Chapter XV (2)

29. The savage character of Tamburlaine, and the want of all interest as to every other, render this tragedy a failure in comparison with those which speedily followed from the pen of Christopher Marlowe. The first two acts of the Jew of Malta are more vigorously conceived, both as to character and circumstance, than any other Elizabethan play, except those of Shakspeare; and perhaps we may think that Barabas, though not the prototype of Shylock, a praise of which he is unworthy, may have suggested some few ideas to the inventor. But the latter acts, as is usual with our old dramatists, are a tissue of uninteresting crimes and slaughter.[1280] Faustus is better known; it contains nothing, perhaps, so dramatic as the first part of the Jew of Malta; yet the occasional glimpses of repentance and struggles of alarmed conscience in the chief character are finely brought in. It is full of poetical beauties; but an intermixture of buffoonery weakens the effect, and leaves it on the whole rather a sketch by a great genius than a finished performance. There is an awful melancholy about Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, perhaps more impressive than the malignant mirth of that fiend in the renowned work of Goethe. But the fair form of Margaret is wanting; and Marlowe has hardly earned the credit of having breathed a few casual inspirations into a greater mind than his own.[1281]

[1280] “Blood,” says a late witty writer, “is made as light of in
some of these old dramas as _money_ in a modern sentimental comedy;
and as _this_ is given away till it reminds us that it is nothing
but counters, so _that_ is spilt till it affects us no more than
its representative, the paint of the property-man in the theatre.”
Lamb’s specimens of Early Dramatic Poets, i. 19.

[1281] The German story of Faust is said to have been published for the
first time in 1587. It was rapidly translated into most languages
of Europe. We need hardly name the absurd supposition, that Faust,
the great printer, was intended.

|His Edward II.|

|Plays whence Henry Vl. was taken.|

30. Marlowe’s Life of Edward II. which was entered on the books of the Stationers’ Company in 1593, has been deemed by some the earliest specimen of the historical play founded upon English chronicles. Whether this be true or not, and probably it is not, it is certainly by far the best after those of Shakspeare.[1282] And it seems probable that the old plays of the Contention of Lancaster and York, and the True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, which Shakspeare remodelled in the second and third parts of Henry VI., were in great part by Marlowe, though Greene seems to put in for some share in their composition.[1283] These plays claim certainly a very low rank among those of Shakspeare: his original portion is not inconsiderable; but it is fair to observe, that some of the passages most popular, such as the death of Cardinal Beaufort, and the last speech of the Duke of York, are not by his hand.

[1282] Collier observes that, “the character of Richard II. in
Shakspeare seems modelled in no slight degree upon that of
Edward II.” But I am reluctant to admit that Shakspeare modelled
his _characters_ by those of others; and it is natural to ask
whether there were not an extraordinary likeness in the
dispositions as well as fortunes of the two kings.

[1283] These old plays were reprinted by Stevens in 1766. Malone, on a
laborious comparison of them with the second and third parts of
Henry VI., has ascertained that 1771 lines in the latter plays were
taken from the former unaltered, 2373 altered by Shakspeare, while
1899 were altogether his own. It remains to inquire, who are to
claim the credit of these other plays, so great a portion of which
has passed with the world for the genuine work of Shakspeare. The
solution seems to be given, as well as we can expect, in a passage
often quoted from Robert Greene’s Groat’sworth of Wit, published
not long before his death in September 1592. “Yes,” says he,
addressing himself to some one who has been conjectured to be
Peele, but more probably Marlowe, “trust them (the players) not,
for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that,
with his tyger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, supposes he is
as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and
being an absolute Johannes factotum, is, in his own conceit, the
only _Shakescene_ in a country.” An allusion is here manifest to
the “tyger’s heart, wrapt in a woman’s hide,” which Shakspeare
borrowed from the old play. The Contention of the Houses, and which
is here introduced to hint the particular subject of plagiarism
that prompts the complaint of Greene. The bitterness he displays
must lead us to suspect that he had been one himself of those who
were thus preyed upon. But the greater part of the plays in
question is in the judgment, I conceive, of all competent critics,
far above the powers either of Greene or Peele, and exhibits a much
greater share of the spirited versification, called by Jonson the
“mighty line,” of Christopher Marlowe. Malone, upon second
thoughts, gave both these plays to Marlowe, having, in his
dissertation on the three parts of Henry VI., assigned one to
Greene, the other to Peele. None of the three parts have any
resemblance to the manner of Peele.

