Chapter XXIII (2)

36. Charles, as we might expect, was not less inclined to this liberal pleasure than his predecessors. It was to his own cost that Prynne assaulted the stage in his immense volume, the Histrio-mastix. Even Milton, before the foul spirit had wholly entered into him, extolled the learned sock of Jonson, and the wild wood-notes of Shakspeare. But these days were soon to pass away; the ears of Prynne were avenged; by an order of the two houses of parliament, Sept. 2, 1642, the theatres were closed, as a becoming measure, during the season of public calamity and impending civil war; but, after some unsuccessful attempts to evade this prohibition, it was thought expedient, in the complete success of the party who had always abhorred the drama, to put a stop to it altogether; and another ordinance of Jan. 22, 1648, reciting the usual objections to all such entertainments, directed the theatres to be rendered unserviceable. We must refer the reader to the valuable work which has supplied the sketch of these pages for further knowledge;[537] it is more our province to follow the track of those who most distinguished a period so fertile in dramatic genius; and first, that of the greatest of them all.

[537] I have made no particular references to Mr. Collier’s
_double_ work, The History of English Dramatic Poetry, and Annals
of the Stage; it will be necessary for the reader to make use of
his index; but few books lately published contain so much
valuable and original information, though not entirely arranged
in the most convenient manner. He seems, nevertheless, to have
obligations to Dodsley’s preface to his Collection of Old Plays,
or rather, perhaps, to Reed’s edition of it.

|Shakspeare’s Twelfth Night.|

37. Those who originally undertook to marshal the plays of Shakspeare according to chronological order, always attending less to internal evidence than to the very fallible proofs of publication they could obtain, placed Twelfth Night last of all, in 1612 or 1613. It afterwards rose a little higher in the list; but Mr. Collier has finally proved that it was on the stage early in 1602, and was at that time chosen, probably as rather a new piece, for representation at one of the Inns of Court.[538] The general style resembles, in my judgment, that of Much Ado about Nothing, which is referred with probability to the year 1600. Twelfth Night, notwithstanding some very beautiful passages, and the humorous absurdity of Malvolio, has not the coruscations of wit and spirit of character that distinguish the excellent comedy it seems to have immediately followed; nor is the plot nearly so well constructed. Viola would be more interesting, if she had not indelicately, as well as unfairly towards Olivia, determined to win the Duke’s heart before she had seen him. The part of Sebastian has all that improbability which belongs to mistaken identity, without the comic effect for the sake of which that is forgiven in Plautus and in the Comedy of Errors.

[538] Vol. i., p. 327.

|Merry Wives of Windsor.|

38. The Merry Wives of Windsor is that work of Shakspeare in which he has best displayed English manners; for though there is something of this in the historical plays, yet we rarely see in them such a picture of actual life as comedy ought to represent. It may be difficult to say for what cause he has abstained from a source of gaiety whence his prolific invention and keen eye for the diversities of character might have drawn so much. The Masters Knowell and Well-born, the young gentlemen who spend their money freely, and make love to rich widows, an insipid race of personages, it must be owned, recur for ever in the old plays of James’s reign; but Shakspeare threw an ideality over this class of characters, the Bassanios, the Valentines, the Gratianos, and placed them in scenes which neither by dress nor manners recalled the prose of ordinary life.[539] In this play, however, the English gentleman, in age and youth, is brought upon the stage, slightly caricatured in Shallow, and far more so in Slender. The latter, indeed, is a perfect satire, and I think was so intended, on the brilliant youth of the provinces, such as we may believe it to have been before the introduction of newspapers and turnpike roads, awkward and boobyish among civil people, but at home in rude sports, and proud of exploits at which the town would laugh, yet perhaps with more courage and good nature than the laughers. No doubt can be raised that the family of Lucy is ridiculed in Shallow; but those who have had recourse to the old fable of the deer stealing, forget that Shakspeare never lost sight of his native county, and went, perhaps every summer, to Stratford. It is not impossible that some arrogance of the provincial squires towards a player, whom, though a gentleman by birth and the recent grant of arms, they might not reckon such, excited his malicious wit to those admirable delineations.

[539] “No doubt,” says Coleridge, “they (Beaumont and Fletcher)
imitated the ease of gentlemanly conversation better than
Shakspeare, who was unable not to be too much _associated_ to
succeed in this.” Table Talk, ii., 396. I am not quite sure that
I understand this expression; but probably the meaning is not
very different from what I have said.

