragedy of Hamlet the praise of variety. The ncidents are so numerous, that the argument of ;he play would make a long tale. The scenes are nterchangeably diversified with merriment and solemnity ; with merriment that includes judicious ind instructive observations, and solemnity, not trained by poetical violence above the natural ientiments of man. New characters appear from ime to time in continual succession, exhibiting Carious forms of life and particular modes of :onversation. The pretended madness of Hamlet auses much mirth, the mournful distraction of )phelia fills the heart with tenderness, and every •ersonage produces the effect intended, from the .pparition that in the first act chills the blood with torror, to the fop in the last, that exposes affecta- ion to just contempt.
140 JOHNSON
The conduct is perhaps not wholly secure against objections. The action is indeed for the most part in continual progression, but there are some scenes which neither forward nor retard it. Of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity. He plays the madman most, when he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness, which seems to be useless and wanton cruelty.
Hamlet is, through the whole play, rather an instrument than an agent. After he has, by the stratagem of the play, convicted the King, he makes no attempt to punish him, and his death is at last effected by an incident which Hamlet has no part in producing.
The catastrophe is not very happily produced ; the exchange of weapons is rather an expedient of necessity, than a stroke of art. A scheme might easily have been formed, to kill Hamlet with the dagger, and Laertes with the bowl.
The poet is accused of having shewn little regard to poetical justice, and may be charged with equal neglect of poetical probability. The apparition left the regions of the dead to little purpose ; the revenge which he demands is not obtained but by the death of him that was required to take it ; and the gratification which would arise from the destruction of an usurper and a murderer, is abated by the untimely death of Ophelia, the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the pious.
P. 311.
OTHELLO 141
Othello.
The beauties of this play impress themselves so strongly upon the attention of the reader, that they can draw no aid from critical illustration. The fiery openness of Othello, magnanimous, artless, and credulous, boundless in his confidence, ardent in his affection, inflexible in his resolution, and obdurate in his revenge ; the cool malignity of lago, silent in his resentment, subtle in his designs, and studious at once of his interest and his ven- geance ; the soft simplicity of Desdemona, con- fident of merit, and conscious of innocence, her artless perseverance in her suit, and her slowness to suspect that she can be suspected, are such proofs of Shakespeare's skill in human nature, as, I sup- pose, it is vain to seek in any modern writer. The gradual progress which lago makes in the Moor's conviction, and the circumstances which he em- ploys to inflame him, are so artfully natural, that, though it will perhaps not be said of him as he says of himself, that he is a man not easily jealous, yet we cannot but pity him when at last we find him perplexed in the extreme.
There is always danger lest wickedness conjoined with abilities should steal upon esteem, though it misses of approbation ; but the character of lago is so conducted, that he is from the first scene to the last hated and despised.
Even the inferiour characters of this play would be very conspicuous in any other piece, not only for their justness but their strength. Cassio is brave, benevolent, and honest, ruined only by his want of stubbornness to resist an insidious invitation. Rodorigo's suspicious credulity, and impatient
142 JOHNSON
submission to the cheats which he sees practised upon him, and which by persuasion he suffers to be repeated, exhibit a strong picture of a weak mind betrayed by unlawful desires, to a false friend ; and the virtue of JEmilia is such as we often find, worn loosely, but not cast off, easy to commit small crimes, but quickened and alarmed at atrocious villanies.
The Scenes from the beginning to the end are busy, varied by happy interchanges, and regularly promoting the progression of the story ; and the narrative in the end, though it tells but what is known already, yet is necessary to produce the death of Othello.
Had the scene opened in Cyprus, and the pre- ceding incidents been occasionally related, there had been little wanting to a drama of the most exact and scrupulous regularity.
Pp. 472-3.
143
THOMAS WHATELY
Remarks on some of the Characters of Shake- speare. By the Author of Observations on Modern Gardening. M.DCC.LXXXV1
EVERY Play of Shakespeare abounds with in- stances of his excellence in distinguishing characters. It would be difficult to determine which is the most striking of all that he drew ; but his merit will appear most conspicuously by comparing two
1 Thomas Whately — Under-Secretary of State under Lord North, 1771-2 — died in 1772. This essay was brought out by his brother, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Whately, after it had remained at least fifteen years in manuscript. The short preface states that the author ' intended to have gone through eight or ten of the principal characters of Shakespeare in the same manner, but suspended his design, in order to finish his Observations on Modern Gardening, first published in the year 1770 ; immediately after which time, he was engaged in such an active scene of public life, as left him but little leisure to attend to the Belles Lettres ; and in the year 1772 he died. The ensuing pages must therefore be considered as a Fragment only of a greater work, and that also destitute of the last corrections of the Author.' A second edition was published in 1808 ; and a third in 1839, with a preface by Archbishop Whately, the author's nephew. The present reprint is from the edition of 1785, but has corrections from the edition of 1808. It has been found necessary for reasons of space to make several omissions, but they do not affect the general character of the work, which, apart from its intrinsic merits, is important as the earliest volume devoted exclu- sively to the minute analysis of Shakespeare characters
144 WHATELY
opposite characters, who happen to be placed in similar circumstances : — not that on such occasions he marks them more strongly than on others, but because the contrast makes the distinction more apparent; and of these none seem to agree so much in situation, and to differ so much in dis- position, as KICHARD THE THIRD and MACBETH. Both are soldiers, both usurpers ; both attain the throne by the same means, by treason and murder ; and both lose it too in the same manner, in battle against the person claiming it as lawful heir. Perfidy, violence, and tyranny are common to both ; and those only, their obvious qualities, would have been attributed indiscriminately to both by an ordinary dramatic writer. But Shake- speare, in conformity to the truth of history as far as it led him, and by improving upon the fables which have been blended with it, has ascribed opposite principles and motives to the same designs and actions, and various effects to the operation of the 'same events upon different tempers. Richard and Macbeth, as represented by him, agree in nothing but their fortunes.
The periods of history, from which the subjects are taken, are such as at the best can be depended on only for some principal facts ; but not for the minute detail, by which characters are unravelled. That of Macbeth is too distant to be particular ; that of Richard, too full of discord and animosity to be true : and antiquity has not feigned more circumstances of horror in the one, than party violence has given credit to in the other. Fiction has even gone so far as to introduce supernatural fables into both stories : the usurpation of Macbeth is said to have been foretold by some witches ;
RICHARD III AND MACBETH 145
and the tyranny of Richard by omens attending his birth. From these fables, Shakespeare, un- restrained and indeed uninformed by history, seems to have taken the hint of their several characters ; and he has adapted their dispositions so as to give to such fictions, in the days he wrote, a shew of probability. The first thought of acceding to the throne is suggested, and success in the attempt is promised, to Macbeth by the witches : he is therefore represented as a man, whose natural temper would have deterred him from such a design, if he had not been immediately tempted, and strongly impelled to it. Richard, on the other hand, brought with him into the world the signs of ambition and cruelty : his disposition, therefore, is suited to those symptoms ; and he is not discouraged from indulging it by the improbability of succeeding, or by any difficulties and dangers which obstruct his way.
Agreeably to these ideas, Macbeth appears to be a man not destitute of the feelings of humanity. His lady gives him that character :
I fear thy nature ;
It is too full o' th' milk of human kindness, To catch the nearest way.
Which apprehension was well founded ; for his reluctance to commit the murther is owing in a great measure to reflexions which arise from sensibility :
He's here in double trust :
First, as* I am his kinsman and his subject ; Strong both against the deed ; then, as his host, Who should against his murtherer shut the door, Not bear the knife myself.
146 WHATELY
Immediately after he tells Lady Macbeth,
We will proceed no further in this business ; He hath honour'd me of late.
And thus giving way to his natural feelings oi kindred, hospitality, and gratitude, he for a while lays aside his purpose.
A man of such a disposition will esteem, as they ought to be esteemed, all gentle and amiable qualities in another : and therefore Macbeth is affected by the mild virtues of Duncan ; anc reveres them in his sovereign when he stifles them in himself. That
-This Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meekly ; hath been So clear in his great office,
is one of his reasons against the murther : anc when he is tortured with the thought of Banquo's issue succeeding him in the throne, he aggravates his misery by observing, that,
For them the gracious Duncan have I murther'd :
which epithet of gracious would not have occurred to one who was not struck with the particular merit it expresses.
The frequent references to the prophecy in favour of Banquo's issue, is another symptom oJ the same disposition : for it is not always from fear, but sometimes from envy, that he alludes to it : and being himself very susceptible of those domestic affections, which raise a desire and love of posterity, he repines at the succession assured to the family of his rival, and which in his estima- tion seems more valuable than his own actua'
RICHARD III AND MACBETH 147
possession. He therefore reproaches the sisters for their partiality, when
Upon my head they plac'd a fruitless crown, And put a barren sceptre in my gripe, Thence to be wrench'd with an unlineal hand, No son of mine succeeding. If 'tis so, For Banquo's issue have I 'fil'd my mind, For them the gracious Duncan have I murther'd ; Put rancours in the vessel of my peace Only for them ; and mine eternal jewel Given to the common enemy of man, To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings ! . Rather than so, come, Fate, into the list, And champion me to the utterance.
Thus, in a variety of instances, does the tender- ness in his character shew itself ; and one who has these feelings, though he may have no prin- ciples, cannot easily be induced to commit a murther. The intervention of a supernatural cause accounts for his acting so contrary to his dis- position. But that alone is not sufficient to prevail entirely over his nature : the instigations of his wife are also necessary to keep him to his purpose ; and she, knowing his temper, not only stimulates tris courage to the deed, but sensible that, besides a backwardness in daring, he had a degree of soft- ness which wanted hardening, endeavours to remove all remains of humanity from his breast, by the horrid comparison she makes between him and herself :
I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me : I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, And dasli'd the brains out, had I but so sworn As you have done to this.
The argument is, that the strongest and most
148 WHATELY
natural affections are to be stifled upon so great an occasion : and such an argument is proper to persuade one who is liable to be swayed by them ; but is no incentive either to his courage or his ambition.
Richard is in all these particulars the very reverse to Macbeth. He is totally destitute of every softer feeling :
I that have neither pity, love, nor fear,
is the character he gives of himself, and which he preserves throughout ; insensible to his habitudes with a brother, to his connexion with a wife, to the piety of the king, and the innocence of the babes, whom he murthers. The deformity of his body was supposed to indicate a similar depravity of mind ; and Shakespeare makes great use both of that, and of the current stories of the times concerning the circumstances of his birth, to intimate that his actions proceeded not from the occasion, but from a savageness of nature. Henry therefore tells him,
Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother's hope ; To wit, an indigested, defonn'd lump, Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree. Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born, To signify thou cam'st to bite the world ; And, if the rest be true which I have heard, Thou cam'st into the world with thy legs forward.
Which violent invective does not affect Richard as a reproach ; it serves him only for a pretence to commit the murther he came resolved on ; and his answer while he is killing Henry is,
I'll hear no more ; die, prophet, in thy speech ! For this, among the rest, was I ordain'd.
mmediately afterwards he resumes the subject dmself ; and, priding himself that the signs given at his birth were verified in his conduct, ic says,
Indeed 'tis true that Henry told me of ;
For I have often heard my mother say,
I came into the world with my legs forward.
Had I not reason, think ye, to make haste,
And seek their ruin that usurp' d our right ?
The midwife wonder'd ; and the women cry'd,
O Jesus bless us ! he is born with teeth !
And so I was ; which plainly signified
That I should snarl, .and bite, and play the dog.
Then, since the Heavens have shap'd my body so,
Let Hell make crook'd my mind to answer it.
Several other passages to the same effect imply hat he has a natural propensity to evil ; crimes ire his delight : but Macbeth is always in an igony when he thinks of them. He is sensible, >efore he proceeds, of
the heat-oppressed brain.
He feels
the present horror of the time
Which now suits with it.-
A.nd immediately after he has committed the inurther, he is
afraid to think what he has done.
Ie is pensive even while he is enjoying the effect of his crimes ; but Richard is in spirits merely it the prospect of committing them ; and what s effort in the one, is sport to the other. An sxtraordinary gaiety of heart shews itself upon those occasions, which to Macbeth seem most iwful ; and whether he forms or executes, con-
150 WHATELY
templates the means, or looks back on the success, of the most wicked and desperate designs, they are at all times to him subjects of merriment. Upon parting from his brother, he bids him
Go, tread the path that thou shalt ne'er return ; Simple, plain Clarence ! I do lOve thee so, That I will shortly send thy soul to Heaven, If Heaven will take the present at our hands.
His amusement, when he is meditating the murther of his nephews, is the application of some proverbs to their discourse and situation :
So wise so young, they say, do ne'er live long.
And,
Short summer lightly has a forward spring.
His ironical address to Tyrrel,
Dar'st thou resolve to kill a friend of mine ?
is agreeable to the rest of his deportment : and his pleasantry does not forsake him when he considers some of his worst deeds, after he has committed them ; for the terms in which he mentions them are, that,
The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham's bosom ; And Ann my wife hath bid the world good night.
But he gives a still greater loose to his humour, when his deformity, and the omens attending his birth, are alluded to, either by himself or by others, as symptoms of the wickedness of his nature. . . .
But the characters of Richard and Macbeth are marked not only by opposite qualities ; but even the same qualities in each differ so much in the
RICHARD III AND MACBETH 151
ause, the kind, and the degree, that the dis- inction in them is as evident as in the others. Ambition is common to both ; but in Macbeth it roceeds only from vanity, which is flattered and atisfied by the splendor of a throne : in Richard is founded upon pride ; his ruling passion is the ust of power :
this earth affords no joy to him,
But to command, to check, and to o'er bear.
Lnd so great is that joy, that he enumerates mong the delights of war,
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries ;
rhich is a pleasure brave men do not very sensibly el ; they rather value
Battles
Nobly, hardly fought.-
Jut, in Richard, the sentiments natural to his igh courage are lost in the greater satisfaction f trampling on mankind, and seeing even those rhom he despises crouching beneath him : at the ame time, to submit himself to any authority, 5 incompatible with his eager desire of ruling ver all ; nothing less than he first place can atiate his love of dominion, he declares that e shall
Count himself but bad, till he is best : nd,
While I live account this world but hell, Until the mis-shap'd trunk that bears this head Be round impaled with a glorious crown.
Vhich crown he hardly ever mentions, except in
152 WHATELY
swelling terms of exultation ; and which, even after he has obtained it, he calls
The high imperial type of this earth's glory.
But the crown is not Macbeth' s pursuit through life : he had never thought of it till it was sug- gested to him by the witches ; he receives their promise, and the subsequent earnest of the truth of it, with calmness. But his wife, whose thoughts are always more aspiring, hears the tidings with rapture, and greets him with the most extravagant congratulations ; she complains of his moderation ; the utmost merit she can allow him is, that he is
not without ambition.
But it is cold and faint, for the subject of it is that of a weak mind; it is only pre-eminence of place, not dominion. He never carries his idea beyond the honour of the situation he aims at ; and therefore he considers it as a situation which Lady Macbeth will partake of equally with him : and in his letter tells her,
This have I thought good to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou might' st not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being ignorant of what greatness is pro- mis' d thee.
But it was his rank alone, not his power, in which she could share : and that indeed is all which he | afterwards seems to think he had attained by his j usurpation. He styles himself,
high-plac'd Macbeth :
but in no other light does he ever contemplate his advancement with satisfaction ; and when he finds that it is not attended with that adulation
RICHARD III AND MACBETH 153
ind respect which he had promised himself, and would have soothed his vanity, he sinks inder the disappointment, and complains that
my way of life
Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf ; And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have.
These blessings, so desirable to him, are widely lifferent from the pursuits of Richard. He wishes lot to gain the affections, but to secure the mb mission of his subjects, and is happy to see nen shrink under his controul. But Macbeth, on ;he contrary, reckons among the miseries of his condition
mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, but dare not :
ind pities the wretch who fears him.
The towering ambition of Richard, and the weakness of that passion in Macbeth, are further nstances wherein Shakespeare has accommodated ;heir characters to the fabulous parts of their itories. The necessity for the most extraordinary ncitements to stimulate the latter, thereby Decomes apparent ; and the meaning of the )mens, which attended the birth of the former, s explained. Upon the same principle, a dis- ^ iinction still stronger is made in the article of courage, though both are possessed of it even to in eminent degree ; but in Richard it is intrepidity, md in Macbeth no more than resolution : in him t proceeds from exertion, not from nature ; in mterprise he betrays a degree of fear, though he able, when occasion requires, to stifle and
154 WHATELY
subdue it. When he and his wife are concerting the murther, his doubt,
If we should fail,
is a difficulty raised by apprehension ; and as soon as that is removed by the contrivance of Lady Macbeth, to make the officers drunk, and lay the crime upon them, he runs with violence into the other extreme of confidence, and cries out, with a rapture unusual to him,
Bring forth men-children only !
For thy undaunted metal should compose Nothing but males. Will it not be received, When we have mark'd with blood these sleepy two Of his own chamber, and us'd their very daggers, That they have done it ?
Which question he puts to her, who but the moment before had suggested the thought of
His spongy officers, who shall bear the guilt • Of our great quell.
And his asking it again proceeds from that extrava- gance, with which a delivery from apprehension and doubt is always accompanied. Then summon- ing all his fortitude, he says,
I am settled, and bend up
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat ;
and proceeds to the bloody business without any further recoils. But a certain degree of restless- ness and anxiety still continues, such as is con- 1 stantly felt by a man, not naturally very bold, ' worked up to a momentous achievement. His, imagination dwells entirely on the circumstances1 of horror which surround him ; the vision of the j dagger ; the darkness and the stillness of the !
RICHAED III AND MACBETH 155
ight ; and the terrors and the prayers of the hamberlains. Lady Macbeth, who is cool and ndismayed, attends to the business only ; con- iders of the place where she had laid the daggers >ady ; the impossibility of his missing them ; nd is afraid of nothing but a disappointment, he is earnest and eager ; he is uneasy and npatient, and therefore wishes it over :
I go, and it is done ; the bell invites me ; Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell Which summons thee to heaven or to hell.
ut a resolution, thus forced, cannot hold longer lan the immediate occasion for it : the moment fter that is accomplished for which it was neces- ary, his thoughts take the contrary turn, and he ries out in agony and despair,
fake, Duncan, with this knocking : would thou could' st !
hat courage, which had supported him while he as settled and bent up, forsakes him so immediately fter he has performed the terrible feat for which had been exerted, that he forgets the favourite ircumstance of laying it on the officers of the ed-chamber ; and when reminded of it, he refuses return and complete his work, acknowledging hat
I am afraid to think what I have done ;
Look on't again I dare not.
«-|Iis disordered senses deceive him, and his debili- ated spirits fail him ; he owns that
every noise appals him.
Ie listens when nothing stirs ; , he mistakes the ounds he does hear ; he is so confused, as not to istinguish whence the knocking proceeds. She,
156 WHATELY
who is more calm, knows that it is at the south entry ; she gives clear and direct answers to al' the incoherent questions he asks her : but he returns none to that which she puts to him ; and though after some time, and when necessity again urges him to recollect himself, he recovers so far as to conceal his distress, yet he still is not able to divert his thoughts from it. .
Nothing can be conceived more directly opposite to the agitations of Macbeth's mind, than the serenity of Richard in parallel circumstances. Upon the murther of the Prince of Wales, he immediately resolves on the assassination of Henry ; and stays only to say to Clarence,
Rich. Clarence, excuse me to the king my brother; I'll hence to London, on a serious matter : Ere ye come there, be sure to hear some news.
Cla. What ? What ?
Rich. The Tower, man, the Tower ! I'll root them out.
It is' a thought of his own, which just then occurs to him : he determines upon it without hesita- tion ; it requires no consideration, and admits oi no delay : he is eager to put it in execution but his eagerness proceeds from ardor, not from anxiety ; and is not hurry, but dispatch. He does not wait to communicate to the king hif brother ; he only hints the thought, as he hac conceived it, to Clarence ; and supposes that the name alone of the Tower will sufficiently indicate his business there. When come thither, he p ceeds directly without relenting ; it is not tc him, as to Macbeth, a terrible feat, but only a serioui matter : and
Sir, leave us to ourselves, we must confer,
RICHARD III AND MACBETH 157
s all the preparation he makes for it ; and indeed with him it is little more than a conference with n enemy : his animosity and his insolence are lie same, both before and after the assassination ; nd nothing retards, staggers, or alarms him. 'he humour which breaks from him, upon this nd other occasions, has been taken notice of Iready, as a mark of his depravity ; it is at the ame time a proof of his calmness, and of the omposure he preserves when he does not indulge limself in ridicule. It is with the most unfeeling teadiness that he tells the first tidings of the eath of Clarence to Edward, when, on the Queen's intercession in his favour, he occasionally ntroduces it as a notorious fact, and tells her,
Who knows not that the gentle duke is dead ? You do him injury to scorn his corse.
Be feels no remorse for the deed, nor fear of dis- jovery ; and therefore does not drop a word ivhich can betray him, but artfully endeavours o impute it to others ; and, without the least ippearance of ostentation, makes the most natural ind most pertinent reflections upon the fruits of ashness, and the vengeance of God against such )ffenders. . . .
He never deviates ; but throughout the whole progress of his reiterated crimes, he is not once daunted at the danger, discouraged by the diffi-
ulties, nor disconcerted by the accidents attending them ; nor ever shocked either at the idea or the reflection.
Macbeth indeed commits subsequent murthers with less agitation than that of Duncan : but
his is no inconsistency in his character ; on the
158 WHATBLY
contrary, it confirms the principles upon which it is formed ; for besides his being hardened to the deeds of death, he is impelled to the perpetra- tion of them by other motives than those which instigated him to assassinate his sovereign. In the one he sought to gratify his ambition ; the rest are for his security : and he gets rid of fear by guilt, which, to a mind so constituted, may be the less uneasy sensation of the two. ...
But Macbeth wants no disguise of his natural disposition, for it is not bad ; he does not affect more piety than he has : on the contrary, a part of his distress arises from a real sense of religion ; which, in the passages already quoted, makes him regret that he could not join with the chamber- lains in prayer for God's blessing ; and bewail that he has given his eternal jewel to the common enemy of man. He continually reproaches himself for his deeds ; no use can harden him ; confidence cannot silence, and even despair cannot stifle the cries of his conscience. By the first murther he committed he put rancours in the vessel of his peace ; and of the last he owns to Macduff,
my soul is too much charg'd
With blood of thine already.
How heavily it was charged with his crimes ! appears from his asking the physician,
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd, j
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff, Which weighs upon the heart ?
For though it is the disorder of Lady Macbeth that gives occasion to these questions, yet the
RICHARD III AND MACBETH 159
feeling with which he describes the sensations he wishes to be removed ; the longing he expresses for the means of doing it ; the plaintive measure of the lines ; and the rage into which he bursts, when he says,
Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it
upon being told that
therein the patient
Must minister unto himself,-
evidently shew, that, in his own mind, he is all the while making the application to himself. His credulity in the mysterious assurances of safety, which the incantations of the witches had procured, proceeds from superstition. He con- siders those who give him such assurances as
spirits that know
All mortal consequences :-
ind yet he condemns all intercourse with them, it the very time that he seeks it ; and he calls bis own application to the sisters a resolution
to know,
By the worst means, the worst
Conscious therefore of all these feelings, he has no jccasion to assume the appearance, but is obliged ;o conceal the force of them : and Lady Macbeth inds it necessary more than once to suggest to lim the precautions proper to hide the agitations )f his mind. After the murther of Duncan, she rids him,
Get on your night-gown, lest occasion call us, And shew us to be watchers. Be not lost So poorly in your thoughts.
160 WHATELY
and while he is meditating the death of Banquo. she says to him,
Come on ;
Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks ; Be bright and jovial with your friends to-night.
Whic'i kind of disguise is all that is wanting to him ; and yet, when he had assumed it, he in both instances betrays himself : in the first, by his too guarded conversation with Macduff and Lenox, which has been quoted already ; and in the last, by an over-acted regard for Banquo, of whose absence from the feast he affects to com- plain, that he may not be suspected of knowing the cause of it, though at the same time he very unguardedly drops an allusion to that cause, when he says,
Here had we now our country's honour roof'd, Were the grac'd person of our Banquo present • Whom may I rather challenge for unkindness, Than pity for mischance !
This he says before the ghost rises ; and after it is vanished, he, from the same consciousness, reassumes the same affectation ; and as soon as he is recovered, drinks
to the general joy of the whole table ;
, And to our dear friend Banquo, whom we miss ; Would he were here !
Richard is able to put on a general character, directly the reverse of his disposition ; and it is ready to him upon every occasion. .But Macbeth cannot effectually conceal his sensations, when it • is most necessary to conceal them ; nor actj a part which does not belong to him with any degree of consistency : and the same weakness
RICHARD III AND MACBETH 161
)f mind, which disqualifies him from maintaining uch a force upon his nature, shews itself still 'urther in that hesitation and dullness to dare, which he feels in himself, and allows in others. . . . A mind so framed and so tortured as that of Vtacbeth, when the hour of extremity presses upon him, can find no refuge but in despair ; and ;he expression of that despair by Shakespeare is ierhaps one of the finest pictures that ever was xhibited. It is wildness, inconsistency, and dis- order, to such a degree, and so apparent, that
Some say he's mad ; others, who lesser hate him, Do call it valiant fury : but for certain, He cannot buckle his distemper'd cause Within the belt of rule.
t is presumption without hope, and confidence without courage : that confidence rests upon his uperstition ; he buoys himself up with it against 11 the dangers that threaten him, and yet sinks pon every fresh alarm. . . .
But his seeming composure is not resignation ;
is passion still ; it is one of the irregularities of espair, which sometimes overwhelms him, at >ther times starts into rage, and is at all times ntemperate and extravagant. The resolution rith which he bore up against the desertion of be Thanes, fails him, upon meeting the messenger vho comes to tell him the numbers of the enemy : rhen he receives the confirmation of that news, is dejection turns into fury, and he declares,
I'll fight, till from my bones my flesh is hack'd. [e then impetuously gives his orders, to
Send out more horses ; skirr the country round ;
Hang those that talk of fear.
212 G
162 WHATELY
He repeats them afterwards with impatience. Though the enemy is still at a distance, he calls for his armour ; notwithstanding Seyton's remon- strance, that it is not needed yet, he persists in putting it on ; he calls for it again eagerly after- wards ; he bids the person who is assisting him, dispatch ; then, the moment it is on, he pulls it off again, and directs his attendants to bring it after him. In the midst of all this violence and hurry, the melancholy which preys upon him shews itself, by the sympathy he expresses so feelingly, when the diseased mind of Lady Macbeth is mentioned ; and yet neither the troubles of his conscience, nor his concern for her, can divert his attention from the distress of his situation. He tells her physician, that the Thanes fly from him ; and betrays to him, whose' assistance he could not want, and in whom he did not mean to place any particular confidence, his apprehen- sions of the English forces. After he has forbid those about him to bring him any more reports, he anxiously enquires for news ; he dreads every danger which he supposes he scorns; at last he recurs to his superstition, as to the only relief from his agony ; and concludes the agitated scene, as he had begun it, with declaring that he
will not be afraid of death or bane,
Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.
At his next appearance, he gives his orders, and considers his situation more calmly ; but still there is no spirit in him. If he is for a short time sedate, it is because
he has surfeited with horrors ;
Direness, familiar to his slaughterous thoughts, Cannot now start him.
He appears composed, only because lie is become almost indifferent to every thing : he is hardly affected by the death of the Queen, whom he tenderly loved : he checks himself for wishing she had lived longer ; for he is weary himself of ife, which in his estimation now
Is but a walking shadow ; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more : it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Yet though he grows more careless about his fate, tie cannot reconcile himself to it ; he still flatters himself that he shall escape, even after he has Eound the equivocation of the fiend. When Birnam wood appeared to come towards Dunsinane, he trusts to the other assurance ; and believes that he
bears a charmed life, which must not yield
To one of woman born.
His confidence however begins to fail him ; he raves as soon as he perceives that he has reason to doubt of the promises which had been made to him, and says,
If this which he avouches does appear,
There is no flying hence, nor tarrying here.
I 'gin to be a- weary of the sun,
And wish the state o' th' world were now undone. —
Ring the alarum bell : — Blow, wind ! come, wrack !
At least we'll die with harness on our back.
But sensible, at last, that he is driven to extremity, and that
They've tied him to a stake ; he cannot fly, But, bear-like, he must fight the course,
he summons all his fortitude ; and, agreeably to
164 WHATELY
the manliness of character to which he had always formed himself, behaves with more temper and spirit during the battle than he had before. He is so well recovered from the disorder he had been in, that the natural sensibility of his dis- position finds even in the field an opportunity to work ; where he declines to fight with Macduff, not from fear, but from a consciousness of the wrongs he had done to him : he therefore answers his provoking challenge, only by saying,
Of all men else I have avoided thee :
But get thee back ; my soul is too much charg'd
With blood of thine already.'
and then patiently endeavours to persuade this injured adversary to desist from so unequal a combat ; for he is confident that it must be fatal to Macduff, and therefore tells him,
thou losest labour ;
As easy may'st thou the intrenchant air With thy keen sword impress, as make me bleed : Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests ; I bear a charmed life.
But his reliance on this charm being taken away by the explanation given by Macduff, and every hope now failing him, though he wishes not to fight, yet his sense of honour being touched by the threat, to be made the shew and gaze of the time, and all his passions being now lost in despair, his habits recur to govern him ; he disdains the i thought of disgrace, find dies as becomes a soldier. His last words are,
I will not yield,
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet, And to be baited by the rabble's curse. Tho' Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane,
EICHAKD III AND MACBETH 165
And thou oppos'd, being of no woman born, Yet will I try the last. Before my body I throw my warlike shield : lay on, Macduff ! And damn'd be he that first cries, Hold, enough.
If this behaviour of Macbeth required, it would eceive illustration, by comparing it with that Kichard in circumstances not very different. When he is to fight for his crown and for his life, prepares for the crisis with the most perfect evenness of temper ; and rises, as the danger ;hickens, into ardour, without once starting out nto intemperance, or ever sinking into dejection. Though he is so far from being supported, that is depressed, as much as a brave spirit can be depressed, by supernatural means, and instead of laving a superstitious confidence, he is threatened >y all the ghosts of all whom he has murthered, ;hat they will sit heavy on his soul to-morrow, yet ie soon shakes off the impression they had made, and is again as gallant as ever. Before their appearance he feels a presentiment of his fate ; ic observes that he
has not that alacrity of spirit,
Nor cheer of mind, that he was wont to have :
and upon signifying his intention of lying in Bosworth field that night, the reflexion of where to-morrow ? occurs to him ; but he pushes it aside by answering, Well, all 's one for that : and ic struggles against the lowness of spirits which ic feels, but cannot account for, by calling for a, bowl of wine, and applying to business. Instead of giving way to it in himself, he attends to every symptom of dejection in others, and endeavours ;o dispel them. He asks,
My lord of Surry, why look you so sad ?
166 WHATELY
He enquires,
Saw'st thou the melancholy lord Northumberland ?
and is satisfied upon being told, that he and Surry were busied in cheering up the soldiers. He adverts to every circumstance which can dishearten or encourage his attendants or his troops, and observes upon them accordingly. When he per- ceives the gloominess of the morning, and that the sun might probably not be seen that day, his observation is,
Not shine to-day ? why, what is that to me
More than to Richmond ? for the self-same heaven,
That frowns on me, looks sadly upon him.
He takes notice of the superiority of his numbers ; he points out the circumstance that
the king's name is a tower of strength,
Which they upon the adverse faction want.
He represents the enemy as a troop only of banditti ; he urges the inexperience of Richmond ; and he animates his soldiers with their
ancient word of courage, fair St. George ;
the effect of which he had before intimated to the Duke of Norfolk ; when, having explained to him the disposition he intended, he asks him, This, and St. George to boot ! what think'st thou, Norfolk ?
He deliberately, and after having surveyed the vantage of the ground, forms that disposition by himself ; for which purpose he calls for ink and paper, and, being informed that it is ready, directs his guard to watch, and his attendants to leave him ; but, before he retires, he issues the neces- sary orders. They are not, like those of Macbeth,
RICHARD III AND MACBETH 167
general and violent, but temperate and particular ; delivered coolly, and distinctly given to different persons. To the Duke of Norfolk he trusts the mounting of the guard during the night, and bids him be ready himself early in the morning. He directs Catesby to
send out a pursuivant at arms-
To Stanley's regiment ; bid him bring his power
Before sun-rising.
He bids his menial servants,
Saddle white Surry for the field to-morrow ; Look that my staves be sound, and not too heavy.
And, instead of hastily putting on, and as hastily pulling off his armour, he quietly asks,
What, is my beaver easier than it was ? And all my armour laid into my tent ?
directing them to come about midnight to help to arm him. He is attentive to every circum- stance preparatory to the battle ; and preserves throughout a calmness and presence of mind which denote his intrepidity. He does not lose it upon being told, that the foe vaunts in the field ; but recollecting the orders he had given over- night, now calls for the execution of them, by directing Lord Stanley to be sent for, and his own horse to be caparisoned. He tells the Duke of Norfolk, who is next in command to himself, the disposition he had formed ; and every thing being in readiness, he then makes a speech to encourage his soldiers : but on hearing the enemy's drum, he concludes with,
Fight, gentlemen of England ! fight, bold yeomen ! Draw, archers, draw your arrows to the head ! Spur your proud horses hard, and ride in blood ; Amaze the welkin with your broken staves !
168 WHATELY
But even in this sally of ardour he is not hurried away by a blind impetuosity, but still gives orders, and distinguishes the persons to whom he addresses them. From this moment he is all on fire ; and, possessed entirely with the great objects around him, others of lesser note are below his attention. Swelling himself with courage, and inspiring his troops with confidence of victory, he rushes on the enemy. It is not a formed sense of honour, nor a cold fear of disgrace, which impels him to fight ; but a natural high spirit, and bravery exulting in danger : and being sensible that the competition is only personal between him and Richmond, he directs all his efforts to the destruction of his rival ; endeavours himself to single him out ; and seeking Mm in the throat of death, lie sets his own life upon the cast. Five times foiled in his aim, unhorsed, and surrounded with foes, he still persists to stand the hazard of the die ; and, having enacted more wonders than a man, loses his life in an attempt so worthy of himself.
Thus, from the beginning of their history to their last moments, are the characters of Macbeth and Richard preserved entire and distinct : and though probably Shakespeare, when he was draw- ing the one, had no attention to the other ; yet, as he conceived them to be widely different, expressed his conceptions exactly, and copied both from nature, they necessarily became con- trasts to each other ; and, by seeing them together, that contrast is more apparent, especially where the comparison is not between opposite qualities, but arises from the different degrees, or from
III AND MACBETH 169
ara particular orasplay, or total omission, of the ^.jjSame quality. This last must often happen, as nj-the character of Macbeth is much more complicated jg than that of Kichard ; and therefore, when they UDare set in opposition, the judgement of the poet jjj shews itself as much in what he has left out of enf he latter as in what he has inserted. The picture ibf Macbeth is also, for the same reason, much the more highly finished of the two ; for it required a greater variety, and a greater delicacy of paint- ing, to express and to blend with consistency all the several properties which are ascribed to him. That of Eichard is marked by more careless strokes, but they are, notwithstanding, perfectly just. Much bad composition may indeed be found in the part ; it is a fault from which the best of Shakespeare's plays are not exempt, and with which this Play particularly abounds; and the taste of the age in which he wrote, though it may afford some excuse, yet cannot entirely vindicate the exceptionable passages. After every reasonable allowance, they must still remain blemishes ever to be lamented ; but happily, for the most part, they only obscure, they do not disfigure his draughts from nature. Through whole speeches and scenes, character is often wanting ; but in the worst instances of this kind, Shakespeare is but insipid ; he is not inconsistent ; and in his peculiar excellence of drawing characters, though he often neglects to exert his talents, he is very rarely guilty of perverting them.
G3
170
WILLIAM RICHARDSON
Shakespeare's Characters.