|Peele.|

31. No one could think of disputing the superiority of Marlowe, to all his contemporaries of this early school of the English drama. He was killed in a tavern fray in 1593. There is more room for difference of tastes as to the second place. Mr. Campbell has bestowed high praises upon Peele. “His David and Bethsabe is the earliest fountain of pathos and harmony that can be traced in our dramatic poetry. His fancy is rich and his feeling tender: and his conceptions of dramatic character have no inconsiderable mixture of solid veracity [sic] and ideal beauty. There is no such sweetness of versification and imagery to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakspeare.”[1284] I must concur with Mr. Collier in thinking these compliments excessive. Peele has some command of imagery, but in every other quality it seems to me that he has scarce any claim to honour; and I doubt if there are three lines together in any of his plays that could be mistaken for Shakspeare’s. His Edward I. is a gross tissue of absurdity, with some facility of language, but nothing truly good. It has also the fault of grossly violating historic truth, in hideous misrepresentation of the virtuous Eleanor of Castile; probably from the base motive of rendering the Spanish nation odious to the vulgar. This play, which is founded on a ballad equally false, is referred to the year 1593. The versification of Peele is much inferior to that of Marlowe; and though sometimes poetical he seems rarely dramatic.

[1284] Specimens of English Poetry, i. 140. Hawkins says of three lines
in Peele’s David and Bethsabe, that they contain a metaphor worthy
of Æschylus:--

At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt;
And his fair spouse with bright and fiery wings
Sit ever burning on his hateful bones.

It may be rather Æschylean, yet I cannot much admire it. Peele
seldom attempts such flights. “His genius was not boldly original;
but he had an elegance of fancy, a gracefulness of expression, and
a melody of versification which, in the earlier part of his career,
was scarcely approached.” Collier, iii. 191.

|Greene.|

32. A third writer for the stage in this period is Robert Greene, whose “Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay” may probably be placed about the year 1590. This comedy, though savouring a little of the old school, contains easy and spirited versification, superior to Peele, and though not so energetic as that of Marlowe, reminding us perhaps more frequently of Shakspeare.[1285] Greene succeeds pretty well in that florid and gay style, a little redundant in images, which Shakspeare frequently gives to his princes and courtiers, and which renders some unimpassioned scenes in the historic plays effective and brilliant. There is great talent shown, though upon a very strange canvas, in Greene’s “Looking-glass for London and England.” His angry allusion to Shakspeare’s plagiarism is best explained by supposing that he was himself concerned in the two old plays which have been converted into the second and third parts of Henry VI.[1286] In default of a more probable claimant, I have sometimes been inclined to assign the first part of Henry VI. to Greene. But those who are far more conversant with the style of our dramatists do not suggest this; and we are evidently ignorant of many names, which might have ranked not discreditably by the side of these tragedians. The first part, however, of Henry VI. is, in some passages, not unworthy of Shakspeare’s earlier days, nor, in my judgment, unlike his style; nor in fact do I know any one of his contemporaries who could have written the scene in the Temple Garden. The light touches of his pencil have ever been still more inimitable, if possible, than its more elaborate strokes.[1287]

[1285] “Green in facility of expression and in the flow of his blank
verse is not to be placed below his contemporary Peele. His usual
fault, more discoverable in his plays than in his poems, is an
absence of simplicity; but his pedantic classical references,
frequently without either taste or discretion, he had in common
with the other scribbling scholars of the time. It was Shakspeare’s
good fortune to be in a great degree without the knowledge, and
therefore, if on no other account, without the defect.” Collier,
iii. 153. Tieck gives him credit for “a happy talent, a clear
spirit, and a lively imagination, which characterise all his
writings.” Collier iii. 148.

[1286] Mr. Collier says, iii. 146, Greene may possibly have had a hand
in the True History of Richard Duke of York. But why possibly? when
he claims it, if not in express words, yet so as to leave no doubt
of his meaning. See the note in p. 377.

In a poem written on Greene in 1594, are these lines:--

Green is the pleasing object of an eye;
Greene pleased the eyes of all that looked upon him:
Green is the ground of every painter’s die;
Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him:
Nay more, the men that so eclipsed his fame,
Purloined his plumes, can they deny the same?

This seems an allusion to Greene’s own metaphor, and must be taken
for a covert attack on Shakspeare, who had by this time pretty well
eclipsed the fame of Greene.