39. The Merry Wives of Windsor was first printed in 1602, but very materially altered in a subsequent edition. It is wholly comic; so that Dodd, who published the Beauties of Shakspeare, confining himself to poetry, says it is the only play which afforded him nothing to extract. This play does not excite a great deal of interest; for Anne Page is but a sample of a character not very uncommon, which, under a garb of placid and decorous mediocrity, is still capable of pursuing its own will. But in wit and humorous delineation no other goes beyond it. If Falstaff seems, as Johnson has intimated, to have lost some of his powers of merriment, it is because he is humiliated to a point where even his invention and impudence cannot bear him off victorious. In the first acts he is still the same Jack Falstaff of the Boar’s Head. Jonson’s earliest comedy, Every Man in his Humour, had appeared a few years before the Merry Wives of Windsor; they both turn on English life in the middle classes, and on the same passion of jealousy. If, then, we compare these two productions of our greatest comic dramatists, the vast superiority of Shakspeare will appear undeniable. Kitely, indeed, has more energy, more relief, more perhaps of what might appear to his temper matter for jealousy, than the wretched, narrow-minded Ford; he is more of a gentleman, and commands a certain degree of respect; but dramatic justice is better dealt upon Ford by rendering him ridiculous, and he suits better the festive style of Shakspeare’s most amusing play. His light-hearted wife, on the other hand, is drawn with more spirit than Dame Kitely; and the most ardent admirer of Jonson would not oppose Master Stephen to Slender, or Bobadil to Falstaff. The other characters are not parallel enough to admit of comparison; but in their diversity (nor is Shakspeare, perhaps, in any one play more fertile), and their amusing peculiarity, as well as in the construction and arrangement of the story, the brilliancy of the wit, the perpetual gaiety of the dialogue, we perceive at once to whom the laurel must be given. Nor is this comparison instituted to disparage Jonson, whom we have praised, and shall have again to praise so highly, but to show how much easier it was to vanquish the rest of Europe than to contend with Shakspeare.

|Measure for Measure.|

40. Measure for Measure, commonly referred to the end of 1603, is perhaps, after Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth, the play in which Shakspeare struggles, as it were, most with the over-mastering power of his own mind; the depths and intricacies of being which he has searched and sounded with intense reflection, perplex and harass him; his personages arrest their course of action to pour forth, in language the most remote from common use, thoughts which few could grasp in the clearest expression; and thus he loses something of dramatic excellence in that of his contemplative philosophy. The Duke is designed as the representative of this philosophical character. He is stern and melancholy by temperament, averse to the exterior shows of power, and secretly conscious of some unfitness for its practical duties. The subject is not very happily chosen, but artfully improved by Shakspeare. In most of the numerous stories of a similar nature, which before or since his time have been related, the sacrifice of chastity is really made, and made in vain. There is, however, something too coarse and disgusting in such a story; and it would have deprived him of a splendid exhibition of character. The virtue of Isabella, inflexible and independent of circumstance, has something very grand and elevated; yet one is disposed to ask, whether, if Claudio had been really executed, the spectator would not have gone away with no great affection for her; and at least we now feel that her reproaches against her miserable brother when he clings to life like a frail and guilty being, are too harsh. There is great skill in the invention of Mariana, and without this the story could not have had anything like a satisfactory termination; yet it is never explained how the Duke had become acquainted with this secret, and being acquainted with it, how he had preserved his esteem and confidence in Angelo. His intention, as hinted towards the end, to marry Isabella, is a little too common-place, it is one of Shakspeare’s hasty half-thoughts. The language of this comedy is very obscure, and the text seems to have been printed with great inaccuracy. I do not value the comic parts highly; Lucio’s impudent profligacy, the result rather of sensual debasement than of natural ill disposition, is well represented; but Elbow is a very inferior repetition of Dogberry. In dramatic effect, Measure for Measure ranks high; the two scenes between Isabella and Angelo, that between her and Claudio, those where the Duke appears in disguise, and the catastrophe in the fifth act are admirably written and very interesting; except so far as the spectator’s knowledge of the two stratagems which have deceived Angelo may prevent him from participating in the indignation at Isabella’s imaginary wrong which her lamentations would excite. Several of the circumstances and characters are borrowed from the old play of Whetstone, Promos and Cassandra; but very little of the sentiments or language. What is good in Measure for Measure is Shakspeare’s own.

|Lear.|

41. If originality of invention did not so much stamp almost every play of Shakspeare that to name one as the most original seems a disparagement to others, we might say that this great prerogative of genius was exercised above all in Lear. It diverges more from the model of regular tragedy than Macbeth or Othello, and even more than Hamlet; but the fable is better constructed than in the last of these, and it displays full as much of the almost superhuman inspiration of the poet as the other two. Lear himself is perhaps the most wonderful of dramatic conceptions, ideal to satisfy the most romantic imagination, yet idealized from the reality of nature. In preparing us for the most intense sympathy with this old man, he first abases him to the ground; it is not Œdipus, against whose respected age the gods themselves have conspired; it is not Orestes, noble minded and affectionate, whose crime has been virtue; it is a headstrong feeble and selfish being, whom, in the first act of the tragedy, nothing seems capable of redeeming in our eyes; nothing but what follows, intense woe, unnatural wrong. Then comes on that splendid madness, not absurdly sudden, as in some tragedies, but in which the strings that keep his reasoning power together give way one after the other in the frenzy of rage and grief. Then it is that we find what in life may sometimes be seen, the intellectual energies grow stronger in calamity, and especially under wrong. An awful eloquence belongs to unmerited suffering. Thoughts burst out, more profound than Lear in his prosperous hour could ever have conceived; inconsequent, for such is the condition of madness, but in themselves fragments of coherent truth, the reason of an unreasonable mind.