UPON the whole, it is manifest, that a great4 portion of the delight we receive from poetry an<* fine writing, depends no less on the state of GUI- own minds, than on the intrinsic excellence of th(? performance. It is also obvious, that, though the description of a passion or affection may give us pleasure, whether it be described by the agent or the spectator, yet, to those who would apply the inventions of the poet to the uses of philosophical investigation, it is far from being of equal utility with a passion exactly imitated.' The talent of imitation is very different from that of description, and far superior.1
No writer has hitherto appeared who possesses in a more eminent degree than Shakespeare, the power of imitating the passions. All of them seem familiar to him ; the boisterous no less than the gentle ; the benign no less than the malignant. There are several writers, as there are many players, who are successful in imitating some particular passions, but who appear stiff, aukward, and unnatural, in the expression of others. Some are capable of exhibiting very striking representations of resolute and intrepid natures, but cannot so easily bend themselves to those that are softer and more complacent. Others, again, seem full of
1 The author of the Elements of Criticism is, if I mis- take not, the first writer who has taken any notice of this important distinction between the imitation and descrip- tion of a passion.
THE PROTEUS OF THE DRAMA 171
amiable affection and tenderness, but cannot exalt ;hemselves to the boldness of the hero, or magna- nimity of the patriot. The genius of Shakespeare s unlimited. Possessing extreme sensibility, and uncommonly susceptible, he is the Proteus of the drama ; he changes himself into every character, and enters easily into every condition of human nature. O youths and virgins ! 0 declining eld ! 0 pale misfortune's slaves ! O ye who dwell Unknown with humble quiet ! Ye who wait In courts, and fill the golden seats of kings : 0 sons of sport and pleasure ! 0 thou wretch That weep'st for jealous love, and the sore wound Of conscious guilt, or death's rapacious hand That left thee void of hope ! 0 ye who mourn In exile ! Ye who thro' th' embattled field Seek bright renown ; or who for nobler palms Contend, the leaders of a public cause ! Hath not his faithful tongue Told you the fashion of your own estate, The secrets of your bosom ? (Akenside.)
Many dramatic writers of different ages are capable, occasionally, of breaking out with great ervour of genius in the natural language of strong emotion. No writer of antiquity is more distin- guished for abilities of this kind than Euripides, lis whole heart and soul seem torn and agitated >y the force of the passion he imitates. He ceases ;o be Euripides ; he is Medea ; he is Orestes. Shakespeare, however, is most eminently distin- guished, not only by these occasional sallies, but >y imitating the passion in all its aspects, by mrsuing it through all its windings and labyrinths, >y moderating or accelerating its impetuosity iccording to the influence of other principles and )f external events, and finally by combining it n a judicious manner with other passions and
172 RICHARDSON
ropensities, or by setting it aptly in opposition. He thus unites the two essential powers of dramatic invention, that of forming characters ; and that of imitating, in their natural expressions, the passions and affections of which they are composed. It is, therefore, my intention to examine some of his remarkable characters, and to analyze their com- ponent parts : An exercise no less adapted to improve the heart, than to inform the understand- ing. It is obvious that my design by no means coincides with that of the ingenious author of the Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, whose success in rescuing the fame of our poet from the attacks of partial criticism, and in drawing the attention of the public to various excellences in his works which might otherwise have escaped the notice they deserve, gives her a just title to the reputation she has acquired. My intention is to make poetry subservient to philosophy, and to employ it in tracing the principles of human conduct. The design surely is laudable : Of the execution, I have no right to determine.
From the Introduction to A Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of some of Shake- speare's Remarkable Characters, 1774. J
1 This volume deals with Macbeth, Hamlet, Jaques, and Imogen, and is the first published work devoted specifically and exclusively to the ' philosophical ' examination of Shakespeare's characters. It was followed in 1784 by a second series dealing with Richard III, King Lear, and Timon of Athens, and in 1789 by an essay on Falstaff and on Shakespeare's Female Characters. Richardson was Professor of Humanity in the University of Glasgow from 1773 till his death in 1814.
Mrs. Elizajbeth Montagu's Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, . . . with Some Remarks upon the Mis- representations of Mons. de Voltaire was published in 1769.
173
MAURICE MORGANN
An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff. MDCCLXXVii.1
PREFACE
THE following sheets were written in consequence of a friendly conversation, turning by some chance upon the Character of FALSTAFF, wherein the Writer,maintaining contrary to the general Opinion, that, this Character was not intended to be shewn as a Coward, he was challenged to deliver and support that Opinion from the Press, with an engagement, now he fea,rs forgotten, for it was three years ago, that he should be answered thro' the same channel : Thus stimulated, these papers were almost wholly written in a very short time, but not without those attentions, whether successful or not, which seemed necessary to carry them beyond the Press into the hands of the Public. From the influence of the foregoing circumstances it is, that the Writer has generally assumed rather the character and tone of an Advocate than of an Inquirer ; — though if he had not first inquired and been convinced, he
;0nly representative passages of this remarkable essay are given here. Modern reprints of the complete text will be found in the Oxford Library of Prose and Poetry (ed. W. A. Gill, 1912), and in the editor's Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 1903.
The essay was written in 1774, though not published till 1777. Other editions appeared in 1820 and 1825.
174 MORGANN
should never have attempted to have amused either himself or others with the subject. — The impulse of the occasion, however, being passed, the papers were thrown by, and almost forgotten : But having been looked into of late by some friends, who observing that the Writer had not enlarged so far for the sake of FALSTAFF alone, but that the Argument was made subservient to Critical amusement, persuaded him to revise and convey it to the Press. This has been accordingly done, though he fears something too hastily, as he found it proper to add, while the papers were in the course of printing, some considerations on the Whole Character of FALSTAFF ; which ought to have been accompanied by a slight reform of a few preceding passages, which may seem, in conse- quence of this addition, to contain too favourable a representation of his Morals.
The vindication of FALSTAFF'S Courage is truly no otherwise the object than some old fantastic Oak, or grotesque Rock, may be the object of a morning's ride ; yet being proposed as such, may serve to limit the distance, and shape the course : The real object is Exercise, and the Delight which a rich, beautiful, picturesque, and perhaps unknown Country, may excite from every side. Such an Exercise may admit of some little excursion, keeping however the Road in view ; but seems to exclude every appearance of labour and of toil. — Under the impression of such Feelings the Writer has endeavoured to preserve to his Text a certain lightness of air, and chearfulness of tone ; but is sensible however that the manner of discussion does not every where, particularly near the com- mencement, sufficiently correspond with his design.
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 175
— If the Book shall be fortunate enough to obtain another Impression, a separation may be made ; and such of the heavier parts as cannot be wholly dispensed with, sink to their more proper station, — a Note.
He is fearful likewise that he may have erred in the other extreme ; and that having thought him- self intitled, even in argument, to a certain degree of playful discussion, may have pushed it, in a few places, even to levity. This error might be yet more easily reformed than the other. — The Book is perhaps, as it stands, too bulky for the subject ; but if the Reader knew how many pressing con- siderations, as it grew into size, the Author resisted, which yet seemed intitled to be heard, he would the more readily excuse him.
The whole is a mere Experiment, and the Writer considers it as such : It may have the advantages, but it is likewise attended with all the difficulties and dangers, of Novelty.
ON THE DRAMATIC CHARACTER OF SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.
THE ideas which I have formed concerning the Courage and Military Character of the Dramatic Sir John Falstaff, are so different from those which I find generally to prevail in the world, that I shall take the liberty of stating my sentiments on the subject ; in hope that some person as unengaged as myself, will either correct and reform my error in this respect ; or, joining himself to my opinion, redeem me from, what I may call, the reproach of singularity.
I am to avow then, that I do not clearly discern
176 MOEGANN
that Sir John Falstaff deserves to bear the char- acter so generally given him of an absolute Coward ; or, in other words, that I do not conceive Shake- /speare ever meant to make Cowardice an essential \^ part of his constitution.
I know how universally the contrary opinion prevails ; and I know what respect and deference are due to the public voice. But if to the avowal of this singularity, I add all the reasons that have led me to it, and acknowledge myself to be wholly in the judgment of the public, I shall hope to avoid the censure of too much forwardness or indecorum. It must, in the first place, be admitted that the appearances in this case are singularly strong and striking ; and so they had need be, to become the ground of so general a censure. We see this extra- ordinary Character, almost in the first moment of our acquaintance with him, involved in circum- stances of apparent dishonour ; and we hear him familiarly called Coward by his most intimate companions. We see him, on occasion of the robbery at Gads-Hill, in the very act of running away from the Prince and Poins ; and we behold him, on another of more honourable obligation, in open day light, in battle, and acting in his pro- fession as a Soldier, escaping from Douglas even out of the world as it were ; counterfeiting death, and deserting his very existence ; and we find him on the former occasion, betrayed into those lies and braggadocioes, which are the usual concomi- tants of Cowardice in Military men, and pretenders to valour. These are not only in themselves strong circumstances, but they are moreover thrust for- ward, prest upon our notice as the subject of our mirth, as the' great business of the scene :
No wonder, therefore, that the word should go forth that Falstaff is exhibited as a character of Cowardice and dishonour.
What there is to the contrary of this, it is my business to discover. Much, I think, will presently appear ; but it lies so dispersed:jj}_gp_laifiiitr.aJid SO-JEmrpfisely' obscured, that the reader must have some patience whilst I collect it into one body, and make it the object of a steady and regular contemplation.
But what have we to do, may my readers ex- claim, with principles so latent, so obscured? In Dramatic composition the Impression. i& ih&Fact ; and the Writer, who, meaning to impress one thing, has impressed another, is unworthy of observation.
It is a very unpleasant thing to have, in the first setting out, so many and so strong prejudices to contend with. All that one can do in such, case, is, to pray the reader to have a little patience in the commencement ; and to reserve his censure, if it' must pass, for the conclusion. Under his gracious allowance, therefore, I presume to declare it, as my opinion, that Cowardice is 'not the Impression, j which the whole character of Falstaff ™ nftip.i7lat.Pfl j to make on the minds of an unprejudiced audience ; | tno1 there be, 1 confess, a great deal of something in thg^ mmj)nsrf.iqn likely p.nnngTi f,p pnz7lp; and consequently to mislead the Understanding. — The . reader will perceive that I distinguish between 1 mental Impressions, and the Understanding. — I ; wish to avoid every thing that looks like subtlety and refinement ; but this is a distinction, which we all comprehend. — There are none of us unconscious of certain feelings or sensations of mind, which do
178 MORGANN
not seem to have passed thro' the Understanding ; the effects, I suppose, of some secjstjnfluences from without, acting upon a certain mental sense, and producing feelings and passions in just corre- spondence to the force and variety of those influ- ences on the one hand, and to the quickness of our sensibility on the other. Be the cause, however, what it may, the fact is undoubtedly so ; which is all I am concerned in. And it is equally a fact, /which every man's experience may avouch, that the Understanding and those feelings are frequently at variance. The latter often arise from the most minute circumstances, and frequently from such as the Understanding cannot estimate, or even recognize ; whereas the Understanding delights in abstraction, and in general propositions ; which, however true considered as such, are very seldom, I had like to have said never, perfectly applicable to any particular case. And hence, among other causes, it is, that we often condemn or applaud characters and actions on the credit of some logical process, while our hearts revolt, and would fain lead us to a very different conclusion.
The Understanding seems for the most part to \y take cognizance of actions only, and from these to
A infer motives and character ; but the sense we have
1 been speaking of proceeds in a contrary course ;
and determines of actions from certain first prin-
?\ciples of character, which seem wholly out of the
/ reach of the Understanding. We cannot indeed do otherwise than admit that there must be dis- tinct principles of character in every distinct individual : The manifest variety even in the minds of infants will oblige us to this. But what are these first principles of character ? Not the
THE CHAEACTER OF FALSTAFF 179
objects, I am persuaded, of the Understanding ; and yet we take as strong Impressions of them as if we could compare and assort them in a syllogism. We often love or hate at first sight ; and indeed, in general, dislike or approve by some secret reference to these principles ; and we judge even of conduct, not from any idea of abstract good or evil in the nature of actions, but by refering those actions to a supposed original character in the man himself. I do not mean that we talk thus ; we could not indeed, if we would, explain ourselves in detail on this head ; we can neither account for Impressions and passions, nor communicate them to others by words : Tones and looks will sometimes convey the passion strangely, but the Impression is incom- municable. The same causes may produce it indeed at the same time in many, but it is the separate possession of each, and not in its nature transferable : It is an imperfect sort of instinct, and proportionably dumb. — We might indeed, if we chose it, candidly confess to one another, that we are greatly swayed by these feelings, and are by no means so rational in all points as we could wish ; but this would be a betraying of the interests of that high faculty, the Understanding, which we so value ourselves upon, and which we more peculiarly call our own. This, we think, must not be ; and so we huddle up the matter, concealing it as much as possible, both from ourselves and others. In Books indeed, wherein character, motive, and action, are all alike subjected to the Understand- ing, it is generally a very clear case ; and we make decisions compounded of them all : And thus we are willing to approve of Candide, tho' he kills my Lord the Inquisitor, and runs thro' the body the
180 MOEGANN
Baron of Thunder-ten-tronchk the son of his patron, and the brother of his beloved Cunegonde : But in real life, I believe, my Lords the Judges would be apt to inform the Gentlemen of the Jury, that my Lord the Inquisitor was ill killed ; as Candide did not proceed on the urgency of the moment, but on the speculation only of future evil. And indeed this clear perception, in Novels and Plays, of the union of character and action not seen in nature, is the principal defect of such compositions, and what renders them but ill pictures of human life, and wretched guides of conduct.
But if there was one man in the world, who could make a more perfect draught of real nature, and steal such Impressions on his audience, without their special notice, as should keep their hold in spite of any error of their Understanding, and should thereupon venture to introduce an apparent incongruity of character and action, for ends which I shall presently endeavour to explain ; such an imitation would be worth our nicest curiosity and attention. But in such a case as this, the reader might expect that he should find us all talking the language of the Understanding only ; that is, cen- suring the action with very little conscientious investigation even of that; and transferring the censure, in every odious colour, to the actor him- self ; how much soever our hearts and affections might secretly revolt : For as to the Impression, we have already observed that it has no tongue ; nor is its operation and influence likely to be made the subject of conference and communication.
It is not to the Courage only of Falstaff that we think these observations will apply : No part whatever of his character seems to be fully settled
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 181
in our minds ; at least there is something strangely incongruous in our discourse and affections con- cerning him. We all like Old Jack ; yet, by some j \/ strange perverse fate, we all abuse him, and deny him the possession of any one single good or respect- able quality. There is something extraordinary in this : It must be a strange art in Shakespeare^ which can draw our liking and good will towards so offensive an object. He has wit, it will be said ; chearfulness and humour of the most characteristic and captivating sort. And is this enough ? Is the humour and gaiety of vice so very captivating ? Is the wit, characteristic of baseness and every ill quality capable of attaching the heart and winning the affections ? Or does not the apparency of such humour, and the flashes of such wit, by more strongly disclosing the deformity of character, but the more effectually excite our hatred and con- tempt of the man ? And yet this is not our feeling of Falstaffs character. When he has ceased to / amuse us, we find no emotions of disgust ; we can scarcely forgive the ingratitude of the Prince in the new-born virtue of the King, and we curse the severity of that poetic justice which consigns our i old good-natured delightful companion to the custody of the warden, and the dishonours of the ; Fleet.
I am willing, however, to admit that if a Dra- matic writer will but preserve to any character , the qualities of a strong mind, particularly Courage ^/ and ability, that it will be afterwards no very /\ difficult task (as I may have occasion to explain) to discharge that disgust which arises from vicious-y manners ; and even to attach us (if such char-^ acter should contain any quality productive of
182 MOKGANN
x chearfulness and laughter) to the cause and subject V^ of our mirth with some degree of affection.
But the question which I am to consider is of a very different nature : It is a question of fact, and concerning a quality which forms the basis of every respectable character ; a quality which is the very essence of a Military man ; and which is held up to us, in almost every Comic incident of the Play, as the subject of our observation. It is strange then that it should now be .a question, whether Falstaff is, or is not a man of Courage ; and whether we do in fact contemn him for the want, or respect him for the possession of that quality : And yet I believe the reader will find that \ he has by no means decided this question, even V for himself. — If then it should turn out, that this * difficulty has arisen out of the Art of Shakespeare, who has contrived to make secret Impressions upon us of Courage, and to preserve those Impres- sions in favour of a character which was to be held up for sport and laughter on account of actions of apparent Cowardice and dishonour, we shall have * less occasion to wonder, as Shakespeare is a Name which contains All of Dramatic artifice and genius. If in this place the reader shall peevishly and prematurely object that the observations and dis- tinctions I have laboured to establish, are wholly unapplicable ; he being himself unconscious of ever having received any such Impression ; what can be done in so nice a case, but to refer him to the following pages ; by the number of which he may judge how very much I respect his objection, and by the variety of those proofs, which I shall employ to induce him to part with it ; and to recognize in its stead certain feelings, concealed and
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 183
covered over perhaps, but not erazed, by time, reasoning, and authority.
In the mean while, it may not perhaps be easy for him to resolve how it comes about, that, whilst we look upon" F. distaff as a charagter_pf thp. lUrp.
nature with that, »f P/M-nTfc* or nf Rnha/fal, W£
should Bresgrxe Joi .him .a great degree of respect and gpod-wj}!. and yet feel the highest disdain and contempt of the others, tho' they are all involved in similar situations. The reader, I believe, would wonder extremely to find either Parolles or Bobadil possess himself in danger : What then can be the cause that we are not a,t all surprized at the gaiety and ease of Falstaff under the most trying circum- stances ; and that we never think of charging Shakespeare with departing, on this account, from the truth and coherence of character ? Perhaps, after all, the real character of Falstaff may be different from his apparent one ; and possibly this difference between reality and appearance, whilst ' it accounts at onc6 for our liking and our censure, may be the true point of humour in the character, and the source of all our laughter and deligb/. We may chance to find, if we will but examine a little into the nature of those circumstances which have accidentally involved him, that he was intended to be drawn as a character of much Natural courage and resolution ; and be obliged thereupon to repeal those decisions, which may have been made upon the credit of some general tho' unapplicable propositions ; the common source of error in other and higher matters. A little reflection may perhaps bring us round again to the point of our departure, and unite our Understandings to our instinct. — Let us then for a moment suspend at
184 MORGANN
least our decisions, and candidly and coolly inquire if Sir John Falstaff be, indeed, what he has so often been called by critic and commentator, male and female, — a Constitutional Coward.
It will scarcely be possible to consider the Courage of Falstaff as wholly detached from his other qualities : But I write not professedly of any part of his character, but what is included under the term, Courage ; however I may incidentally throw some lights on the whole. — The reader will not need to be told that this Inquiry will resolve itself of course into a Critique on the genius, the arts, and the conduct of Shakespeare : For what is Falstaff, what Lear, what Hamlet, or Othello, but different modifications of Shakespeare's thought ? It is true that this Inquiry is narrowed almost to a single point : But general criticism is as unin- structive as it is easy : Shakespeare deserves to be considered inxletailj — a task hitherto unattempted.
It may be proper, in the first place, to take a short view of all the parts of Falstaff's Character, and then proceed to discover, if we can, what Im- pressions, as to Courage or Cowardice, he had made on the persons of the Drama : After which we will examine, in course, such evidence, either of persons or facts, as are relative to the matter ; and account as we may for those appearances, which seem to have led to the opinion of his Constitutional Cowardice.
The scene of the robbery, and the disgraces attending it, which stand first in the Play, and introduce us to the knowledge of Falstaff, I shall beg leave (as I think this scene to have been the source of much unreasonable prejudice) to reserve till we are more fully acquainted with the whole character of Falstaff; and I shall therefore hope
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 185
that the reader will not for a time advert to it, or to the jests of the Prince or of Poins in conse- quence of that unlucky adventure.
In drawing out the parts of Falstaff'B character, with which I shall begin this Inquiry, I shall take the liberty of putting Constitutional bravery into his composition ; but the reader will be pleased to consider what I shall say in that respect as spoken hypothetically for the present, to be retained, or discharged out of it, as he shall finally determine.
To me then it appears that the leading quality in~ Fdl.staff's character, and that from which all the rest take their colour, is a high degree of wit and humour, accompanied with great natural vigour and ;:!acri1.y of mind. This quality so accompanied, led him probably very early into life, and made him highly acceptable to society ; so acceptable, as to make it s.eem unnecessary for him to acquire any other virtue. Hence, perhaps, his continued debaucheries and dissipations of every kind. — He | i seems, bv nature, to have had a mind free of malice i or any evil principle : but he never took the trouble of acquiring any good one. He found himself esteemed and beloved with all his faults ; nay for his faults, which were all connected with humour, and for the most part, grew out of it. As he had, possibly, no vices but such as he thought might be openly professed, so he appeared more - dissolute thro' ostentation. To the character of wit and humour, to which all his other qualities seem to have conformed themselves, he appears to have added a very necessary support, that of the profession of a Soldier. He had from nature, as I presume to say, a spirit of boldness and enter- prise ; which in a Military age, tho' employment
186 MORGANN
was only occasional, kept him always above con- tempt, secured him an honourable reception among the Great, and suited best both with his particular mode of humour and of vice. Thus living con- tinually in society, nay even in Taverns, and in- dulging himself, and being indulged by others, in every debauchery ; drinking, whoring, gluttony, and ease ; assuming a liberty of fiction, necessary perhaps to his wit, and often falling into falsity and lies, he seems to have set, by degrees, all sober reputation at defiance ; and finding eternal resources in his wit, he borrows, shifts, defrauds, and even robs, without dishonour. — Laughter and approbation attend his greatest excesses ; and being governed visibly by no settled bad principle or ill design, fun and humour account for and cover all. By degrees, however, and thro' indulgence, he acquires bad habits, becomes an humourist, grows enormously corpulent, and falls into the infirmities of age ; yet never quits, all the time, one single levity or vice of youth, or loses any of that chearfulness of mind, which had enabled him to pass thro' this course with ease to himself and delight to others ; and thus, at last, mixing youth and age, enterprize and corpulency, wit and folly, poverty and expence, title and buffoonery, inno- cence as to purpose, and wickedness as to practice ;
• neither incurring hatred by bad principle, or con- tempt by Cowardice, yet involved in circumstances productive of imputation in both ; a butt and a wit, a humourist and a man. of humour, a touch- stone and a laughing stock, a jester and a jest, has
\Sir John Falstaff, taken at that period of his life in which we see him, become the most perfect
j Comic character that perhaps ever was exhibited.
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 187
It may not possibly be wholly amiss to remark in this place, that if Sir John F distaff had pos- sessed any of that Cardinal quality, Prudence, alike the guardian of virtue and the protector of vice • that quality, from the possession or the absence of which, the character and fate of men in this life take, I think, their colour, and not from real vice or virtue ; if he had considered his wit not as 'principal but accessary only ; as the instru- ment of power, and not as power itself ; if he had had much baseness to hide, if he had had less of what may be called mellowness or good humour, or less of health and spirit ; if he had spurred and rode the world with his wit, instead of suffering the world, boys and all, to ride him ; — he might, without any other essential change, have been the admiration and not the jest of mankind : — Or if he had lived in our day, and instead of attaching himself to one Prince, had renounced all friendship and all attachment, and had let himself out as the ready instrument and Zany of every successive Minister, he might possibly have acquired the high honour of marking his shroud or decorating his coffin with the living rays of an Irish at least, if not a British Coronet : Instead of which, tho' enforc- ing laughter from every disposition, he appears, now, as such a character, which every wise man will pity and avoid, every knave will censure, and every fool will fear : And accordingly Shakespeare, ever true to nature, has made Harry desert, and Lancaster censure him : — He dies where he lived, in a Tavern, broken-hearted, without a friend ; and his final exit is given up to the derision of fools. Nor have his misfortunes ended here ; the scandal arising from the misapplication of his wit and
188 MORGANN
talents seems immortal. He has met with as little justice or mercy from his final judges the critics, as from his companions of the Drama. With our cheeks still red with laughter, we ungratefully as unjustly censure him as a coward by nature, and a rascal upon principle : Tho', if this were so, it might be hoped, for our own credit, that we should behold him rather with disgust and disapprobation than with pleasure and delight.
But to remember our question — Is Falstaff a constitutional coward ?
With respect to every infirmity, except that of Cowardice, we must take him as at the period in which he is represented to us. If we see him dissipated, fat, — it is enough ; — we have nothing to do with his youth, when he might perhaps have been modest, chaste, ' and not an Eagle's talon in the waist.' But Constitutional Courage extends to a man's whole life, makes a part of his nature, and is not to be taken up or deserted like a mere Moral quality. It is true, there is a Courage founded upon principle, or rather a principle independent of Courage, which will sometimes operate in spite of nature ; a principle, which prefers death to shame, but which always refers itself, in con- formity to its own nature, to the prevailing modes of honour, and the fashions of the age. — But Natural courage is another thing : It is indepen- dent of opinion; It adapts itself to occasions,, preserves itself under every shape, and can avail itself of flight as well as of action. — In the last war, some Indians of America perceiving a line of Highlanders to keep their station under every disadvantage, and under a fire which they could not effectually return, were so miserably mistaken
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 189
in our points of honour as to conjecture, from observation on the habit and stability of those troops, that they were indeed the women of England, who wanted courage to run away. — That Courage which is founded in nature and constitution, Falstaff, as I presume to say, possessed ; — but I am I ready to allow, that the principle already men- 1 tioned, so far as it refers to reputation only, began with every other Moral quality to lose its hold on him in his old age ; that is, at the time of life in which he is represented to us ; a period, as it should seem, approaching to seventy. — The truth is that he had drollery enough to support -himself | \Y in credit without the point of honour, and had f\ address enough to make even the preservation of ! his life a point of drollery. The reader knows '<• I allude, tho' something prematurely, to his ictitious death in the battle of Shrewsbury. This NX ncident is generally construed to the disadvantage /\ of Falstaff : It is a transaction which bears the xternal marks of Cowardice : It is also aggra- vated to the spectators by the idle tricks of the Player, who practises on this occasion all the attitudes and wild apprehensions of fear ; more ambitious, as it should seem, of representing a Caliban than a Falstaff ; or indeed rather a poor unweildy miserable Tortoise than either.— The painful Comedian lies spread out on his belly, and aot only covers himself all over with his robe as with a shell, but forms a kind of round Tortoise- back by I know not what stuffing or contrivance ; in addition to which, he alternately lifts up, and depresses, and dodges his head, and looks to the one side and to the other, so much with the piteous aspect of that animal, that one would not be sorry
190 MORGANN
to see the ambitious imitator calipashed in his robe, and served up for the entertainment of the gallery. — There is no hint for this mummery in the Play : Whatever there may be of dishonour in Falstaff' & conduct, he neither does or says any thing" on this occasion which indicates terror or disorder of jnind : On the contrary, this very act
* is a proof of his having all his wits about him, and is a stratagem, such as it is, not improper for a buffoon, whose fate would be singularly hard, if he should not be allowed to avail himself of his Character when it might serve him in most stead. We must remember, in extenuation, that the executive, the destroying hand of Douglas was over him : ' It was time to counterfeit, or that hot terma- gant Scot had paid him scot and lot too.' He had but one choice ; he was obliged to pass thro' the ceremony of dying either in jest or in earnest ; and we shall not be surprized at the event, when we remember his propensities to the former. — Life (and especially the life of Falstaff) might be a jest ; but he could see no joke whatever in dying : To be chopfallen was, with him, to lose both life and character together : He saw the point of honour,
! as well as every thing else, in ridiculous lights, and
; began to renounce its tyranny.
But I am too much in advance, and must retreat for more advantage. I should not forget how much opinion is against me, and that I am; to make my way by the mere force and weight of evidence ; without which I must not hope to possess myself of the reader : No address, no insinuation will avail. To this evidence, then, I now resort. The Courage of Falstaff is my Theme : And no passage will I spare from which
THE CHAEACTEK OF FALSTAFF 191
any thing can be inferred as relative to this point. It would be as vain as injudicious to attempt con- cealment : How could I escape detection ? The Play is in every one's memory, and a single passage remembered in detection would tell, in the mind of the partial observer, for fifty times its real weight. Indeed this argument would be void of all excuse if it declined any difficulty ; if it did not meet, if it did not challenge opposition. Every passage then shall be produced from which, in my opinion, any inference, favourable or unfavourable, has or can be drawn ; — but not methodically, not formally, as texts for comment, but as chance or convenience shall lead the way ; but in what shape soever, they shall be always distinguishingly marked for notice. And so with that attention to truth and candour which ought to accompany even our lightest amusements I proceed to offer such proof as the case will admit, that Courage is a part of Falstaff's Character, that it belonged to his constitution, and was manifest in the conduct and practice of his whole life. . . .
I cannot foresee the temper of the reader, nor whether he be content to go along with me in these kind of observations. Some of the incidents which I have drawn out of the Play may appear too minute, whilst yet they refer to principles, which may seem too general. Many points require explanation ; something should be said of the nature of Shakespeare's Dramatic characters ; x by
1 The reader must be sensible of something in the com- position of Shakespeare's characters, which renders them essentially different from those drawn by other writers. The characters of every Drama must indeed be grouped ; but in the groiipes of other poets the parts which are not ±
192 MORGANN
what arts they were formed, and wherein they differ from those of other writers ; something like- seen, do not in fact exist. But there is a certain rovn.d.nes8 and integrity in the forms of ShaTcespeare, which give..them an independence as well as a relation, insomuch that we often meet with passages, which tho' perfectly felt, cannot be sufficiently explained in words, without unfolding the whole character of the speaker : And this I may be obliged to do in respect to that of Lancaster, in order to account for some words spoken by him in censure of Falstaff. . . . Some- thing which may be thought too heavy for the text, I shall add here, as a conjecture concerning the composition of Shakespeare's characters : Not that they were the effect, I believe, so much of a minute and laborious attention, as of a certain comprehensive energy of mind, involving within itself all the effects of system and of labour.
Bodies of all kinds, whether of metals, plants, or animals, are supposed to possess certain first principles of being, and to have an existence independent of the accidents, which form their magnitude or growth : Those accidents are supposed to be drawn in from the surrounding elements, but not indiscriminately ; each plant and each animal, imbibes those things only, which are proper to its own distinct nature, and which have besides such a secret relation to each other as to be capable of forming a perfect union and coalescence : But so variously are the surround- ing elements mingled and disposed, that each particular body, even of those under the same species, has yet some peculiar of its own. Shakespeare appears to have con- sidered the being and growth of the human mind as analogous to this system : There are certain qualities and capacities, which he seems to have considered as first principles ; the chief of which are certain energies of courage and activity, according to their degrees ; together with different degrees and sorts of sensibilities, and a capacity, varying likewise in the degree, of discernment and intelligence. The rest of the composition is drawn in from an atmosphere of surrounding things ; that is, from the various influences of the different laws, religions and governments in the world ; and from those of the different ranks and inequalities in society ; and from the different professions of men, encouraging or repressing passions of
THE CHAEACTEE OF FALSTAFF 193
wise more professedly of Shakespeare himself, and of the peculiar character of his genius. After such
particular sorts, and inducing different modes of thinking and habits of life ; and he seems to have known intuitively what those influences in particular were which this or that original constitution would most freely imbibe, and which would most easily associate and coalesce. But all these things being, in different situations, very differently disposed, and those differences exactly discerned by him, he found no difficulty in marking every individual, even among characters of the same sort, with something peculiar and distinct. — Climate and complexion demand their influence, ' Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, and love thee after,' is a sentiment characteristic of, and fit only to be uttered by a Moor.
But it was not enough for Shakespeare to have formed his characters with the most perfect truth and coherence ; it was further necessary that he should possess a wonderful facility of compressing, as it were, his own spirit into these images, and of giving alternate animation to the forms. This was not to be done from without • he must have felt every varied situation, and have spoken thro' the organ he had formed. Such an intuitive comprehension of things and such a facility, must unite to produce a Shakespeare. The reader will not now be surprised if I affirm that those. . characters in Shakespeare, which are seen only in part, are yrt capable of being unfolded and understood in che whole ; overy part being in fact relative, and inferring all the rest. It is true that the point of action or sentiment, which we are most concerned in, is always held out for our special notice. But who does not perceive that there is a pecu- liarity about it, which conveys a relish of the whole ? And very frequently, when no particular point presses, he boldly makes a character act and speak from those parts of the composition, which are inferred only, and not dis- tinctly shewn. This produces a wonderful effect ; it seems to carry us bej'ond the poet to nature itself, and wives an integrity and truth to facts and character, which they could not otherwise obtain : And this is in reality that art in Shakespeare, which being withdrawn from our notice, we more emphatically call nature. A felt propriety and truth from causes unseen, I take to be the highest point of
212 H
194 MORGANN
a review we may not perhaps think any considera- tion arising out of the Play, or out of general nature, either as too minute or too extensive.
Shakespeare is in truth, an author whose mimic creation agrees in general so perfectly with that of nature, that it is not only wonderful in the great, but opens another scene of amazement to the discoveries of the microscope. We have been charged indeed by a Foreign writer with an over- much admiring of this Barbarian : Whether we have admired with knowledge, or have blindly followed those feelings of affection which we could not resist, I cannot tell ; but certain it is, that to the labours of his Editors he has not been overmuch obliged. They are however for the most part oJ the first rank in literary fame ; but some of them had possessions of their own in Parnassus, of an extent too great and important to allow of a very diligent attention to the interests of others ; and among those Critics more professionally so, the ablest and the best has unfortunately looked more to the praise of ingenious than of just conjecture. The character of his emendations are not so much that of right or wrong, as that, being in the extreme, they are always Warburtonian. Another has since undertaken the custody of our author, whom he seems to consider as a sort of wild Proteus or mad- man, and accordingly knocks him down with the butt-end of his critical staff, as often as he exceeds
Poetic composition. If the characters of Shakespeare an thus whole, and as it were original, while those of almosl all other writers are mere imitation, it may be fit to con aider them rather as Historic than Dramatic beings ; and when occasion requires, to account for their conduct froir the whole of character, from general principles, from lateni motives, and from policies not avowed.
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 195
that line of sober discretion, which this learned Editor appears to have chalked out for him : Yet is this Editor notwithstanding ' a man take him for all in all,' very highly respectable for his genius and his learning. What however may be chiefly complained of in these gentlemen is, that having erected themselves into the condition, as it were, of guardians and trustees of Shakespeare, they have never undertaken to discharge the disgraceful incumbrances of some wretched productions, which have long hung heavy on his fame. Besides the evidence of taste, which indeed is not communi- cable, there are yet other and more general proofs that these incumbrances were not incurred by Shakespeare : The Latin sentences dispersed thro' the imputed trash is, I think, of itself a decisive one. Love's Labour lost contains a very conclusive one of another kind ; tho' the very last Editor has,
believe, in his critical sagacity, suppressed the evidence, and withdrawn the record.
Yet whatever may be the neglect of some, or the censure of others, there are those, who firmly believe that this wild, this uncultivated Barbarian, has not yet obtained one half of his fame ; and who trust that some new Stagyrite will arise, who instead of pecking at the surface of things will enter into the inward soul of his compositions, and expel by the force of congenial feelings, those foreign impurities which have stained and disgraced his page. And as to those spots which will still remain, they may perhaps become invisible to those who shall seek them thro' the medium of his beauties, instead of looking for those beauties, as is too frequently done, thro' the smoke of some real or imputed obscurity. When the hand of time
196 MORGANN
shall have brushed off his present Editors and Commentators, and when the very name of Voltaire, and even the memory of the language in which he has written, shall be no more, the Apalachian mountains, the banks of the Ohio, and the plains of Sciota shall resound with the accents of this Bar- barian: In his native tongue he shall roll the genuine passions of nature ; nor shall the griefs of Lear be alleviated, or the charms and wit of Rosa- lind be abated by time. There is indeed nothing perishable about him, except that very learning which he is said so much to want. He had not, it is true, enough for the demands of the age in which he lived, but he had perhaps too much for the reach of his genius, and the interest of his fame. Milton and he will carry the decayed remnants and fripperies of antient mythology into more distant ages than they are by their own force intitled to extend ; and the metamorphoses of Ovid, upheld by them, lay in a new claim to unmerited immortality.