[1287] “These three gifted men (Peele, Greene, and Marlowe), says their
late editor, Mr. Dyce (Peele’s Works, preface xxxv.), though they
often present to us pictures that in design and colouring outrage
the truth of nature, are the earliest of our tragic writers who
exhibit any just delineation of the workings of passion; and their
language, though now swelling into bombast, and now sinking into
meanness, is generally rich with poetry, while their versification,
though somewhat monotonous, is almost always flowing and
harmonious. They as much excel their immediate predecessors as they
are themselves excelled by Shakspeare.” Not quite as much.

|Other writers of this age.|

|Heywood’s Woman killed with Kindness.|

33. We can hardly afford time to dwell on several other writers anterior to Shakspeare. Kyd, whom Mr. Collier places, as a writer of blank verse, next to Marlowe,[1288] Lodge,[1289] Lily, Nash, Hughes, and a few more, have all some degree of merit. Nor do the anonymous tragedies, some of which were formerly ascribed to Shakspeare, and which even Schlegel, with less acuteness of criticism than is usual with him, has deemed genuine, always want a forcible delineation of passion, and a vigorous strain of verse, though not kept up for many lines. Among these are specimens of the domestic species of tragic drama, drawn probably from real occurrences, such as Arden of Feversham and the Yorkshire Tragedy, the former of which, especially, has very considerable merit. Its author, I believe has not been conjectured; but it may be referred to the last decade of the century.[1290] Another play of the same kind, A Woman killed with Kindness, bears the date of 1600, and is the earliest production of a fertile dramatist, Thomas Heywood. The language is not much raised above that of comedy, but we can hardly rank a tale of guilt, sorrow, and death, in that dramatic category. It may be read with interest and approbation at this day, being quite free from extravagance either in manner or language, the besetting sin of our earlier dramatists, and equally so from buffoonery. The subject resembles that of Kotzebue’s drama, the Stranger, but is managed with a nobler tone of morality. It is true that Mrs. Frankfort’s immediate surrender to her seducer, like that of Beaumelé in the Fatal Dowry, makes her contemptible; but this, though it might possibly have originated in the necessity created by the narrow limits of theatrical time, has the good effect of preventing that sympathy with her guilt, which is reserved for her penitence.

[1288] Collier, iii. 207. Kyd is author of Jeronymo, and of the
“Spanish Tragedy,” a continuation of the same story. Shakspeare has
selected some of their absurdities for ridicule, and has left an
abundant harvest for the reader. Parts of the Spanish Tragedy, Mr.
C. thinks, “are in the highest degree pathetic and interesting.”
This perhaps may be admitted, but Kyd is not, upon the whole, a
pleasing dramatist.

[1289] Lodge, one of the best poets of the age, was concerned, jointly
with Greene, in the Looking Glass for London. In this strange
performance the prophet Hosea is brought to Nineveh, and the
dramatis personæ, as far as they are serious, belong to that city:
but all the farcical part relates to London. Of Lodge Mr. C. says,
that he is “second to Kyd in vigour and boldness of conception, but
as a drawer of character, so essential a part of dramatic poetry,
he unquestionably has the advantage,” iii. 214.

[1290] The murder of Arden of Feversham occurred under Edward VI., but
the play was published in 1592. The impression made by the story
must have been deep to produce a tragedy so long afterwards. It is
said by Mr. Collier, that Professor Tieck has inclined to think
Arden of Feversham a genuine work of Shakspeare. I cannot but
venture to suspect that, if this distinguished critic were a
native, he would discern such differences of style, as render this
hypothesis improbable. The speeches in Arden of Feversham have
spirit and feeling, but there is none of that wit, that fertility
of analogical imagery, which the worst plays of Shakspeare display.
The language is also more plain and perspicuous than we ever find
in him, especially on a subject so full of passion. Mr. Collier
discerns the hand of Shakspeare in the Yorkshire Tragedy, and
thinks that “there are some speeches which could scarcely have
proceeded from any other pen,” Collier, iii. 51. It was printed
with his name in 1608; but this, which would be thought good
evidence in most cases, must not be held sufficient. It is
impossible to explain the grounds of internal persuasion in these
nice questions of æsthetic criticism, but I cannot perceive the
hand of Shakspeare in any of the anonymous tragedies.