|Timon of Athens.|

42. Timon of Athens is cast as it were in the same mould as Lear; it is the same essential character, the same generosity more from wanton ostentation than love of others, the same fierce rage under the smart of ingratitude, the same rousing up, in that tempest, of powers that had slumbered unsuspected in some deep recess of the soul; for had Timon or Lear known that philosophy of human nature in their calmer moments which fury brought forth, they would never have had such terrible occasion to display it. The thoughtless confidence of Lear in his children has something in it far more touching than the self-beggary of Timon; though both one and the other have prototypes enough in real life. And as we give the old king more of our pity, so a more intense abhorrence accompanies his daughters and the worse characters of that drama, than we spare for the miserable sycophants of the Athenian. Their thanklessness is anticipated, and springs from the very nature of their calling; it verges on the beaten road of comedy. In this play there is neither a female personage, except two courtezans, who hardly speak, nor any prominent character (the honest steward is not such) redeemed by virtue enough to be estimable; for the cynic Apemantus is but a cynic, and ill replaces the noble Kent of the other drama. The fable, if fable it can be called, is so extraordinarily deficient in action, a fault of which Shakspeare is not guilty in any other instance, that we may wonder a little how he should have seen in the single delineation of Timon a counterbalance for the manifold objections to this subject. But there seems to have been a period of Shakspeare’s life when his heart was ill at ease, and ill content with the world or his own conscience; the memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the experience of man’s worser nature, which intercourse with ill-chosen associates, by choice or circumstance, peculiarly teaches;--these, as they sank down into the depths of his great mind, seem not only to have inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary character, the censurer of mankind. This type is first seen in the philosophic melancholy of Jaques, gazing with an undiminished serenity, and with a gaiety of fancy, though not of manners, on the follies of the world. It assumes a graver cast in the exiled Duke of the same play, and next one rather more severe in the Duke of Measure for Measure. In all these, however, it is merely contemplative philosophy. In Hamlet, this is mingled with the impulses of a perturbed heart under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances; it shines no longer, as in the former characters, with a steady light, but plays in fitful coruscations amidst feigned gaiety and extravagance. In Lear it is the flash of sudden inspiration across the incongruous imagery of madness; in Timon it is obscured by the exaggerations of misanthropy. These plays all belong to nearly the same period: As you Like It, being usually referred to 1600; Hamlet, in its altered form, to about 1602; Timon to the same year; Measure for Measure to 1603, and Lear to 1604. In the later plays of Shakspeare, especially in Macbeth and the Tempest, much of moral speculation will be found, but he has never returned to this type of character in the personages. Timon is less read and less pleasing than the great majority of Shakspeare’s plays; but it abounds with signs of his genius. Schlegel observes that of all his works it is that which has most satire; comic in representation of the parasites, indignant and Juvenalian in the bursts of Timon himself.

|Pericles.|

43. Pericles is generally reckoned to be in part, and only in part, the work of Shakspeare. From the poverty and bad management of the fable, the want of any effective or distinguishable character, for Marina is no more than the common form of female virtue, such as all the dramatists of that age could draw, and a general feebleness of the tragedy as a whole, I should not believe the structure to have been Shakspeare’s. But many passages are far more in his manner than in that of any contemporary writer with whom I am acquainted; and the extrinsic testimony, though not conclusive, being of some value, I should not dissent from the judgment of Steevens and Malone, that it was, in no inconsiderable degree, repaired and improved by his touch. Drake has placed it under the year 1590, as the earliest of Shakspeare’s plays, for no better reason, apparently, than that he thought it inferior to all the rest. But if, as most will agree, it were not quite his own, this reason will have less weight; and the language seems to me rather that of his second or third manner than of his first. Pericles is not known to have existed before 1609.

44. The majority of readers, I believe, assign to Macbeth, which seems to have been written about 1606, the pre-eminence among the works of Shakspeare; many, however, would rather name Othello, one of his latest, which is referred to 1611; and a few might prefer Lear to either. The great epic drama, as the first may be called, deserves, in my own judgment, the post it has attained, as being, in the language of Drake, “the greatest effort of our author’s genius, the most sublime and impressive drama which the world has ever beheld.” It will be observed that Shakspeare had now turned his mind towards the tragic drama. No tragedy but Romeo and Juliet belongs to the sixteenth century; ten, without counting Pericles, appeared in the first eleven years of the present. It is not my design to distinguish each of his plays separately; and it will be evident that I pass over some of the greatest. No writer, in fact, is so well known as Shakspeare, or has been so abundantly, and, on the whole, so ably criticised; I might have been warranted in saying even less than I have done.

|His Roman tragedies. Julius Cæsar.|

45. Shakspeare was, as I believe, conversant with the better class of English literature which the reign of Elizabeth afforded. Among other books, the translation by North, of Amyot’s Plutarch, seems to have fallen into his hands about 1607. It was the source of three tragedies founded on the lives of Brutus, Antony, and Coriolanus, the first bearing the name of Julius Cæsar. In this the plot wants even that historical unity which the romantic drama requires; the third and fourth acts are ill connected; it is deficient in female characters, and in that combination which is generally apparent amidst all the intricacies of his fable. But it abounds in fine scenes and fine passages; the spirit of Plutarch’s Brutus is well seized, the predominance of Cæsar himself is judiciously restrained, the characters have that individuality which Shakspeare seldom misses; nor is there, perhaps, in the whole range of ancient and modern eloquence a speech more fully realising the perfection that orators have striven to attain than that of Antony.