Shakespeare is a name so interesting, that it is excusable to stop a moment, nay it would be indecent to pass him without the tribute of some admiration. He differs essentially from all other writers : Him we may profess rather to feel than to understand ; and it is safer to say, on many occasions, that we are possessed by him, than that we possess him. And no wonder ; — He scatters the seeds of things, the principles of character and action, with so cunning a hand yet with so careless an air, and, master of our feelings, submits himself so little to our judgment, that every thing seems superior. We discern not his course, we see no connection of cause and effect, we are rapt in
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 197
ignorant admiration, and claim no kindred with his abilities. All the incidents, all the parts, look like chance, whilst we feel and are sensible that the whole is design. His Characters not only act and speak in strict conformity to nature, but in strict relation to us ; just so much is shewn as is requisite, just so much is impressed ; he commands every passage to our heads and to our hearts, and moulds us as he pleases, and that with so much ease, that he never betrays his own exertions. We see these
Jharacters act from the mingled motives of passion, reason, interest, habit and complection, in all their proportions, when they are supposed to know it lot themselves ; and we are made to acknowledge ;hat their actions and sentiments are, from those motives, the necessary result. He at once blends and distinguishes every thing ; — every thing is complicated, every thing is plain. I restrain the 'urther expressions of my admiration lest they should not seem applicable to man ; but it is really astonishing that a mere human being, a part of humanity only, should so perfectly comprehend the whole ; and that he should possess such
sxquisite art, that whilst every woman and every
>hild shall feel the whole effect, his learned Editors and Commentators should yet so very frequently mistake or seem ignorant of the cause. A sceptre or a straw are in his hands of equal efficacy ; he needs no selection ; he converts every thing into
ixcellence ; nothing is too great, nothing is too base. Is a character efficient like Richard, it is every thing we can wish : Is it otherwise, like Hamlet, it is productive of equal admiration : Action produces one mode of excellence and in- action another : The Chronicle, the Novel, or the
198 MORGANN
Ballad ; the king, or the beggar, the hero, the madman, the sot or the fool ; it is all one ; — nothing is worse, nothing is better : The same genius pervades and is equally admirable in all. Or, is a character to be shewn in progressive change, and the events of years comprized within the hour ; — with what a Magic hand does he prepare and scatter his spells ! The Understanding must, in the first place, be subdued ; and lo ! how the rooted prejudices of the child spring up to confound the man ! The Weird sisters rise, and order is extin- guished. The laws of nature give way, and leave nothing in our minds but wildness and horror. No pause is allowed us for reflection : Horrid senti- ment, furious guilt and compunction, air-drawn daggers, murders, ghosts, and inchantment, shake and possess us wholly. In the mean time the process is completed. Macbeth changes under our eye, the milk of human kindness is converted to gall ; he lias supped full of horrors, and his May of life is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf; whilst we, the fools of amazement, are insensible to the shifting of place and the lapse of time, and till the curtain drops, never once wake to the truth of things, or recognize the laws of existence. — On such an occasion, a fellow, like Rymer, waking from his trance, shall lift up his Constable's staff, and charge this great Magician, this daring practicer of arts inhibited, in the name of Aristotle, to surrender ; whilst Aristotle himself, disowning his wretched Officer, would fall prostrate at his feet and acknow- ledge his supremacy. — 0 supreme of Dramatic- excellence ! (might he say,) not to me be imputed the insolence of fools. The bards of Greece were confined within the narrow circle of the Chorus,
<l*u* Y-t.
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 199
and hence they found themselves constrained to practice, for the most part, the precision, and copy the details of nature. I followed them, and knew not that a larger circle might be drawn, and the Drama extended to the whole reach of human genius. Convinced, I see that a more compen- dious nature may be obtained ; a nature of effects ', only, to which neither the relations of place, or ! continuity of time, are always essential. Nature, condescending to the faculties and apprehensions *. of man, has drawn through human life a regular chain of visible causes and effects : But Poetry delights in surprize, conceals her steps, seizes at once upon the heart, and obtains the Sublime of things without betraying the rounds of her ascent : True Poesy is magic, not nature ; an effect from causes hidden or unknown. To the Magician I prescribed no laws ; his law and his power are one ; his power is his law. Him, who neither imitates,, nor is within the reach of imitation, no precedent can or ought to bind, no limits to contain. If his end is obtained, who shall question his course ? Means, whether apparent or hidden, are justified in poesy by success ; but then most perfect and most admirable when most concealed.1 — But whither
1 These observations have brought me so near to the regions of Poetic magic, (using the word here in its strict and proper sense, and not loosely as in the text) that tho' they lie not directly in my course, I yet may be allowed in this place to point the reader that way. A felt propriety, or truth of art, from an unseen, tho' supposed adequate cause, we call nature. A like feeling of propriety and truth, supposed without a cause, or as seeming to be derived from causes inadequate, fantastic, and absurd, — such as wands, circles, incantations, and so forth, — we call by the general name magic, including all the train of superstition, witches, ghosts, fairies, and the rest. — Season is confined to the
200 MORGANN
am I going ! This copious and delightful topic has drawn me far beyond my design : I hasten back to
line of visible existence ; our passions and our fancy extend far beyond into the obscure • but however lawless their operations may seem, the images they so wildly form have yet a relation to truth, and are the shadows at least, how- ever fantastic, of reality. I am not investigating but passing this subject, and must therefore leave behind me much curious speculation. Of Personifications however we should observe that those which are made out of abstract ideas are the creatures of the Understanding only : Thus, of the mixed modes, virtue, beauty, wisdom and others, — what are they but very obscure ideas of qualities considered as abstracted from any subject whatever ? The mind cannot steadily contemplate such an abstraction: What then does it do ? — Invent or imagine a subject in order to support these qualities ; and hence we get the Nymphs or Goddesses of virtue, of beauty, or of wisdom ; the very obscurity of the ideas being the cause of their conversion into sensible objects, with precision both of feature and of form. But as reason has its personifica- tions, so has passion. — Every passion has its Object, tho' often distant and obscure ;— to be brought nearer then, and rendered more distinct, it is perspnified ; and Fancy fantastically decks, or aggravates the form, and adds ' a local habitation and a name.' But passion is the dupe of its own artifice and realises the image it had formed. The Grecian theology was mixed of. both these kinds of personification. Of the images produced by passion it must be observed that they are the images, for the most part, not of the passions themselves, but of their remote effects. Quilt looks through the medium, and beholds a devil ; fear, spectres of every sort ; hope, a smiling cherub ; malice and envy see hags, and witches, a ad inchanters dire ; whilst the innocent and the young, behold with fearful delight the tripping fairy, whose shadowy form the moon gilds with its softest beams. — Extravagant as all this appears, it has its laws so precise that we are sensible both of a local and temporary, and of an universal magic ; the first derived from the general nature of the human mind, influenced by particular habits, institutions, and climate; and the latter from the same general nature
THE CHAKACTEE OF FALSTAFF 201
my subject, and am guarded, for a time at least, against any further temptation to digress.
abstracted from those considerations : Of the first sort the machinery in Macbeth is a very striking instance ; a machinery, which, however exquisite at the time, has already lost more than half its force ; and the Gallery now laughs in some places where it ought to shudder : — But the magic of the Tempest is lasting and universal.
There is besides a species of writing for which we have no term of art, and which holds a middle place between nature and magic ; I mean where fancy either alone, or mingled with reason, or reason assuming the appearance of fancy, governs some real existence ; but the whole of this art is pourtrayed in a single Play ; in the real madness of Lear, in the assumed wildness of Edgar, and in the Professional Fantasque of the Fool, all operating to con- trast and heighten each other. There is yet another feat in this kind, which Shakespeare has performed ; — he has personified malice in his Caliban ; a character kneaded up of three distinct natures, the diabolical, the human, and the brute. The rest of his preternatural beings are images of effects only, and cannot subsist but in a surrounding atmo- sphere of those passions, from which they are derived. Caliban is the passion itself, or rather a compound of malice, servility, and lust, substantiated ; and therefore best shewn in contrast with the lightness of Ariel and the innocence of Miranda. — Witches are sometimes substantial existences, supposed to be possessed by, or allyed to the unsubstantial ; but the Witches in Macbeth are a gross sort of shadows, ' bubbles of the earth,' as they are finely called by Banquo. — Ghosts differ from other imaginary beings in this, that they belong to no element, have no specific nature or character, and are effects, however harsh the expression, supposed without a cause ; the reason of which is that they are not the creation of the poet, but the servile copies or transcripts of popular imagination, connected with supposed reality and religion. Should the poet assign the true cause, and call them the mere painting or coinage of the brain, he would disappoint his own end, and destroy the being he had raised. Should he assign fictitious causes, and add a specific nature, and a local habitation, it would not be endured ; or the effect would H3
202 MORGANN
I was considering the dignity of Falstaff so far as it might seem connected with, or productive of military merit, and I have assigned him reputation at least, if not fame, noble connection, birth, attendants, title, and an honourable pension ; every one of them presumptive proofs of Military merit, and motives of action. What deduction is to be made on these articles, and why they are so much obscured may, perhaps, hereafter appear.
I have now gone through the examination of all the persons of the Drama from whose mouths any thing can be drawn relative to the Courage of Falstaff, excepting the Prince and Poins, whose evidence I have begged leave to reserve, and excepting a very severe censure passed on him by Lord John of Lancaster, which I shall presently consider : But I must first observe, that setting aside the jests of the Prince and Poins, and this censure of Lancaster, there is not one expression uttered by any character in the Drama that can be - construed into any impeachment of Falstaff's /' -Courage ; — an observation made before as respect- ing some of the Witnesses ; — it is now extended to all : And though this silence be a negative proof only, it cannot, in my opinion, under the circum- stances of the case, and whilst uncontradicted by facts, be too much relied on. If Falstaff had been intended for the character of a Miles Gloriosus, his
be lost by the conversion of one being into another. The approach to reality in this case defeats all the arts and managements of fiction. — The whole play of the Tempes is of so high and superior a nature that Dryden, who had attempted to imitate in vain, might well exclaim that
' — Shakespeare's magic could not copied be, Within that circle none durst walk but He.'
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 203
behaviour ought, and therefore would have been commented upon by others. Shakespeare seldom trusts to the apprehensions of his audience ; his characters interpret for one another continually, and when we least suspect such artful and secret management : The conduct of Shakespeare in this respect is admirable, and I could point out a thou- sand passages which might put to shame the advocates of a formal Chorus, and prove that there is as little of necessity as grace in so mechanic a contrivance.1 But I confine my censure of the Chorus to its supposed use of comment and inter- pretation only. . . .
Tho' I have considered Falstaff's character as relative only to one single quality, yet so much has been said, that it cannot escape the reader's notice that he is a character made up by Shakespeare wholly of incongruities ; — a man at once young and old, enterprizing and fat, a dupe and a wit, harm- less and wicked, weak in principle and resolute by constitution, cowardly in appearance and brave in reality ; a knave without malice, a lyar without deceit ; and a knight, a gentleman, and a soldier, without either dignity, decency, or honour : This is a character, which, though it may be decom- pounded, could not, I believe, have been formed, j nor the ingredients of it duly mingled upon any receipt whatever : It required the hand of Shake- j» speare himself to give to every particular part a relish of the whole, and of the whole to every par- ticular part ; — alike the same incongruous, identical Falstaff, whether to the grave Chief Justice he vainty talks of his youth, and offers to caper for
^Enobarbus, in Anthony and Cleopatra, is in effect the Chorus of the Play ; as Menenius Agrippa is of Coriolanus.
204 MOKGANN
a thousand ; or cries to Mrs. Doll, ' I am old, I am old,' though she is seated on his lap, and he is courting her for busses. How Shakespeare could furnish out sentiment of so extraordinary a com- position, and supply it with such appropriated and characteristic language, humour and wit, I cannot tell ; but I may, however, venture to infer, and that confidently, that he who so well understood the uses of incongruity, and that laughter was to be raised by the opposition of qualities in the same man, and not by their agreement or conformity, would never have attempted to raise mirth by shewing us Cowardice in a Coward unattended by Pretence, and softened by every excuse of age, corpulence, and infirmity : And of this we cannot have a more striking proof than his furnishing this very character, on one instance of real terror, how- ever excusable, with boast, braggadocio, and pre- tence, exceeding that of all other stage Cowards the whole length of his superior wit, humour, and invention.
What then upon the whole shall be said but that Shakespeare has made certain Impressions, or produced certain effects, of which he has thought fit to conceal or obscure the cause ? How he has done this, and for what special ends, we shall now presume to guess. — Before the period in which Shakespeare wrote, the fools and Zanys of the stage were drawn out of the coarsest and cheapest materials : Some essential folly, with a dash of knave and coxcomb, did the feat. But Shake- speare, who delighted in difficulties, was resolved to furnish a richer repast, and to give to one eminent buffoon the high relish of wit, humour, birth, dignity, and Courage. But this was a process
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 205
which required the nicest hand, and the utmost management and address : These enumerated qualities are, in their own nature, productive of respect ; an Impression the most opposite to laughter that can be. This Impression then, it was, at all adventures, necessary to with-hold ; which could not perhaps well be without dressing up these qualities in fantastic forms, and colours not their own ; and thereby cheating the eye with shews of baseness and of folly, whilst he stole as it were upon the palate a richer and a fuller gout. To this end, what arts, what contrivances, has he not practised ! How has he steeped this singular character in bad habits for fifty years together, and brought him forth saturated with every folly and with every vice not destructive of his essential character, or incompatible with his own primary design ! For this end, he has deprived Falstaff of every good principle ; and for another, which will be presently mentioned, he has concealed every bad one. He has given him also every infirmity of body that is not likely to awaken our compas- sion, and which is most proper to render both his better qualities and his vices ridiculous : He has associated levity and debauch with age, corpulence and inactivity with courage, and has roguishly coupled the gout with Military honours, and a pension with the pox. He has likewise involved this character in situations, out of which neither wit or Courage can extricate him with honour. The surprize at Gads-hill might have betrayed a hero into flight, and the encounter with Douglas left him no choice but death or stratagem. If he plays an after-game, and endeavours to redeem his ill fortune by lies and braggadocio, his ground fails
206 MORGANN
him ; no wit, no evasion will avail : Or is he likely to appear respectable in his person, rank, and demeanor, how is that respect abated or dis- charged ! Shakespeare has given him a kind of state indeed ; but of what is it composed ? Of that fustian cowardly rascal Pistol, and his yoke-fellow of few words the equally deedless Nym ; of his cup-bearer the fiery Trigon, whose zeal burns in his nose, Bardolph ; and of the boy, who bears the purse with seven groats and two-pence ; — a boy who was given him on purpose to set him off, and whom he walks before, according to his own description, ' like a soiv that had overwhelmed all her litter but one.'
But it was not enough to render Falstaff ridicu- lous in his figure, situations, and equipage ; still his respectable qualities would have come forth, at least occasionally, to spoil our mirth ; or they might have burst the intervention of such slight impediments, and have every where shone through : It was necessary then to go farther, and throw on him that substantial ridicule, which only the incongruities of real vice can furnish ; of vice, which was to be so mixed and blended with his frame as to give a durable character and colour to the whole.
But it may here be necessary to detain the reader a moment in order to apprize him of my further intention ; without which, I might hazard that good understanding, which I hope has hitherto been preserved between us.
I have 'till now looked only to the Courage of Falstaff, a quality which having been denied, in terms, to belong to his constitution, I have endeavoured to vindicate to the Understandings of
uoJ-U, UofwUiyAj y/-\
Cerv^k^vCi^*/ •
THE CHAEACTEE OF FALSTAFF 207
my readers ; the Impression on their Feelings (in which all Dramatic truth consists) being already, as I have supposed, in favour of the character. In the pursuit of this subject I have taken the general Impression of the whole character pretty much, I suppose, like other men ; and, when occasion has required, have so transmitted it to the reader ; joining in the common Feeling of Falstaff's pleasantry, his apparent freedom from ill principle, and his companionable wit and good humour : With a stage character, in the article of exhibition, we have nothing more to do ; for in fact what is it but an Impression ; an appearance, which we are to consider as a reality ; and which we may ven- ture to applaud or condemn as such, without further inquiry or investigation ? But if we would account for our Impressions, or for certain senti- ments or actions in a character, not derived from its apparent principles, yet appearing, we know not why, natural, we are then compelled to look farther, and examine if there be not something more in the character than is shewn ; something inferred, which is not brought under our special notice : In short, we must look to the art of the writer, and to the principles of human nature, to discover the hidden causes of such effects. — Now this is a very different matter — The former con- siderations respected the Impression only, without regard to the Understanding ; but this question relates to the Understanding alone. It is true that there are but few Dramatic characters which will bear this kind of investigation, as not being drawn in exact conformity to those principles of general nature to which we must refer. But this is not the case with regard to the characters of
208 MORGANN
Shakespeare ; they are struck out whole, by some happy art which I cannot clearly comprehend, out of the general mass of things, from the block as it were of nature : And it is, I think, an easier thing to give a just draught of man from these Theatric forms, which I cannot help considering as originals, than by drawing from real life, amidst so much intricacy, obliquity, and disguise. If therefore, for further proofs of Falstaff's Courage, or for the sake of curious speculation, or for both, I change my position, and look to causes instead of effects, the reader must not be surprized if he finds the former Falstaff vanish like a dream, and another, of more disgustful form, presented to his view ; one, whose final punishment we shall be so far from regretting, that we ourselves shall be ready to consign him to a severer doom.
The reader will very easily apprehend that a character, which we might wholly disapprove of, considered as existing in human life, may yet be thrown on the stage into certain peculiar situa- tions, and be compressed by external influences into such temporary appearances, as may render such character for a time highly acceptable and entertaining, and even more distinguished for qualities, which on this supposition would be accidents only, than another character really possessing those qualities, but which, under the pressure of the same situation and influences, would be distorted into a different form, or totally lost in timidity and weakness. If therefore the character before us will admit of this kind of investi- gation, our Inquiry will not be without some dignity, considered as extending to the principles of human nature, and to the genius and arts of
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 209
Him, who has best caught every various form of the human mind, and transmitted them with the greatest happiness and fidelity. . . .
Such, I think, is the true character of this extraordinary buffoon ; and from hence we may discern for what special purposes Shakespeare has given him talents and qualities, which were to be afterwards obscured, and perverted to ends oppo- site to their nature ; it was clearly to furnish out a Stage buffoon of a peculiar sort ; a kind of Game-bull which would stand the baiting thro' a hundred Plays, and produce equal sport, whether he is pinned down occasionally by Hal or Poins, or tosses such mongrils as Bardolph, or the Justices, sprawling in the air. There is in, truth no such thing as totally demolishing Falstaff; he-has -so much of tlie invulnerable in his frame that.. no ridicule can destroy him ; he is safe even in defeat, and seems. .to. rise, like another Antaeus, with re- cruited vigour from every fall ; in this as in every other respect, unlike Parolles or Bobadil : They fall T)y the first shaft of ridicule, but Falstaff is a butt on which we may empty the whole quiver; whilst the substance of his character remains unimpaired. His ill habits, and the accidents of age and corpulence, are no part of his essential constitution ; they come forward indeed on our eye, and solicit our notice, but they are second natures, not first ; mere shadows, we pursue them in vain ; Falstaff himself has a distinct and separate subsistence ; he laughs at the chace, and when the sport is over, gathers them with unruffled feather under his wing : And hence it is that he is made to undergo not one detection only, but a series of detections ; that he is not formed for one
210 « MOEGANN
Play only, but was intended originally at least for two ; and the author we are told, was doubtful if he should not extend him yet farther, and engage him in the wars with France. This he might well have done, for there is nothing perishable in the nature of Falstaff : He might have involved him, by the vicious part of his character, in new diffi- culties and unlucky situations, and have enabled him, by the better part, to have scrambled through, abiding and retorting the jests and laughter of every beholder.
But whatever we may be told concerning the intention of Shakespeare to extend this character farther, there is a manifest preparation near the end of the second part of Henry IV. for his disgrace : The disguise is taken off, and he begins openly to pander to the excesses of the Prince, intitling him- self to the character afterwards given him of being the tutor and the feeder of his riots. ' I will fetch off,' (says he) ' these Justices. — / will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep the Prince in continual laughter the wearing out of six fashions. — If the young dace be a bait for the old pike,' (speaking with reference to his own designs upon Shallow) ' I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him.' — This is shewing himself abommably dissolute : The laborious arts of fraud, which he practices on Shallow to induce the loan of a thou- sand pound, create disgust ; and the more, as we are sensible this money was never likely to be paid back, as we are told that was, of which the travel- lers had been robbed. It is true we feel no pain for Shallow, he being a very bad character, as would fully appear, if he were unfolded ; but Falstaff's deliberation in fraud is not on that
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 211
account more excusable. — The event of the old King's death draws him out almost into detesta- tion.— ' Master Robert Shallow, chuse what office thou wilt in the land, — 'tis thine. — / am fortune's steward. — Let us take any man's horses. — The laws of England are at my commandment. — Happy are they who have been my friends ; — and woe to my Lord Chief Justice.' — After this we ought not to complain if we see Poetic justice duly executed upon him, and that he is finally given up to shame and dishonour.
But it is remarkable that, during this process, we are not acquainted with the success of Falstaff's designs upon Shallow 'till the moment of his dis- grace. ' If I had had time,' (says he to Shallow, as the King is approaching,) ' to have made new liveries, I would have bestowed the thousand pounds I borrowed of you ; ' — and the first word he utters after this period is, ' Master Shallow, / owe you a thousand pounds : ' We may from hence very reasonably presume, that Shakespeare meant to connect this fraud with the punishment of Falstaff, as a more avowed ground of censure and dishonour : Nor ought the consideration that this passage con- tains the most exquisite comic humour and pro- priety in another view, to diminish the truth of this observation.
But however just it might be to demolish Falstaff in this way, by opening to us his bad principles it was by no means convenient. If we had been to have seen a single representation of him only, it might have been proper enough ; but as he was to be shewn from night to night, and from age to age, the disgust arising from the close, would by degrees have spread itself over the whole
1 UZ-4/H^L. /' « / / T » 212 MORGANN
character ; reference would be had throughout to his bad principles, and he would have become less acceptable as he was more known : And yet it was necessary to bring him, like all other stage char- acters, to some conclusion. Every play must be wound up by some event, which may shut in the characters and the action. If some hero obtains a crown, or a mistress, involving therein the fortune of others, we are satisfied ; — we do not desire to be afterwards admitted of his council, or his bed- chamber : Or if through jealousy, causeless or well founded, another kills a beloved wife, and himself after, — there is no more to be said ; — they are dead, and there an end ; Or if in the scenes of Comedy, parties are engaged, and plots formed, for the furthering or preventing the completion of that great article Cuckoldom, we expect to be satisfied in the point as far as the nature of so nice a case will permit, or at least to see such a manifest dis- position as will leave us in no doubt of the event. By the bye, I cannot but think that the Comic writers of the last age treated this matter as of more importance, and made more bustle about it, than the temper of the present times will well bear ; and it is therefore to be hoped that the Dramatic authors of the present day, some of whom, to the best of my judgment, are deserving of great praise, will consider and treat this business, rather as a common and natural incident arising out of. modern manners, than as worthy to be held forth as the great object and sole end of the Play.
But whatever be the question, or whatever the character, the curtain must not only be dropt before the eyes, but over the minds of the spec- tators, and nothing left for further examination
THE CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF 213
and curiosity. — But how was this to be done in j regard to Falstaff 1 He was not involved in the *• fortune of the Play ; he was engaged in no action which, as to him, was to be compleated ; he had reference to no system, he was attracted to no center ; he passes thro' the Play as a lawless meteor, and we wish to know what course he is afterwards likely to take : He is detected and disgraced, it is true ; but he lives by detection, and thrives on disgrace ; and we are desirous to see him detected and disgraced again. The Fleet might be no bad scene of further amusement ; — he carries all within him, and what matter where, if lie be still the same, possessing the same force of mind, the same wit, and the same incongruity. This, Shakespeare was fully sensible of, and knew that this character could not be compleatly dismissed but by death. — ' Our author, (says the Epilogue to the Second Part of Henry IV.) will continue the story with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Catherine of France ; where, for any thing I know, Falstaff shall dye of a sweat, unless already he be killed with your hard opinions.' If it had been prudent in Shakespeare to have killed Falstaff with hard opinion, he had the means in his hand to effect it ; — but dye, it seems, he must, in one form or another, and a sweat would have been no unsuitable catastrophe. However we have reason to be satisfied as it is ; — his death was worthy of his birth and of his life : ' He was born, he says, ' about three o'clock in the afternoon with a white head, and something a round belly.' But if he came into the world in the evening with these marks of age, he departs out of it in the morning in all the follies and vanities of youth ; — ' He was
214 MORGANN
shaked (we are told) ' of a burning quotidian tertian ; — the young King had run bad humours on the knight ; — his heart was fracted and corroborate ; and a' parted just between twelve and one, even at the turning of the tide, yielding the crow a pudding, and passing directly into Arthur's bosom, if ever man went into the bosom of Arthur.' — So ended this singular buffoon ; and with him ends an Essay, on which the reader is left to bestow what character he pleases : An Essay professing to treat of the Courage of Falstaff, but extending itself to his Whole character ; to the arts and genius of his Poetic-Maker, SHAKESPEARE ; and thro' him soms- times, with ambitious aim, even to the principles of human nature itself.
"I
>
'
<
C .< i l^t-UU/V '
•4-C etc r l^, bnA"
"
215
On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, considered with reference to their fitness for Stage Representa- tion.1
' TAKING a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen before, and which upon examination proved to be a whole- length of the celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not go so far with some good catholics abroad as to shut players altogether out of con- secrated ground, yet I own I was not a . little scandalized at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this harlequin figure the following lines : —
' To paint fair Nature, by divine command, Her magic pencil in his glowing hand, A Shakspeare rose : then, to expand his fame Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came. Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew, The Actor's genius bade them breathe anew ; Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay, Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day : And till Eternity with pow'r sublime Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time, Shakspeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine, And earth irradiate with a beam divine.
1 First published in The Reflector, 1811 ; here printed from The Works of Charles Lamb, 1818 vol. ii, pp. 1-36.
216 CHARLES LAMB
It would be an insult to my readers' under- standings to attempt any thing like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and nonsense. But the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder, how, from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should have been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that has had the luck to please the town in any of the great characters of Shakspeare, with the notion of possessing a mind congenial with the poet's : how people should come thus unaccount- ably to confound the power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty of being able to read or recite the same when put into words ; 1 or what connection that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man, which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which a player by observing a few general effects, which some common passion, as grief, anger, &c. usually has upon the gestures and exterior, can so easily compass. To know the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for instance, the when and the why arid the how far they should be moved ; to what pitch a passion is becoming ; to give the reins and to pull in the curb exactly at the moment
1 It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in dramatic recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who reads Lucretius in public with great applause, is there- fore a great poet and philosopher ; nor do we find that Tom Davies, the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the Paradise Lost better than any man in England in his day (though I cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this tradition) was therefore, by his intimate friends, set upon a level with Milton.
THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 217
when the drawing in or the slackening is most graceful ; seems to demand a reach of intellect of a vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or gesture, which signs are usually observed, to be most lively and emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief, generally ; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible sounds. But such is the instan- taneous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, the actor with the character which he represents. It is difficult for a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea jof Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K. [We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in •eality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion ncidental alone to unlettered persons, who, not 'Ossessing the advantage of reading, are neces- arily dependent upon the stage-player for all he pleasure which they can receive from the •ama, and to whom the very idea of what an zuthor is cannot be made comprehensible without ome pain and perplexity of mind : the error is me from which persons otherwise not meanly
218 CHARLES LAMB
lettered, find it almost impossible to extricate themselves.
Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the first time a tragedy of Shakspeare performed, in which those two great performers sustained the principal parts. It seemed to embody and realize concep- tions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape. But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.
How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions thus crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness, with which we turn to those plays of Shakspeare which have escaped being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the same writer which have happily been left out in the performance. How far the very custom of hear- ing any thing spouted, withers and blows upon a fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from Henry the Fifth, &c. which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to be found in Enfold Speakers, and such kind of books. I confess myself utterly unable to appre- ciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning ' To be or not to be ', or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and
THE TEAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 219
torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member.
It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguishing excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.
The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of passion ; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a sur- prising manner talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular upon our stage. And the reason is 'plain, because the spectators are here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round such 'intellectual prize-fighters \ Talking is the direct object of the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in Shakspeare above all, how obvious it is, that the form of speaking, whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at in that form of
220 CHARLES LAMB
composition by any gift short of intuition. We do here as we do with novels written in the epis- tolary form. How many improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter- writing, do we put up with in Clarissa and other books, for the sake of the delight which that form upon the whole gives us. But the practice of stage representation reduces every thing to a controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must play the orator. The love-dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night ; the more intimate and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so delightful in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in Paradise —
-As beseem'd
Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league, Alone :
by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these things sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly ; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed at the spectators, who are to judge of her endear- ments and her returns of love.
The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest ambition to distinguish themselves. The length
of the part may be one of their reasons. But for the character itself, we find it in a play, and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic representation. The play itself abounds in maxims and reflexions beyond any other, and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying moral instruction. But Hamlet himself — what does he suffer meanwhile by being dragged forth as a public schoolmaster, to give lectures to the crowd ! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions between himself and his moral sense, they are the effusions of his solitary musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth ; or rather, they are the silent meditations with which his bosom is burst- ing, reduced to words for the sake of the reader, who must else remain ignorant of what is passing there. These profound sorrows, these light-and- noise-abhorring ruminations, which the tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticulating actor, who comes and mouths them out before an audience, making four hundred people his confidants at once ? I say not that it is the fault of the actor s"o to do ; he must pronounce them ore rotundo, he must accompany them with his eye, he must insinuate them into his auditory by some trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. 'He must be thinking all the while of his appearance, because he knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it. And this is the way to represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet.
It is true that there is no other mode of con- veying a vast quantity of thought and feeling to
222 CHARLES LAMB
a great portion of the audience, who otherwise would never earn it for themselves by reading, and the intellectual acquisition gained this way may, for aught I know, be inestimable ; but I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted. I have heard much of the wonders which Grarrick performed in this part ; but as I never saw him, I must have leave to doubt whether the representation of such a character came within the province of his art. Those who tell me of him, speak of his eye, of the magic of his eye, and of his commanding voice : physical properties, vastly desirable in an actor, and without which he can never insinuate meaning into an auditory, — but what have they to do with Hamlet ? what have they to do with intellect ? In fact, the things aimed at in theatrical representation, are to arrest the spectator's eye upon the form and the gesture, and so to gain a more favourable hearing to what is spoken : it is not what the character is, but how he looks ; not what he says, but how he speaks it. I see no reason to think that if the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakspeare, his stupendous intellect ; and only taking care to give us enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to furnish ; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakspeare to us differently from his representation of Banks or Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished prince,
THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 223
and must be gracefully personated ; he might be puzzled in his mind, wavering in his conduct, seemingly-cruel to Ophelia, he might see a ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be his father ; all this in the poorest and most homely language of the servilest creeper after nature that ever consulted the palate of an audience ; without troubling Shakspeare for the matter : and I see not but there would be room for all the power which an actor has, to display itself. All the passions and changes of passion might remain : for those are much less difficult to write or act than is thought, it is a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or falling a note or two in the voice, a whisper with a' significant foreboding look to announce its approach, and so contagious the counterfeit appearance of any emotion is, that let the words be what they will, the look and tone shall carry it off and make it pass for deep skill in the passions.
It is common for people to talk of Shakspeare's plays being so natural ; that every body can understand him. They are natural indeed, they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies out of the reach of most of us. You shall hear the same persons say that George Barnwell is very natural, and Othello is very natural, that they are both very deep ; and to them they are the same kind of thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit a trifling peccadillo, the murder of an uncle or so,1 that is all, and so comes to an untimely
1 If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the Managers, I would intreat and beg of them, in the name of
224 CHARLES LAMB
end, which is so moving ; and at the other, because a blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife : and the odds are that ninety-nine out of a hundred would willingly behold the same catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and have thought the rope more due to Othello than to Barn well. For of the texture of Othello's mind, the inward construction marvellously laid open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love, they see no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their pennies a-piece to look through the man's telescope in Leicester-fields, see into the inward plot and topography of the moon. Some dim thing or other they see, they see an actor personating a passion, of grief, or anger, for instance, and they recognize it as a copy of the usual external effects of such passions ; or at least as being true to that symbol of the emotion which passes current at the theatre for it, for it is often no more than that : but of the grounds
both the Galleries, that this insult upon the morality of the common people of London should cease to be eternally repeated in the holiday weeks. Why are the 'Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead of an amuse- ment, to be treated over and over again with the nauseous sermon of George Barnwell ? Why at the end of their vistoes are we to place the gallows ? Were I an uncle, I should not much like a nephew of mine to have such an example placed before his eyes. It is really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as done upon such slight motives ; — it is attributing too much to such characters as Millwood ; — it is putting things into the heads of good young men, which they would never otherwise have dreamed of. Uncles that think any thing of their lives, should fairly petition the Chamberlain against it.
THE TKAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEAKE 225
of the passion, its correspondence to a great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy object of tragedy, — that common auditors know any thing of this, or can have any such notions dinned into them by the mere strength of an actor's lungs, — that apprehensions foreign to them should be thus infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how it can be possible.
We talk of Shakspeare's admirable observation of life, when we should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day char- acters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very ' sphere of humanity ', he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which every one of us recogniz- ing a part, think we comprehend in our natures the whole ; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he positively creates in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties of our own minds which only waited the application of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and clear echo of the same.
To return to Hamlet. — Among the distinguish- ing features of that wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is that sore- ness of mind which makes him treat the intru- sions of Polonius with harshness, and that asperity which he puts on in his interviews with Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if they be not mixed in the latter case with a profound artifice of love, to alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind for the breaking off of that loving intercourse, which can no longer find a place amidst business so serious as that which he has
212 i
226 CHARLES LAMB
to do) are parts of his character, which to reconcile with our admiration of Hamlet, the most patient consideration of his situation is no more than necessary ; they are what we forgive afterwards, and explain by the whole of his character, but at the time they are harsh and unpleasant. Yet such is the actor's necessity of giving strong blows to the audience, that I have never seep a player in this character, who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous features, — these temporary deformities in the character. They make him express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his gent^ty, and which no explanation can render palateable ; they make him shew contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia's father, — contempt in its very grossest and most hateful form ; but they get applause by it : it is natural, people say ; that is> the words are scornful, and the actor expresses scorn, and that they can judge of : but why so much scorn, and of that sort, they never think of asking. So to Ophelia. — All -the Hamlets that I have ever seen, rant and rave at her as if she had committed some great crime, and the audience are highly pleased, because the words of the part are satirical, and they are enforced by the strongest expression of satirical indignation of which the face and voice are capable. But then, whether Hamlet is likely to have put on such brutal appearances to a lady whom he loved so dearly, is never thought on. The truth is, that in all such deep affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there is a stock of superero- gatory love, (if I may venture to use the [expression) which in any great grief of heart, especially where
THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 227
that which preys upon the mind cannot be com- municated, confers a kind of indulgence upon the grieved party to express itself, even to its heart's dearest object, in the language of a temporary alienation ; but it is not alienation, it is a dis- traction purely, and so it always makes itself to be felt by that object : it is not anger, but grief assuming the appearance of anger, — love awk- wardly counterfeiting hate, as sweet countenances when they try to frown : but such sternness and fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to shew, is no counterfeit, but the real face of absolute aversion, — of irreconcileable alienation. It may be said he puts on the madman ; but then he should only so far put on this counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction will give him leave ; that is, incompletely, imperfectly ; not in that confirmed, practised way, like a master of his art, or as Dame Quickly would say, ' like one of those harlotry players.'
I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which Shakspeare's plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to differ from that which the audience receive from those of other writers ; and, they being in themselves essentially so different from all others, I must conclude that there is something in the nature of acting which levels all distinctions. And in fact, who does not speak indifferently of the Gamester and of Macbeth as fine stage performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. S. ? Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella, and Euphrasia, are they less liked than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than Desdemona ? Are they not spoken of and remembered in the same way ?