|William Shakspeare.|

34. Of William Shakspeare,[1291] whom, through the mouths of those whom he has inspired to body forth the modifications of his immense mind, we seem to know better than any human writer, it may be truly said that we scarcely know anything. We see him, so far as we do see him, not in himself, but in a reflex image from the objectivity in which he was manifested; he is Falstaff, and Mercutio, and Malvolio, and Jaques, and Portia, and Imogen, and Lear, and Othello; but to us he is scarcely a determined person, a substantial reality of past time, the man Shakspeare. The two greatest names in poetry are to us little more than names. If we are not yet come to question his unity, as we do that of “the blind old man of Scio’s rocky isle,” an improvement in critical acuteness doubtless reserved for a distant posterity, we as little feel the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear, as we can give a distinct historic personality to Homer. All that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have hitherto detected about Shakspeare serves rather to disappoint and perplex us, than to furnish the slightest illustration of his character. It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name that we seek. No letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary can be produced.

[1291] Though I shall not innovate in a work of this kind, not
particularly relating to Shakspeare, I must observe, that Sir
Frederic Madden has offered very specious reasons (in the
Archæologia, vol. xxvi.), for believing that the poet and his
family spelt their name _Shakspere_, and that there are, at
least, no exceptions in his own autographs, as has commonly been
supposed. A copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne, a book which
he had certainly read (see Malone’s note on Tempest, act ii. scene
1), has been lately discovered with the name _W. Shakspere_
clearly written in it, and there seems no reason to doubt that it
is a genuine signature. This book has, very properly, been placed
in the British Museum, among the choice κειμηλια [keimêlia] of that
repository.

|His first writings for the stage.|

35. It is generally supposed that he settled in London about 1587, being then twenty-three years old. For some time afterwards we cannot trace him distinctly. Venus and Adonis, published in 1593, he describes in his dedication to Lord Southampton, as “the first heir of his invention.” It is however certain that it must have been written some years before, unless we take these words in a peculiar sense, for Greene, in his Groat’sworth of Wit, 1592, alludes, as we have seen, to Shakspeare as already known among dramatic authors. It appears by this passage, that he had converted the two plays on the wars of York and Lancaster into what we read as the second and third parts of Henry VI. What share he may have had in similar repairs of the many plays then represented, cannot be determined. It is generally believed that he had much to do with the tragedy of Pericles, which is now printed among his works, and which external testimony, though we should not rely too much on that as to Shakspeare, has assigned to him; but the play is full of evident marks of an inferior hand.[1292] Its date is unknown; Drake supposes it to have been his earliest work, rather from its inferiority than on any other ground. Titus Andronicus is now by common consent denied to be, in any sense, a production of Shakspeare; very few passages, I should think not one, resemble his manner.[1293]

[1292] Malone, in a dissertation on the tragedy of Pericles, maintained
that it was altogether an early work of Shakspeare. Stevens
contended that it was a production of some older poet, improved by
him; and Malone had the candour to own that he had been wrong. The
opinion of Stevens is now general. Drake gives the last three acts,
and part of the former, to Shakspeare; but I can hardly think his
share is by any means so large.

[1293] Notwithstanding this internal evidence, Meres, so early as 1598,
enumerates Titus Andronicus among the plays of Shakspeare, and
mentions no other but what is genuine. Drake, ii. 287. But, in
criticism of all kinds, we must acquire a dogged habit of resisting
testimony, when _res ipsa per se vociferatur_ to the contrary.

|Comedy of Errors.|

36. The Comedy of Errors may be presumed by an allusion it contains to have been written before the submission of Paris to Henry IV. in 1594, which nearly put an end to the civil war.[1294] It is founded on a very popular subject. This furnishes two extant comedies of Plautus, a translation from one of which, the Menœchmi, was represented in Italy earlier than any other play. It had been already, as Mr. Collier thinks, brought upon the stage in England; and another play, later than the Comedy of Errors, has been reprinted by Stevens. Shakspeare himself was so well pleased with the idea that he has returned to it in Twelfth Night. Notwithstanding the opportunity which these mistakes of identity furnish for ludicrous situations and for carrying on a complex plot, they are not very well adapted to dramatic effect, not only from the manifest difficulty of finding performers quite alike, but because, were this overcome, the audience must be in as great embarrassment as the represented characters themselves. In the Comedy of Errors there are only a few passages of a poetical vein, yet such perhaps as no other living dramatist could have written; but the story is well invented and well managed; the confusion of persons does not cease to amuse; the dialogue is easy and gay beyond what had been hitherto heard on the stage; there is little buffoonery in the wit, and no absurdity in the circumstances.