|Antony and Cleopatra.|

46. Antony and Cleopatra is of rather a different order; it does not furnish, perhaps, so many striking beauties as the last, but is at least equally redolent of the genius of Shakspeare. Antony, indeed, was given him by history, and he has but embodied in his own vivid colours the irregular mind of the Triumvir, ambitious and daring against all enemies but himself. In Cleopatra he had less to guide him; she is another incarnation of the same passions, more lawless and insensible to reason and honour, as they are found in women. This character being not one that can please, its strong and spirited delineation has not been sufficiently observed. It has, indeed, only a poetical originality; the type was in the courtezan of common life, but the resemblance is that of Michael Angelo’s Sybils to a muscular woman. In this tragedy, like Julius Cæsar, as has been justly observed by Schlegel, the events that do not pass on the stage are scarcely made clear enough to one who is not previously acquainted with history, and some of the persons appear and vanish again without sufficient reason. He has, in fact, copied Plutarch too exactly.

|Coriolanus.|

47. This fault is by no means discerned in the third Roman tragedy of Shakspeare, Coriolanus. He luckily found an intrinsic historical unity which he could not have destroyed, and which his magnificent delineation of the chief personage has thoroughly maintained. Coriolanus himself has the grandeur of sculpture; his proportions are colossal, nor would less than this transcendent superiority by which he towers over his fellow-citizens, warrant, or seem for the moment to warrant, his haughtiness and their pusillanimity. The surprising judgment of Shakspeare is visible in this. A dramatist of the second class, a Corneille, a Schiller, or an Alfieri, would not have lost the occasion of representing the plebeian form of courage and patriotism. A tribune would have been made to utter noble speeches, and some critics would have extolled the balance and contrast of the antagonist principles. And this might have degenerated into the general saws of ethics and politics, which philosophical tragedians love to pour forth. But Shakspeare instinctively perceived that to render the arrogance of Coriolanus endurable to the spectator, or dramatically probable, he must abase the plebeians to a contemptible populace. The sacrifice of historic truth is often necessary for the truth of poetry. The citizens of early Rome, “_rusticorum mascula militum proles_,” are indeed calumniated in his scenes, and might almost pass for burgesses of Stratford; but the unity of emotion is not dissipated by contradictory energies. Coriolanus is less rich in poetical style than the other two, but the comic parts are full of humour. In these three tragedies it is manifest that Roman character, and still more Roman manners, are not exhibited with the precision of a scholar; yet there is something that distinguishes them from the rest, something of a _grandiosity_ in the sentiments and language, which shows us that Shakspeare had not read that history without entering into its spirit.

|His retirement and death.|

48. Othello, or perhaps the Tempest, is reckoned by many the latest of Shakspeare’s works. In the zenith of his faculties, in possession of fame disproportionate indeed to what has since accrued to his memory, but beyond that of any contemporary, at the age of about forty-seven, he ceased to write, and settled himself at a distance from all dramatic associations in his own native town; a home, of which he had never lost sight, nor even permanently quitted, the birthplace of his children, and to which he brought what might then seem affluence in a middle station, with the hope, doubtless, of a secure decline into the yellow leaf of years. But he was cut off in 1616, not probably in the midst of any schemes for his own glory, but to the loss of those enjoyments which he had accustomed himself to value beyond it. His descendants, it is well known, became extinct in little more than half a century.

|Greatness of his genius.|

49. The name of Shakspeare is the greatest in our literature--it is the greatest in all literature. No man ever came near to him in the creative powers of the mind; no man had ever such strength at once, and such variety of imagination. Coleridge has most felicitously applied to him a Greek epithet, given before to I know not whom, certainly none so deserving of it, μυριονους [myrionous], the thousand-souled Shakspeare.[540] The number of characters in his plays is astonishingly great, without reckoning those, who, although transient, have often their individuality, all distinct, all types of human life in well defined differences. Yet he never takes an abstract quality to embody it, scarcely perhaps a definite condition of manners, as Jonson does; nor did he draw much, as I conceive, from living models; there is no manifest appearance of personal caricature in his comedies, though in some slight traits of character this may not improbably have been the case. Above all, neither he nor his contemporaries wrote for the stage in the worst, though most literal, and of late years the most usual sense; making the servants and handmaids of dramatic invention to lord over it, and limiting the capacities of the poet’s mind to those of the performers. If this poverty of the representative department of the drama had hung like an incumbent fiend on the creative power of Shakspeare, how would he have poured forth with such inexhaustible prodigality the vast diversity of characters that we find in some of his plays? This it is in which he leaves far behind not the dramatists alone, but all writers of fiction. Compare with him Homer, the tragedians of Greece, the poets of Italy, Plautus, Cervantes, Molière, Addison, Le Sage, Fielding, Richardson, Scott, the romancers of the elder or later schools--one man has far more than surpassed them all. Others may have been as sublime, others may have been more pathetic, others may have equalled him in grace and purity of language, and have shunned some of its faults; but the philosophy of Shakspeare, his intimate searching out of the human heart, whether in the gnomic form of sentence, or in the dramatic exhibition of character, is a gift peculiarly his own. It is, if not entirely wanting, very little manifested in comparison with him, by the English dramatists of his own and the subsequent period, whom we are about to approach.