228 CHARLES LAMB
Is not the female performer as great (as they call it) in one as in the other ? Did not Garrick shine, and was he not ambitious of shining in every • drawling tragedy that his wretched day pro- duced,— the productions of the Hills and the Murphys and the Browns, — and shall he have that honour to dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable concomitant with Shakspeare ? A kindred mind ! 0 who can read that affecting sonnet of Shakspeare which alludes to his profes- sion as a player : —
Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public custom breeds —
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ;
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand —
Or that other confession : —
Alas ! 'tis true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a motly to thy view, Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear —
Who can read these instances of jealous self- watchfulness in our sweet Shakspeare, and dream of any congeniality between him and one that, by every tradition of him, appears to have been as mere a player as ever existed ; to have had his mind tainted with the lowest players' vices, — envy and jealousy, and miserable cravings after applause ; one who in the exercise of his pro- fession was jealous even of the women-performers that stood in his way ; a manager full of managerial tricks and stratagems and finesse : that any resemblance should be dreamed of between him
THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 229
and Shakspeare, — Shakspeare who, in the pleni- tude and consciousness of his own powers, could with that noble modesty, which we can neither imitate nor appreciate, express himself thus of his own sense of his own defects : —
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featur'd like him, like him with friends possest ; Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope.
I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer of Shakspeare. A true lover of his excellencies he certainly was not ; for would any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless scenes such ribald trash as Tate and Gibber, and the rest of them, that
With their darkness durst affront his light.
have foisted into the acting plays of Shakspeare' ? I believe it impossible that he could have had a proper reverence for Shakspeare, and have condescended to go through that interpolated scene in Richard the Third, in which Richard tries to break his wife's heart by telling her he loves another woman, and says, ' if she survives this she is immortal.' Yet I doubt not he delivered this vulgar stuff with as much anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine parts : and for acting, it is as well calculated as any. But we have seen the part of Richard lately produce great fame to an actor by his manner of playing it, and it lets us into the secret of acting, and of popular judg- ments of Shakspeare derived from acting. Not one of the spectators who have witnessed Mr. C.'s exertions in that part, but has come away with a proper conviction that Richard is a very wicked man, and kills little children in their beds, with
230 CHARLES LAMB
something like the pleasure which the giants and ogres in children's books are represented to have taken in that practice ; moreover, that he is very close and shrewd and devilish cunning, for you could see that by his eye.
But is in fact this the impression we have in reading the Richard of Shakspeare ? Do we feel any thing like disgust, as we do at that butcher- like representation of him that passes for him on the stage ? A horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel, but how is it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect which he displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his part, — not an atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of acting it. Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible ; they are prominent and staring ; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius, the man of vast capacity, — the profound, the witty, accomplished Richard ?
The truth is, the Characters of Shakspeare are so much the objects of meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions, that while we are reading any of his great criminal characters, — Macbeth, Richard, even lago, — we think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity, which prompts them to overleap those moral fences. Barnwell is a wretched murderer ; there is a certain fitness between his neck and the rope ; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows ; nobody who thinks at all can think of any alleviating circumstances in his case to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an
THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 231
instance from the higher tragedy, what else but a mere assassin is Glenalvon ! Do we think of any thing but of the crime which he commits, and the rack which he deserves ? That is all which we really think about him. Whereas in corresponding characters in Shakspeare so little do the actions comparatively affect us, that while the impulses, the inner mind in all its perverted greatness, solely seems real and is exclusively attended to, the crime is comparatively nothing. But when we see these things represented, the acts which they do are comparatively every thing, their impulses nothing. The state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by those images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to murder Duncan, — when we no longer read it in a book, when we have given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seeing, and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit a murder, if the acting be true and impressive, as I have witnessed it in Mr. K.'s performance of that part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where the deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence : it rather seems to belong to history, — to something past and inevitable, if it has any thing to do with time at all. The sublime images, the poetry alone,
232 CHAELES LAMB
is that which is present to our minds in the reading.
So to see Lear acted, — to see an old man totter- ing about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and dis- gusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. .That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. The con- temptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear : they might more easily propose to personate 'the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual : the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on ; even as he him- self neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage ; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, — we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms ; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks, or tones, to do
THE TKAGBDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 233
with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in his r,e- proaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that ' they themselves are old'. What gesture shall we appropriate to this ? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things ? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it shew : it is too hard and stony ; it must have love- scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily. A happy ending ! — as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through, — -the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation, — why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy ? As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station, — as if at his years, and with his experience, any thing was left but to die.
Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how many dramatic personages are there in Shakspeare, which though more tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be shewn to our bodily eye. Othello for instance. Nothing can be more soothing, more flattering to the 13
234 CHAELES LAMB
nobler parts of our natures, than to read of a young Venetian lady of highest extraction, through the force of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying aside every consideration of kindred, and country, and colour, and wedding with a coal-black Moor — (for such he is represented, in the imperfect state of know- ledge respecting foreign countries in those days, compared with our own, or in compliance with popular notions, though the Moors are now well enough known to be by many shades less unworthy of a white woman's fancy) — it is the perfect triumph of virtue over accidents, of the imagina- tion over the senses. She sees Othello's colour in his mind. But upon the stage, when the imagination is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello played, whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in his colour ; whether he did not find something extremely revolting in the courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona ; and whether the actual sight of the thing did not over-weigh all that beautiful compromise which we make in reading ; — and the reason it should do so is obvious, because there is just so much reality presented to our senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with not enough of belief in the internal motives, — all that which is unseen, — to overpower and reconcile the first and obvious prejudices.1 What we see upon a stage is body
1 The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do
THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 235
and bodily action ; what we are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements : and this I think may sufficiently account for the very different sort of delight with which the same play so often affects us in the reading and the seeing.
It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters in Shakspeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagina- tion, to admit of their being made objects to /the senses without suffering a change and a diminu- tion,— that still stronger the objection must lie against representing another line of characters, which Shakspeare has introduced to give a wild- ness and a supernatural elevation to his scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimila- tion to common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist. When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the Witches in Macbeth, though some of the ingre- dients of their hellish composition savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the most serious and appalling that can be imagined ? Do we not feel spell-bound as Mae- beth was ? Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence ? We might as well laugh under a
in the poem. But in the poem we for a while have Para- disaical senses given us, which vanish when we see a man and his wife without clothes in the picture. The painters themselves feel this, as is apparent by the aukward shifts they have recourse to, to make them look not quite naked ; by a sort of prophetic anachronism, antedating the inven- tion of fig-leaves. So in the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes ; in the seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.
236 CHARLES LAMB
consciousness of the principle of Evil himself being truly and really present with us. But attempt to bring these beings on to a stage, and you turn them instantly into so many old women, that men and children are to laugh at. Contrary to the old saying, that 'seeing is believing', the sight actually destroys the faith ; and the mirth in which we indulge at their expense, when we see these creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification which we make to ourselves for the terror which they put us in when reading made them an object of belief, — when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, as children to their nurses and their elders ; and we laugh at our fears, as children who thought they saw something in the dark, triumph when the bringing in of a candle discovers the vanity of their fears. For this exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness. It is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in these terrors : a ghost by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no spectators, — a ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human dimensions made out at leisure. The sight of a well -lighted house, and a well-dressed audience, shall arm the most nervous child against any apprehensions : as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his impene- trable armour over it, ' Bully Dawson would have fought the devil with such advantages.'
Much has been said^ and deservedly, in reproba- tion of the vile mixture which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest : doubtless without some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would
THE TEAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 237
never have sate out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the Tempest of Shakspeare at all a subject for stage representa- tion ? It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we are reading it ; but to have a conjuror brought before us in his conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself and some hundred of favoured spectators before the curtain are sup- posed to see, involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted, — they can only be believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties, positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A parlour or a drawing- room, — a library opening into a garden, — a garden with an alcove in it, — a street, or the piazza of Covent-garden, does well enough in a scene ; we are content to give as much credit to it as it demands ; or rather, we think little about it,^- it is little more than reading .at the top of a page, ' Scene, a Garden ; ' we do not imagine ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and caverns, which we know to be
238 CHARLES LAMB
painted, to transport our minds to Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell ; x or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was full : — the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his apparatus, to make us believe that we do indeed hear the chrystal spheres ring out that chime, which if it were to inwrap our fancy long, Milton thinks,
Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,
And speckled vanity
Would sicken soon and d»e,
And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould ;
Yea Hell itself would pass away,
And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.
The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more impossible to be shewn on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, with its no less interest- ing and innocent first settlers.
The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses, which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of garment which he varied, — the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity of the public eye, require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish monarch
1 It will be said these things are done in pictures. But pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a world of itself, but in scene-painting there is the attempt to deceive ; and there is the discordancy, never to be got over, between painted scenes and real people.
THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 239
was fairly a counterpart to that which our King wears when he goes to the Parliament-house, — just so full and cumbersome, and set out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be repre- sented, I see not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what robe are we conscious of ? Some dim images of royalty — a crown and sceptre, may float before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it ? Do we see in our mind's eye what Webb or any other robe-maker could pattern? This is the inevitable consequence of imitating every thing, to make all things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of external appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood, while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character. But in acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible \ things, call upon us to judge of their naturalness.
Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with that quiet delight which we find in the reading of it, to the different feelings with which a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine poem. The accursed critical habit, — the being called upon to judge and pronounce, must make it quite a different thing to the former. In seeing these plays acted, we are affected just as judges. When Hamlet compares the two pictures of Gertrude's first and second husband, who wants to see the pictures ? But in the acting, a miniature must be lugged out ; which we know not to be the picture, but
240 CHAELES LAMB
only to shew how finely a miniature may be represented. This shewing of every thing, levels all things : it makes tricks, bows, and curtesies, of importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by any thing than by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in Macbeth : it is as much remembered as any of her thrilling tones or impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this enter into the imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful scene ? Does not the mind dismiss the f casters as rapidly as it can ? Does it care about the gracefulness of the doing it ? But by acting, and judging of acting, all these non-essentials are raised into an importance, injurious to the main interest of the play.
I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakspeare. It would be no very difficult task to extend the enquiry to his comedies ; and to shew why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest, are equally incompatible with stage representation. The length to which this Essay has run, will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without going any deeper into the subject at present.
241
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis of ShaJcspeare' s ' Venus and Adonis ', and ' IJucrece '.
IN the application of these principles to purposes of practical criticism as employed in the appraisal of works more or less imperfect, I have endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a poem are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power, as distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the inspiration of a genial and productive nature. In this investigation, I could not, I thought, do better, than keep before me the earliest work of the greatest genius that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded * Shakspeare. I mean the ' Venus and Adonis ', and the ' Lucrece ' ; works which give at once strong promises of the strength, and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity, of his genius. From these I abstracted the following marks, as characteristics of original poetic genius in general.
fj.vpt6vovs, a phrase which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constanti- nople. I might have said, that I have reclaimed, rather than borrowed it : for it seems to belong to Shakspeare, de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturae.'
242 COLERIDGE
1. In the 'Venus and Adonis', the first and most obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versification ; its adaptation to the subject ; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant. The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in the compositions of a young man. ' The man that hath not music in his soul ' can indeed never be a genuine poet. Imagery (even taken from nature, much more when transplanted from books, as travels, voyages, and works of natural history) ; affecting incidents ; just thoughts ; interesting personal or domestic feelings ; and with these the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem ; may all by incessant effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talents and much reading, who, as I once before observed, has mistaken an intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius ; the love of the arbitrary end for a possession of the peculiar means. But the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination ; and this together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and im- proved, but can never be learned. It is in these that ' Poeta nascitur non fit.'
2. A second promise of genius is the choice of
POETIC POWER 243
subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. At least I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately from the author's personal sensa- tions and experiences, the excellence of a par- ticular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power. We may perhaps remember the tale of the statuary, who had acquired considerable reputation for the legs of his goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but indifferently with ideal beauty ; till his wife, elated by her husband's praises, modestly acknowledged that she herself had been his constant model. In the 'Venus and Adonis' this proof of poetic power exists even to excess. It is throughout as if a superior spirit more intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only of every out- ward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view ; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasureable excitement, which had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting, what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I think, I should have conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct, which impelled the poet to the drama, was secretly working in him, prompting him by a series and never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and, because unbroken, often minute ; by the highest effort of the picturesque in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted ; to
244 COLERIDGE
provide a substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and running comment by tone, look and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitled to expect from the players. His Venus and Adonis seem at once the charac- ters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, that from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader ; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images ; and above all from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst ; that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more offensively, Wieland has done, instead of degrad- ing and deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence ; Shakspeare has here represented the animal impulse itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery ; or by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty or profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. The reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our nature. As little can
POETIC POWER 245
a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded on by mean and indistinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep upon the surface of a lake, while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and billows.
3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion ; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion ; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant ; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit,
Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air.
In the two following lines for instance, there is nothing objectionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place, part of a descriptive poem :
Behold yon row of pinea, that shorn and bow'd Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve.
But with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The same image will rise into a semblance of poetry if thus conveyed :
Yon row of bleak and visionary pines, By twilight glimpse discerned, mark ! how they flee From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wfld Streaming before them.
246 COLEKIDGE
I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of that particular excellence which I had in view, and in which Shakspeare even in his earliest, as in his latest, works sur- passes all other poets. It is by this, that he still gives a dignity and a passion to the objects which he presents. Unaided by any previous excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power.
Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.
Shakspeare's Sonnet 33rd.
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come —
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd, And the sad augurs mock their own presage ; Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd, And Peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and DEATH to me subscribes ! Since spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes. And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants' crests, and tombs of brass are spent.
Sonnet 107.
As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colors itself to the circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the mind. For unrivalled instances of this excellence, the reader's own memory will refer him to the LEAK, OTHELLO, in short to which not of the ' great, ever living, dead man's ' dramatic works ? ' Inopem me copia fecit.' How true it
POETIC POWEK 247
is to nature, he has himself finely expressed in the instance of love in Sonnet 98.
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud pied April drest in all its trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of lifferent flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them, where they grew :
Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose ;
They were, tho' sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play !
Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark
Tovifiov [itv WOITJTOV —
— oaris pfjpa yevvatov \aicoi
will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the painter, the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of simultaneousness !
With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace Of those fair arms, that held him to her heart, And homeward through the dark lawns runs apace Look ! how a bright star shooteth from the sky, So glides he in the night from Venus' eye.
4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former ; yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were possible) would give pro- mises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric
248 COLERIDGE
power ; is DEPTH, and ENERGY of THOUGHT. No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. In Shakspeare's poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinc- tion of the other. At length in the DRAMA they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other and intermix reluctantly and in tumult ; but soon finding a wider channel and more yield- ing shores blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. The ' Venus and Adonis ' did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favor, and even demand their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakspeare's management of the tale neither pathos, nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties ; and with a yet larger dis- ' play, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflec- tion ; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language. What then shall we say ? even this ; that Shak- speare, no mere child of nature ; no automaton of genius ; no passive vehicle of inspiration
POETIC POWEE 249
possessed by the spirit, not possessing it ; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at 'ength gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class ; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer, not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood ; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own IDEAL. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of MILTON ; while SHAKSPEAKE becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. 0 what great men hast thou not produced, England ! my country ! truly indeed —
Must we be free or die, who speak the tongue, Which SHAKSPEAKE spake ; the faith and morals hold, Which MILTON held. In every thing we are sprung Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold !
WORDSWORTH.
From Biographia Literaria, 1817, Chap. XV.
Shakspeare as 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
250 COLERIDGE
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 Shakespeare possessed the chief, if not every, requisite of a poet, — deep feeling and exquisite sense of beauty, both as exhibited to the eye in the combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet and appropriate melody ; that these feelings were under the command of his own will ; that in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own particular being, and felt, and made others feel, on subjects no way connected with himself, except by force of contemplation and that sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that, on which it meditates. To this must be added that affectionate love of nature and natural objects, without which no man could have observed so steadily, or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of the external world : —
And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare, Mark the poor wretch ; to overshoot his troubles How he outruns the wind, and with what care, He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles The many musits through the which he goes Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.
Sometimes he runs among the flock of sheep, To make the cunning hounds mistake their sme And sometime where earth-delving conies keep, To stop the loud pursuers in their yell ;
SHAKESPEAKE AS POET GENERALLY 251
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, v 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.
252 COLERIDGE
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 feel- ing, 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 descrip- tion 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 :
SHAKESPEARE AS POET GENERALLY 253
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 con- sciousness of words, — to make him see every thing flashed, as Wordsworth has grandly and appro- priately 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, how- ever, 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 circum- stances of the first two lines, and the activity of
254 COLEEIDGE
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 argu- ment 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 men* tioned 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 excite- ment, 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 un- pleasing ; 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 ;
SHAKESPEARE AS POET GENERALLY 255
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.
Lectures.1
1 Coleridge's ' Lectures ' are not preserved as they were delivered. It was his habit to write out only portions of them and to make many notes, then to study the ' mass of material ', and then to speak extempore. The fragments which remain cannot all be assigned to the same date, though most of them probably belong to the series delivered in London in 1818. They were printed in H. N. Coleridge's edition of his uncle's Literary Remains, 1836-39. Much additional matter is included in Ashe's collection of Coleridge's Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and Other English Poets, 1883.
In the extracts from the ' Lectures ' the spelling ' Shak- speare ' has been adopted throughout. It is the spelling in the Biographia Literaria, which Coleridge himself saw through the press.
256 COLERIDGE
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 naturce, 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
SHAKESPEAKE'S JUDGEMENT 257
of ' wild,' ' irregular,' ' pure child of nature,' &c.
[f all this be true, we must submit to it ; though
;o a thinking mind it cannot but be painful to
ind any excellence, merely human, thrown out of all human analogy, and thereby leaving us neither rules for imitation, nor motives to imitate ; — but
f 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
ntellect enough to comprehend, or soul to feel, without assigning any reason, or referring his opinion to any demonstrative principle ; — thus
eaving Shakspeare as a sort of grand Lama, adored indeed, and his very excrements prized as relics, but with no authority or real influence, grieve that every late voluminous edition of
lis 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
he greatness of the cataract to be neither more ed, nor less than his three-ounce phial has been able
to receive.
I think this a very serious subject. It is my
arnest desire — my passionate endeavour, — to en- iiid force at various times and by various arguments
and instances the close and reciprocal connexion
212 K
258 COLERIDGE
of just taste with pure morality. Without that acquaintance with the heart of man, or that docility and childlike gladness to be made ac- quainted 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 erudi- tion, however patient his antiquarian researches, can possibly understand, or be worthy of under- standing, the writings of Shakspeare.
Assuredly that criticism of Shakspeare will alone be genial which is reverential. The English- man, 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, extravagances 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 Institu- tion, it has been, and it still remains, my object, to prove that in all points from the most important
SHAKESPEARE'S JUDGEMENT 259
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 conscious- ness 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,
260 COLERIDGE
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 accord- ing 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 Shakespeare works of rude uncultivated genius, in which the splendour of the parts compensates, if aught can compensate, for the barbarous shape- lessness 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 Shak- speare 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 con- trasted with lifeless mechanism — of free and rival originality as contradistinguished from servile
SHAKESPEARE'S JUDGEMENT 261
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 connexion 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 involu- crum 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 appro- priate 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,
262 COLEKIDGE
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 con- founding 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 excel- lence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakspeare, — himself a nature humanized, a genial understand- ing directing self-consciously a power and an im- plicit 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 demon- strationum) called the conscience, the understand- ing or prudence, wit, fancy, imagination, judg- ment,— and then of the objects on which these are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors,
SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS 263
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 indi- vidual 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 irregu- lar, genius of our daily criticism ! What ! are we to have miracles in sport ? — Or, I speak rever- ently, does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man ?
Lectures,
Recapitulation and Summary of the Characteristics of Shakspeare' s Dramas.
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
264 COLEKEDGE
a whole, filled the mind with the calm and elevated impression of perfect beauty and symmetrical proportion. The moderns also produced a whole, a more striking whole ; but it was by blending materials and fusing the parts together. And as the Pantheon is to York Minster or Westminster Abbey, so is Sophocles compared with Shak- speare ; in the one a completeness, a satisfaction, an excellence, on which the mind rests with com- placency ; 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 pro- gression, 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 admira- tion 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 succes- sion only of pleasing sounds, — the modern embrac- ing 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 eaeh 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
SHAKESPEAEE'S DRAMAS 265
the symbol of that power which acts without our consciousness in the vital energies of nature, — the vinum mundi, — as Apollo was that of the conscious agency of our intellectual being. The heroes of old under the influences of this Bacchic enthusiasm performed more than human actions ; — hence tales of the 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 enter- tained 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 per- petually 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 in- stance in the Eumenides, where during an evident retirement of the chorus from the orchestra, the scene is changed to Athens, and Orestes is first intro- duced in the temple of Minerva, and the chorus of Furies come in afterwards in pursuit of him.
In the Greek drama there were no formal divisions into scenes and acts ; there were no means, therefore, of allowing for the necessary lapse of time between one part of the dialogue and another, and unity of time in a strict sense K3
266 COLEBIDGE
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 sup- plied music and measured motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the vacuity. In the story of the Agamemnon of ^Eschylus, 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 Mycenae. The signal is first seen at the 21st line, and the herald from Troy itself enters at the 486th, and Aga- memnon 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 narra- tive 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 Shak- speare'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 ^schylean 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 Mgis- thus, 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.
SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS 267
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 volup- tuous 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 expecta- tion.
268 COLERIDGE
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 admoni- tions 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,
SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS 269
even Venus ; so in Shakspeare all the characters are strong. Hence real folly and dulness are made by him the vehicles of wisdom. There is no difficulty for one being 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, — hie labor, hoc opus est. A drunken constable is not uncommon, nor hard to draw ; but see and examine what goes to make up a Dogberry.
3. Keeping at all times in the high road of life. Shakespeare has no innocent adulteries, no interest- ing 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 succeed- ing, 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 natters, 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
COLERIDGE
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 week, 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 Shak- speare 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
SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS 271
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 Shak- speare 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.
272 COLERIDGE
7. The characters of tKe dramatis persona, 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 misunder- stood, 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 reflect- ing 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.
Lectures.
THE TEMPEST 273
The Tempest.
THE Tempest is a specimen of the purely ro- mantic drama, in which the interest is not his- torical, or dependent upon fidelity of portraiture, or the natural connexion of events, — but is a birth of the imagination, and rests only on the coapta- tion 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 geo- graphy— 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 pre- pares 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
274 COLEKIDGE
in strictness natural — (the distinction to which I have so often alluded) — and is purposely re- strained 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 re- member, of retrospective narration for the purpose of exciting immediate interest, and putting the audience in possession of all the information neces- sary for the understanding of the plot. 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 com- pletely any thing that might have been disagree- able 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, excep- tions, the female characters in the plays of Beau- mont and Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not decent ; when heroic, complete viragos. But in1 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 experi-
THE TEMPEST 275
ence, — not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their prede- cessors even up to the first mother that lived. Shakspeare saw that the want of prominence, which Pope notices for sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman's character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite 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 distinc- tive energies of faith, patience, constancy, forti- tude,— 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 exaggera- tions 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 circum- stances, 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, con- trasted. 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 com- parison 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 under- standing 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
276 COLERIDGE
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 sense, 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. 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 com -
THE TEMPEST 277
mand of her father is very finely drawn, so as to seem the working of the Scriptural command, Thou shall leave father and mother, &c. 0 ! with what exquisite purity this scene is conceived and exe- cuted ! 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 pre- served 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 civiliza- tion ; 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 Mac- beth and his lady, only pitched in a lower key throughout, as designed to be frustrated and con- cealed, and exhibiting the same profound manage- ment 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 habi- tually matter of reverence. By this kind of sophis- .try the imagination and fancy are first bribed to contemplate the suggested act, and at length to
278 COLEKIDGE
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 pro- found veneration for all the established institu- tions of society, and for those classes which form the permanent elements of the state — especially never introducing a professional character, as such, other- wise than as respectable. If he must have any name, he should be styled a philosophical aristo- crat, 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.
THE TEMPEST 279
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 colours necessary to combine them with each other. He had virtually surveyed all the great component powers and impulses of human nature, — had seen that their different combina- tions and subordinations were in fact the indi- vidualizers 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 prof oundest depths of his moral being, and is, therefore for all ages.
Lectures.
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 ma- turity, a formidable rival of Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. Feliciter audax is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakspeare's other
280 COLEKIDGE
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 excellences 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 spon- taneous 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 mi- nutely, 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.
Lectures.
ROMEO AND JULIET 281
Romeo and Juliet.
I HAVE previously had occasion to speak at large on the subject of the three unities of time, place, nd action, as applied to the drama in the abstract, and to the particular stage for which Shakspeare wrote, as far as he can be said to have written for ny stage but that of the universal mind. I hope ! have in some measure succeeded in demonstrating hat the former two, instead of being rules, were mere inconveniences attached to the local pecu- iarities of the Athenian drama ; that the last ilone deserved the name of a principle, and that in •he preservation of this unity Shakspeare stood pre-eminent. Yet, instead of unity of action, [ should greatly prefer the more appropriate, hough scholastic and uncouth, words homo- jeneity, proportionateness, and totality of interest, — expressions, which involve the distinction, or •ather the essential difference, betwixt the shaping kill of mechanical talent, and the creative, pro- iuctive, life-power of inspired genius. In the ormer each part is separately conceived, and then >y a succeeding act put together ; — not as watches ire made for wholesale, — (for there each part sup- )oses a pre-conception of the whole in some mind) — but more like pictures on a motley screen. Whence arises the harmony that strikes us in the | wildest natural landscapes, — in the relative shapes >f rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, erns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the >ak, the stems and rich brown branches of the )irch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring, — compared
282 COLERIDGE \
with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations ? — From this, that the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified ab intra in each component part. And as this is the particular excellence of the Shak- spearian drama generally, so is it especially charac- teristic of the Romeo and Juliet.
The groundwork of the tale is altogether in family life, and the events of the play have their first origin in family feuds. Filmy as are the eyes of party-spirit, at once dim and truculent, still there is commonly some real or supposed object in view, or principle to be maintained ; and though but the twisted wires on the plate of rosin in the preparation for electrical pictures, it is still a guide in some degree, an assimilation to an outline. But in family quarrels, which have proved scarcely less injurious to states, wilfulness, and precipitancy, and passion from mere habit and custom, can alone be expected. With his accustomed judgment, Shakspeare has begun by placing before us a lively picture of all the impulses of the play ; and as nature ever presents two sides, one for Hera- clitus, and one for Democritus, he has, by way of prelude, shown the laughable absurdity of the evil by the contagion of it reaching the servants, who have so little to do with it, but who are under the necessity of letting the superfluity of sensoreal, power fly off through the escape-valve of wit- combats, and of quarrelling with weapons of sharper edge, all in humble imitation of their masters. Yet there is a sort of unhired fidelity, an ourishness about all this that makes it rest pleasant on one's feelings. All the first scene, down to the conclusion of the Prince's speech, is a motley dance
ROMEO AND JULIET 283
all ranks and ages to one tune, as if the horn of Buon had been playing behind the scenes. Benvolio's speech —
Madam, an hour before the worshipp'd sun Peer'd forth the golden window of the east —
and, far more strikingly, the following speech of Did Montague —
Many a morning hath he there been seen
With tears augmenting the fresh morning dew —
Drove that Shakspeare meant the Romeo and Juliet to approach to a poem, which, and indeed its iarly date, may be also inferred from the multitude rhyming couplets throughout. And if we are dght, from the internal evidence, in pronouncing ;his one of Shakspeare's early dramas, it affords a, strong instance of the fineness of his insight into bhe nature of the passions, that Romeo is intro- duced already love-bewildered. The necessity of oving creates an object for itself in man and woman ; and yet there is a difference in this respect between the sexes, though only to be known Dy a perception of it. It would have displeased us f Juliet had been represented as already in love, Dr as fancying herself so ; — but no one, I believe, ver experiences any shock at Romeo's forgetting bis Rosaline, who had been a mere name for the yearning of his youthful imagination, and rushing nto his passion for Juliet. Rosaline was a mere creation of his fancy ; and we should remark the boastful positiveness of Romeo in a love of his own making, which is never shown where love is really lear the heart.
284 COLERIDGE
When the devout religion of mine eye
Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires !
One fairer than my love ! the all-seeing sun Ne'er saw her match, since first the world begun.
The character of the Nurse is the nearest of any thing in Shakspeare to a direct borrowing from mere observation ; and the reason is, that as in infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class, — just as in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them, — so it is nearly as much so in old age. The generaliza- tion is done to the poet's hand. Here you have the garrulity of age strengthened by the feelings of a long-trusted servant, whose sympathy with the mother's affections gives her privileges and rank in the household ; and observe the mode of con- nection by accidents of time and place, and the childlike fondness of repetition in a second child- hood, and also that happy, humble, ducking under, yet constant resurgence against, the check of her superiors ! —
Yes, madam ! — Yet I cannot choose b.ut laugh, &c.
In the fourth scene we have Mercutio introduced to us. 0 ! how shall I describe that exquisite ebul- lience and overflow of youthful life, wafted on over the laughing waves of pleasure and prosperity, as a wanton beauty that distorts the face on which she knows her lover is gazing enraptured, and wrinkles her forehead in the triumph of its smooth- ness ! Wit ever wakeful, fancy busy and pro- creative as an insect, courage, an easy mind that, without cares of its own, is at once disposed to laugh away those of others, and yet to be interested
ROMEO AND JULIET 285
in them, — these and all congenial qualities, melting into the common copula of them all, the man of rank and the gentleman, with all its excellencies and all its weaknesses, constitute the character of Mercutio !
Lectures.
Lear.
OP all Shakspeare's plays Macbeth is the most rapid, Hamlet the slowest, in movement. Lear combines length with rapidity, — like the hurricane and the whirlpool, absorbing while it advances. It begins as a stormy day in summer, with brightness ; but that brightness is lurid, and anticipates the tempest.
It was not without forethought, nor is it without its due significance, that the division of Lear's kingdom is in the first six lines of the play stated as a thing already determined in all its particulars, previously to the trial of professions, as the relative rewards of which the daughters were to be made to consider their several portions. The strange, yet by no means unnatural, mixture of selfishness, sensibility, and habit of feeling derived from, and fostered by, the particular rank and usages of the inidvidual ; — the intense desire of being intensely beloved, — selfish, and yet characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone ; — the self-supportless leaning for all pleasure on another's breast ; — the craving after sympathy with a prodigal disinterestedness, frustrated by its own ostentation, and the mode and nature of its claims ; — the anxiety, the distrust, the jealousy, which more or less accompany all selfish affections, and are amongst the surest contradistinctions of
286 COLEKIDGE
mere fondness from true love, and which originate Lear's eager wish to enjoy his daughter's violent professions, whilst the inveterate habits of sove- reignty convert the wish into claim and positive right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason ; — these facts, these passions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found implied, in these first four or five lines of the play. They let us know that the trial is but a trick ; and that the grossness of the old king's rage is in part the natural result of a silly trick suddenly and most unexpectedly baffled and disappointed.
It may here be worthy of notice, that Lear is the only serious performance of Shakspeare, the interest and situations of which are derived from the assumption of a gross improbability ; whereas Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies are, almost all of them, founded on some out of the way accident or exception to the general experience of mankind. But observe the matchless judgment of our Shak- speare. First, improbable as the conduct of Lear is in the first scene, yet it was an old story rooted in the popular faith, — a thing taken for granted already, and consequently without any of the effects of improbability. Secondly, it is merely the canvass for the characters and passions, — a mere occasion for, — and not, in the manner of Beaumont and Fletcher, perpetually recurring as the cause, and sine qua non of, — the incidents and emotions. Let the first scene of this play have been lost, and let it only be understood that a fond father had been duped by hypocritical professions of love and duty on the part of two daughters to disinherit the
LEAR 287
third, previously, and deservedly, more dear to him ; — and all the rest of the tragedy would retain its interest undiminished, and be perfectly intelli- gible. The accidental is no where the groundwork of the passions, but that which is catholic, which in all ages has been, and ever will be, close and native to the heart of man, — parental anguish from filial ingratitude, the genuineness of worth, though cof- fined in bluntness, and the execrable vileness of a smooth iniquity. Perhaps I ought to have added the Merchant of Venice ; but here too the same remarks apply. It was an old tale ; and substi- tute any other danger than that of the pound of flesh (the circumstance in which the improbability lies), yet all the situations and the emotions apper- taining to them remain equally excellent and appro- priate. Whereas take away from the Mad Lover of Beaumont and Fletcher the fantastic hypothesis of his engagement to cut out his own heart, and have it presented to his mistress, and all the main scenes must go with it. ...
Act I. sc. 4. In Lear old age is itself a character, — its -natural imperfections being increased by life- long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any addition of individuality would have been unneces- sary and gainful ; for the relations of others to him, •of wondrous fidelity and of frightful ingratitude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the open and ample play-room of nature's passions.
Knight. Since my young lady's going into France, Sir the fool hath much pin'd away.
The Fool is no comic buffoon to make the groundlings laugh, — no forced condescension of
288 COLEKIDGE
Shakspeare's genius to the taste of his audience. Accordingly the poet prepares for his introduction, which he never does with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living con- nection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a creation as Caliban ; — his wild bab- blings, and inspired idiocy, articulate and gauge the horrors of the scene.
The monster Goneril prepares what is necessary, while the character of Albany renders a still more maddening grievance possible, namely, Regan and Cornwall in perfect sympathy of monstrosity. Not a sentiment, not an image, which can give pleasure on its own account, is admitted ; whenever these creatures are introduced, and they are brought forward as little as possible, pure horror reigns throughout. In this scene and in all the earlier speeches of Lear, the one general sentiment of filial ingratitude prevails as the main spring of the feel- ings ; — in this early stage the outward object causing the pressure on the mind, which is not yet sufficiently familiarized with the anguish for the imagination to work upon it. ...
Act II. sc. 3. dgar's assumed madness serves the great purpose of taking off part of the shock which would otherwise be caused by the true mad- ness of Lear, and further displays the profound difference between the two. • In every attempt at representing madness throughout the whole range of dramatic literature, with the single exception of Lear, it is mere lightheadedness, as especially in Otway. In Edgar's ravings Shakspeare all the while lets you see a fixed purpose, a practical end in view ; — in Lear's, there is only the brooding of the one anguish, an eddy without progression. . . .
LEAR 289
Act iii. sc. 4. 0, what a world's convention of agonies is here ! All external nature in a storm, all moral nature convulsed, — the real madness of Lear, the feigned madness of Edgar, the babbling of the Fool, the desperate fidelity of Kent — surely such a scene was never conceived before or since ! Take it but as a picture for the eye only, it is more terrific than any which a Michel ngelo, inspired by a Dante, could have conceived, and which none but a Michel Angelo could have executed. Or let it have been uttered to the blind, the howlings of nature would seem converted into the voice of con- scious humanity. This scene ends with the first symptoms of positive derangement ; and the inter- vention of the fifth scene is particularly judicious, — the interruption allowing an interval for Lear to appear in full madness in the sixth scene.
Lectures.
Hamlet.
In Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the workings of our minds, — an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed : his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very per- ceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual acti- vity, and a proportionate aversion to real action, consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and
accompanying qualities. This character Shak- 212 L
290 COLEKIDGE
speare places in circumstances, under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment : — Hamlet is brave and careless of death ; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. Thus it is that this tragedy presents a direct contrast to that of Macbeth ; the one pro- ceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with a crowded and breathless rapidity.
The effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting breedings and superfluous activities of Hamlet's mind, which, unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly occupied with the world within, and abstracted from the world without, — giving sub- stance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all commonplace actualities. It is the nature of thought to be indefinite ; — definiteness belongs to external imagery alone. Hence it is that the sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight of an out- ward object, but from the beholder's reflection upon it ; — not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex. Few have seen a celebrated waterfall without feeling something akin to disappointment : it is only subsequently that the image comes back full into the mind, and brings with it a train of grand or beautiful asso- ciations. Hamlet feels this ; his senses are in a state of trance, and he looks upon external things as hieroglyphics. His soliloquy —
0 ! that this too too solid flesh would melt, &c.
springs from that craving after the indefinite — for that which is not — which most easily besets men of genius ; and the self-delusion common to this
HAMLET 291
temper of mind is finely exemplified in the char- acter which Hamlet gives of himself : —
— It cannot be
But I am pigeon -livered, and lack gall To make oppression bitter.