[1294] Act iii. scene 2. Some have judged the play from this passage
to be as early as 1591, but on precarious grounds.

|Two Gentlemen of Verona.|

37. The Two Gentlemen of Verona ranks above the Comedy of Errors, though still in the third class of Shakspeare’s plays. It was probably the first English comedy in which characters are drawn from social life, at once ideal and true; the cavaliers of Verona and their lady-loves are graceful personages, with no transgression of the probabilities of nature; but they are not exactly the real men and women of the same rank in England. The imagination of Shakspeare must have been guided by some familiarity with romances before it struck out this play. It contains some very poetical lines. Though these two plays could not give the slightest suspicion of the depth of thought which Lear and Macbeth were to display, it was already evident that the names of Greene, and even Marlowe, would be eclipsed without any necessity for purloining their plumes.

|Love’s Labour Lost.|

|Taming of the Shrew.|

38. Love’s Labour Lost is generally placed, I believe, at the bottom of the list. There is indeed little interest in the fable, if we can say that there is any fable at all; but there are beautiful coruscations of fancy, more original conception of character than in the Comedy of Errors, more lively humour than in the Gentlemen of Verona, more symptoms of Shakspeare’s future powers as a comic writer than in either. Much that is here but imperfectly developed came forth again in his later plays, especially in As you Like it, and Much Ado about Nothing. The Taming of the Shrew is the only play, except Henry VI., in which Shakspeare has been very largely a borrower. The best parts are certainly his, but it must be confessed, that several passages, for which we give him credit, and which are very amusing, belong to his unknown predecessor. The original play, reprinted by Stevens, was published in 1594.[1295] I do not find so much genius in the Taming of the Shrew as in Love’s Labour Lost; but, as an entire play, it is much more complete.

[1295] Mr. Collier thinks that Shakspeare had nothing to do with any
of the scenes where Katherine and Petruchio are not introduced. The
underplot resembles, he says, the style of Haughton, author of a
comedy called Englishmen for my Money, iii. 78.

|Midsummer Night’s Dream.|

39. The beautiful play of Midsummer Night’s Dream is placed by Malone as early as 1592; its superiority to those we have already mentioned affords some presumption that it was written after them. But it evidently belongs to the earlier period of Shakspeare’s genius; poetical as we account it, more than dramatic, yet rather so, because the indescribable profusion of imaginative poetry in this play overpowers our senses till we can hardly observe anything else, than from any deficiency of dramatic excellence. For in reality the structure of the fable, consisting as it does of three if not four actions, very distinct in their subjects and personages, yet wrought into each other without effort or confusion, displays the skill, or rather instinctive felicity of Shakspeare, as much as in any play he has written. No preceding dramatist had attempted to fabricate a complex plot, for low comic scenes, interspersed with a serious action upon which they have no influence, do not merit notice. The Menœchmi of Plautus had been imitated by others as well as by Shakspeare; but we speak here of original invention.

|Its machinery.|

40. The Midsummer Night’s Dream is, I believe, altogether original in one of the most beautiful conceptions that ever visited the mind of a poet, the fairy machinery. A few before him had dealt in a vulgar and clumsy manner with popular superstitions; but the sportive, beneficent, invisible population of the air and earth, long since established in the creed of childhood, and of those simple as children, had never for a moment been blended with “human mortals” among the personages of the drama. Lily’s Maid’s Metamorphosis is probably later than this play of Shakspeare, and was not published till 1600.[1296] It is unnecessary to observe that the fairies of Spenser, as he has dealt with them, are wholly of a different race.

[1296] Collier, iii. 185. Lily had, however, brought fairies, without
making them speak, into some of his earlier plays. Ibid.