[540] Table-talk, vol. ii., p. 301. Coleridge had previously
spoken of Shakspeare’s _oceanic_ mind, which, if we take it in
the sense of multitudinous unity, ποντιων κυματων ανηριθμον
γελασμα [pontiôn kymatôn anêrithmon gelasma], will present the
same idea as μυριονουσ [myrionous] in a beautiful image.

|His judgment.|

50. These dramatists, as we shall speedily perceive, are hardly less inferior to Shakspeare in judgment. To this quality I particularly advert, because foreign writers, and sometimes our own, have imputed an extraordinary barbarism and rudeness to his works. They belong indeed to an age sufficiently rude and barbarous in its entertainments, and are of course to be classed with what is called the romantic school, which has hardly yet shaken off that reproach. But no one who has perused the plays anterior to those of Shakspeare, or contemporary with them, or subsequent to them down to the closing of the theatres in the civil war, will pretend to deny that there is far less regularity, in regard to everything where regularity can be desired, in a large proportion of these (perhaps in all the tragedies) than in his own. We need only repeat the names of the Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, the Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure. The plots in these are excellently constructed, and in some with uncommon artifice. But even where an analysis of the story might excite criticism, there is generally an unity of interest which tones the whole. The Winter’s Tale is not a model to follow, but we feel that the Winter’s Tale is a single story; it is even managed as such with consummate skill. It is another proof of Shakspeare’s judgment, that he has given action enough to his comedies without the bustling intricacy of the Spanish stage. If his plots have any little obscurity in some parts, it is from copying his novel or history too minutely.

51. The idolatry of Shakspeare has been carried so far of late years, that Drake and perhaps greater authorities have been unwilling to acknowledge any faults in his plays. This, however, is an extravagance rather derogatory to the critic than honourable to the poet. Besides the blemishes of construction in some of his plots, which are pardonable but still blemishes, there are too many in his style. His conceits and quibbles often spoil the effect of his scenes and take off from the passion he would excite. In the last act of Richard II., the Duke of York is introduced demanding the punishment of his son Aumale for a conspiracy against the king, while the Duchess implores mercy. The scene is ill conceived and worse executed throughout; but one line is both atrocious and contemptible. The Duchess having dwelt on the word _pardon_, and urged the king to let her hear it from his lips, York takes her up with this stupid quibble:

Speak it in French, King; say, Pardonnez moi.

It would not be difficult to find several other instances, though none, perhaps, quite so bad, of verbal equivocations, misplaced and inconsistent with the person’s, the author’s, the reader’s sentiment.

|His obscurity.|

52. Few will defend these notorious faults. But is there not one, less frequently mentioned, yet of more continual recurrence; the extreme obscurity of Shakspeare’s diction? His style is full of new words and new senses. It is easy to pass this over as obsoleteness; but though many expressions are obsolete and many provincial, though the labour of his commentators has never been so profitably, as well as so diligently, employed as in tracing this by the help of the meanest and most forgotten books of the age, it is impossible to deny that innumerable lines in Shakspeare were not more intelligible in his time than they are at present. Much of this may be forgiven, or rather is so incorporated with the strength of his reason and fancy that we love it as the proper body of Shakspeare’s soul. Still can we justify the very numerous passages which yield to no interpretation, knots which are never unloosed, which conjecture does but cut, or even those, which if they may at last be understood, keep the attention in perplexity till the first emotion has passed away? And these occur not merely in places where the struggles of the speaker’s mind may be well denoted by some obscurities of language, as in the soliloquies of Hamlet and Macbeth, but in dialogues between ordinary personages, and in the business of the play. We learn Shakspeare, in fact, as we learn a language, or as we read a difficult passage in Greek, with the eye glancing on the commentary; and it is only after much study that we come to forget a part, it can be but a part, of the perplexities he has caused us. This was no doubt one reason that he was less read formerly, his style passing for obsolete, though in many parts, as we have just said, it was never much more intelligible than it is.[541]

[541] “Shakspeare’s style is so pestered with figurative
expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure. It is true
that in his later plays he had worn off somewhat of this
rust.”--Dryden’s Works (Malone), vol. ii., part ii., p. 252. This
is by no means the truth, but rather the reverse of it: Dryden
knew not at all which were earlier, or which later, of
Shakspeare’s plays.

|His popularity.|

53. It does not appear probable that Shakspeare was ever placed below, or merely on a level with the other dramatic writers of this period.[542] That his plays were not so frequently represented as those of Fletcher, is little to the purpose; they required a more expensive decoration, a larger company of good performers, and above all, they were less intelligible to a promiscuous audience. But it is certain that throughout the seventeenth century, and even in the writings of Addison and his contemporaries, we seldom or never meet with that complete recognition of his supremacy, that unhesitating preference of him to all the world, which has become the faith of the last and the present century. And it is remarkable that this apotheosis, so to speak, of Shakspeare was originally the work of what has been styled a frigid and tasteless generation--the age of George II. Much is certainly due to the stage itself, when those appeared, who could guide and control the public taste, and discover that in the poet himself which sluggish imaginations could not have reached. The enthusiasm for Shakspeare is nearly coincident with that for Garrick; it was kept up by his followers, and especially by that highly-gifted family which has but recently been withdrawn from our stage.

[542] A certain William Cartwright, in commendatory verses
addressed to Fletcher, has the assurance to say:

Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies
I’ th’ ladies’ questions, and the fools’ replies.