He mistakes the seeing his chains for the breaking them, delays action till action is of no use, and dies the victim of mere circumstance and accident. . . . But as of more importance, so more striking, is the judgment displayed by our truly dramatic poet, as well as poet of the drama, in the management of his first scenes. With the single exception of Cymbeline, they either place before us at one glance both the past and the future in some effect, which implies the continuance and full agency of its cause, as in the feuds and party-spirit of the servants of the two houses in the first scene of Romeo and Juliet ; or in the degrading passion for shews and public spectacles, and the overwhelming attachment for the newest successful war-chief in the Roman people, already become a populace, contrasted with the jealousy of the nobles in Julius Ccesar ; — or they at once commence the action so as to excite a curiosity for the explanation in the following scenes, as in the storm of wind and waves, and the boatswain in the Tempest, instead of anti- cipating our curiosity, as in most other first scenes, and in too many other first acts ; — or they act, by contrast of diction suited to the characters, at once to heighten the effect, and yet to give a naturalness to the language and rhythm of the principal per- sonages, either as that of Prospero and Miranda by the appropriate lowness of the style, — :or as in King John, by the equally appropriate stateliness
292 COLERIDGE
of official harangues or narratives, so that the after blank verse seems to belong to the rank and quality of the speakers, and not to the poet ; — or they strike at once the key-note, and give the predomi- nant spirit of the play, as in the Twelfth Night and in Macbeth ; — or finally, the first scene comprises all these advantages at once, as in Hamlet.
Compare the easy language of common life, in which this drama commences, with the direful music and wild wayward rhythm and abrupt lyrics of the opening of Macbeth. The tone is quite familiar ; — there is no poetic description of night, no elaborate information conveyed by one speaker to another of what both had immediately before their senses — (such as the first distich in Addison's Cato, which is a translation into poetry of ' Past four o'clock and a dark morning ! ') ; — and yet nothing bordering on the comic on the one hand, nor any striving of the intellect on the other. It is precisely the language of sensation among men who feared no charge of effeminacy for feeling, what they had no want of resolution to bear. Yet the armour, the dead silence, the watchfulness that first interrupts it, the welcome relief of the guard, the cold, the broken expressions of compelled attention to bodily feelings still under control — all excellently accord with, and prepare for, the after gradual rise into tragedy ; — but, above all, into a tragedy, the interest of which is as eminently ad et apud intra, as that of Macbeth is directly ad extra.
In all the best attested stories of ghosts and visions, as in that of Brutus, of Archbishop Cran- mer, that of Benvenuto Cellini recorded by himself, and the vision of Galileo communicated by him to his favourite pupil Torricelli, the ghost-seers were
HAMLET 293
in a state of cold or chilling damp from without, and of anxiety inwardly. It has been with all of them as with Francisco on his guard, — alone, in the depth and silence of the night ; — ' 'twas bitter cold, and they were sick at heart, and not a mouse stirring."1 The attention to minute sounds, — naturally associated with the recollection of minute objects, and the more familiar and trifling, the more impressive from the unusualness of their producing any impression at all — gives a philo- sophic pertinency to this last image ; but it has likewise its dramatic use and purpose. For its commonness in ordinary conversation tends to produce the sense of reality, and at once hides the poet, and yet approximates the reader or spectator to that state in which the highest poetry will appear, and in its component parts, though not in the whole composition, really is, the language of nature. If I should not speak it, I feel that I should be thinking it ; — the voice only is the poet's, — the words are my own. That Shak- speare meant to put an effect in the actor's power in the very first words — ' Who's there ? ' — is evident from the impatience expressed by the startled Francisco in the words that follow — ' Nay, answer me : stand and unfold yourself.' A brave man is never so peremptory, as when he fears that he is afraid. Observe the gradual transition from the silence and the still recent habit of listening in Francisco's — ' I think I hear them ' — £o the more cheerful call out, which a good actor would observe, in the — ' Stand ho ! Who is there ? ' Bernardo's inquiry after Horatio, and the repetition of his name and in his own presence indicate a respect or an eagerness that implies him as one of the persons
294 COLEKIDGE
who are in the foreground ; and the scepticism attributed to him, —
Horatio says, 'tis but our fantasy ;
And will not let belief take hold of him —
prepares us for Hamlet's after eulogy on him as one whose blood and judgment were happily com- mingled. The actor should also be careful to distinguish the expectation and gladness of Ber- nardo's ' Welcome, Horatio ! ' from the mere courtesy of his ' Welcome, good Marcellus ! '
Now observe the admirable indefiniteness of the first opening out of the occasion of all this anxiety. The preparation informative of the audience is just as much as was precisely necessary, and no more ; — it begins with the uncertainty appertaining to a question : —
Mar. What, has this thing appear'd again to-night ? —
Even the word ' again ' has its credibilizing effect. Then Horatio, the representative of the ignorance of the audience, not himself, but by Marcellus to Bernardo, anticipates the common solution — ' 'tis but our fantasy ! ' upon which Marcellus rises into
This dreaded sight, twice seen of us —
which immediately afterwards becomes ' this appa- rition,' and that, too, an intelligent spirit, that is, to be spoken to ! Then comes the confirmation of Horatio's disbelief ;,—
Tush ! tush ! 'twill not appear ! — %
and the silence, with which the scene opened, is again restored in the shivering feeling of Horatio sitting down, at such a time, and with the two eye- witnesses, to hear a story of a ghost, and that, too,
HAMLET 295
of a ghost which had appeared twice before at the very same hour. In the deep feeling which Ber- nardo has of the solemn nature of what he is about to relate, he makes an effort to master his own imaginative terrors by an elevation of style, — itself a continuation of the effort, — and by turning off from the apparition, as from something which would force him too deeply into himself, to the outward objects, the realities of nature, which had accompanied it : —
Ber. Last night of all,
When yon same star, that's westward from the pole Had made his course to illume that part of heaven Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, The bell then beating one —
This passage seems to contradict the critical law that what is told, makes a faint impression com- pared with what is beholden ; for it does indeed convey to the mind more than the eye can see ; whilst the interruption of the narrative at the very moment, when we are most intensely listening for the sequel, and have our thoughts diverted from the dreaded sight in expectation of the desired, yet almost dreaded, tale — this gives all the suddenness and surprise of the original appearance ; — Mar. Peace, break thee off ; look, where it comes again ! —
Note the judgment displayed in having the two persons present, who, as having seen the Ghost before, are naturally eager in confirming their former opinions, — whilst the sceptic is silent, and after having been twice addressed by his friends, answers with two hasty syllables — ' Most like,' — and a confession of horror :
— It harrows me with fear and wonder.
296 COLERIDGE
0 heaven ! words are wasted on those who feel, and to those who do not feel the exquisite judg- ment of Shakspeare in this scene, what can be said ? — Hume himself could not but have had faith in this Ghost dramatically, let his anti- ghostism have been as strong as Sampson against other ghosts less powerfully raised. . . . Act I. sc. 2. Hamlet's first soliloquy : —
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! &c.
This tcedium vitce is a common oppression on minds cast in the Hamlet mould, and is caused by disproportionate mental exertion, which necessi- tates exhaustion of bodily feeling. Where there is a just coincidence of external and internal action, pleasure is always the result ; but where the former is deficient, and the mind's appetency of the ideal is unchecked, realities will seem cold and unmov- ing. In such cases, passion combines itself with the indefinite alone. In this mood of his mind the relation of the appearance of his father's spirit in arms is made all at once to Hamlet : — it is — Horatio's speech, in particular — a perfect model of the true style of dramatic narrative ; — the purest poetry, and yet in the most natural lan- guage, equally remote from the ink-horn and the plough.
Lectures.
Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity ; but every incident sets him thinking ; and it is curious, and, at the same time
HAMLET 297
strictly natural, that Hainlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should be impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.
A maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely retrospective : an Idea, or, if you like, a Principle, carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective. Polonius is a man of maxims. Whilst he is descanting on matters of past experience, as in that excellent speech to Laertes before he sets out on his travels, he is admirable ; but when he comes to advise or project, he is a mere dotard. You see, Hamlet, as the man of ideas, despises him.
A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in the back of his head. Table Talk June 24, 1827.
Macbeth.
Macbeth stands in contrast throughout with Hamlet ; in the manner of opening more especially. In the latter, there is a gradual ascent from the simplest forms of conversation to the language of impassioned intellect, — yet the intellect still remaining the seat of passion : in the former, the invocation is at once made to the imagination and the emotions connected therewith. Hence the movement throughout is the most rapid of all Shakspeare's plays ; and hence also, with the exception of the disgusting passage of the Porter (Act ii. sc. 3.), which I dare pledge myself to demon- strate to be an interpolation of the actors, there is not, to the best of my remembrance, a single pun or play on words in the whole drama. . . . L3
298 COLERIDGE
In Hamlet and Macbeth the scene opens with superstition ; but, in each it is not merely different, but opposite. In the first it is connected with the best and holiest feelings ; in the second with the shadowy, turbulent, and unsanctified cravings of the individual will. Nor is the purpose the same ; in the one the object is to excite, whilst in the other it is to mark a mind already excited. Superstition, of one sort or another, is natural to victorious generals ; the instances are too notorious to need mentioning. There is so much of chance in war- fare, and such vast events are connected with the acts of a single individual, — the representative, in truth, of the efforts of myriads, and yet to the public and, doubtless, to his own feelings, the aggre- gate of all, — that the proper temperament for generating or receiving superstitious impressions is naturally produced. Hope, the master element of a commanding genius, meeting with an active and combining intellect, and an imagination of just that degree of vividness which disquiets and impels the soul to try to realize its images, greatly increases the creative power of the mind; and hence the images become a satisfying world of themselves, as is the case in every poet and original philosopher : — but hope fully gratified, and yet the elementary basis of the passion remaining, becomes fear ; and, indeed, the general, who must often feel, even though he may hide it from his own consciousness, how large a share chance had in his successes, may very naturally be irresolute in a new scene, where he knows that all will depend on his own act and election.
The Weird Sisters are as true a creation of Shak- speare's, as his Ariel and Caliban, — fates, furies, and
MACBETH 299
materializing witches being the elements. They are wholly different from any representation of witches in the contemporary writers, and yet presented a sufficient external resemblance to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to act immedi- ately on the audience. Their character consists in the imaginative disconnected from the good ; they are the shadowy obscure and fearfully ano- malous of physical nature, the lawless of human nature, — elemental avengers without sex or kin :
Fair is foul, and foul is fair ;
Hover thro' the fog and filthy air.
How much it were to be wished in, playing Macbeth, that an attempt should be made to introduce the flexile character-mask of the ancient pantomime ; — that Flaxman would contribute his genius to the embodying and making sensuously perceptible that of Shakspeare ! . . .
Ib. sc. 5. Macbeth is described by Lady Mac- beth so as at the same time to reveal her own character. Could he have every thing he wanted, he would rather have it innocently ; — ignorant, as alas ! how many of us are, that he who wishes a temporal end for itself, does in truth will the means ; and hence the danger of indulging fancies. Lady Macbeth, like all in Shakspeare, is a class individualized : — of high rank, left much alone, and feeding herself with day-dreams of ambition, she mistakes the courage of fantasy for- the power of bearing the consequences of the realities of guilt. Hers is the mock fortitude of a mind deluded by ambition ; she shames her husband with a super- human audacity of fancy which she cannot support,
300 COLERIDGE
but sinks in the season of remorse, and dies in suicidal agony. Her speech :
Come, all you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, uneex me here, &c.
is that of one who had habitually familiarized her imagination to dreadful conceptions, and was trying to do so still more. Her invocations and requisitions are all the false efforts of a mind accustomed only hitherto- to the shadows of the imagination, vivid enough to throw the every-day substances of life into shadow, but never as yet brought into direct contact with their own corre- spondent realities. She evinces no womanly life, no wifely joy, at the return of her husband, no pleased terror at\ the thought of his past dangers, whilst Macbeth bursts forth naturally —
My dearest love —
and shrinks from the boldness with which she presents his own thoughts to him. With consum- mate art she at first uses as incentives the very circumstances, Duncan's coming to their house, &c. which Macbeth's. conscience would most probably have adduced to her as motives of abhorrence or repulsion. Yet Macbeth is not prepared : We will speak further.
Act II. sc. 3. This low soliloquy of the Porter and his few speeches afterwards, I believe to have been written for the mob by some other hand, perhaps with Shakspeare's consent ; and that finding it take, he with the remaining ink of a pen otherwise employed, just interpolated the words —
I'll devil-porter it no further : I had thought to ha've let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to th' everlasting bonfire.
MACBETH 301
Of the rest not one syllable has the ever-present being of Shakspeare.
Lectures.
Othello. Act I. sc. 1.
Bod. What a full fortune does the thick-lips owe, If he can carry 't thus.
Roderigo turns off to Othello ; and here conies one, if not the only, seeming justification of our blackamoor or negro Othello. Even if we sup- posed this an uninterrupted tradition of the theatre, and that Shakspeare himself, from want of scenes, and the experience that nothing could be made too marked for the senses of his audience, had practi- cally sanctioned it, — would this prove aught con- cerning his own intention as a poet for all ages ? Can we imagine him so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth, — at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves ? — As for lago's language to Brabantio, it implies merely that Othello was a Moor, that is, black. Though I think the rivalry of Roderigo sufficient to account for his wilful confusion of Moor and Negro, — yet, even if compelled to give this up, I should think it only adapted for the acting of the day, and should complain of an enor- mity built on a single word, in direct contradiction to lago's ' Barbary horse.' Besides, if we could in good earnest believe Shakspeare ignorant of the distinction, still why should we adopt one disagree- able possibility instead of a ten times greater and more pleasing probability ? It is a common error to mistake the epithets applied by the' dramatis per- sona to each other, as truly descriptive of what the
302 COLERIDGE
audience ought to see or know. No doubt Desde- mona saw Othello's visage in his mind ; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakspeare -does not appear to - have in the least contemplated. . . . Act I. sc. 5. lago's speech : —
Virtue ? a fig ! 'tis in ourselves, that we are thus, or thus, &c.
This speech comprises the passionless character of lago. It is all will in intellect ; and therefore he is here a bold partizan of a truth, but yet of a truth converted into a falsehood by the absence of all the necessary modifications caused by the frail nature of man. And then comes the last senti- ment,—
Our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this, that you call — love, to be a sect or scion !
Here is the true lagoism of, alas ! how many ! Note lago's pride of mastery in the repetition of ' Go, make money ! ' to his anticipated dupe, even stronger than his love of lucre : and when Roderigo is completely won —
I am chang'd. Fll go sell all my land —
when the effect has been fully produced, the repetition of triumph —
Go to ; farewell ; put money enough in your purse ! The remainder — lago's soliloquy — the motive-
OTHELLO 303
hunting of a motiveless malignity — how awful it is ! Yea, whilst he is still allowed to bear the divine image, it is too fiendish for his own steady view, — for the lonely gaze of a being next to devil, and only not quite devil, — and yet a character which Shakspeare has attempted and executed, without disgust and without scandal ! . . .
Finally, let me repeat that Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of lago, such a conviction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed lago's honesty as Othello did. We, the audience, know that lago is a villain from the beginning ; but in considering the essence of the Shakspearian Othello, we must perseveringly place ourselves in his situation, and under his circumstances. Then we shall immedi- ately feel the fundamental difference between the solemn agony of the noble Moor, and the wretched fishing jealousies of Leontes, and the morbid sus- piciousness of Leonatus, who is, in other respects, a fine character. Othello had no life but in Des- demona : — the belief that she, his angel, had fallen from the heaven of her native innocence, wrought a civil war in his heart. She is his counterpart ; and, like him, is almost sanctified in our eyes by her absolute unsuspiciousness, and holy entireness of love. As the curtain drops, which do we pity
the most ? Lectures.
Othello must not be conceived as a negro, but a high and chivalrous Moorish chief. Shakspeare learned the spirit of the character from the Spanish poetry, which was prevalent in England in his time.
304 . COLERIDGE
Jealousy does not strike me as the point in his passion ; I take it to be rather an agony that the creature, whom he had believed angelic, with whom he had garnered up his heart, and whom he could not help still loving, should be proved impure and worthless. It was a struggle not to love her. It was a moral indignation and regret that virtue should so fall : — 'But yet the pity of it, lago ! — 0 lago ! the pity of it, lago ! ' In addition to this, his honour was concerned : lago would not have succeeded but by hinting that his honour was compromised. There is no ferocity in Othello ; his mind is majestic and composed. He deliber- ately determines to die ; and speaks his last speech with a view of showing his attachment to the Venetian State, though it had superseded him. Table Talk, Dec. 29, 1822.
Lear is the most tremendous effort of Shakspeare as a poet ; Hamlet as a philosopher or meditater ; and Othello is the union of the two. There is something gigantic and unformed in the former two ; but in the latter, everything assumes its due place and proportion, and the whole mature powers of his mind are displayed in admirable equilibrium.
Id.
I have often told you that I do not think there is any jealousy, properly so called, in the character of Othello. There is no predisposition to suspicion, which I take to be an essential term in the definition of the word. Desdemona very truly told Emilia that he was not jealous, that is, of a jealous habit, and he says so as truly of himself. lago's sug- gestions, you see, are quite new to him ; they do
OTHELLO 305
not correspond with anything of a like nature previously in his mind. If Desdemona had, in fact, been guilty, no one would have thought of calling Othello's conduct that of a jealous man. He could not act otherwise than he did with the lights he had ; whereas jealousy can never be strictly right. See how utterly unlike Othello is to Leontes, in the Winter's Tale, or even to Leonatus, in Cymbeline \ The jealousy of the first proceeds from an evident trifle, and something like hatred is mingled with it ; and the conduct of Leonatus in accepting the wager, and exposing his wife to the trial, denotes a jealous temper already formed.
Id. June 24, 1827.
Shakspeare is the Spinozistic ' deity — an omni- present creativeness. Milton is the deity. of pre- science ; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless ; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare ; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed, — epi- grams with the point everywhere ; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweet- ness long drawn out. No one can understand Shakspeare's superiority fully until he has ascer- tained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakspeare's own. His rhythm is so perfect, that you may be almost sure that you do not understand the real force of a line, if it does
306 COLERIDGE
not run well as you read it. The necessary mental pause after every hemistich or imperfect line is always equal to the time that would have been taken in reading the complete verse.
Table Talk, May 12, 1830.
Shakspeare is of no age. It is idle to endeavour to support his phrases by quotations from Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, &c. His lan- guage is entirely his own, and the younger dra- matists imitated him. The construction of Shak- speare's sentences, whether in verse or prose, is the necessary and homogeneous vehicle of his peculiar manner of thinking. His is not the style of the age. More particularly, Shakspeare's blank verse is an absolutely new creation. Read Daniel — the admirable Daniel — in his Civil Wars, and Tri- umphs .of Hymen. The style and language are just such as any very pure and manly writer of the present day — Wordsworth, for example — would use ; it seems quite modern in comparison with the style of Shakspeare. Ben Jonson's blank verse is very masterly and individual, and perhaps Massinger's is even still nobler. In Beaumont and Fletcher it is constantly slipping into lyricisms.
I believe Shakspeare was not a whit more intelli- gible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no conse- quence. As I said, he is of no age — nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind : his observation and reading, which was consider- able, supplied him with the drapery of his figures. Table Talk, March 15, 1834.
307
Macbeth.
MACBETH and Lear, Othello and Hamlet, are usually reckoned Shakespear's four principal tra- gedies. Lear stands first for the profound in- tensity of the passion; Macbeth for the wildness of the imagination and the rapidity of the action ; Othello for the progressive interest and powerful alternations of feeling ; Hamlet for the refined developement of thought and sentiment. If the force of genius shown in each of these works is astonishing, their variety is not less so. They are like different creations of the same mind, not one of which has the slightest reference to the rest. This distinctness and originality is indeed the necessary consequence of truth and nature. Shakespear's genius alone appeared to possess the resources of nature. He is ' your only tragedy- maker.' His plays have the force of things upon the mind. What he represents is brought home to the bosom as a part of our experience, implanted in the memory as if we had known the places, persons, and things of which he treats, MACBETH is like a record of a preternatural and tragical event. It has the rugged severity of an old chronicle with all that the imagination of the poet can engraft upon traditional belief. The castle of Macbeth, round which ' the air smells wooingly,' and where ' the temple-haunting martlet builds,'
308 WILLIAM HAZLITT
has a real subsistence in the mind ; the Weird Sisters meet us in person on ' the blasted heath ; ' the ' air-drawn dagger ' moves slowly before our eyes ; the ' gracious Duncan,' the ' blood-boltered Banquo ' stand before us ; all that passed through the mind of Macbeth passes, without the loss of a tittle, through ours. All that could actually take place, and all that is only possible to be conceived, what was said and what was done, the workings of passion, the spells of magic, are brought before us with the same absolute truth and vivid- ness.— Shakespear excelled in the openings of his plays : that of MACBETH is the most striking of any. The wildness of the scenery, the sudden shifting of the situations and characters, the bustle, the expectations excited, are equally extra- ordinary. From the first entrance of the Witches and the description of them when they meet Macbeth,
What are these
So wither'd and so wild in their attire,
That look not like the inhabitants of th' earth
And yet are on't ?
the mind is prepared for all that follows.
This tragedy is alike distinguished for the lofty imagination it displays, and for the tumultuous vehemence of the action ; and the one is made the moving principle of the other. The overwhelming pressure of preternatural agency urges on the tide of human passion with redoubled force. Macbeth himself appears driven along by the violence of his fate like a vessel drifting before a storm : he reels to and fro like a drunken man ; he staggers under the weight of his own purposes and the suggestions of others ; he stands at bay with his situation ; and
MACBETH 309
from the superstitious awe and breathless suspense into which the communications of the Weird Sisters throw him, is hurried on with daring impatience to verify their predictions, and with impious and bloody hand to tear aside the veil which hides the uncertainty of the future. He is not equal to the struggle with fate and conscience. He now ' bends up each corporal instrument to the terrible feat ; ' at other times his heart misgives him, and he is cowed and abashed by his success. ' The deed, no less than the attempt, confounds him.' His mind is assailed by the stings of remorse, and full of ' preternatural solicitings.' His speeches and soliloquies are dark riddles on human life, baffling solution, and entangling him in their laby- rinths. In thought he is absent and perplexed, sudden and desperate in act, from a distrust of his own resolution. His energy springs from the anxiety and agitation of his mind. His blindly rushing forward on the objects of his ambition and revenge, or his recoiling from them, equally betrays the harassed state of his feelings. — This part of his character is admirably set off by being brought in connection with that of Lady Macbeth, whose obdurate strength of will and masculine firmness give her the ascendancy over her husband's faulter- ing virtue. She at once seizes on the opportunity that offers for the accomplishment of all their wished-for greatness, and never flinches from her object till all is over. The magnitude of her reso- lution almost covers the magnitude of her guilt. She is a great bad woman, whom we hate, but whom we fear more than we hate. She does not excite our loathing and abhorrence like Kegan and Goneril. She is only wicked to gain a great end ;
310 WILLIAM HAZLITT
and is perhaps more distinguished by her com- manding presence of mind and inexorable self-will, which do not suffer her to be diverted from a bad purpose, when once formed, by weak and womanly regrets, than by the hardness of her heart or want of natural affections. The impression which her lofty determination of character makes on the mind of Macbeth is well described where he ex- claims,
Bring forth men children only ;
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males !
Nor do the pains she is at to ' screw his courage to the sticking-place,' the reproach to him, not to be ' lost so poorly in himself,' the assurance that ' a little water clears them of this deed,' show any- thing but her greater consistency in depravity. Her strong-nerved ambition furnishes ribs of steel to ' the sides of his intent ; ' and she is herself wound up to the execution of her baneful project with the same unshrinking fortitude in crime, that in other circumstances she would probably have shewn patience in suffering. The deliberate sacrifice of all other considerations to the gaining ' for their future days and nights sole sovereign sway and masterdom,' by the murder of Duncan, is gorgeously expressed in her invocation on hearing of ' his fatal entrance under her battlements : ' —
-Come all you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here : And fill me, from the crown to th' toe, top-full Of direst cruelty ; make thick my blood, Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it. Come to my woman's breasts,
MACBETH 311
And take my milk for gall, you murthering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night !
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heav'n peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, hold, hold !—
When she first hears that ' Duncan comes there to sleep,' she is so overcome by the news, which is beyond her utmost expectations, that she answers the messenger, ' Thou'rt mad to say it : ' and on receiving her husband's account of the predictions of the Witches, conscious of his instability of purpose, and that her presence is necessary to goad him on to the consummation of his promised greatness, she exclaims —
Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear, And chastise with the valour of my tongue All that impedes thee from the golden round, Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem To have thee crowned withal.
This swelling exultation and keen spirit of triumph, this uncontroulable eagerness of anticipation, which seems to dilate her form and take possession of all her faculties, this solid, substantial flesh and blood display of passion, exhibit a striking contrast to the cold, abstracted, gratuitous, servile malignity of the Witches, who are equally instrumental in urging Macbeth to his fate for the mere love of mischief, and from a disinterested delight in deformity and cruelty. They are hags of mischief, obscene panders to iniquity, malicious from their impotence of enjoyment, enamoured of destruc- tion, because they are themselves unreal, abortive, half-existences — who become sublime from their
312 WILLIAM HAZLITT
exemption from all human sympathies and con- tempt for all human affairs, as Lady Macbeth does by the force of passion ! Her fault seems to have been an excess of that strong principle of self- Interest and family aggrandisement, not amenable to the common feelings of compassion and justice, which is so marked a feature in barbarous nations and times. A passing reflection of this kind, on the resemblance of the sleeping king to her father, alone prevents her from slaying Duncan with her own hand. . . .
MACBETH (generally speaking) is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of con- trast than any other of Shakespear's plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other. There is nothing but what has a violent end or violent beginnings. The lights and shades are laid on with a determined hand ; the transi- tions from triumph to despair, from the height of terror to the repose of death, are sudden and startling ; every passion brings in its fellow- contrary, and the thoughts pitch and jostle against each other as in the dark. The whole play is an unruly chaos of strange and forbidden things, where the ground rocks under our feet. Shake- spear's genius here took its full swing, and trod upon the farthest bounds of nature and passion. This circumstance will account for the abruptness and violent antitheses of the style, the throes and labour which run through the expression, and from defects will turn them into beauties. * So fair and
MACBETH 313
foul a day I have not seen,' &c. ' Such welcome and unwelcome news together.' ' Men's lives are like the flowers in their caps, dying or ere they sicken.' ' Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.' The scene before the castle-gate follows the appearance of the Witches on the heath, and is followed by a mid- night murder. Duncan is cut off betimes by treason leagued with witchcraft, and Macduff is ripped untimely from his mother's womb to avenge his death. Macbeth, after the death of Banquo, wishes for his presence in extravagant terms, ' To him and all we thirst,' and when his ghost appears, cries out, ' Avaunt and quit my sight,' and being gone, he is ' himself again.' Macbeth resolves to get rid of Macduff, that ' he may sleep in spite of thunder ; ' and cheers his wife on the doubt- ful intelligence of Banquo's taking-off with the encouragement — ' Then be thou jocund : ere the bat has flown his cloistered flight ; ere to black Hecate's summons the shard-born beetle has rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done — a deed of dreadful note.' In Lady Macbeth's speech ' Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done 't,' there is murder and filial piety together ; and in urging him to fulfil his vengeance against the de- fenceless king, her thoughts spare the blood neither of infants nor old age. The description of the Witches is full of the same contradictory principle ; they 'rejoice when good kings bleed,' they are neither of the earth nor the air, but both ; ' they should be women, but their beards forbid it ; * they take all the pains possible to lead Macbeth on to the height of his ambition, only to betray him 'in deeper consequence,' and after showing him
314 WILLIAM HAZLITT
all the pomp of their art, discover their malignant delight in his disappointed hopes, by that bittei taunt, ' Why stands Macbeth thus amazedly ? ! We might multiply such instances everywhere.
The leading features in the character of Macbeth are striking enough, and they form what may be thought at first only a bold, rude, Gothic outline. By comparing it with other characters of the same author we shall perceive the absolute truth and identity which is observed in the midst of .the giddy whirl and rapid career of events. Macbeth in Shakespear no more loses his identity of character in the fluctuations of fortune or the storm oi passion, than Macbeth in himself would have lost the identity of his person. Thus he is as distinct a being from Richard III. as it is possible to imagine, though these two characters in common hands, and indeed in the hands of any other poet, would have been a repetition of the same genera' idea, more or less exaggerated. For both arei tyrants, usurpers, murderers, both aspiring and ambitious, both courageous, cruel, treacherous. But Richard is cruel from nature and constitution. Macbeth becomes so from accidental circumstances. Richard is from his birth deformed in body and mind, and naturally incapable of good. Macbeth is full of ' the milk of human kindness,' is frank, sociable, generous. He is tempted to the com- mission of guilt by golden opportunities, by the instigations of his wife, and by prophetic warnings. Fate and metaphysical aid conspire against his virtue and his loyalty. Richard on the contrary needs no prompter, but wades through a series o1 crimes to the height of his ambition from the ungovernable violence of his temper and a reckless
MACBETH 315
ove of mischief. He is never gay but in the prospect or in the success of his villainies : Macbeth "s full of horror at the thoughts of the murder of Duncan, which he is with difficulty prevailed on :o commit, and of remorse after its perpetration. Richard has no mixture of common humanity in lis composition, no regard to kindred or posterity, owns no fellowship with others, he is 'himself alone.' Macbeth is not destitute of feelings of sympathy, is accessible to pity, is even made n some measure the dupe of his uxoriousness, •anks the loss of friends, of the cordial love of bis followers, and of his good name, among the causes which have made him weary of life, and regrets that he has ever seized the crown by unjust means, since he cannot transmit it to his posterity —
For Banquo's issue have I fil'd my mind — For them the gracious Duncan have I murther'd To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings.
In the agitation of his mind, he envies those whom le has sent to peace. ' Duncan is in his grave ; after
ife's fitful fever he sleeps well.' It is true, he be- comes more callous as he plunges deeper in guilt, " direness is thus rendered familiar to his slaughterous thoughts ' — and he in the end anticipates his wife in the boldness and bloodiness of his enterprises, while she for want of the same stimulus of action,
is troubled with thick-coming fancies that rob her of her rest, ' goes mad and dies. Macbeth endeavours to escape from reflection on his crimes by repelling their consequences, and banishes remorse for the past by the meditation of future mischief. This is not the principle of Richard's cruelty, which
316 WILLIAM HAZLITT
displays the wanton malice of a fiend as much , the frailty of human passion. Macbeth is goad< on to acts of violence and retaliation by necessitj to Richard, blood is a pastime. — There are oth decisive differences inherent in the two charactei Richard may be regarded as a man of the worl a plotting, hardened knave, wholly regardless everything but his own ends, and the means • secure them. — Not so Macbeth. The superstitioi of the age, the rude state of society, the loc scenery and customs, all give a wildness and imag nary grandeur to his character. From the strang ness of the events that surround him, he is full < amazement and fear ; and stands in doubt betwee the world of reality and the world of fancy. I sees sights not shewn to mortal eye, and hea: unearthly music. All is tumult and disord« within and without his mind ; his purposes reco upon himself, are broken and disjointed ; he the double thrall of his passions and his evil dei tiny. Richard is not a character either of imaging tion or pathos, but of pure self-will. There is r conflict of opposite feelings in his breast. Tl apparitions which he sees only haunt him in hi| sleep ; nor does he live like Macbeth in a wakin, dream. Macbeth has considerable energy an, manliness of character ; but then he is ' subject t all the skyey influences.' He is sure of nothinj but the present moment. Richard in the bus; turbulence of his projects never loses his self possession, and makes use of every circumstanc that happens as an instrument of his long-reachm designs. In his last extremity we can only regar< him as a wild beast taken- in the toils : while w never entirely lose our concern for Macbeth ; an<
MACBETH 317
calls back all our sympathy by that fine close : thoughtful melancholy,
'y way of life is fallen into the sear,
he yellow leaf ; and that which should accompany old age,
fi honour, troops of friends, I must not look to have ;
ut in their stead, curses not loud but deep,
xmth-honour, breath, which the poor heart
rould fain deny, and dare not.
From Characters of Shakespear's Plays, 1817.1
Othello.
IT has been said that tragedy purifies the afiec- ons by terror and pity. That is, it substitutes haginary sympathy for mere selfishness. It gives s a high and permanent interest, beyond ourselves, i humanity as such. It raises the great, the smote, and the possible to an equality with the :al, the little and the near. It makes man partaker with his kind. It subdues and softens le stubbornness of his will. It teaches him that lere are and have been others like himself, by lewing him as in a glass what they have felt, lought, and done. It opens the chambers of the uman heart. It leaves nothing indifferent to us lat can affect our common nature. It excites IT sensibility by exhibiting the passions wound p to the utmost pitch by the power of imagina- on or the temptation of circumstances ; and
Hazlitt knew Whately's comparison of Macbeth and ichard III, which he considered ' an exceedingly ingeni- is piece of analytical criticism ' (Preface to Characters of \akespear 's Plays). But he attributed it to ' a gentleman the name of Mason,' confounding Whately's Observa- ms on Modern Gardening, 1770, with George Mason's ssay on Design in Gardening, 1768.
318 WILLIAM HAZLITT
corrects their fatal excesses in ourselves by pointinj to the greater extent of sufferings and of crimei to which they have led others. Tragedy create; a balance of the affections. It makes us thought ful spectators in the lists of life. It is the refine of the species ; a discipline of humanity. Th< habitual study of poetry and works of imaginatioi is one chief part of a well-grounded education A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete th character of a gentleman. Science alone is hare and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves th affections unemployed, or engrossed with our owi immediate, narrow interests. — OTHELLO furnisher an illustration of these remarks. It excites ou sympathy in an extraordinary degree. The mora it conveys has a closer application to the concern! of human life than that of almost any other o Shakespear's plays. ' It comes directly home t< the bosoms and business of men.' The pathos u Lear is indeed more dreadful and overpowering but it is less natural, and less of every day's occur rence. We have not the same degree of sympathy with the passions described in Macbeth. Th< interest in Hamlet is more remote and reflex That of OTHELLO is at once equally profound anc affecting.
The picturesque contrasts of character in thij play are almost as remarkable as the depth of th< passion. The Moor Othello, the gentle Desde mona, the villain lago, the good-natured Cassio the fool Roderigo, present a range and variety o: character as striking and palpable as that producec by the opposition of costume in a picture. Theu distinguishing qualities stand out to the mind's
OTHELLO 319
ye, so that even when we are not thinking of their ictions or sentiments, the idea of their persons is till as present to us as ever. These characters
nd the images they stamp upon the mind are the arthest asunder possible, the distance between hem is immense : yet the compass of knowledge ind invention which the poet has shown in embody- ng these extreme creations of his genius is only greater than the truth and felicity with which he las identified each character with itself, or blended heir different qualities together in the same story. What a contrast the character of Othello forms to that of lago ! At the same time, the force of conception with which these two figures are opposed to each other is rendered still more intense >y the complete consistency with which the traits of each character are brought out in a state of the highest finishing. The making one black and the other white, the one unprincipled, the other unfortunate in the extreme, would have answered the common purposes of effect, and satisfied the ambition of an ordinary painter of character. Shakespear has laboured the finer shades of differ-
nce in both with as much care and skill as if he had had to depend on the execution alone for the success of his design. On the other hand. Desde- mona and ./Emilia are not meant to be opposed with any thing like strong contrast to each other. Both are, to outward appearance, characters of common life, not more distinguished than women usually are, by difference of rank and situation. The difference of their thoughts and sentiments is however laid open, their minds are separated from each other by signs as plain and as little to be mistaken as the complexions of their husbands.