|Its language.|

41. The language of Midsummer Night’s Dream is equally novel with the machinery. It sparkles in perpetual brightness with all the hues of the rainbow; yet there is nothing overcharged or affectedly ornamented. Perhaps no play of Shakspeare has fewer blemishes, or is from beginning to end in so perfect keeping; none in which so few lines could be erased, or so few expressions blamed. His own peculiar idiom, the dress of his mind, which began to be discernible in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, is more frequently manifested in the present play. The expression is seldom obscure, but it is never in poetry, and hardly in prose, the expression of other dramatists, and far less of the people. And here, without reviving the debated question of Shakspeare’s learning, I must venture to think, that he possessed rather more acquaintance with the Latin language than many believe. The phrases, unintelligible and improper, except in the sense of their primitive roots, which occur so copiously in his plays, seem to be unaccountable on the supposition of absolute ignorance. In the Midsummer Night’s Dream, these are much less frequent than in his later dramas. But here we find several instances. Thus, “things base and vile, holding no _quantity_,” for value; rivers, that “have overborn their _continents_,” the _continente ripa_ of Horace; “_compact_ of imagination;” “something of great _constancy_,” for consistency; “sweet Pyramus _translated_ there;” “the law of Athens, which by no means we may _extenuate_.” I have considerable doubts whether any of these expressions would be found in the contemporary prose of Elizabeth’s reign, which was less overrun by pedantry than that of her successor; but, could authority be produced for Latinisms so forced, it is still not very likely that one, who did not understand their proper meaning, would have introduced them into poetry. It would be a weak answer that we do not detect in Shakspeare any imitations of the Latin poets. His knowledge of the language may have been chiefly derived, like that of schoolboys, from the dictionary, and insufficient for the thorough appreciation of their beauties. But, if we should believe him well acquainted with Virgil or Ovid, it would be by no means surprising that his learning does not display itself in imitation. Shakspeare seems now and then to have a tinge on his imagination from former passages; but he never designedly imitates, though, as we have seen, he has sometimes adopted. The streams of invention flowed too fast from his own mind to leave him time to accommodate the words of a foreign language to our own. He knew that to create would be easier, and pleasanter, and better.[1297]

[1297] The celebrated essay by Farmer on the learning of Shakspeare,
put an end to such notions as we find in Warburton and many of the
older commentators, that he had imitated Sophocles, and I know not
how many Greek authors. Those indeed who agree with what I have
said in a former chapter as to the state of learning under
Elizabeth, will not think it probable that Shakspeare could have
acquired any knowledge of Greek. It was not a part of such
education as he received. The case of Latin is different: we know
that he was at a grammar school, and could hardly have spent two or
three years there without bringing away a certain portion of the
language.

|Romeo and Juliet.|

42. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is referred by Malone to the year 1596. Were I to judge by internal evidence, I should be inclined to date this play before the Midsummer Night’s Dream; the great frequency of rhymes, the comparative absence of Latinisms, the want of that thoughtful philosophy, which, when it had once germinated in Shakspeare’s mind, never ceased to display itself, and several of the faults that juvenility may best explain and excuse, would justify this inference.

|Its plot.|

43. In one of the Italian novels to which Shakspeare had frequently recourse for his fable, he had the good fortune to meet with this simple and pathetic subject. What he found he has arranged with great skill. The incidents in Romeo and Juliet are rapid, various, unintermitting in interest, sufficiently probable, and tending to the catastrophe. The most regular dramatist has hardly excelled one writing for an infant and barbarian stage. It is certain that the observation of the unity of time, which we find in this tragedy, unfashionable as the name of unity has become in our criticism, gives an intenseness of interest to the story, which is often diluted and dispersed in a dramatic history. No play of Shakspeare is more frequently represented, or honoured with more tears.

|Its beauties and blemishes.|

44. If from this praise of the fable we pass to other considerations, it will be more necessary to modify our eulogies. It has been said above of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, that none of Shakspeare’s plays have fewer blemishes. We can by no means repeat this commendation of Romeo and Juliet. It may be said rather that few, if any, are more open to reasonable censure; and we are almost equally struck by its excellencies and its defects.

45. Madame de Stael has truly remarked, that in Romeo and Juliet we have, more than in any other tragedy, the mere passion of love; love, in all its vernal promise, full of hope and innocence, ardent beyond all restraint of reason, but tender as it is warm. The contrast between this impetuosity of delirious joy, in which the youthful lovers are first displayed, and the horrors of the last scene, throws a charm of deep melancholy over the whole. Once alone each of them, in these earlier moments, is touched by a presaging fear; it passes quickly away from them, but is not lost on the reader. To him there is a sound of despair in the wild effusions of their hope, and the madness of grief is mingled with the intoxication of their joy. And hence it is that, notwithstanding its many blemishes, we all read and witness this tragedy with delight. It is a symbolic mirror of the fearful realities of life, where “the course of true love,” has so often “not run smooth,” and moments of as fond illusion as beguiled the lovers of Verona have been exchanged, perhaps as rapidly, not indeed for the dagger and the bowl, but for the many-headed sorrows and sufferings of humanity.