But the suffrage of Jonson himself, of Milton, and of many more
that might be quoted, tends to prove that his genius was esteemed
beyond that of any other, though some might compare inferior
writers to him in other qualifications of the dramatist. Even
Dryden, who came in a worse period, and had no undue reverence
for Shakspeare, admits that “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
anything, 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.”--Dryden’s
Prose Works (Malone’s edition), vol. i., part ii., p. 99.

|Critics on Shakspeare.|

54. Among the commentators on Shakspeare, Warburton, always striving to display his own acuteness and scorn of others, deviates more than anyone else from the meaning. Theobald was the first who did a little. Johnson explained much well, but there is something magisterial in the manner wherein he dismisses each play like a boy’s exercise, that irritates the reader. His criticism is frequently judicious, but betrays no ardent admiration for Shakspeare. Malone and Steevens were two laborious commentators on the meaning of words and phrases; one dull, the other clever; but the dullness was accompanied by candour and a love of truth, the cleverness by a total absence of both. Neither seems to have had a full discernment of Shakspeare’s genius. The numerous critics of the last age who were not editors have poured out much that is trite and insipid, much that is hypercritical and erroneous; yet, collectively, they not only bear witness to the public taste for the poet, but taught men to judge and feel more accurately than they would have done for themselves. Hurd and Lord Kaimes, especially the former, may be reckoned among the best of this class;[543] Mrs. Montagu, perhaps, in her celebrated Essay, not very far from the bottom of the list. In the present century, Coleridge and Schlegel, so nearly at the same time that the question of priority and even plagiarism has been mooted, gave a more philosophical, and, at the same time, a more intrinsically exact view of Shakspeare, than their predecessors. What has since been written, has often been highly acute and æsthetic, but occasionally with an excess of refinement which substitutes the critic for the work. Mrs. Jameson’s Essays on the Female Characters of Shakspeare are among the best. It was right that this province of illustration should be reserved for a woman’s hand.

[543] Hurd, in his notes on Horace’s Art of Poetry, vol. .,
p. 52, has some very good remarks on the diction of Shakspeare,
suggested by the “callida junctura” of the Roman poet,
illustrated by many instances. These remarks both serve to bring
out the skill of Shakspeare, and to explain the disputed passage
in Horace. Hurd justly maintains the obvious construction of that
passage: “notum si callida verbum Reddiderit junctura novum.”
That proposed by Lambinus and Beattie, which begins with _novum_,
is inadmissible, and gives a worse sense.

|Ben Jonson.|

55. Ben Jonson, so generally known by that familiar description that some might hardly recognise him without it, was placed next to Shakspeare by his own age. They were much acquainted, and belonged to the oldest, perhaps, and not the worst of clubs, formed by Sir Walter Raleigh about the beginning of the century, which met at the Mermaid in Friday-street. We may easily believe the testimony of one of its members, that it was a feast of the most subtle and brilliant wit.[544] Jonson had abundant powers of poignant and sarcastic humour, besides extensive reading, and Shakspeare must have brought to the Mermaid the brightness of his fancy. Selden and Camden, the former in early youth, are reported to have given the ballast of their strong sense and learning to this cluster of poets. There has been, however, a prevalent tradition that Jonson was not without some malignant and envious feelings towards Shakspeare. Gifford has repelled this imputation with considerable success, though we may still suspect that there was something caustic and saturnine in the temper of Jonson.

[544] Gifford’s Life of Jonson, p. 65. Collier, iii., 275.

|The Alchemist.|

56. The Alchemist is a play which long remained on the stage, though I am not sure that it has been represented since the days of Garrick, who was famous in Abel Drugger. Notwithstanding the indiscriminate and injudicious panegyric of Gifford, I believe there is no reader of taste but will condemn the outrageous excess of pedantry with which the first acts of this play abound; pedantry the more intolerable, that it is not even what, however unfit for the English stage, scholars might comprehend, but the gibberish of obscure treatises on alchemy, which, whatever the commentators may chuse to say, was as unintelligible to all but a few half-witted dupes of that imposture as it is at present. Much of this, it seems impossible to doubt, was omitted in representation. Nor is his pedantic display of learning confined to the part of the Alchemist, who had certainly a right to talk in the style of his science, if he had done it with some moderation: Sir Epicure Mammon, a worldly sensualist, placed in the author’s own age, pours out a torrent of gluttonous cookery from the kitchens of Heliogabalus and Apicius; his dishes are to be camels’ heels, the beards of barbels and dissolved pearl, crowning all with the paps of a sow. But while this habitual error of Jonson’s vanity is not to be overlooked, we may truly say, that it is much more than compensated by the excellencies of this comedy. The plot, with great simplicity, is continually animated and interesting; the characters are conceived and delineated with admirable boldness, truth, spirit, and variety; the humour, especially in the two Puritans, a sect who now began to do penance on the stage, is amusing; the language, when it does not smell too much of book-learning, is forcible and clear. The Alchemist is one of the three plays which usually contest the superiority among those of Jonson.

|Volpone or The Fox.|

57. The second of these is The Fox, which, according to general opinion, has been placed above the Alchemist. Notwithstanding the dissent of Gifford, I should concur in this suffrage. The fable belongs to a higher class of comedy. Without minutely inquiring whether the Roman hunters after the inheritance of the rich, so well described by Horace, and especially the costly presents by which they endeavoured to secure a better return, are altogether according to the manners of Venice, where Jonson has laid his scene, we must acknowledge that he has displayed the base cupidity, of which there will never be wanting examples among mankind, in such colours as all other dramatic poetry can hardly rival. Cumberland has blamed the manner, in which Volpone brings ruin on his head by insulting, in disguise, those whom he had duped. In this, I agree with Gifford, there is no violation of nature. Besides their ignorance of his person, so that he could not necessarily foresee the effects of Voltore’s rage, it has been well and finely said by Cumberland himself, that there is a moral in a villain’s out-witting himself. And this is one that many dramatists have displayed.