320 WILLIAM HAZLITT
The movement of the passion in Othello is exceedingly different from that of Macbeth. In Macbeth there is a violent struggle between oppo- site feelings, between ambition and the stings of conscience, almost from first to last : in Othello, the dbubtful conflict between contrary passions, though dreadful, continues only for a short time, and the chief interest is excited by the alternate ascendancy of different passions, by the entire and unforeseen change from the fondest love and most unbounded confidence to the tortures of jealousy and the madness of hatred. The revenge of Othello, after it has once taken thorough possession of his mind, never quits it, but grows stronger and stronger at every moment of its delay. The nature of the Moor is noble, confiding, tender, and gener- ous ; but his blood is of the most inflammable kind ; and being once roused by a sense of his wrongs, he is stopped by no considerations of remorse or pity till he has given a loose to all the dictates of his rage and his despair. It is in working his noble nature up to this extremity through rapid but gradual transitions, in raising passion to its height from the smallest beginnings and in spite of all obstacles, in painting the expiring conflict between love and hatred, tenderness and resentment, jealousy and remorse, in unfolding the strength and the weakness of our nature, in uniting sublimity of thought with the anguish of the keenest woe, in putting in motion the various impulses that agitate this our mortal being, and at last blending them in that noble tide of deep and sustained passion, impetuous but majestic, that ' flows on to the Propontic, arid knows no ebb,' that Shakespear has shown the mastery of his
OTHELLO 321
genius and of his power over the human heart. The third act of OTHELLO is his finest display, not of knowledge or passion separately, but of the two combined, of the knowledge of character with the expression of passion, of consummate art in the keeping up of appearances with the profound workings of nature, and the convulsive movements of uncontroulable agony, of the power of inflicting torture and of suffering it. Not only is the tumult of passion in Othello's mind heaved up from the very bottom of the soul, but every the slightest undulation of feeling is seen on the surface, as it arises from the impulses of imagination or the malicious suggestipns of lago. . . .
The character of lago is one of the supereroga- tions of Shakespear's genius. Some persons, more nice than wise, have thought this whole character unnatural, because his villainy is without a sufficient motive. Shakespear, who was as good a philo- sopher as he was a poet, thought otherwise. He knew that the love of power, which is another name for the love of mischief, is natural to man. He would know this as well or better than if it had been demonstrated to him by a logical diagram, merely from seeing children paddle in the dirt or kill flies for sport. lago in fact belongs to a class of character, common to Shakespear and at the same time peculiar to him ; whose heads are as acute and active as their hearts are hard and callous. lago is to be sure an extreme instance of the kind ; that is to say, of diseased intellectual activity, with the most perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided preference of the latter,
because it falls more readily in with his favourite 212 M
322 WILLIAM HAZLITT
propensity, gives greater zest to his thoughts and scope to his actions. He is quite or nearly as indifferent to his own fate as to that of others ; he runs all risks for a trifling and doubtful advantage ; and is himself the dupe and victim of his ruling passion — an insatiable craving after action of the most difficult and dangerous kind. ' Our ancient ' is a philosopher, who fancies that a lie that kills has more point in it than an alliteration or an anti- thesis ; who thinks a fatal experiment on the peace of a family a better thing than watching the palpitations in the heart of a flea in a microscope ; who plots the ruin of his friends as an exercise for his ingenuity, and stabs men in the dark to prevent ennui. His gaiety, such as it is, arises from the success of his treachery ; his ease from the torture he has inflicted on others. He is an amateur of tragedy in real life ; and instead of employing his invention on imaginary characters, or long-for- gotten incidents, he takes the bolder and more desperate course of getting up his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his nearest friends and connections, and rehearses it in downright earnest, with steady nerves and unabated resolu- tion.
Id.
HAMLET 323
Hamlet.
THIS is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our youth, and whom we may be said almost to remember in our after-years ; he who made that famous soliloquy on life, who gave the advice to the players, who thought ' this goodly frame, the earth, a steril promontory, and this brave o'er- hanging firmament, the air, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, a foul and pestilent con- gregation of vapours ; ' whom ' man delighted not, nor woman neither ; ' he who talked with the grave-diggers, and moralised on Yorick's skull ; the school-fellow of Rosencraus and Guildenstern at Wittenberg ; the friend of Horatio ; the lover of Ophelia ; he that was mad and sent to England ; the slow avenger of his father's death ; who 'lived at the court of Horwendillus five hundred years before we were born, but all whose thoughts we seem to know as well as we do our own, because we have read them in Shakespear.
Hamlet is a name ; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real ? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet. This play has a prophe- tic truth, which is above that of history. Who- ever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others ; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself ' too much i' th' sun ; ' whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it ;
324 WILLIAM HAZLITT
whoever lias known ' the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes ; ' he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange things ; who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre ; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite, and himself nothing ; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to' a play as his best resource to shove ofl, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock repre- sentatipn of them — this is the true Hamlet.
We have been so used to this tragedy that we hardly know how to criticise it any more than we should know how to describe our own faces. But we must make such observations as we can. It is the one of Shakespear's plays that we think of the oftenest, because it abounds most in striking reflections on human life, and because the dis- tresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his mind, to the general account of humanity. What- ever happens to him we apply to ourselves, because he applies it so himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a great moraliser ; and what makes him worth attending to is, that he moralises , on his own feelings and experience. He is not a common-place pedant. If Lear is distinguished by the greatest depth of passion, HAMLET is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, origina- lity, and unstudied development of character. Shakespear had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shown more of it in this play than
HAMLET 325
in any other. There is no attempt to force an interest : every thing is left for time and circum- stances to unfold. The attention is excited with- out effort, the incidents succeed each other as matters of course, the characters think and speak and act just as they might do, if left entirely to themselves. There is no set purpose, no straining at a point. The observations are suggested by the passing scene — the gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind. The whole play is an exact transcript of what might be supposed to have taken place at the court of Denmark, at the remote .period of time fixed upon, before the modern refinements in morals and manners were heard of. It would have been interesting enough to have been admitted as a bystander in such a scene, at such a time, to have heard and witnessed something of what was going on. But here we are more than spectators. We have not only ' the outward pageants and the signs of grief ; ' but ' we have that within which passes shew.' We read the thoughts of the heart, we catch the passions living as they rise. Other dramatic writers give us very fine versions and paraphrases of nature ; but Shakespear, together with his own comments, gives us the original text, that we may judge for ourselves. This is a very great advantage.
The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be : but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility — the sport of circumstances, questioning with
326 WILLIAM HAZLITT
fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect, as in the scene where he kills Polonius, and again, where he alters the letters which Rosencraus and Guildenstern are taking with them to England, purporting his death. At other times, when he is most bound to act, he remains puzzled, undecided, and sceptical, dallies with his purposes, till the occasion is lost, and finds out some pretence to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness again. For this reason he refuses to kill the King when he is at his prayers, and by a refinement in malice, which is in truth only an excuse for his own want of resolution, defers his revenge to a more fatal opportunity, when he shall be engaged in some act ' that has no relish of salvation in it.'
He kneels and prays,
And now I'll do't, and so he goes to heaven, And so am I reveng'd : that would be scanned. He kill'd my father, and for that, I, his. sole son, send him to heaven. Why, this is reward, not revenge. Up sword and know thou a more horrid time, When he is drunk, asleep, or in a rage.
He is the prince of philosophical speculators ; and because he cannot have his revenge perfect, according to the most refined idea his wish can form, he declines it altogether. So he scruples to trust the suggestions of the ghost, contrives the scene of the play to have surer proof of his uncle's guilt, and then rests satisfied with this confirma-
HAMLET 327
tion of his suspicions, and the success of his experi- ment, instead of acting upon it. Yet he is sensible of his own weakness, taxes himself with it, and tries to reason himself out of it. ...
Still he does nothing ; and this very speculation on his own infirmity only affords him another occasion for indulging it. It is not from any want of attachment to his father or of abhorrence of his murder that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge his imagination in reflecting upon the enormity of the crime and refining on his schemes of vengeance, than to put them into immediate practice. His ruling passion is to think, not to act : and any vague pretext that flatters this propensity instantly diverts him from his previous purposes. . . .
We do not like to see our author's plays acted, and least of all, HAMLET. There is no play that suffers so much in being transferred to the stage. Hamlet himself seems hardly capable of being acted. Mr. Kemble unavoidably fails in this character from a want of ease and variety. The character of Hamlet is made up of undulating lines ; it has the yielding flexibility of ' a wave o' th' sea.' Mr. Kemble plays it like a man in armour, with a determined inveteracy of purpose, in one undeviating straight line, which is as remote from the natural grace and refined susceptibility of the character, as the sharp angles and abrupt starts which Mr. Kean introduces into the part. Mr. Kean's Hamlet is as much too splenetic and rash as Mr. Kemble's is too deliberate and formal. His -manner is too strong and pointed. He throws a severity, approaching to virulence, into the
328 WILLIAM HAZLITT
common observations and answers. There is nothing of this in Hamlet. He is, as it were, wrapped up in his reflections, and only thinks aloud. There should therefore be no attempt to impress what he says upon others by a studied exaggeration of emphasis or manner ; no talking at his hearers. There should be as much of the gentleman and scholar as possible infused into the part, and as little of the actor. A pensive air of sadness should sit reluctantly upon his brow, but no appearance of fixed and sullen gloom. He is full of weakness and melancholy, but there is no harshness in his nature. He is the most amiable of misanthropes.
Id.
Lear
WE wish that we could pass this play over, and •say nothing about it. All that we can say must fall far short of the subject ; or even of what we ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to give a description of the play itself or of its effect upon the mind, is mere impertinence : yet we must say something. — It is then the best of all Shakespear's plays, for it is the one in which he was the most in earnest. He was here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination. The passion which he has taken as his subject is that which strikes its root deepest into the human heart ; of which the bond is the hardest to be unloosed ; and the cancelling and tearing to pieces of which gives the greatest revulsion to the frame. This depth of nature, this force of passion, this tug and war of the elements of our being, this firm faith in filial piety, and. the giddy anarchy and whirling tumult of the thoughts
LEAR 329
at finding this prop failing it, the contrast between the fixed, immoveable basis of natural affection, and the rapid, irregular starts of imagination, suddenly wrenched from all its accustomed holds and resting-places in the soul, this is what Shake- spear has given, and what nobody else but he could give. So we believe. — The mind of Lear, stagger- ing between the weight of attachment and the hurried movements of passion, is like a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffetted by the furious waves, but that still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the sea ; or it is like the sharp rock circled by the eddying whirlpool that foams and beats against it, or like the solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake. . . .
It has been said, and we think justly, that the third act of Othello and the three first acts of LEAR are Shakespear's great masterpieces in the logic of passion : that they contain the highest examples not only of the force of individual passion, but of its dramatic vicissitudes and striking effects arising from the different circumstances and characters of the persons speaking. We see the ebb and flow of the feeling, its pauses and feverish starts, its impatience of Opposition, its accumu- lating force when it has time to recollect itself, the manner in which it avails itself of every passing word or gesture, its haste to repel insinuation, the alternate contraction and dilatation of the soul, and all ' the dazzling fence of controversy ' in this mortal combat with poisoned weapons, aimed at the heart, where each wound is fatal. We have seen in Othello, how the unsuspecting frankness and impetuous passions of the Moor are played M3
330 WILLIAM HAZLITT
upon and exasperated by the artful dexterity of lago. In the present play, that which aggravates the sense of sympathy in the reader, and of uncon- troulable anguish in the swoln heart of Lear, is the petrifying indifference, the cold, calculating, obdurate selfishness of his daughters. His keen passions seem whetted on their stony hearts. The contrast would be too painful, the shock too great, but for the intervention of the Fool, whose well- timed levity conies in to break the continuity of feeling when it can no longer be borne, and to bring into play again the fibres of the heart just as they are growing rigid from over-strained excite- ment. The imagination is glad to take refuge in the half-comic, half-serious comments of the Fool, just as the mind under the extreme anguish of a surgical operation vents itself in sallies of wit. The character was also a grotesque ornament of the barbarous times, in which alone the tragic ground- work of the story could be laid. In another point of view it is indispensable, inasmuch as while it is a diversion to the too great intensity of our disgust, it carries the pathos to the highest pitch of which it is capable, by showing the pitiable weakness of the old king's conduct and its irretrievable conse- quences in the most familiar point of view. Lear may well ' beat at the gate which let his folly in/ after, as the Fool says, ' he has made his daughters his mothers.' The character is dropped in the third act to make room for the entrance of Edgar as Mad Tom, which well accords with the increasing bustle and wildness of the incidents ; and nothing can be more complete than the distinction between Lear's real and Edgar's assumed madness, while the resemblance in the cause of their distresses,
LEAR 331
rom the severing of the nearest ties of natural flection, keeps up a unity of interest. Shake- pear's mastery over his subject, if it was not art, yas owing to a knowledge of the connecting links f the passions, and their effect upon the mind, till more wonderful than any systematic adherence o rules, and that anticipated and outdid all the Sorts of the most refined art, not inspired and mdered instinctive by genius.
Id.
Falstaff.
IF Shakespear's fondness for the ludicrous some- imes led to faults in his tragedies (which was not [ten the case) he has made us amends by the aaracter of Falstaff. This is perhaps the most ubstantial comic character that ever was invented, ir John carries a most portly presence in the nind's eye ; and in him, not to speak it profanely, we behold the fulness of the spirit of wit and umour bodily.' We are as well acquainted with is person as his mind, and his jokes come upon us rith double force and relish from the quantity of esh through which -they make their way, as he hakes his fafr sides with laughter, or ' lards the an earth as he walks along.' Other comic char- cters seem, if we approach and handle them, to solve themselves into air, ' into thin air ; ' but bis is embodied and palpable to the grossest pprehension : it lies ' three ringers deep upon the bs,' it plays about the lungs and diaphragm with 11 the force of animal enjoyment. His body is ke a good estate to his mind, from which he
332 WILLIAM HAZLITT
receives rents and revenues of profit and pleasure in kind, according to its extent, and the richness of the soil. Wit is often a meagre substitute fo] pleasurable sensation ; an effusion of spleen anc petty spite at the comforts of others, from feeling none in itself. FalstafE's wit is an emanation o: a fine constitution ; an exuberance of good-humoui and good-nature ; an overflowing of his love o: laughter and good-fellowship ; a giving vent to his heart's ease, and over-contentment with himseb and others. He would not be in character, if h< were not so fat as he is ; for there is the greatest keeping in the boundless luxury of his imaginatior and the pampered .self-indulgence of his physical appetites. He manures and nourishes his mine with jests, as he does his body with sack and sugar He carves out his jokes, as he would a capon 01 a haunch of venison, where there is cut and conn again ; and pours out upon them the oil of glad- ness. His tongue drops fatness, and in the cham- bers of his brain ' it snows of meat and drink.' He keeps up perpetual holiday and open house, anc we live with him in a round of invitations to rump and dozen. — Yet we are not to suppose thai he was a mere sensualist. All this is as much ir imagination as in reality. His sensuality does noi engross and stupify his other faculties, but ' ascends me into the brain, clears away all -the dull, crude vapours that environ it, and makes it full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes.' His imaginatior keeps up the ball after his senses have done with it. He seems to have even a greater enjoyment of the freedom from restraint, of good cheer, of his ease, of his vanity, in the ideal exaggerated description which he gives of them, than in fact. He nevei
FALSTAFF 333
fails to enrich his discourse with allusions to eating and drinking, but we never see him at table. He carries his own larder about with him, and he is himself ' a tun of man.' His pulling out the bottle in the field of battle is a joke to show his contempt for glory accompanied with danger, his systematic adherence to his Epicurean philosophy in the most trying circumstances. Again, such is his deliberate exaggeration of his own vices, that it does not seem quite certain whether the account of his hostess's bill, found in his pocket, with such an out-of-the- way charge for capons and sack with only one halfpenny-worth of bread, was not put there by himself as a trick to humour the jest upon his favourite propensities, and as a conscious carica- ture of himself. He is represented as a liar, a braggart, a coward, a glutton, &c., and yet we are not offended but delighted with him ; for he is all these as much to amuse others as to gratify himself. He openly assumes all these characters to shew the humourous part of them. The unre- strained indulgence of his own ease, appetites, and conveniences, has neither malice nor hypocrisy in it. In a word, he is an actor in himself almost as much as upon the stage, and we no more object to bhe character of Falstafi in a moral point of view than we should think of bringing an excellent comedian, who should represent him to the life, before one of the police offices. We only consider the number of pleasant lights in which he puts certain foibles (the more pleasant as they are opposed to the received rules and necessary restraints of society) and do not trouble ourselves about the consequences resulting from them, for no mischievous consequences do result. Sir John
334 WILLIAM HAZLITT
is old as well as fat, which gives a melancholj retrospective tinge to the character ; and by th( disparity between his inclinations and his capacit} for enjoyment, makes it still more ludicrous anc fantastical.
The secret of FalstafFs wit is for the most parl a masterly presence of mind, an absolute self- possession, which nothing can disturb. His repartees are involuntary suggestions of his self- love ; instinctive evasions of everything thai threatens to interrupt the career of his triumphant jollity and self-complacency. His very size floats him out of all his difficulties in a sea of rich con- ceits ; and he turns round on the pivot of his con- venience, with every occasion and at a moment's warning. His natural repugnance to every unplea- sant thought or circumstance, of itself makes light of objections, and provokes the most extravagant and licentious answers in his own justification. His indifference to truth puts no check upon his invention, and the more improbable and unex- pected his contrivances are, the more happily does he seem to be delivered of them, the anticipation of their effect acting as a stimulus to the gaiety of his fancy. The success of one adventurous sally gives him spirits to undertake another : he deals always in round numbers, and his exaggerations and excuses are ' open, palpable, monstrous as the father that begets them.'
Id.
Midsummer Night's Dream.
PUCK, or Robin Goodfellow, is the leader of the fairy band. He is the Ariel of the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM ; and yet as unlike as can be to
MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 335
the Ariel in the Tempest. No other poet could have made two such different characters out of the same fanciful materials and situations. Ariel is a minister of retribution, who is touched with the sense of pity at the woes he inflicts. Puck is a madcap sprite, full of wantonness and mischief, who laughs at those whom he misleads — ' Lord, what fools these mortals be ! ' Ariel cleaves the air, and executes his mission with the zeal of a winged messenger ; Puck is borne along on his fairy errand like the light and glittering gossamer before the breeze. He is, indeed, a most Epicurean little gentleman, dealing in quaint devices, and faring in dainty delights. Prospero and his world of spirits are a set of moralists : but with Oberon and his fairies we are launched at once into the empire of the butterflies. How beautifully is this race of beings contrasted with the men and women actors in the scene, by a single epithet which Titania gives to the latter, ' the human mortals ! ' It is aston- ishing that Shakespear should be considered, not only by foreigners, but by many of our own critics, as a gloomy and heavy writer, who painted nothing but ' gorgons and hydras, and chimeras dire.' His subtlety exceeds that of all other dramatic writers, insomuch that a celebrated person of the present day said that he regarded him rather as a meta- physician than a poet. His delicacy and sportive gaiety are infinite. In the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM alone, we should imagine, there is more sweetness and beauty of description than in the whole range of French poetry put together. What we mean is this, that we will produce out of that single play ten passages, to which we do not think any ten passages in the works of the French poets
336 WILLIAM HAZLITT
can be opposed, displaying equal fancy and imagery. Shall we mention the remonstrance of Helena to Hermia, or Titania's description of her fairy train, or her disputes with Oberon about the Indian boy, or Puck's account of himself and his employments, or the Fairy Queen's exhortation to the elves to pay due attendance upon her favourite, Bottom ; or Hippolita's description of a chase, or Theseus's answer ? The two last are as heroical and spirited as the others are full of luscious tenderness. The reading of this play is like wandering in a grove by moonlight ; the descriptions breathe a sweetness like odours thrown from beds of flowers. . . '.
• The MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DKEAM, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand ; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled. — Poetry and the stage do not agree well together. The attempt to reconcile them in this instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum. The ideal can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective ; everything there is in the fore-ground. That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality. Where all is left to the imagination (as is the case in reading), every circumstance, near or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells accordingly to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested. But the imagination cannot suffi- ciently qualify the actual impressions of the senses. Any offence given to the eye is not to be got rid of by explanation. Thus Bottom's head in the play
MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 337
is a fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells : on the stage it is an ass's head, and nothing more ; certainly a very strange costume for a gentleman to appear in. Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted ; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moon- shine. Fairies are not incredible, but fairies six feet high are so. Monsters are not shocking, if they are seen at a proper distance. When ghosts appear at mid-day, when apparitions stalk along Cheapside, then may the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM be represented without injury at Covent- garden or at Drury-lane. The boards of a theatre and the regions of fancy are not the same thing.
Id.
Twelfth Night ; or, What You Will.
THIS is justly considered as one of the most delightful of Shakespear's comedies. It is full of sweetness and pleasantry. It is perhaps too good- natured for comedy. It has little satire, and no spleen. It aims at the ludicrous rather than the ridiculous. It makes us laugh at the follies of mankind, not despise them, and still less bear any ill-will towards them. Shakespear's comic genius resembles the bee rather in its power of extracting sweets from weeds or poisons, than in leaving a sting behind it. He gives the most amusing exaggeration of the prevailing foibles of his char- acters, but in a way that they themselves, instead of being offended at, would almost join in to humour ; he rather contrives opportunities for them to show themselves off in the happiest lights,
338 WILLIAM HAZLITT
than renders them contemptible in the perverse construction of the wit or ma ice of others. There is a certain stage of society in which people become conscious of their peculiarities and absurdities, affect to disguise what they are, and set up pre- tensions to what they are not. This gives rise to a corresponding style of comedy, the object of which is to detect the disguises of self-love, and to make reprisals on these preposterous assumptions of vanity, by marking the contrast between the real and the affected character as severely as possible, and denying to those, who would impose on us for what they are not, even the merit which they have. This is the comedy of artificial life, of wit and satire, such as we see it in Congreve, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, &c. To this succeeds a state of society from which the same sort of affectation and pretence are banished by a greater knowledge of the world or by their successful exposure on the stage ; and which by neutralising the materials of comic character, both natural and artificial, leaves no comedy at all — but the senti- mental. Such is our modern comedy. There is a period in the progress of manners anterior to both these, in which the foibles and follies of individuals are of nature's planting, not the growth of art or study ; in which they are therefore unconscious of them themselves, or care not who knows them, if they can but have their whim out ; and in which, as there is no attempt at imposition, the spectators rather receive pleasure from humouring the incli- nations of the persons they laugh at, than wish to give them pain by exposing their absurdity. This may be called the comedy of nature, and it is the comedy which we generally find in Shakespear. —
TWELFTH NIGHT 339
Whether the analysis here given be just or not, the spirit of his comedies is evidently quite distinct from that of the authors above mentioned, as it is in its essence the same with that of Cervantes, and also very frequently of Moliere, though he was more systematic in his extravagance than Shakespear. Shakespear's comedy is of a pastoral and poetical cast. Folly is indigenous to the soil, and shoots out with native, happy, unchecked luxuriance. Absurdity has every encouragement afforded it ; and nonsense has room to flourish in. Nothing is stunted by the churlish, icy hand of indifference or severity. The poet runs riot in a conceit, and idolises a quibble. His whole object is to turn the meanest or rudest objects to a pleasurable account. The relish which he has of a pun, or of the quaint humour of a low character, does not interfere with the delight with which he describes a beautiful image, or the most refined love. The clown's forced jests do not spoil the sweetness of the char- acter of Viola ; the same house is big enough to hold Malvolio, the Countess, Maria, Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew Ague-cheek. For instance, nothing can fall much lower than this last character in intellect or morals : yet how are his weaknesses nursed and dandled by Sir Toby into something ' high fantas- tical,' when on Sir Andrew's commendation of himself for dancing and fencing, Sir Toby answers — ' Wherefore are these things hid ? Wherefore have these gifts a curtain before them ? Are they like to take dust like mistress Moll's picture ? Why dost thou not go to church in a galliard, and come home in a coranto ? My very walk should be a jig ! I would not so much as make water but in a cinque- pace. What dost thou mean ? Is this a world to
340 WILLIAM HAZLITT
hide virtues in ? I did think by the excellent con- stitution of thy leg, it was framed under the star of a galliard ! ' How Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and the Clown afterwards chirp over their cups, how they ' rouse the night-owl in a catch, that will draw three souls out of one weaver ! ' What can be better than Sir Toby's unanswerable answer to Malvolio, ' Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale ? ' — In a word, the best turn is given to every thing, instead of the worst. There is a constant infusion of the romantic and enthusiastic, in proportion as the characters are natural and sincere : whereas, in the more artificial style of comedy, everything gives way to ridicule and indifference, there being nothing left but affectation on one side, and incre- dulity on the other. Much as we like Shakespear's comedies, we cannot agree with Dr. Johnson that they are better than his tragedies ; nor do we like them half so well. If his inclination to comedy sometimes led him to trifle with the seriousness of tragedy, the poetical and impassioned passages are the best parts of his comedies. The great and secret charm of TWELFTH NIGHT is the character of Viola. Much as we like catches and cakes and ale, there is something that we like better. We have a friendship for Sir Toby ;• we patronise Sir Andrew ; we have an understanding with the Clown, a sneaking kindness for Maria and her rogueries ; we feel a regard for Malvolio, and sympathise with his gravity, his smiles, his cross garters, his yellow stockings, and imprisonment in the stocks. But there is something that excites in us a stronger feeling than all this — it is Viola's confession of her love.
TWELFTH NIGHT 341
Duke. What's her history ?
Viola. A blank, my lord ; she never told her love : She let concealment, like a worm i' th' bud, Feed on her damask cheek : she pin'd in thought, And with a green and yellow melancholy, She sat like Patience on a monument, Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed ? We men may say more, swear more, but indeed, Our shews are more than will ; for still we prove Much in our vows, but little in our love.
Duke. But died thy sister of her love, my boy ?
Viola. I am all the daughters of my father's house, And all the brothers too ; — and yet I know not. —
Shakespear alone could describe the effect of his own poetry.
0, it came o'er the ear like the sweet south That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour.
What we so much admire here is not the image of Patience on a monument, which has been generally quoted, but the lines before and after it. ' They give a very echo to the seat where love is throned.' How long ago it is since we first learnt to repeat them ; and still, still they vibrate on the heart, like the sounds which the passing wind draws from the trembling strings of a harp left on some desert shore ! There are other passages of not less impas- sioned sweetness. Such is Olivia's address to Sebastian, whom she supposes to have already deceived her in a promise of marriage :
Blame not this haste of mine : if you mean well, Now go with me and with this holy man Into the chantry by : there before him, And underneath that consecrated roof, Plight me the full assurance of your faith, That my most jealous and too doubtful soul May live at peace.
Id.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
The Heroines.
IT is the peculiar excellence of Shakespear's heroines, that they seem to exist only in their attachment to others. They are pure abstractions of the affections. We think as little of their persons as they do themselves, because we are let into the secrets of their hearts, which are more important. We are too much interested in their affairs to stop to look at their faces, except by stealth and at intervals. No one ever hit the true perfection of the female character, the sense of weakness leaning on the strength of its affections for support, so well as Shakespear — no one ever so well painted natural tenderness free from affectation and disguise — no one else ever so well shewed how delicacy and timidity, when driven to extremity, grow romantic and extravagant ; for the romance of his heroines (in which they abound) is only an excess of the habitual prejudices of their sex, scrupulous of being false to their vows, truant to their affections, and taught by the force of feeling when to forego the forms of propriety for the essence of it. His women were in this respect exquisite logicians ; for there is nothing so logical as passion. They knew their own minds exactly ; and only followed up a favourite purpose, which they had sworn to with their tongues, and which was engraven on their hearts, into its untoward consequences. They were the prettiest little set of martyrs and confessors on record. — Gibber, in speaking of the early English stage, accounts for the want of prominence and theatrical display in Shakespear's female characters from the circumstance, that
THE HEROINES 343
women in those days were not allowed to play the parts of women, which made it necessary to keep them a good deal in the back-ground. Does not this state of manners itself, which prevented their exhibiting themselves in public, and confined them to the relations and charities of domestic life, afford a truer explanation of the matter ? His women are certainly very unlike stage-heroines ; the reverse of tragedy-queens.
Id., Cymbeline.
Shakespeare's Genius.
. . IN comparing these four writers together, it might be said that Chaucer excels as the poet of manners, or of real life ; Spenser, as the poet of romance ; Shakspeare, as the poet of nature (in the largest use of the term) ; and Milton, as the poet of morality. Chaucer most frequently describes things as they are ; Spenser, as we wish them to be ; Shakspeare, as they would be ; and Milton as they ought to be. As poets, and as great poets, imagination, that is, the power of feigning things according to nature, was common to them all : but the principle, or moving power, to which this faculty was most subservient in Chaucer, was habit, or inveterate prejudice ; in Spenser, novelty, and the love of the marvellous ; in Shakspeare, it was the force of passion, combined with every variety of possible circumstances ; and in Milton, [combined] only with the highest. The charac- teristic of Chaucer is intensity ; of Spenser, remoteness ; of Milton, elevation ; of Shakspeare, everything. — It has been said by some critic, that Shakspeare was distinguished from the other dramatic writers of his day only by his wit ; that
344 WILLIAM HAZLITT
they had all his other qualities but that ; that one writer had as much sense, another as much fancy, another as much knowledge of character, another the same depth of passion, and another as great a power of language. This statement is not true ; nor is the inference from it well-founded, even if it were. This person does not seem to have been aware that, upon his own shewing, the great dis- tinction of Shakspeare's genius was its virtually including the genius of all the great men of his age, and not its differing from them in one accidental particular. But to have done with such minute and literal trifling.
The striking peculiarity of Shakespeare's mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds — so that it contained a uni- verse of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself, but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intui- tively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had ' a mind reflecting ages past ' and present : — all the people that ever lived are there. There was no respect of persons with him. His genius shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar. ' All corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave,' are hardly
HIS GENIUS 345
hid from his searching glance. He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives — as well those that they knew, as those which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. Harmless fairies ' nodded to him, and did him curtesies : ' and the night-hag bestrode the blast at the command of ' his so potent art.' The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women : and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other ; for if the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel, and act, as he makes them. He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. When he con- ceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touch- ing a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, ' subject to the same skyey influ- ences,' the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which would occur in reality. Thus the character of Caliban not only stands before us with a language and manners of its own, but the scenery and situation of the enchanted island he inhabits, the traditions of the place, its strange noises, its hidden recesses, ' his frequent haunts and ancient
346 WILLIAM HAZLITT
neighbourhood,' are given with a miraculous truth of nature, and with all the familiarity of an old recollection. The whole ' coheres semblably to- gether ' in time, place, and circumstance. In reading this author, you do not merely learn what his characters say, — you see their persons. By something expressed or understood, you are at no loss to decipher their peculiar physiognomy, the meaning of a look, the grouping, the bye-play, as we might see it on the stage. A word, an epithet, paints a whole scene, or throws us back whole years in the history of the person represented. So (as it has been ingeniously remarked) when Prospero describes himself as left alone in the boat with his daughter, the epithet which he applies to her, ' Me and thy crying self,' flings the imagination instantly back from the grown woman to the help- less condition of infancy, and places the first and most trying scene of his misfortunes before us, with all that he must have suffered in the interval. How well the silent anguish of Macduff is conveyed to the reader, by the friendly expostulation of Malcolm : — ' What ! man, ne'er pull your hat upon your brows.' Again, Hamlet, in the scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstefn, somewhat abruptly concludes his fine soliloquy on life by saying, ' Man delights not me, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.' Which is explained by their answer — ' My lord, we had no such stuff in our thoughts. But we smiled to think, if you delight not in man, what lenten entertainment the players shall receive from you, whom we met on the way : ' — as if while Hamlet was making this speech, his two old schoolfellows from Wittenberg had been really standing by, and
HIS GENIUS 347
he had seen them smiling by stealth, at the idea of the players crossing their minds. It is not ' a com- bination and a form ' of words, a set speech or two, a preconcerted theory of a character, that will do this : but all the persons concerned must have been present in the poet's imagination, as at a kind of rehearsal ; and whatever would have passed through their minds on the occasion, and have been observed by others, passed through his, and is made known to the reader. — I may add in passing, that Shakespeare always gives the best directions for the costume and carriage of his heroes. Thus to take one example, Ophelia gives the following account of Hamlet ; and as Ophelia had seen Hamlet, I should think her word ought to be taken against that of any modern authority.
Ophelia. My lord, as I was reading in my closet, Prince Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac'd, No hat upon his head, his stockings loose, Ungartred, and down-gyved to his ancle, Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, And with a look so piteous, As if he had been sent from hell To speak of horrors, thus he comes before me.
Polonium. Mad for thy love !
Oph. My lord, I do not know, But truly I do fear it.
Pol. What said he ?
Oph. He took me by the wrist, and held me hard ; Then goes he to the length of all his arm ; And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow, He falls to such perusal of my face, As he would draw it : long staid he so ; At last, a little shaking of my arm, And thrice his head thus waving up and down, He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound, As it did seem to shatter all his bulk, And end his being. That done, he lets me go,
348 WILLIAM HAZLITT
And with his head over his shoulder turn'd, He seem'd to find his way without his eyes ; For out of doors he went without their help, And to the last bended their light on me.
Act II. Scene 1.
How after this airy, fantastic idea of irregular grace and bewildered melancholy any one can play Hamlet, as we have seen it played, with strut, and stare, and antic right-angled sharp-pointed gestures, it is difficult to say, unless it be that Hamlet is not bound, by the prompter's cue, to study the part of Ophelia. The account of Ophelia's death begins thus :
There is a willow hanging o'er a brook,
That shows its hoary leaves in the glassy stream. —
Now this is an instance of the same unconscious power of mind which is as true to nature as itself. The leaves of the willow are, in fact, white under- neath, and it is this part of them which would appear ' hoary ' in the reflection in the brook. The same sort of intuitive power, the same faculty of bringing every object in nature, whether present or absent, before the mind's eye, is observable in the speech of Cleopatra, when conjecturing what were the employments of Antony in his absence : — ' He's speaking now, or murmuring, where's my serpent of old Nile ? ' How fine to make Cleopatra have this consciousness of her own character, and to make her feel that it is this for which Antony is in love with her ! She says, after the battle of Actium, when Antony has resolved to risk another fight, ' It is my birth-day ; I had thought to have held it poor : but since my lord is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.' What other poet would have
HIS GENIUS 349
thought of such a casual resource of the imagina- tion, or would have dared to avail himself of it ? The thing happens in the play as it might have- happened in fact. — That which, perhaps, more than any thing else distinguishes the dramatic pro- ductions of Shakspeare from all others, is this wonderful truth and individuality of conception. Each of his characters is as much itself, and as absolutely independent of the rest, as well as of the author, as if they were living persons, not fictions of the mind. The poet may be said, for the time, to identify himself with the character he wishes to represent, and to pass from one to another, like the same soul successively animating different bodies. By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throws his imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from the mouth of the person in whose name it is given. His plays alone are properly expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. His characters are real beings of flesh and blood ; they speak like men, not like authors. One might suppose that he had stood by at the time, and overheard what passed. As in our dreams we hold conversations with our- selves, make remarks, or communicate intelligence, and have no idea of the answer which we shall receive, and which we ourselves make, till we hear it : so the dialogues in Shakspeare are carried on without any consciousness of what is to follow, without any appearance of preparation or pre- meditation. The gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind. Nothing is made out by formal inference and analogy, by climax and antithesis: all comes, or seems to come, immediately from nature. Each object and
350 WILLIAM HAZLITT
circumstance exists in his mind, as it would have existed in reality : each several train of thought and feeling goes on of itself , without confusion or effort. In the world of his imagination, everything has a life, a place, and being of its own.!
Chaucer's characters are sufficiently distinct from one another, but they are too little varied in themselves, too much like identical propositions. They are consistent, but uniform ; we get no new idea of them from first to last ; they are not placed in different lights, nor are their subordinate traits brought out in new situations ; they are like por- traits or physiognomical studies, with the distin- guishing features marked with inconceivable truth and precision, but that preserve the same unaltered air and attitude. Shakspeare's are historical figures, equally true and correct, but put into action, where every nerve and muscle is displayed in the struggle with others, with all the effect of collision and contrast, with every variety of light and shade. Chaucer's characters are narrative, Shakspeare's dramatic, Milton's epic. That is, Chaucer told only as much of his story as he pleased, as was required for a particular purpose. He answered for his characters himself. In Shak- peare they are introduced upon the stage, are liable to be asked all sorts of questions, and are forced to answer for themselves. In Chaucer we perceive a fixed essence of character. In Shak- speare there is a continual composition and decom- position of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity or antipathy to other principles which are brought in contact with it. Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the result, the turn which the char-
HIS GENIUS 351
acter will take in its new circumstances. Milton took only a few simple principles of character, and raised them to the utmost conceivable grandeur, and refined them from every base alloy. His imagination, ' nigh sphered in Heaven,' claimed kindred only with what he saw from that height, and could raise to the same elevation with itself. He sat retired and kept his state alone, ' playing with wisdom ; ' while Shakspeare mingled with the crowd, and played the host, ' to make society the sweeter welcome.'