|The characters.|

46. The character of Romeo is one of excessive tenderness. His first passion for Rosaline, which no vulgar poet would have brought forward, serves to display a constitutional susceptibility. There is indeed so much of this in his deportment and language, that we might be in some danger of mistaking it for effeminacy, if the loss of his friend had not aroused his courage. It seems to have been necessary to keep down a little the other characters, that they might not overpower the principal one; and though we can by no means agree with Dryden, that if Shakspeare had not killed Mercutio, Mercutio would have killed him, there might have been some danger of his killing Romeo. His brilliant vivacity shows the softness of the other a little to a disadvantage. Juliet is a child, whose intoxication in loving and being loved whirls away the little reason she may have possessed. It is however impossible, in my opinion, to place her among the great female characters of Shakspeare’s creation.

|The language.|

47. Of the language of this tragedy what shall we say? It contains passages that every one remembers, that are among the nobler efforts of Shakspeare’s poetry, and many short and beautiful touches of his proverbial sweetness. Yet, on the other hand, the faults are in prodigious number. The conceits, the phrases that jar on the mind’s ear, if I may use such an expression, and interfere with the very emotion the poet would excite, occur at least in the first three acts without intermission. It seems to have formed part of his conception of this youthful and ardent pair, that they should talk irrationally. The extravagance of their fancy, however, not only forgets reason, but wastes itself in frigid metaphors and incongruous conceptions; the tone of Romeo is that of the most bombastic commonplace of gallantry, and the young lady differs only in being one degree more mad. The voice of virgin love has been counterfeited by the authors of many fictions: I know none who have thought the style of Juliet would represent it. Nor is this confined to the happier moments of their intercourse. False thoughts and misplaced phrases deform the whole of the third act. It may be added that, if not dramatic propriety, at least the interest of the character, is affected by some of Juliet’s allusions. She seems indeed to have profited by the lessons and language of her venerable guardian; and those who adopt the edifying principle of deducing a moral from all they read, may suppose that Shakspeare intended covertly to warn parents against the contaminating influence of such domestics. These censures apply chiefly to the first three acts; as the shadows deepen over the scene, the language assumes a tone more proportionate to the interest; many speeches are exquisitely beautiful; yet the tendency to quibbles is never wholly eradicated.

|Second period of Shakspeare.|

48. The plays we have hitherto mentioned, to which one or two more might be added, belong to the earlier class, or, as we might say, to his first manner. In the second period of his dramatic life, we should place his historical plays, and such others as were written before the end of the century or perhaps before the death of Elizabeth. The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Much Ado about Nothing, are among these. The versification in these is more studied, the pauses more artificially disposed, the rhymes, though not quite abandoned, become less frequent, the language is more vigorous and elevated, the principal characters are more strongly marked, more distinctly conceived, and framed on a deeper insight into mankind. Nothing in the earlier plays can be compared, in this respect, with the two Richards, or Shylock, or Falstaff, or Hotspur.

|The historical plays.|

49. Many attempts had been made to dramatise the English chronicles, but with the single exception of Marlowe’s Edward II., so unsuccessfully, that Shakspeare may be considered as almost an original occupant of the field. He followed historical truth with considerable exactness; and, in some of his plays, as in that of Richard II., and generally in Richard III. and Henry VIII., admitted no imaginary personages, nor any scenes of amusement. The historical plays have had a great effect on Shakspeare’s popularity. They have identified him with English feelings in English hearts, and are very frequently read more in childhood, and consequently better remembered than some of his superior dramas. And these dramatic chronicles borrowed surprising liveliness and probability from the national character and form of government. A prince, and a courtier, and a slave are the stuff on which the historic dramatist would have to work in some countries; but every class of freemen, in the just subordination, without which neither human society, nor the stage, which should be its mirror, can be more than a chaos of huddled units, lay open to the selection of Shakspeare. What he invented is as truly English, as truly historical, in the large sense of moral history, as what he read.

|Merchant of Venice.|

50. The Merchant of Venice is generally esteemed the best of Shakspeare’s comedies. This excellent play is referred to the year 1597.[1298] In the management of the plot, which is sufficiently complex without the slightest confusion or incoherence, I do not conceive that it has been surpassed in the annals of any theatre. Yet there are those who still affect to speak of Shakspeare as a barbarian; and others who, giving what they think due credit to his genius, deny him all judgment and dramatic taste. A comparison of his works with those of his contemporaries, and it is surely to them that we should look, will prove that his judgment is by no means the least of his rare qualities. This is not so remarkable in the mere construction of his fable, though the present comedy is absolutely perfect in that point of view, and several others are excellently managed, as in the general keeping of the characters, and the choice of incidents. If Shakspeare is sometimes extravagant, the Marstons and Middletons are seldom otherwise. The variety of characters in the Merchant of Venice, and the powerful delineation of those upon whom the interest chiefly depends, the effectiveness of many scenes in representation, the copiousness of the wit, and the beauty of the language, it would be superfluous to extol; nor is it our office to repeat a tale so often told as the praise of Shakspeare. In the language there is the commencement of a metaphysical obscurity which soon became characteristic; but it is perhaps less observable than in any later play.