58. In the choice of subject, The Fox is much inferior to Tartuffe, to which it bears some very general analogy. Though the Tartuffe is not a remarkably agreeable play, The Fox is much less so; five of the principal characters are wicked almost beyond any retribution that comedy can dispense; the smiles it calls forth are not those of gaiety but scorn; and the parts of an absurd English knight and his wife, though very humorous, are hardly prominent enough to enliven the scenes of guilt and fraud which pass before our eyes. But, though too much pedantry obtrudes itself, it does not overspread the pages with nonsense, as in the Alchemist; the characters of Celia and Bonario excite some interest; the differences, one can hardly say the gradations, of villainy are marked with the strong touches of Jonson’s pen; the incidents succeed rapidly and naturally; the dramatic effect, above all, is perceptible to every reader, and rises in a climax through the last two acts to the conclusion.

|The Silent Woman.|

59. The Silent Woman, which has been named by some with the Alchemist and the Fox, falls much below them in vigorous delineation and dramatic effect. It has more diversity of manners than of character, the amusing scenes border sometimes on farce, as where two cowardly knights are made to receive blows in the dark, each supposing them to come from his adversary, and the catastrophe is neither pleasing nor probable. It is written with a great deal of spirit, and has a value as the representation of London life in the higher ranks at that time. But, upon the whole, I should be inclined to give to Every Man in his Humour a much superior place. It is a proof of Jonson’s extensive learning that the story of this play, and several particular passages, have been detected in a writer so much out of the beaten track as Libanius.[545]

[545] Gifford discovered this. Dryden, who has given an
examination of the Silent Woman, in his Essay on Dramatic Poetry,
takes Morose for a real character, and says that he had so been
informed. It is possible that there might be some foundation of
truth in this; the skeleton is in Libanius, but Jonson may have
filled it up from the life. Dryden gives it as his opinion that
there is more wit and acuteness of fancy in this play than in any
of Ben Jonson’s, and that he has described the conversation of
gentlemen with more gaiety and freedom than in the rest of his
comedies, p. 107.

|Sad Shepherd.|

60. The pastoral drama of the Sad Shepherd is the best testimony to the poetical imagination of Jonson. Superior in originality, liveliness, and beauty, to the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, it reminds us rather, in language and imagery, of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, perhaps, no other poetry has come so near to that of Shakspeare. Jonson, like him, had an extraordinary command of English, in its popular and provincial idioms, as well as what might be gained from books; and though his invincible pedantry now and then obtrudes itself into the mouths of shepherds, it is compensated by numerous passages of the most natural and graceful expression. This beautiful drama is imperfect, hardly more than half remaining, or more probably having ever been written. It was also Jonson’s last song; age and poverty had stolen upon him; but, as one has said, who experienced the same destiny, “the life was in the leaf,” and his laurel remained verdant amidst the snow of his honoured head. The beauties of the Sad Shepherd might be reckoned rather poetical than dramatic; yet the action is both diversified and interesting to a degree we seldom find in the pastoral drama; there is little that is low in the comic speeches, nothing that is inflated in the serious.

|Beaumont and Fletcher.|

61. Two men, once united by friendship, and for ever by fame, the Dioscuri of our zodiac, Beaumont and Fletcher, rose upon the horizon as the star of Shakspeare, though still in its fullest brightness, was declining in the sky. The first, in order of time, among more than fifty plays published with their joint names, is the Woman-Hater, represented, according to Langbaine, in 1607, and ascribed to Beaumont alone by Seward, though, I believe, merely on conjecture.[546] Beaumont died, at the age of thirty, in 1615; Fletcher in 1625. No difference of manner is perceptible, or, at least, no critic has perceived any, in the plays that appeared between these two epochs; in fact, the greater part were not printed till 1647, and it is only through the records of the play-house that we distinguish their dates. The tradition, however, of their own times, as well as the earlier death of Beaumont, give us reason to name Fletcher, when we mention one singly, as the principal author of all these plays; and, of late years, this has, perhaps, become more customary than it used to be. A contemporary copy of verses, indeed, seems to attribute the greater share in the Maid’s Tragedy, Philaster, and King and no King, to Beaumont. But testimony of this kind is very precarious. It is sufficient that he bore a part in these three.

[546] Vol. i., p. 3. He also thinks The Nice Valour exclusively
Beaumont’s. These two appear to me about the worst in the
collection.

|Corrupt state of their text.|

62. Of all our early dramatic poets, none have suffered such mangling by the printer as Beaumont and Fletcher. Their style is generally elliptical, and not very perspicuous; they use words in peculiar senses, and there seems often an attempt at pointed expression, in which its meaning has deserted them. But, after every effort to comprehend their language, it is continually so remote from all possibility of bearing a rational sense, that we can only have recourse to one hypothesis, that of an extensive and irreparable corruption of the text. Seward and Simpson, who, in 1750, published the first edition in which any endeavour was made at illustration or amendment, though not men of much taste, and too fond of extolling their authors, showed some acuteness, and have restored many passages in a probable manner, though often driven out at sea to conjecture something, where the received reading furnished not a vestige which they could trace. No one since has made any great progress in this criticism, though some have carped at these editors for not performing more. The problem of actual restoration in most places, where the printers or transcribers have made such strange havoc, must evidently be insoluble.