The passion in Shakspeare is of the same nature as his delineation of character. It is not some one habitual feeling or sentiment preying upon itself, growing out of itself, and moulding everything to itself ; it is passion modified by passion, by all the other feelings to which the individual is liable, and to which others are liable with him ; subject to all the fluctuations of caprice and accident ; calling into play all the resources of the understanding and all the energies of the will ; irritated by obstacles or yielding to them ; rising from small beginnings to its utmost height ; now drunk with hope, now stung to madness, now sunk in despair, now blown to air with a breath, now raging like a torrent. The human soul is made the sport of fortune, the prey of adversity : it is stretched on the wheel of destiny, in restless ecstasy. The passions are in a state of projection. Years are melted down to moments, and every instant teems with fate. We know the results, we see the process. Thus after lago has been boasting to himself of the effect of his poisonous suggestions on the mind of Othello, ' which, with a little act upon the blood, will work like mines of sulphur,' he adds : —
352 WILLIAM HAZLITT
Look where he comes ! not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the East, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou ow'dst yesterday.
And he enters at this moment, like the crested serpent, crowned with his wrongs and raging for revenge ! The whole depends upon the turn of a thought. A word, a look, blows the spark of jealousy into a flame ; and the explosion is im- mediate and terrible as a volcano. The dialogues in Lear, in Macbeth, that betwem Brutus and Cassius, and nearly all those in Shakspeare, where the interest is wrought up to its highest pitch, afford examples of this dramatic fluctuation of passion. The interest in Chaucer is quite different ; it is like the course of a river, strong, and full, and increasing. In Shakspeare, on the contrary, it is like the sea, agitated this way and that, and loud-lashed by furious storms ; while in the still pauses of the blast we distinguish only the cries of despair, or the silence of death ! Milton, on the other hand, takes the imaginative part of passion — that which remains after the event, which the mind reposes on when all is over, which looks upon cir- cumstances from the remotest elevation of thought and fancy, and abstracts them from the world of action to that of contemplation. The objects of dramatic poetry affect us by sympathy, by their nearness to ourselves, as they take us by surprise, or force us upon action, ' while rage with rage doth sympathise ' : the objects of epic poetry affect us through the medium of the imagination, by magni- tude and distance, by their permanence and universality. The one fills us with terror and pity, the other with admiration and delight. There are
HIS GENIUS 353
certain objects that strike the imagination, and inspire awe in the very idea of them, independently of any dramatic interest, that is, of any connection with the vicissitudes of human life. For instance, we cannot think of the pyramids of Egypt, of a Gothic ruin, or an old Roman encampment, without a certain emotion, a sense of power and sublimity coming over the mind. The heavenly bodies that hang over our heads wherever we go, and ' in their untroubled element shall shine when we are laid in dust, and all our cares forgotten,' aSect us in the same way. Thus Satan's address to the Sun has an epic, not a dramatic interest ; for though the second person in the dialogue makes no answer and feels no concern, yet the eye of that vast luminary is upon him, like the eye of heaven, and seems conscious of what he says, like an universal presence. Dramatic poetry and epic in. their perfection, indeed, approximate to and strengthen one another. Dramatic poetry borrows aid from the dignity of persons and things, as the heroic does from human passion, but in theory they are distinct. When Richard II. calls for the looking-glass to contemplate his faded majesty in it, and bursts into that affecting exclamation : ' Oh that I were a mockery-king of snow, to melt away before the sun of Bolingbroke ! ' we have here the utmost force of human passion, combined with the ideas of regal splendour and fallen power. When Milton says of Satan :
' His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appear'd Less than archangel ruin' d, and th' excess Of glory obscur'd ' ;
the mixture of beauty, of grandeur, and pathos 212
354 WILLIAM HAZLITT
from the sense of irreparable loss, of never-ending, unavailing regret, is perfect.
The great fault of a modern school of poetry is, that it is an experiment to reduce poetry to a mere effusion of natural sensibility ; or what is worse, to divest it both of imaginary . splendour and human passion, to surround the meanest objects with the morbid feelings and devouring egotism of the writers' own minds. Milton and Shakspeare did not so understand poetry. They gave a more liberal interpretation both to nature and art. They did not do all they could to get rid of the one and the other, to fill up the dreary void with the Moods of their own Minds. They owe their power over the human mind to their having had a deeper sense than others of what was grand in the objects of nature, or affecting in the events of human life. But to the men I speak of there is nothing interest- ing, nothing heroical, but themselves. To them the fall of gods or of great men is the same. They do not enter into the feeling. They cannot under- stand the terms. They are even debarred from the last poor, paltry consolation of an unmanly triumph over fallen greatness ; for their minds reject, with a convulsive effort and intolerable loathing, the very idea that there ever was, or was thought to be, anything superior to themselves. All that has ever excited the attention or admira- tion of the world, they look upon with the most perfect indifference ; and they are surprised to find that the world repays their indifference with scorn. ' With what measure they mete, ic has been meted to them again.' —
Shakspeare's imagination is of the same plastic kind as his conception of character or passion. It :
HIS GENIUS 35
glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.' Its movement is rapid and devious. It unites the most opposite extremes ; or, as Puck says, in boasting of his own feats, ' puts a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.' He seems always hurrying from his subject, even while describing it ; but the stroke, like the lightning's, is sure as it is sudden. He takes the widest possible range, but from that very range he has his choice of the greatest variety and aptitude of materials. He brings together images the most alike, but placed at the greatest distance from each other ; that is, found in circumstances of the greatest dissimilitude. From the remoteness of his combinations, and the celerity with which they are effected, they coalesce the more indissolubly together. The more the thoughts are strangers to each other, and the longer they have been kept asunder, the more intimate does their union seem to become. Their felicity is equal to their force. Their likeness is made more dazzling by their novelty. They startle, and take the fancy prisoner in the same instant. I will mention one or two which are very striking, and not much known, out of Troilus and Cressida. JEneas says to Aga- memnon :
I ask that I may waken reverence, And on the cheek be ready with a blush Modest as morning, when she coldly eyes The youthful PhcEbus.
Ulysses urging Achilles to shew himself in the field, says —
No man is the lord of any thing,
Till he communicate his parts to others
356 WILLIAM HAZLITT
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught, Till he behold them formed in the applause, Where they're extended ! which, like an arch
reverberates
The voice again, or like a gate of steel Fronting the sun, receives and renders back Its figure and its heat.
Patroclus gives the indolent warrior the same advice :
Rouse yourself ; and the weak wanton Cupid Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane Be shook to air.
Shakspeare's language and versification are like the rest of him. He has a magic power over words : they come winged at his bidding ; and seem to know their places. They are struck out at a heat, on the spur of the occasion, and have all the truth and vividness which arise from an actual impression of the objects. His epithets and single phrases are like sparkles, thrown off from an imagination, fired by the whirling rapidity of its own motion. His language is hieroglyphical. It translates thoughts into visible images. It abounds in sudden transitions and elliptical expres- sions. This is the source of his mixed metaphors, which are only abbreviated forms of speech. These, however, give no pain from long custom; They have, in fact, become idioms in the language. They are the building, and not the scaffolding to thought. We take the meaning and effect of a well-known passage entire, and no more stop to scan and spell out the particular words and phrases than the syllables of which they are composed. In trying to recollect any other author, one some-
HIS GENIUS 357
times stumbles, in case of failure, on a word as good. In Shakspeare, any other word but the true one, is sure to be wrong. If anybody, for instance, could not recollect the words of the following description,
Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
he would be greatly at a loss to substitute others for them equally expressive of the feeling. These remarks, however, are strictly applicable only to the impassioned parts of Shakspeare's language, which flowed from the warmth and originality of his imagination, and were his own. The language used for prose conversation and ordinary business is sometimes technical, and involved in the affecta- tion of the time. Compare, for example, Othello's apology to the Senate, relating ' his whole course of love,' with some of the preceding parts relating to his appointment, and the official dispatches from Cyprus. In this respect, ' the business of the state does him offence.' — His versification is no less powerful, sweet, and varied. It has every occa- ional excellence, of sullen intricacy, crabbed and perplexed, or of the smoothest and loftiest expan- sion— from the ease and familiarity of measured conversation to the lyrical sounds
Of ditties highly penned,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower, With ravishing division to her lute.'
It is the only blank verse in the language, except Milton's, that for itself is readable. It is not stately and uniformly swelling like his, but varied and broken by the inequalities of the ground it has to pass over in its uncertain course,
358 WILLIAM HAZLITT
And so by many winding nooks it strays, With willing sport to the wild ocean.
It remains' to speak of the faults of Shakspeare. They are not so many or so great as they have been represented ; what there are, are chiefly owing to the following causes : — The universality of his genius was, perhaps, a disadvantage to his single works ; the variety of his resources sometimes diverting him from applying them to the most effectual purposes. He might be said to combine the powers of ^Eschylus and Aristophanes, of Dante and Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been only half what he was, he would perhaps have appeared greater. The natural ease and indiffer- ence of his temper made him sometimes less scrupulous than he might have been. He is relaxed and careless in critical places ; he is in earnest throughout only in Timon, Macbeth, and Lear. Again, he had no models of acknowledged excellence constantly in view to stimulate his efforts, and, by all that appears, no love of fame. He wrote for the ' great vulgar and the small ' in his time, not for posterity. If Queen Elizabeth and the maids of honour laughed heartily at his worst jokes, and the catcalls in the gallery were silent at his best passages, he went home satisfied, and slept the next night well. He did not trouble himself about Voltaire's criticisms. He was willing to take advantage of the ignorance of the age in many things, and if his plays pleased others, not to quarrel with them himself. His very facility of production would make him set less value on his own excellences, and not care to dis- tinguish nicely between what he did well or ill. His blunders in chronology and geography do not
HIS GENIUS 359
amount to above half a dozen, and they are offences against chronology and geography, not against poetry. As to the unities, he was right in setting them at defiance. He was fonder of puns than became so great a man. His barbarisms were those of his age. His genius was his own. He had no objection to float down with the stream of common taste and opinion : he rose above it by his own buoyancy, and an impulse which he could not keep under, in spite of himself, or others, and ' his delights did show most dolphin-like.'
From Lectures on the English Poets, ' On Shak- speare and MUton,' 1818 (with corrections from the second edition, 1819).
THE poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men ; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and har- mony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature ; to be identified with and to foreknow and to record the feelings of all men at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions, and to exert the same power over the minds of his readers, that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are ; he feels them in their universal interest, for he feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakspeare, whose works will last as long as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and everlasting
360 WILLIAM HAZLITT
impulses of nature, welling out from the bosom as from a perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their maker. The power of the imagination in them, is the representative power of all nature. It has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of the universe.
Id., ' On Dry den and Pope.'
Shakespeare's Contemporaries.
WE affect to wonder at Shakespear and one or two more of that period, as solitary instances upon record ; whereas it is our own dearth of informa- tion that makes the waste ; for there is no time more populous of intellect, or more prolific of intellectual wealth, than the one we are speak- ing of. Shakespear did not look upon himself in this light, as a sort of monster of poetical genius, or on his contemporaries as ' less than smallest dwarfs,' when he speaks with true, not false modesty, of himself and them, and of his wayward thoughts, ' desiring this man's art, and that man's scope.' We fancy that there were no such men, that could either add to or take any thing away from him, but such there were. He indeed over- looks and commands the admiration of posterity, but he does it from the table-land of the age in which he lived. He towered above his fellows, * in shape and gesture proudly eminent ; ' but he was one of a race of giants — the tallest, the strongest, the most graceful and beautiful of them ; but it was a common and a noble brood. He was not something sacred and aloof from the vulgar herd of men, but shook hands with nature and the circumstances of the time, and is dis-
HIS CONTEMPORARIES 361
tinguished from Ms immediate contemporaries, not in kind, but in degree and greater variety of excellence. He did not form a class or species by himself, but belonged to a class or species. His age was necessary to him ; nor could he have been wrenched from his place, in the edifice of which he was so conspicuous a part, without equal injury to himself and it. Mr. Wordsworth says of Milton, that ' his soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.'' This cannot be said with any propriety of Shakespear, who certainly moved in a constellation of bright luminaries, and ' drew after him a third part of the heavens.' If we allow, for argument's sake (or for truth's, which is better), that he was in himself equal to all his competitors put together ; yet there was more dramatic excellence in that age than in the whole of the period that has elapsed since. If his con- temporaries, with their united strength, would hardly make one Shakespear, certain it is that all his successors would not make half a one. With the exception of a single writer, Otway, and of a single play of his (Venice Preserved), there is nobody in tragedy and dramatic poetry (I do not here speak of comedy) to be compared to the great men of the age of Shakespear, and immediately after. They are a mighty phalanx of kindred spirits closing him round, moving in the same orbit, and impelled by the same causes in their whirling and eccentric career. They had the same faults and the same excellences ; the same strength and depth and richness, the same truth of character, passion, imagination, thought and language, thrown, heaped, massed together with- out careful polishing or exact method, but poured N3
362 WILLIAM HAZLITT
out in unconcerned profusion from the lap of nature and genius in boundless and unrivalled magnificence. The sweetness of Deckar, the thought of Marston, the gravity of Chapman, the grace of Fletcher and his young -eyed wit, Jonson's learned sock, the flowing vein of Middleton, Heywood's ease, the pathos of Webster, and Marlow's deep designs, add a double lustre to the sweetness, thought, gravity, grace, wit, artless nature, copiousness, ease, pathos, and sublime conceptions of Shakespear's Muse. They are indeed the scale by which we can best ascend to the true knowledge and love of him. Our admira- tion of them does not lessen our relish for him : but, on the contrary, increases and confirms it.
From Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, ' General View of the Subject,' 1820.
363
FRANCIS JEFFREY
Review of Hazlitt's ' Characters of Shakes pear's Plays ' in ' The Edinburgh Review ' for August 1817.1
. . . The book, as we have already intimated, is written less to tell the reader what Mr. H. knows about Shakespeare or his writings, than to explain to them what he feels about them — and why he feels so — and thinks that all who profess to love poetry should feel so likewise. What we chiefly look for in such a work, accordingly, is a fine sense of the beauties of the author, and an eloquent exposition of them ; and all this, and more, we think, may be found in the volume before us. There is nothing niggardly in Mr. H.'s praises, and nothing affected in his raptures. He seems animated throughout with a full and hearty sympathy with the delight which his author should inspire, and pours himself gladly out in explanation of it, with a fluency and ardour, obviously much more akin to enthusiasm than affectation. He seems pretty generally, indeed, in a state of happy intoxication — and has borrowed from his great original, not indeed the force or
1 Jeffrey included this article in the selection from his writings published in 1844 under the title Contributions to the Edinburgh Review. He there added in a footnote that ' it presumes to direct attention but to one, and that, as I think, a comparatively neglected, aspect of his universal genius.'
364 FRANCIS JEFFREY
brilliancy of his fancy, but something of its play- fulness, and a large share of his apparent joyousness and self-indulgence in its exercise. It is evidently a great pleasure to him to be fully possessed with the beauties of his author, and to follow the impulse of his unrestrained eagerness to impress them upon his readers.
When we have said that his observations are generally right, we have said, in substance, that they are not generally original ; for the beauties of Shakespeare are not of so dim or equivocal a nature as to be visible only to learned eyes — and undoubtedly his finest passages are those which please all classes of readers, and are admired for the same qualities by judges from every school of criticism. Even with regard to those passages, however, a skilful commentator will find some- thing worth hearing to tell. Many persons are very sensible of the effect of fine poetry on their feelings, who do not well know how to refer these feelings to their causes ; and it is always a delight- ful thing to be made to see clearly the sources from which our delight has proceeded — and to trace back the mingled stream that has flowed upon our hearts, to the remoter fountains from which it has been gathered. And when this is done with warmth as well as precision, and embodied in an eloquent description of the beauty which is explained, it forms one of the most attractive, and not the least instructive, of literary exercises. In all works of merit, however, and especially in all works of original genius, there are a thousand retiring and less obtrusive graces, which escape hasty and superficial obser- vers, and only give out their beauties to fond and
HIS IMAGERY 365
patient contemplation ; — a thousand slight and harmonizing touches, the merit and the effect of which are equally imperceptible to vulgar eyes ; and a thousand indications of the continual presence of that poetical spirit, which can only be recognised by those who are in some measure under its influence, or have prepared themselves to receive it, by worshipping meekly at the shrines which it inhabits.
In the exposition of these, there is room enough for originality, — and more room than Mr. H. has yet filled. In many points, however, he has acquitted himself excellently ; — partly in the development of the principal characters with which Shakespeare has peopled the fancies of all English readers — but principally, we think, in the delicate sensibility with which he has traced, and the natural eloquence with which he has pointed out that fond familiarity with beautiful forms and images — that eternal recurrence to what is sweet or majestic in the simple aspects of nature — that indestructible love of flowers and odours, and dews and clear waters, and soft airs and sounds, and bright skies, and woodland solitudes, and moonlight bowers, which are the Material elements of Poetry — and that fine sense of their undefinable relation to mental emotion, which is its essence and vivifying Soul — and which, in the midst of Shakespeare's most busy and atrocious scenes, falls like gleams of sunshine on rocks and ruins — contrasting with all that is rugged and repulsive, and reminding us of the existence of purer and brighter elements ! — which HE ALONE has poured out from the richness of his own mind, without effort or restraint ; and
366 FKANCIS JEFFREY
contrived to intermingle with the play of all the passions, and the vulgar course of this world's affairs, without deserting for an instant the proper business of the scene, or appearing to pause or digress, from love of ornament or need of repose ! — HE ALONE, who, when the object requires it, is always keen and worldly and practical — and who yet, without changing his hand, or stopping his course, scatters around him, as he goes, all sounds and shapes of sweetness — and conjures up land- scapes of immortal fragrance and freshness, and peoples them with Spiiits of glorious aspect and attractive grace — and is a thousand times more full of fancy and imagery, and splendour, than those who, in pursuit of such enchantments, have shrunk back from the delineation of character or passion, and declined the discussion of human duties and cares. More full of wisdom and ridicule and sagacity, than all the moralists and satirists that ever existed — he is more wild, airy, and inventive, and more pathetic and fantastic, than all the poets of all regions and ages of the world : — and has all those elements so happi(y mixed up in him, and bears his high faculties .so tem- perately, that the most severe reader cannot complain of him for want of strength or of reason — nor the most sensitive for defect of ornament or ingenuity. Every thing in him is in unmeasured abundance, and unequalled perfection — but every thing so balanced and kept in subordination, as not to jostle or disturb or take the place of another. The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images, and descriptions, are given with such brevity, and introduced with such skill, as merely to adorn, without loading the sense they accompany.
HIS IMAGERY 367
Although his sails are purple and perfumed, and his prow of beaten gold, they waft him on his voyage, not less, but more rapidly and directly than if they had been composed of baser materials. All his excellences, like those of Nature herself, are thrown out together ; and instead of inter- fering with, support and recommend each other. His flowers are not tied up in garlands, nor his fruits crushed into baskets — but spring living from the soil, in all the dew and freshness of youth ; while the graceful foliage in which they lurk, and the ample branches, the rough and vigorous stem, and the wide-spreading roots on which they depend, are present along with them, and share, in their places, the equal care of their Creator.
What other poet has put all the charm of a Moonlight landscape into a single line ? — and that by an image so true to nature, and so simple, as to seem obvious to the most common observa- tion ?—
See how the Moonlight SLEEPS on yonder bank !
Who else has expressed, in three lines, all that is picturesque and lovely in a Summer's Dawn ? — first setting before our eyes, with magical pre- cision, the visible appearances of the infant light, and then, by one graceful and glorious image, pouring on our souls all the freshness, cheerful- ness, and sublimity of returning morning ? —
See, love ! what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder East I Night's candles l are burnt out, — and jocund Day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops !
1 If the advocates for the grand style object to this expression, we shall not stop to defend it : But, to us, it
368 FRANCIS JEFFREY
Where shall we find sweet sounds and odoxirs so luxuriously blended and illustrated, as in these few words of sweetness and melody, where the author says of soft music —
0 it came o'er my ear like the sweet South That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour !
This is still finer, we think, than the noble speech on Music in the Merchant of Venice, and only to be compared with the enchantments of Prospero's island ; where all the effects of sweet sounds are expressed in miraculous numbers, and traced in their operation on all the gradations of being, from the delicate Ariel to the brutish Caliban, who, savage as he is, is still touched with those supernatural harmonies ; and thus exhorts his less poetical associates —
Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep,
Would make me sleep again.
seems equally beautiful, as it is obvious and natural, to a person coming out of a lighted chamber into the pale dawn. The word candle, we admit, is rather homely in modern language, while lamp is sufficiently dignified for poetry. The moon hangs her silver lamp on high, in every schoolboy's copy of verses ; and she could not be called the candle of heaven without manifest absurdity. Such are the caprices of usage. Yet we like the passage before us much better as it is, than if the candles were changed into lamps. If we should read ' The lamps of heaven are quenched,' or ' wax dim,' it appears to us that the whole charm of the expression would be lost : as our fancies would no longer be recalled to the privacy of that dim-lighted chamber which the lovers were so reluctantly leaving.
HIS IMAGERY 369
Observe, too, that this and the other poeti- cal speeches of this incarnate demon, are not mere ornaments of the poet's fancy, but explain his character and describe his situation more briefly and effectually, than any other words could have done. In this play, indeed, and in the Midsummer-Night's Dream, all Eden is unfbcked before us, and the whole treasury of natural and supernatural beauty poured out profusely, to the delight of all our faculties. We dare not trust ourselves with quotations ; but we refer to those plays generally — to the forest scenes in As You Like It — the rustic parts of the Winter's Tale — several entire scenes in Cymbeline, and in Romeo and Juliet — and many passages in all the other plays — as illustrating this love of nature and natural beauty of which we have been speaking — the power it had over the poet, and the power it imparted to him. Who else would have thought, on the very threshold of treason and midnight murder, of bringing in so sweet and rural an image as this, at the portal of that blood-stained castle of Macbeth ?
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved masonry that heaven's breath Smells wooingly here. No jutting frieze, Buttress, nor coigne of vantage, but this bird Has made his pendent bed, and procreant cradle.
Nor is this brought in for the sake of an elaborate contrast between the peaceful innocence of this exterior, and the guilt and horrors that are to be enacted within. There is no hint of any such suggestion — but it is set down from the pure love of nature and reality — because the kindled mind
370 FRANCIS JEFFREY
of the poet brought the whole scene before his eyes, and he painted all that he saw in his vision. The same taste predominates in that emphatic exhortation to evil, where Lady Macbeth says,
Look like the innocent flower,
JJut be the serpent under it.
And in that proud boast of the bloody Richard —
But I was born so high : Our aery buildeth in the cedar's top, And dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun !
The same splendour of natural imagery, brought simply and directly to bear upon stern and repulsive passions, is to be found in the cynic rebukes of Apemantus to Timon.
Will these moist trees
That 'have out-liv'd the eagle, page thy heels, And skip when thou point'st out ? will the cold brook, Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste To cure thine o'er-night's surfeit ?
No one but Shakespeare would have thought of putting this noble picture into the taunting address of a snappish misanthrope — any more than the following into the mouth of a mercenary murderer.
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk, And in their summer beauty kissed each other !
Or this delicious description of concealed love, into that of a regretful and moralizing parent.
But he, his own affections' Counsellor, Is to himself so secret and so close, As is the bud bit with an envious worm Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air, Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.
HIS IMAGEEY 371
And yet all these are so far from being unnatural, that they are no sooner put where they are, than we feel at once their beauty and their effect ; and acknowledge our obligations to that exuberant genius which alone could thus throw out graces and attractions where there seemed to be neither room nor call for them. In the same spirit of prodigality he puts this rapturous and passionate exaltation of the beauty of Imogen, into the mouth of one who is not even a lover.
— It is her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus ! the flame o' th' taper Bows towards her ! and would under-peep her lids To see th' enclosed lights, now canopied Under the windows, white and azure, laced With blue of Heaven's own tinct ! — on her left breast A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops I' the bottom of a cowslip !
372
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
On the Knocking at the Gate in 'Macbeth.^
FROM my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this : the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murderer a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavoured with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.
Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his under- standing, when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted ; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else, which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes. Of this out of ten thousand instances that I might pro- duce, I will cite one. Ask of any person whatsoever, who is not previously prepared for the demand by a knowledge of the perspective, to draw in the 1 First published in The London Magazine, October 1823.
THE KNOCKING IN MACBETH 373
rudest way the commonest appearance which depends upon the laws of that science ; as, for instance, to represent the effect of two walls standing at right angles to each other, or the appearance of the houses on each side of a street, as seen by a person looking down the street from one extremity. Now in all cases, unless the person has happened to observe in pictures how it is that artists produce these effects, he will be utterly unable to make the smallest approxima- tion to it. Yet why ? For he has actually seen the effect every day of his life. The reason is — that he allows his understanding to overrule his eyes. His understanding, which includes no intuitive knowledge of the laws of vision, can furnish him with no reason why a line which is known and can be proved to be a horizontal line, should not appear a horizontal line ; a line that made any angle with the perpendicular, less than a right angle, would seem to him to indicate that his houses were all tumbling down together. Accordingly, he makes the line of his houses a horizontal line, and- fails, of course, to produce the effect demanded. Here, then, is one instance out of many, in which not only the understanding is allowed to overrule the eyes, but where the understanding is positively allowed to obliterate the eyes, as it were ; for not only does the man believe the evidence of his understanding in opposition to that of his eyes, but (what is monstrous !) the idiot is not aware that his eyes ever gave such evidence. He does not know that he has seen (and therefore quoad his consciousness has not seen) that which he has seen every day of his life.
But to return from thin digression, my under-
374 DE QUINCEY
standing could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflected. In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect. But I knew better ; I felt that it did ; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it. At length, in 1812, Mr. Williams made his debut on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those unparalleled murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying reputation. On which murders, by the way, I must observe, that in one respect they have had an ill effect, by making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied by anything that has been since done in that line. All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his ; and, as an amateur once said to me in a querulous tone, ' There has been absolutely nothing doing since his time, or nothing that 's worth speaking of.' But this is wrong ; for it is unreasonable to expect all men to be great artists, and born with the genius of Mr. Williams. Now it will be remembered, that in the first of these murders (that of the Marrs), the same incident (of a knocking at the door) soon after the work of extermination was complete) did actually occur, which the genius of Shakespeare has in- vented ; and all good judges, and the most eminent dilettanti, acknowledged the felicity of Shakspere's suggestion, as soon as it was actually realized. Here, then, was a fresh proof that I was right in relying on my own feeling, in opposition to my understanding ; and I again set myself to study the problem ; at length I solved it to my own satisfaction, and my solution is this. Murder,
THE KNOCKING IN MACBETH 375
in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror ; and for this reason, that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life ; an instinct which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind (though different in degree) amongst all living creatures : this instinct, therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of ' the poor beetle that we tread on ', exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he do ? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them, — not a sympathy of pity or approbation1). In the murdered person, all strife of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic ; the fear of instant death smites him 'with its petrific mace'. But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet
1 It seems almost ludicrous to guard and explain my use of a word, in a situation where it would naturally explain itself. But it has become necessary to do so, in conse- quence of the unscholarlike use of the word sympathy, at present so general, by which, instead of taking it in its proper sense, as the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings of another, whether for hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it is made a mere synonyme of the word pity • and hence, instead of saying ' sympathy with another', many writers adopt the monstrous barbarism of ' sympathy for another'.
376 DE QUINCEY
will condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of passion — jealousy, ambition, ven- geance, hatred — which will create a hell within him ; and into this hell we are to look.
In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of creation, Shak- spere has introduced two murderers : and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably discrimi- nated : but, though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his wife, the tiger spirit not so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her, — yet, as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. This was to be expressed ; and on its own account, as well as to make it a more proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, ' the gracious Duncan,' and adequately to expound 'the deep damnation of his taking off', this was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the human nature, i. e. the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom utterly withdrawn from man — was gone, vanished, extinct, and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect is marvellously accomplished in the dialogues and soliloquies themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under consideration ; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader's attention. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recom- mencement of suspended life. Or, if the reader
THE KNOCKING IN MACBETH 377
has ever been present in a vast metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully in the silence and desertion of the streets, and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was pos- sessing the heart of man — if all at once he should hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dis- solved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart, and the entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stept in ; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured : Lady Macbeth is ' unsexed ; ' Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman ; both are conformed to the image of devils ; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable ? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers, and the murder must be insulated — cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs — locked up and sequestered in some deep recess ; we must
378 DE QUINCEY
be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested — laid asleep — tranced — racked into a dread armistice ; time must be annihilated ; relation to things without abolished ; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and sus- pension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds : the knocking at the gate is heard ; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced ; the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish ; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again ; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them. 0 mighty poet ! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art ; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers ; like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert — but that, the farther we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident !
A SUMMARY SUEVEY 379
A Summary Survey 1
AFTER this review of Shakspeare's life, it becomes .our duty to take a summary survey of his works, of his intellectual powers, and of his station in literature, — a station which is now irrevocably settled, not so much (which happens in other cases) by a vast overbalanceof favourable suffrages, as by acclamation ; not so much by the voices of those who admire him up to the verge of idolatry, as by the acts of those who everywhere seek for his works among the primal necessities of life, demand them, and crave them as they do their daily bread ; not so much by eulogy openly proclaiming itself, as by the silent homage recorded in the endless multiplication of what he has bequeathed us ; not so much by his own com- patriots, who, with regard to almost every other author,2 compose the total amount of his effective
1 This is the conclusion of the article on Shakespeare contributed in 1838 to the seventh edition of the Encyclo- paedia Britannica.
2 An exception ought perhaps to be made for Sir Walter Scott and for Cervantes ; but with regard to all other writers, Dante, suppose, or Ariosto amongst Italians, Camoens amongst those of Portugal, Schiller amongst Germans, however ably they may have been naturalised in foreign languages, as all of those here mentioned (excepting only Ariosto) have in one part of their works been most powerfully naturalised in English, it still remains true (and the very sale of the books is proof sufficient) that an alien author never does take root in the general sympathies out of his own country ; he takes his station in libraries, he is read by the man of learned leisure, he is known and valued by the refined and the elegant, but he is not (what Shak- speare is for Germany and America) in any proper sense a popular favourite.
380 DE QUINCEY
audience, as by the unanimous ' All hail ! ' of intellectual Christendom ; finally, not by the hasty partisanship of his own generation, nor by the biassed judgment of an age trained in the same modes of feeling and of thinking with himself, but by the solemn award of generation succeeding to generation, of one age correcting the obliquities or peculiarities of another ; by the verdict of two hundred and thirty years, which have now elapsed since the very latest of his creations, or of two hundred and forty-seven years if we date from the earliest ; a verdict which has been continually revived and re-opened, probed, searched, vexed, by criticism in every spirit, from the most genial and intelligent, down to the most malignant and scurrilously hostile which feeble heads and great ignorance could suggest when co-operating with impure hearts and narrow sensibilities ; a verdict, in short, sustained and countersigned by a longer series of writers, many of them eminent for wit or learn- ing, than were ever before congregated upon any inquest relating to any author, be he who he might, ancient x or modern, Pagan or Christian. It was a most witty saying with respect to a piratical and knavish publisher, who made a trade of insulting the memories of deceased authors by forged writings, that he was ' among the new terrors of death.' But in the gravest sense it may be affirmed of Shakspeare that he is among the modern luxuries of life ; that life, in fact, is a new thing, and one more to be coveted,
1 It will occur to many readers that perhaps Homer may furnish the sole exception to this sweeping assertion.
A SUMMARY SURVEY 381
since Shakspeare has extended the domains of human consciousness, and pushed its dark frontiers into regions not so much as dimly descried or even suspected before his time, far less illuminated (as now they are) by beauty and tropical luxuriance of life. For instance, — a single instance, indeed one which in itself is a world of new revelation, — the possible beauty of the female character had not been seen as in a dream before Shakspeare called into perfect life the radiant shapes of Desdemona, of Imogen, of Hermione, of Perdita, of Ophelia, of Miranda, and many others. The Una of Spenser, earlier by ten or fifteen years than most of these, was an idealised portrait of female innocence and virgin purity, but too shadowy and unreal for a dramatic reality. And as to the Grecian classics, let not the reader imagine for an instant that any prototype in this field of Shakspearian power can be looked for there. The Antigone and the Electra of the tragic poets are the two leading female characters that classical antiquity offers to our respect, but assuredly not to our impassioned love, as disciplined and exalted in the school of Shakspeare. They challenge our admiration, severe, and even stern, as impersona- tions of filial duty, cleaving to the steps of a deso- late and afflicted old man ; or of sisterly affection, maintaining the rights of a brother under circum- stances of peril, of desertion, and consequently of perfect self-reliance. Iphigenia, again, though not dramatically coming before us in her own person, but according to the beautiful report of a spectator, presents us wi^h a fine statuesque model of heroic fortitude, and of one whose young heart, even in the very agonies of her cruel immolation,
382 DE QUINCEY
refused to forget, by a single indecorous gesture, or so much as a moment's neglect of her own princely descent, that she herself was ' a lady in the land.' These are fine marble groups, but they are not the warm breathing realities of Shakspeare ; there is ' no speculation ' in their cold marble eyes ; the breath of life is not in their nostrils ; the fine pulses of womanly sensi- bilities are not throbbing in their bosoms. And besides this immeasurable difference between the cold moony reflexes of life, as exhibited by the power of Grecian art, and the true sunny life of Shakspeare, it must be observed that the Anti- gones, &c., of the antique put forward but one single trait of character, like the aloe with its single blossom : this solitary feature is presented to us as an abstraction, and as an insulated quality ; whereas in Shakspeare all is presented in the concrete ; that is to say, not brought for- ward in relief, as by some effort of an anatomical artist ; but embodied and imbedded, so to speak, as by the force of a creative nature, in the complex system of a human life ; a life in which all the elements move and play simultaneously, and with something" more than mere simultaneity or co- existence, acting and re-acting each upon the other — nay, even acting by each other and through each other. In Shakspeare's characters is felt for ever a real organic life, where each is for the whole and in the whole, and where the whole is for each and in each. They only are real incarnations.
The Greek poets could not exhibit any approxi- mations to female character, without violating the truth of Grecian life, and shocking the feelings
A SUMMARY SURVEY 383
of the audience. The drama with the Greeks, as with us, though much less than with us, was a picture of human life ; and that which could not occur in life could not wisely be exhibited on the stage. Now, in ancient Greece, women were secluded from the society of men. The con- ventual sequestration of the yvratKwviVis, or female apartment *• of the house, and the Mahom- medan consecration of its threshold against the ingress of males, had been transplanted from Asia into Greece thousands of years perhaps before either convents or Mahommed existed. Thus barred from all open social intercourse, women could not develop or express any character by word or action. Even to have a character, violated, to a Grecian mind, the ideal portrait of feminine excellence ; whence, perhaps, partly the too generic, too little individualized, style of Grecian beauty. But prominently to express a character was impossible under the common tenor of Grecian life, unless when high tragical catastrophes tran- scended the decorums of that tenor, or for a brief interval raised the curtain which veiled it. Hence the subordinate part which women play upon the Greek stage in all but some half dozen cases. In the paramount tragedy on that stage, the model tragedy, the (Edipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, there is virtually no woman at all ; for Jocasta is a party to the story merely as the dead Laius or the self-murdered Sphinx was a party, — viz.
1 Apartment is here used, as the reader will observe, in its true and continental acceptation, as a division or compart- ment of a house including many rooms ; a suite of chambers, but a suite which is partitioned off (as in palaces), not a single chamber ; a sense so commonly and so erroneously given to this word in England.