[1298] Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, or Wit’s Treasury, 1598, has a
passage of some value in determining the age of Shakspeare’s plays,
both by what it contains, and by what it omits. “As Plautus and
Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the
Latins, so Shakspeare among the English is the most excellent in
both kinds for the stage; for comedy witness his Gentlemen of
Verona, his Errors, his Love’s Labour Lost, his Love’s Labour Won
[the original appellation of All’s Well that Ends Well], his
Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy
his Richard II., his Richard III., Henry IV., King John, _Titus
Andronicus_, and his Romeo and Juliet.” Drake, ii. 287.

|As You Like It.|

51. The sweet and sportive temper of Shakspeare, though it never deserted him, gave way to advancing years, and to the mastering force of serious thought. What he read we know but very imperfectly; yet, in the last years of this century, when five and thirty summers had ripened his genius, it seems that he must have transfused much of the wisdom of past ages into his own all-combining mind. In several of the historical plays, in the Merchant of Venice, and especially in As You Like It, the philosophic eye, turned inward on the mysteries of human nature, is more and more characteristic; and we might apply to the last comedy the bold figure that Coleridge has less appropriately employed as to the early poems, that “the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace.” In no other play, at least, do we find the bright imagination and fascinating grace of Shakspeare’s youth so mingled with the thoughtfulness of his maturer age. This play is referred with reasonable probability to the year 1600. Few comedies of Shakspeare are more generally pleasing, and its manifold improbabilities do not much affect us in perusal. The brave injured Orlando, the sprightly but modest Rosalind, the faithful Adam, the reflecting Jaques, the serene and magnanimous Duke, interest us by turns, though the play is not so well managed as to condense our sympathy, and direct it to the conclusion.

|Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour.|

52. The comic scenes of Shakspeare had generally been drawn from novels, and laid in foreign lands. But several of our earliest plays, as has been partly seen, delineate the prevailing manners of English life. None had acquired a reputation which endured beyond their own time till Ben Jonson in 1596 produced, at the age of twenty-two, his first comedy, Every Man in His Humour; an extraordinary monument of early genius, in what is seldom the possession of youth, a clear and unerring description of human character, various, and not extravagant beyond the necessities of the stage. He had learned the principles of comedy no doubt, from Plautus and Terence; for they were not to be derived from the moderns at home or abroad; but he could not draw from them the application of living passions and manners; and it would be no less unfair, as Gifford has justly observed, to make Bobadil a copy of Thraso, than to deny the dramatic originality of Kitely.

53. Every Man in his Humour is perhaps the earliest of European domestic comedies that deserves to be remembered; for the Mandragola of Machiavel shrinks to a mere farce in comparison.[1299] A much greater master of comic powers than Jonson was indeed his contemporary, and, as he perhaps fancied, his rival; but for some reason, Shakspeare had never yet drawn his story from the domestic life of his countrymen. Jonson avoided the common defect of the Italian and Spanish theatre, the sacrifice of all other dramatic objects to one only, a rapid and amusing succession of incidents; his plot is slight and of no great complexity; but his excellence is to be found in the variety of his characters, and in their individuality very clearly defined with little extravagance.

[1299] This would not have been approved by a modern literary
historian. Quelle etait, avant que Molière parût et même de son
temps, la comedie moderne comparable à la Calandria, à la
Mandragore, aux meilleures pieces de l’Arioste, à celles de
l’Aretin, du Cecchi, du Lasca, du Bentivoglio, de Francesco
d’Ambra, et de tant d’Autres? Ginguéné, vi. 316. This comes of
deciding before we know anything of the facts. Ginguéné might
possibly be able to read English, but certainly had no sort of
acquaintance with the English theatre. I should have no hesitation
in replying that we could produce at least forty comedies, before
the age of Molière, superior to the best of those he has mentioned,
and perhaps three times that number as good as the worst.