|The Maid’s Tragedy.|

63. The first play in the collected works of Beaumont and Fletcher, though not the earliest, is the Maid’s Tragedy, and it is among the best. None of their female characters, though they are often very successful in beautiful delineations of virtuous love, attaches our sympathy like Aspasia. Her sorrows are so deep, so pure, so unmerited, she sustains the breach of plighted faith in Amyntor, and the taunts of vicious women with so much resignation, so little of that termagant resentment these poets are apt to infuse into their heroines, the poetry of her speeches is so exquisitely imaginative, that, of those dramatic persons who are not prominent in the development of a story, scarce any, even in Shakspeare, are more interesting. Nor is the praise due to the Maid’s Tragedy confined to the part of Aspasia. In Melantius we have Fletcher’s favourite character, the brave, honest soldier, incapable of suspecting evil, till it becomes impossible to be ignorant of it, but unshrinking in its punishment. That of Evadne well displays the audacious security of guilt under the safeguard of power; it is highly theatrical, and renders the success of this tragedy not surprising in times when its language and situations could be endured by the audience. We may remark in this tragedy, as in many others of these dramatists, that, while pouring out the unlimited loyalty fashionable at the court of James, they are full of implied satire, which could hardly escape observation. The warm eulogies on military glory, the scorn of slothful peace, the pictures of dissolute baseness in courtiers, seem to spring from a dislike, very usual among the English gentry, a rank to which they both belonged, for that ignominious government; and though James was far enough removed from such voluptuous tyrants as Fletcher has pourtrayed in this and some other plays, they did not serve to exemplify the advantages of monarchy in the most attractive manner.

64. The Maid’s Tragedy, unfortunately, beautiful and essentially moral as it is, cannot be called a tragedy for maids; and, indeed, should hardly be read by any respectable woman. It abounds with that studiously protracted indecency which distinguished Fletcher beyond all our early dramatists, and is so much incorporated with his plays, that very few of them can be so altered as to become tolerable at present on the stage. In this he is strikingly contrasted with Shakspeare, whose levities of this kind are so transitory, and so much confined to language, that he has borne the process of purification with little detriment to his genius, or even to his wit.

|Philaster.|

65. Philaster has been in his day one of the best known and most popular of Fletcher’s plays.[547] This was owing to the pleasing characters of Philaster and Bellario, and to the frequent sweetness of the poetry. It is nevertheless not a first-rate play. The plot is most absurdly managed. It turns on the suspicion of Arethusa’s infidelity. And the sole ground of this is that an abandoned woman, being detected herself, accuses the princess of unchastity. Not a shadow of presumptive evidence is brought to confirm this impudent assertion, which, however, the lady’s father, her lover, and a grave sensible courtier do not fail implicitly to believe. How unlike the chain of circumstance, and the devilish cunning by which the Moor is wrought up to think his Desdemona false! Bellario is suggested by Viola; there is more picturesqueness, more dramatic importance, not, perhaps, more beauty and sweetness of affection, but a more eloquent development of it in Fletcher; on the other hand, there is still more of that improbability which attends a successful concealment of sex by mere disguise of clothes, though no artifice has been more common on the stage. Many other circumstances in the conduct of Fletcher’s story are ill-contrived. It has less wit than the greater part of his comedies; for among such, according to the old distinction, it is to be ranked, though the subject is elevated and serious.

[547] Dryden says, but I know not how truly, that Philaster was
“the first play that brought Beaumont and Fletcher in esteem; for
before that they had written two or three very unsuccessfully,”
p. 100. Philaster was not printed, according to Langbaine, till
1620; I do not know that we have any evidence of the date of its
representation.

|King and No King.|

66. King and No King is, in my judgment, inferior to Philaster. The language has not so much of poetical beauty. The character of Arbaces excites no sympathy; it is a compound of vain-glory and violence, which rather demands disgrace from poetical justice than reward. Panthea is innocent, but insipid; Mardonius a good specimen of what Fletcher loves to exhibit, the plain honest courtier. As for Bessus, he certainly gives occasion to several amusing scenes; but his cowardice is a little too glaring; he is neither so laughable as Bobadil, nor so sprightly as Parolles. The principal merit of this play, which rendered it popular on the stage for many years, consists in the effective scenes where Arbaces reveals his illicit desire. That especially with Mardonius is artfully and elaborately written. Shakspeare had less of this skill; and his tragedies suffer for it in their dramatic effect. The scene between John and Hubert is an exception, and there is a great deal of it in Othello; but in general he may be said not to have exerted the power of detaining the spectator in that anxious suspense, which creates almost an actual illusion, and makes him tremble at every word, lest the secret which he has learned should be imparted to the imaginary person on the stage. Of this there are several fine instances in the Greek tragedians, the famous scene in the Œdipus Tyrannus being the best; and it is possible that the superior education of Fletcher may have rendered him familiar with the resources of ancient tragedy. These scenes in the present play would have been more highly powerful if the interest could have been thrown on any character superior to the selfish braggart Arbaces. It may be said perhaps that his humiliation through his own lawless passions, after so much insolence of success, affords a moral; he seems, however, but imperfectly cured at the conclusion, which is also hurried on with unsatisfactory rapidity.

|The Elder Brother.|