384 DE QUINCEY
by her contributions to the fatalities of the event, not by anything she does or says spontaneously. In fact, the Greek poet, if a wise poet, could not address himself genially to a task in which he must begin by shocking the sensibilities of his countrymen. And hence followed, not only the dearth of female characters in the Grecian drama, but also a second result still more favourable to the sense of a new power evolved by Shakspeare. Whenever the common law of Grecian life did give way, it was, as we have observed, to the suspending force of some great convulsion or tragical catastrophe. This for a moment (like an earthquake in a nunnery) would set at liberty even the timid, fluttering Grecian women, those doves of the dove-cot, and would call some of them into action. But which ? Precisely those of energetic and masculine minds ; the timid and feminine would but shrink the more from public gaze and from tumult. Thus it happened, that such female characters as were exhibited in Greece, could not but be the harsh and the severe. If a gentle Ismene appeared for a moment in contest with some energetic sister Antigone (and chiefly, per- haps, by way of drawing out the fiercer character of that sister), she was soon dismissed as unfit for scenical effect. So that not only were female characters few, but, moreover, of these few the majority were but repetitions of masculine qualities in female persons. Female agency being seldom summoned on the stage except when it had received a sort of special dispensation from its sexual character, by some terrific convulsions of the house or the city, naturally it assumed the style of action suited to these circumstances.
A SUMMARY SURVEY 385
And hence it arose, that not woman as she differed from man, but woman as she resembled man — woman, in short, seen under circumstances so dreadful as to abolish the effect of sexual distinc- tion, was the woman of the Greek tragedy.1 And hence generally arose for Shakspeare the wider field, and the more astonishing by its perfect novelty, when he first introduced female characters, not as mere varieties or echoes of masculine characters, a Medea or Clytemnestra, or a vin- dictive Hecuba, the mere tigress of the tragic tiger, but female characters that had the appro- priate beauty of female nature ; woman no longer grand, terrific, and repulsive, but woman ' after her kind ' — the other hemisphere of the dramatic world ; woman running through, the vast gamut of womanly loveliness ; woman as emancipated, exalted, ennobled, under a new law of Christian morality ; woman the sister and co-equal of man, no longer his slave, his prisoner, and sometimes his rebel. ' It is a far cry to Loch Awe ; ' and from the Athenian stage to the stage of Shakspeare, it may be said, is a prodigious interval. True ; but prodigious as it is, there is really nothing between them. The Roman stage, at least the tragic stage, as is well known, was put out, as by an extin- guisher, by the cruel amphitheatre, just as a candle Is made pale and ridiculous by daylight. Those who were fresh from the real murders of the bloody
And hence, by parity of reason, under the opposite circumstances, under the circumstances which, instead of abolishing, most emphatically drew forth the sexual dis- iinctions, viz. in the comic aspects of social intercourse, the reason that we see no women on the Greek stage ; the Greek comedy, unless when it affects the extravagant fun of farce, rejects women.
212 O
386 DE QUINCE Y
amphitheatre regarded with contempt the mimic murders of the stage. Stimulation too coarse and too intense had its usual effect in making the sensibilities callous. Christian emperors arose at length, who abolished the amphitheatre in its bloodier features. But by that time the genius of the tragic muse had long slept the sleep of death. And that muse had no resurrection until the age of Shakspeare. So that, notwithstanding a gulf of nineteen centuries and upwards separates Shak- speare from Euripides, the last of the surviving Greek tragedians, the one is still the nearest successor of the other, just as Connaught and the islands in Clew Bay are next neighbours to America, although three thousand watery columns, each of a cubic mile in dimensions, divide them from each other.
A second reason, which lends an emphasis of novelty and effective power to Shakspeare's female world, is a peculiar fact of contrast which exists between that and his corresponding world of men. Let us explain. The purpose and the intention of the Grecian stage was not primarily to develop human character, whether in men or in women; human fates were its object ; great tragic situations under the mighty control of a vast cloudy destiny, dimly descried at intervals, and brooding over human life by mysterious agencies, and for mysterious ends. Man, no longer the representative of an august will, — man, the passion-puppet of fate, could not with any effect display what we call a character, which is a dis- tinction between man and man, emanating ori- ginally from the will, and expressing its deter- minations, moving under the large variety of
A SUMMARY SURVEY 387
human impulses. The will is the central pivot of ;haracter ; and this was obliterated, thwarted, cancelled, by the dark fatalism which brooded over ;he Grecian stage. That explanation will suffi- ciently clear up the reason why marked or complex variety of character was slighted by the great principles of the Greek tragedy. And every scholar who has studied that grand drama of Greece with feeling, — that drama, so magnificent, 30 regal, so stately, — and who has thoughtfully investigated its principles, and its difference from the English drama, will acknowledge that powerful and elaborate character, — character, for instance, that could employ the fiftieth part of that profound analysis which has been applied to Hamlet, to Falstaff, to Lear, to Othello, and applied by Mrs. Jamieson so admirably to the full development of the Shakspearian heroines, would have been as much wasted, nay, would have been defeated, and interrupted the blind agencies of fate, just in the same way as it would injure the shadowy grandeur of a ghost to invidualize it too much. Milton's angels are slightly touched, superficially touched, with differences of character ; but they are such differences, so simple and general, as are just sufficient to rescue them from the reproach applied to Virgil's 'fortemque Gyan, fortemque Cloanthem ; ' just sufficient to make them knowable apart. Pliny speaks of painters who painted in one or two colours ; and, as respects the angelic characters, Milton does so ; he is monochromatic. So, and for reasons resting upon the same ultimate philosophy, were the mighty architects of the Greek tragedy. They also were monochromatic ; they also, as to the characters of their persons, painted in one
388 DE QUINCEY
colour. And so far there might have been the same novelty in Shakspeare's men as in his women, There might have been ; but the reason why there is not, must be sought in the fact, that History, the muse of History, had there even been no suet muse as Melpomene, would have forced us into ar acquaintance with human character. History, as the representative of actual life, of real man, gives us powerful delineations of character in its chieJ agents, that is, in men ; and therefore it is thai Shakspeare, the absolute creator of female char- acter, was but the mightiest of all painters with regard to male character. Take a single instance, The Antony of Shakspeare, immortal for its execu- tion, is found, after all, as regards the primary conception, in history : Shakspeare's delineation is but the expansion of the germ already pre-existing, by way of scattered fragments, in Cicero's Philip- pics, in Cicero's Letters, in Appian, &c. Bu1 Cleopatra, equally fine, is a pure creation of art ; the situation and the scenic circumstances belong to history, but the character belongs to Shakspeare, In the great world therefore of woman, as th( interpreter of the shifting phases and the lunai varieties of that mighty changeable planet, thai lovely satellite of man, Shakspeare stands not the first only, not the original only, but is yet the sole authentic oracle of truth. Woman, therefore, the beauty of the female mind, this is one great field of his power. The supernatural world, the world of apparitions, that is another : for reasons whicl it would be easy to give, reasons emanating fronc the gross mythology of the ancients, no Grecian,3
1 It may be thought, however, by some readers, thai JSschylus, in his fine phantom of Darius, has approached
A SUMMARY SURVEY 389
o Roman, could have conceived a ghost. That hadowy conception, the protesting apparition, he awful projection of the human conscience, elongs to the Christian mind : and in all Christen- dom, who, let us ask, who, but Shakspeare, has ound the power for effectually working this nysterious mode of being ? In summoning back to arth ' the majesty of buried Denmark,' how like n awful necromancer does Shakspeare appear ! Ul the pomps and grandeurs which religion, which he grave, which the popular superstition had ;athered about the subject of apparitions, are here onverted to his purpose, and bend to one awful ffect. The wormy grave brought into antagonism vith the scenting of the early dawn ; the trumpet )f resurrection suggested, and again as an anta- gonist idea to the crowing of the cock (a bird nnobled in the Christian mythus by the part he is nade to play at the Crucifixion) ; its starting ' as guilty thing ' placed in opposition to its majestic xpression of offended dignity when struck at by he partisans of the sentinels ; its awful allusions o the secrets of its prison-house ; its ubiquity, ontrasted with its local presence ; its aerial sub- tance, yet clothed in palpable armour ; the heart-
ie English ghost. As a foreign ghost, we would wish (and ee are sure that our excellent readers would wish) to show very courtesy and attention to this apparition of Darius. t has the advantage of being royal, an advantage which it bares with the ghost of the royal Dane. Yet how different, ow removed by a total world, from that or any of Shak- peare's ghosts ! Take that of Banquo, for instance : how hadowy, how unreal, yet how real ! Darius is a mere state host — a diplomatic ghost. But Banquo — he exists only or Macbeth : the guests do not see him, yet how solemn ow real, how heart -searching he is !
390 DE QUINCEY
shaking solemnity of its language, and the appro- priate scenery of its haunt, viz. the ramparts of a capital fortress, with no witnesses but a few gentlemen mounting guard at the dead of night, — what a mist, what a mirage of vapour, is here accu- mulated, through which the dreadful being in the centre looms upon us in far larger proportions than could have happened had it been insulated and left naked of this circumstantial pomp ! In the Tempest, again, what new modes of life, pre- ternatural, yet far as the poles from the spiritualities of religion. Ariel in antithesis to Caliban ! l What is most ethereal to what is most animal ! A phantom of air, an abstraction of the dawn and oi vesper sun-lights, a bodiless sylph on the one hand ; on the other a gross carnal monster, like the
1 Caliban has not yet been thoroughly fathomed. For all Shakspeare's great creations are like works of nature, subjects of unexhaustible study. It was this character of whom Charles I. and some of his ministers expressed such fervent admiration ; and, among other circumstances, most justly they admired the new language almost with which he is endowed, for the purpose of expressing his fiendish and yet carnal thoughts of hatred to his master. Caliban is evidently not meant for scorn, but for abomina- tion mixed with fear and partial respect. He is purposely brought into contrast with the drunken Trinculo and Stephano, with an advantageous result. He is much more intellectual than either, uses a more elevated language, not disfigured by vulgarisms, and is not liable to the low passion for plunder as they are. He is mortal, doubtless,! as his ' dam ' (for Shakspeare will not call her mother) Sycorax. But he inherits from her such qualities of power as a witch could be supposed to bequeath. He trembles indeed before Prospero ; but that is, as we are to under- ; stand, through the moral superiority of Prospero in Chris- j tian wisdom ; for when he finds himself in the presence of dissolute and unprincipled men, he rises at once into the dignity of intellectual power.
A SUMMARY SUEVEY 391
Miltonic Asmodai, ' the fleshliest incubus ' among the fiends, and yet so far ennobled into interest by his intellectual power, and by the grandeur of misanthropy ! In the Midsummer-Night's Dream, again, we have the old traditional fairy, a lovely mode of preternatural life, remodified by Shak- speare's eternal talisman. Oberon and Titania remind us at first glance of Ariel ; they approach, but how far they recede : they are like — ' like, but oh, how different ! ' And in no other exhibition of this dreamy population of the moonlight forests and forest-lawns are the circumstantial proprieties of fairy life so exquisitely imagined, sustained, or expressed. The dialogue between Oberon and Titania is, of itself, and taken separately from its connection, one of the most delightful poetic scenes that literature affords. The witches in Macbeth are another variety of supernatural life, in which Shakspeare's power to enchant and to disenchant are alike portentous. The circumstances of the blasted heath, the army at a distance, the withered attire of the mysterious hags, and the choral litanies of their fiendish Sabbath, are as finely imagined in their kind as those which herald and which surround the ghost in Hamlet. There we see the positive of Shakspeare's superior power. But now turn and look to the negative. At a time when the trials of witches, the royal book on demonology, and popular superstition (all so far useful, as they prepared a basis of undoubting faith for the poet's serious use of such agencies) had degraded and polluted the ideas of these mysterious beings by many mean associations, Shakspeare does not fear to employ them in high tragedy (a tragedy more- over which, though not the very greatest of his
392 DE QUINCEY
efforts as an intellectual whole, nor as a struggle of passion, is among the greatest in any view, and positively the greatest for scenical grandeur, and in that respect makes the nearest approach of all English tragedies to the Grecian model) ; he does not fear to introduce, for the same appalling effect as that for which ^Eschylus introduced the Eu- menides, a triad of old women, concerning whom an English wit has remarked this grotesque peculiarity in the popular creed of that day, — that although potent over winds and storms, in league with powers of darkness, they yet stood in awe of the constable, — yet relying on his own supreme power to disenchant as well as to enchant, to create and to uncreate, he mixes these women and their dark machineries with the power of armies, with the agencies of kings, and the fortunes of martial king- doms. Such was the sovereignty of this poet, so mighty its compass !
A third fund of Shakspeare's peculiar power lies in his teeming fertility of fine thoughts and senti- ments. From his works alone might be gathered a golden bead-roll of thoughts the deepest, subtlest, most pathetic, and yet most catholic and univer- sally intelligible ; the most characteristic, also, and appropriate to the particular person, the situation, and the case, yet, at the same time, applicable to the circumstances of every human being, under all the accidents of life, and all vicissi- tudes of fortune. But this subject offers so vast a field of observation, it being so eminently the prerogative of Shakspeare to have thought more finely and more extensively than all other poets combined, that we cannot wrong the dignity of such a theme by doing more, in our narrow limits,
A SUMMAKY SURVEY 393
than simply noticing it as one of the emblazonries upon Shakspeare's shield.
Fourthly, we shall indicate (and, as in the last case, barely indicate, without attempting in so vast a field to offer any inadequate illustrations) one mode of Shakspeare's dramatic excellence which hitherto has not attracted any special or separate notice. We allude to the forms of life, and natural human passion, as apparent in the structure of his dialogue. Among the many defects and infirmities of the French and of the Italian drama, indeed we may say of the Greek, the dialogue proceeds always by independent speeches, replying indeed to each other, but never modified in its several openings by the momentary effect of its several terminal forms immediately preceding. Now, in Shakspeare, who first set an example of that most important inno- vation, in all his impassioned dialogues, each reply or rejoinder seems the mere rebound of the previous speech. Every form of natural interruption, breaking through the restraints of ceremony under the impulses of tempestuous passion ; every form of hasty interrogative, ardent reiteration when a question has been evaded ; every form of scornful repetition of the hostile words ; every impatient continuation of the hostile statement ; in short, all modes and formulae by which anger, hurry, fret- fulness, scorn, impatience, or excitement under any movement whatever, can disturb or modify or dislocate the formal bookish style of commence- ment,— these are as rife in Shakspeare's dialogue as in life itself ; and how much vivacity, how pro- found a verisimilitude, they add to the scenic effect as an imitation of human passion and real life, we need not say. A volume might be written illus- 03
394 DE QUINCEY
trating the vast varieties of Shakspeare's art and power in this one field of improvement ; another volume might be dedicated to the exposure of the lifeless and unnatural result from the opposite practice in the foreign stages of France and Italy. And we may truly say, that were Shakspeare dis- tinguished from them by this single feature of nature and propriety, he would on that account alone have merited a great immortality.
395
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS
«
Southey and For son.
Southey. ... In so wide and untrodden a creation as that of Shakspeare, can we wonder or complain that sometimes we are bewildered and entangled in the exuberance of fertility ? Dry- brained men upon the Continent, the trifling wits of the theatre, accurate however and expert calcu- lators, tell us that his beauties are balanced by his faults. The poetical opposition, puffing for popularity, cry cheerily against them, his faults are balanced by his beauties ; when, in reality, all the faults that ever were committed in poetry would be but as air to earth, if we could weigh them against one single thought or image, such as almost every scene exhibits in every drama of this un^ rivalled genius. Do you hear me with patience ?
Porson. With more ; although at Cambridge we rather discourse on Bacon, for we know him better. He was immeasurably a less wise man than Shakspeare, and not a wiser writer : for he knew his fellow-man only as he saw him in the street and in the court, which indeed is but a dirtier street and a narrower : Shakspeare, who also knew him there, knew him everywhere else, both as he was, and as he might be.
Southey. There is as great a difference between Shakspeare and Bacon as between an American
396 LANDOR
forest and a London timber-yard. In the timber- yard the materials are sawed and squared and set across : in the forest we have the natural form of the tree, all its growth, all its branches, all its leaves, all the mosses that grow about it, all the birds and insects that inhabit it ; now deep shadows absorbing the whole wilderness ; now bright bursting glades, with exuberant grass and flowers and fruitage ; now untroubled skies ; now terrific thunderstorms ; everywhere multiformity, everywhere immensity.
Works, ed. 1846, vol. i. pp. 14, 15.
The Abbe Delille and Landor.
Delille. Even your immortal Shakspeare bor- rowed from others.
Landor. Yet he was more original than the originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.
Delille. I think however I can trace Caliban, that wonderful creature, when I survey attentively the Cyclops of Euripides.
Landor. He knew nothing of Euripides or his Cyclops. . . . No good writer was ever long neglected ; no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be. Whether, think you, would Shakspeare be amused or mortified, if he were sitting in the pit during the performance of his best tragedy, and heard no other exclamation from one beside him, than, ' How beautifully those scenes are painted ! what palaces, waterfalls, and rocks ! '
Delille. I wish he were more dramatic.
IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 397
Landor. You would say, more observant of certain rules established for one species of the drama. Never was poet so dramatic, so intelli- gent of stage-effect. I do not defend his anachron- isms, nor his confusion of modern customs with ancient ; nor do I willingly join him when I find him with Hector and Aristoteles, arm-in-arm, among knights, esquires, and fiddlers. But our audiences and our princes in those days were resolved that all countries and all ages should be subservient at once, and perceived no incongruity in bringing them together.
DeliUe. Yet what argument can remove the objection made against your poet, of introducing those who in the first act are children, and grown- up men in the last ?
Landor. Such a drama I would not call by the name of tragedy : nevertheless it is a drama ; and a very beautiful species of it. Delightful in the first degree are those pieces of history in verse and action, as managed by Shakspeare.
Delille. We must contend against them : we must resist all barbarous inroads on classic ground, all innovations and abuses.
Landor. You fighb against your own positions. Such a work is to Tragedy what a forest is to a garden. Those alone are wrong who persist in calling it a garden rather than a forest ; who find oaks instead of tulips ; who look about the hills and dales, the rocks and precipices, the groves and waterfalls, for flues and balusters and vases, and smooth marble steps, and shepherdesses in hoops and satin. There are some who think these things as unnatural as that children should grow into men, and that we should live to see it.
398 LANDOR
Delille. Live to see it ! but in one day or night !
Landor. The same events pass before us within the same space of time whenever we look into history.
Delille. Ay, but here they act.
Landor. So they do there, unless the history is an English one. And indeed the histories of our country read by Shakspeare held human life within them. When we are interested in the boy, we spring forward to the man, with more than a poet's velocity. We would interrogate the oracles ; we would measure the thread around the distaff of the Fates ; yet we quarrel with him who knows and tells us all.
Glory to thee in the highest, thou confidant of our Creator ! who alone hast taught us in every particle of the mind how wonderfully and fearfully we are made.
Delille. Voltaire was indeed too severe upon him.
Landor. Severe ? Is it severity to throw a crab or a pincushion at the Farnese Hercules or the Belvedere Apollo ? It is folly, perverseness, and impudence, in poets and critics like Voltaire, whose best composition in verse is a hard mosaic, spark- ling and superficial, of squares and parallelograms, one speck each. He, whose poems are worth all that have been composed from the Creation to the present hour, was so negligent or so secure of fame as to preserve no copy of them. Homer and he confided to the hearts of men the treasures of their genius, which were, like conscience, unengraved words. . .
Landor. We have wandered (and conversation would be tedious unless we did occasionally) far from the subject : but I have not forgotten our Cyclops and Caliban. The character of the Cyc-
IMAGINARY CONVEESATIONS 399
lops is somewhat broad and general, but worthy of Euripides, and such as the greatest of Roman poets was incapable of conceiving ; that of Caliban is peculiar and stands single ; it is admirably imagined and equally well sustained. Another poet would have shown him spiteful : Shakspeare has made the infringement of his idleness the origin of his malice. He has also made him grateful ; but then his gratitude is the return for an indul- gence granted to his evil appetites. Those who by nature are grateful are often by nature vindictive : one of these properties is the sense of kindness, the other of unkindness. Religion and comfort require that the one should be cherished and that the other should be suppressed. The mere conception of the monster without these qualities, without the sudden impressions which bring them vividly out, and the circumstances in which they are displayed, would not be to considerate minds so stupendous as it appeared to Warton, who little knew that there is a nil admirari as requisite to wisdom as to happiness.
Delille. And yet how enthusiastic is your admiration of Shakespeare. ,
Landor.
He lighted with his golden lamp on high
The unknown regions of the human heart,
Show'd its bright fountains, show'd its rueful wastes,
Its shoals and headlands ; and a tower he rais'd
Refulgent, where eternal breakers roll,
For all to see, but no man to approach.
The creation of Caliban, wonderful as it is, would excite in me less admiration than a single sentence, or a single sentiment, such as I find in fifty of his pages.
Id. pp. 102-5.
400 LANDOR
Milton and Andrew Marvel, Milton. The historical dramas of Shakspeare should be designated by that name only, and not be called tragedies, lest persons who reflect little (and how few reflect much ?) should try them by the rules of Aristoteles ; which would be as absurd as to try a gem upon a touchstone. Shakespeare, in these particularly, but also in the rest, can only be relished by a people which retains its feelings and character in perfection. The French, more than any other, are transmuted by the stream that runs over them, like the baser metals. Beautiful poems, in dialogue too, may be composed on the greater part of a life, if that life be eventful, and if there be a proper choice of topics. Votivd veluti depicta tabettd.
No other than Shakspeare hath ever yet been able to give unceasing interest to similar pieces : but he has given it amply to such as understand him. Sometimes his levity (we hear) is misplaced. Human life is exhibited not only in its calamities and its cares, but in the gay unguarded hours of ebullient and confident prosperity ; and we are the more deeply interested in the reverses of those whose familiarity we have long enjoyed, and whose festivity we have recently partaken.
Id. p. 123.
Souihey and Landor*
Landor. A rib of Shakspeare would have made a Milton : the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since.
Id. vol. ii. p. 74.
IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 401
Southey and Landor.
(Second Conversation.)
Southey. Shakspeare, whom you not only prefer to every other poet, but think he contains more poetry and more wisdom than all the rest united, is surely less grand in his designs than several.
Landor. To the eye. But Othello was loftier than the citadel of Troy ; and what a Paradise fell before him ! Let us descend ; for from Othello we must descend, whatever road we take ; let us look at Julius Caesar. No man ever overcame such difficulties, or produced by his life and death such a change in the world we inhabit. But that also is a grand design which displays the interior work- ings of the world within us, and where we see the imperishable and unalterable passions depicted al fresco on a lofty dome. Our other dramatists painted only on the shambles, and represented what they found there ; blood and garbage. We leave them a few paces behind us, and step over the gutter into the green-market. . .
Landor. I wish Milton had abstained from calling ' Aeschylus, Sophbcles, and Euripides, the three tragic poets unequalled yet by any ; ' because it may leave a suspicion that he fancied he, essen- tially undramatic, could equal them, and had now done it ; and because it exhibits him as a detractor from Shakspeare. I am as sorry to find him in this condition as I should have been to find him in a fit of the gout, or treading on a nail with naked foot in his blindness.
Southey. Unfortunately it is impossible to exculpate him ; for you must have remarked
402 LANDOR
where, a few sentences above, are these expressions. ' This is mentioned to vindicate from the small esteem, or rather infamy, which in the account of many, it undergoes at this day, with other common interludes ; happening through the poet's error of intermixing comick stuff with tragick sadness and gravity, or intermixing trivial and vulgar persons, which, by all judicious, hath been counted absurd, and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people.'
Landor. It may be questioned whether the people in the reign of Elizabeth, or indeed the queen herself, would have been contented with a drama without a smack of the indecent or the ludicrous. They had alike been accustomed to scenes of ribaldry and of bloodshed; and the palace opened on one wing to the brothel, on the other to the shambles. The clowns of Shakspeare are still admired by not the vulgar only.
Southey. The more the pity. Let them appear in their proper places. But a picture by Morland or Frank Hals ought never to break a series of frescoes by the hand of Raphael, or of senatorial portraits animated by the sun of Titian. There is much to be regretted in, and (since we are alone I will say it) a little which might without loss or in- jury be rejected from, the treasury of Shakspeare. . Landor. It is difficult to sweep away anything and not to sweep away gold-dust with it ! but viler dust lies thick in some places. The grave Milton too has cobwebs hanging on his workshop, which a high broom, in a steady hand, may reach without doing mischief. But let children and short men, and unwary ones, stand out of the way.
Id. pp. 157-61.
403
THOMAS CARLYLE
The Hero as Poet.
OF this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one ; I think the best judge- ment not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto ; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the char- acters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth ; placid joyous strength ; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea ! It has been said, that in the constructing of Shakspeare's Dramas there is, apart from all other ' faculties ' as they are called, an understanding manifested, equal to that in Bacon's Novum Organum. That is true ; and it is not a truth that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we tried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakspeare's dramatic materials, we could fashion such a result ! The built house seems all so fit, — everyway as it should be, as if it came there by its own law and the nature of things, — we forget the rude disorderly quarry it was shaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself had made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect than any
404 ; CARLYLE
other man, we may call Shakspeare in this : he discerns, knows as by instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, what his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory glance of insight that will suffice ; it is deliberate illumination of the whole matter ; it is a calmly seeing eye ; a great intellect, in short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has wit- nessed, will construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will give of it, — is the best measure you could get of what intellect is in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent ; which unessential, fit to be suppressed ; where is the true beginning, the true sequence and ending ? To find out this, you task the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must understand the thing ; according to the depth of his understanding, will the fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. Does like join itself to like ; does the spirit of method stir in that con- fusion, so that its embroilment becomes order ? Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light ; and out of chaos make a world ? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this.
Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting, delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakspeare is great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that calm creative per- spicacity of Shakspeare. The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart and generic secret : it dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said : poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently ?
THE HERO AS POET 405
The word that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakspeare's morality, his valour, can- dour, tolerance, truthfulness ; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions, visible there too ? Great as the world ! No twisted, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with its own convexities and concavities ; a perfectly level mirror ; — that is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstafl, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus ; sets them all forth to us in their round completeness ; loving, just, the equal brother of all. Novum Organum, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite second- ary order ; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare, reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the object ; you may say what he himself says of Shakspeare : ' His characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal ; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible.'
The seeing eye ! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things ; what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things ? You can laugh over them, you can weep over them ; you can in some way or other genially relate yourself to them ;
406 CARLYLE
—you can, at lowest, hold your peace about them, turn away your own and others' face from them, till the hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them ! At bottom, it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have : a Poet in word ; or failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write at all ; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on accidents : who knows on what extremely trivial accidents,- — perhaps on his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his boyhood ! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself ; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, See. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet ; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, ' But are ye sure he 's not a dunce ? ' Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function ; and consider it as the one inquiry needful : Are ye sure he 's not a dunce ? There is, in this world, no other entirely fatal person.
For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakspeare's faculty, I should say
THE HEKO AS POET 407
superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed are faculties ? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable ; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a capital error. Then again, we hear of a man's ' intellectual nature ', and of his ' moral nature ', as if these again were divisible, and existed apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms of utterance ; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to speak at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. It seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part, radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep forever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names ; that man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible ; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related ; that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is and works ? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings ; his courage, or want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is one ; and preaches the same Self abroad in all these ways.
Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk : but, consider it, — without morality, intellect were impossible for him ; a thoroughly
408 CARLYLE
immoral man could not know anything at all ! To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathize with it : that is, be virtuously related to it. If he have not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he know ? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge, Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever a sealed book : what such can know of Nature is mean, superficial, small ; for the uses of the day merely. — But does not the very Fox know something of Nature ? Exactly so : it knows where the geese lodge ! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the world, what more does he know but this and the like of this ? Nay, it should be considered too, that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine morality, he could not even know where the geese were, or get at the geese ! If he spent his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his own misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so forth ; and had not courage, promptitude, practicality, and other suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We may say of the Fox too, that his morality and insight are of the same dimensions ; different faces of the same internal unity of vulpine life ! — These things are worth stating ; for the contrary of them acts with mani- fold very baleful perversion, in this time : what limitations, modifications they require, your own candour will supply.
If I say, therefore, that Shakspeare is the greatest of Intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakspeare's intellect
THE HERO AS POET 409
than we have yet seen. It is what I call an uncon- scious intellect ; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of. Novalis beautifully remarks of him, that those Dramas of his are Products of Nature too, deep as Nature herself. I find a great truth in this saying. Shakspeare's Art is not Artifice ; the noblest worth of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows up from the deeps of Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of Nature. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in Shakspeare, new elucidations of their own human being ; ' new harmonies with the infinite structure of the Uni- verse ; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man.' This well deserves meditating. It is Nature's highest reward to a true simple great soul, that he get thus to be a 'part of herself. Such a man's works, what- soever he with utmost conscious exertion and fore- thought shall accomplish, grow up withal wwcon- sciously, from the unknown deeps in him ; — as the oak-tree grows from the Earth's bosom, as the mountains and waters shape themselves ; with a symmetry grounded on Nature's own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever. How much in Shakspeare lies hid ; his sorrows, his silent struggles known to himself ; much that was not known at all, not speakable at all : like roots, like sap and forces working underground ! Speech is great ; but Silence is greater.
Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I will not blame Dante for his misery : it is as battle without victory ; but true battle, — the first, indispensable thing. Yet I call Shak- speare greater than Dante, in that he fought truly,
410 CARLYLE
and did conquer. Doubt it not, he had his own sorrows : those Sonnets of his will even testify expressly in what deep waters he had waded, and swum struggling for his life ; — as what man like him ever failed to have to do ? It seems to me a heedless notion, our common one, that he sat like a bird on the bough ; and sang forth, free and offhand, never knowing the troubles of other men. Not so ; with no man is it so. How could a man travel forward from rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy- writing, and not fall in with sorrows by the way ? Or, still better, how could a man delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many suffer- ing-heroic hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered ? — And now, in contrast with all this, observe his mirthfulness, his genuine overflowing love of laughter ! You would say, in no point does he exaggerate but only in laughter. Fiery objurga- tions, words that pierce and burn, are to be found in Shakspeare ; yet he is always in measure here ; never what Johnson would remark as a specially ' good hater '. But his laughter seems to pour from him in floods ; he heaps all manner of ridi- culous nicknames on the butt he is bantering, tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of hcrse-play ; you would say, roars and laughs. And then, if not always the finest, it is always a genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty ; never. No man who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some poor character only desiring to laugh, ?nd have the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy ; good laughter is not ' the crackling of thorns under the pot'. Even at stupidity and pretension this Shakspeare does not laugh other-
THE HERO AS POET 411
wise taan genially. Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts ; and we dismiss them covered with -explosions of laughter : but we like the poor fellows only the better for our laughing ; and hope they will get on well there, and continue Presidents of the City- watch. — -Such laughter, like sunshine On the deep sea, is very beautiful to me.
We have no room to speak of Shakspeare's individual works ; though perhaps there is much still waiting to be said on that head. Had we, for instance, all his plays reviewed as Hamlet, in Wilhelm Meister, is ! A thing which might, one day, be done. August Wilhelm Schlegel has a remark on his Historical Plays, Henry Fifth and the others, which is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of National Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English History but what he had learned from Shakspeare. There are really, if we look to it, few as memorable His- tories. The great salient points are admirably seized ; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence ; it is, as Schlegel says, epic ; — as indeed all delineation by a great thinker will be. There are right beautiful things in those Pieces, which indeed together form one beautiful thing. That battle of Agincourt strikes me as one of the most perfect things, in its sort, we anywhere have of Shakspeare's. The description of the two hosts : the worn-out, jaded English ; the dread hour, big with destiny, when the battle shall begin ; and then that deathless valour : ' Ye good yeomen, whose limbs were made in England ! ' There is a noble Patriotism in it, — far other than the 'indif- ference ' you sometimes hear ascribed to Shak-
412 CAELYLB
speare. A true English heart breathes, caln and strong, through the whole business ; not boister- ous, protrusive ; all the better for that. There is a sound in it like the ring of steel. This man too had a right stroke in him, had it come to that !
But I will say, of Shakspeare's works generally, that we have no full impress of him there ; even as full as we have of many men. His works are so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that was in him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory, imperfect, writ- ten under cramping circumstances ; giving only here and there a note of the full utterance of the man. Passages there are that come upon you like splendour out of Heaven ; bursts of radiance, illuminating the very heart of the thing : you say, * That is true, spoken once and forever ; whereso- ever and whensoever there is an open human soul, that will be recognized as true ! ' Such bursts, however, make us feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant ; that it is, in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakspeare had to] write for the Globe Playhouse : his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that and no other mould. It was with him, then, as it ia with us all. No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his own free Thought before us ; but his Thought as he could translate it into the stone that was given, with the tools that were given. Disjecta membra are all that we find of any Poet, or of any man.
Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakspeare may recognize that he too was a Prophet, in his way ; of an insight analogous to the Prophetic,
THE HEKO AS POET 413
though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemei to this man also divine ; wwspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven : ' We are such stuff as Dreams are made of ! ' That scroll in Wesminster Abbey, which few read with under- standing, is of the depth of any Seer. But the man sang ; did not preach, except musically. We called Dante the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not call Shakspeare the still more melodious Priest of a true Catholicism, the ' Universal Church ' of the Future and of all times ? No narrow superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or perversion : a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thou- sandfold hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature ; which let all men worship as they can ! We may say without offence, that there rises a kind of universal Psalm out of this Shakspeare too ; not unfit to make itself heard among the still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony with these, if we understood them, but in harmony ! — I cannot call this Shakspeare a ' Sceptic,' as some do ; his indifference to the creeds and theological quarrels of his time misleading them. No : neither unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patrio- tism ; nor sceptic, though he says little about his Faith. Such ' indifference ' was the fruit of his greatness withal : his whole heart was in his own grand sphere of worship (we may call it such) ; these other controversies, vitally important to other men, were not vital to him.
But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right glorious thing, and set of things, this that Shakspeare has brought us ? For myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness
414 CAKLYLE
in the fact of such a man being sent into this Earth. Is he not an eye to us all ; a blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light ? — And, at bottom, was it not perhaps far better that this Shakspeare, everyway an unconscious man, was conscious of no Heavenly message ? . . .
Well : this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging ; whom the Earl of Southampton cast some kind glances on ; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill ! We did not account him a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us ; — on which point there were much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat : In spite of the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this Shakspeare has actually become among us. Which Englishman we ever made, in this land of ours, which million of Englishmen, would we not give up rather than the Stratford Peasant ? There is no regiment of highest Dignitaries that we would sell him for. He is the grandest thing we have yet done. For our honour among foreign nations, as an ornament to our English Household, what item is there that we would not surrender rather than him ? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give up your Indian Empire or your Shakspeare, you English ; never have had any Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakspeare ? Keally it were a grave question. Official persons would answer doubtless in official language ; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer : Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire ; we cannot do without Shakspeare ! Indian Empire will go,
THE HERO AS POET 415
at any rate, some day ; but this Shakspeare does not go, he lasts forever with us ; we cannot give up our Shakspeare !
Nay , apart from spiritualities ; and considering him merely as a real, marketable, tangibly useful possession. England, before long, this Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English : in America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike intercourse, helping one another ? This is justly regarded as the greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties and governments are here to accomplish : what is it that will accomplish this ? Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot. America is parted from us, so far as Par- liament could part it. Call it not fantastic, for there is much reality in it : Here, I say, is an English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of Parliaments, can dethrone ! This King Shakspeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs ; indestruc- tible ; really more valuable in that point of view, than any other means or appliance whatsoever ? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, Eng- lish men and women are, they will say to one another : ' Yes, this Shakspeare is ours : we
416 CARLYLE
produced him, we speak and think by Lrim ; w are of one blood and kind with him.' The mos common-sense politician, too, if he pleases, ma think of that.
Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation tha it get an articulate voice ; that it produce a ma; who will speak forth melodiously what the hear of it means ! Italy, for example, poor Italy lie, dismembered, scattered asunder, not appearing ii any protocol or treaty as a unity at all ; yet th< noble Italy is actually one : Italy produced it Dante-; Italy can speak ! The Czar of all th' Russias, he is strong, with so many bayonets Cossadrs and cannons ; and does a great feat ir keeping such a tract of Earth politically together but he cannot yet speak. Something great in him but it is a dumb greatness. He has had no voice of genius, to be heard of all men and times. must learn to speak. He is a great dumb monstei hitherto. His cannons and Cossacks will all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante's voice is still audible. The Nation that has a Dante is bound together as no dumb Russia can be. — We must here end what we had to say of the Hero-Poet. From On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic
in History, Lecture III, ' The Hero as Poet,'
delivered 12th May, 1840.
APR 0 4 1990
•
PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET
PR Smith David Nichol (ed.)
2975 Shakespeare criticism
S6 ' 19l6a cop. 3