Chapter XIX: Preface: It is observed by Mr. Pope, that (9)

The unrequited love of Silvius for Phebe shews the perversity of this passion in the commonest scenes of life, and the rubs and stops which nature throws in its way, where fortune has placed none. Touchstone is not in love, but he will have a mistress as a subject for the exercise of his grotesque humour, and to shew his contempt for the passion, by his indifference about the person. He is a rare fellow. He is a mixture of the ancient cynic philosopher with the modern buffoon, and turns folly into wit, and wit into folly, just as the fit takes him. His courtship of Audrey not only throws a degree of ridicule on the state of wedlock itself, but he is equally an enemy to the prejudices of opinion in other respects. The lofty tone of enthusiasm, which the Duke and his companions in exile spread over the stillness and solitude of a country life, receives a pleasant shock from Touchstone’s sceptical determination of the question.

‘_Corin._ And how like you this shepherd’s life, Mr. Touchstone?

_Clown._ Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good life;
but in respect that it is a shepherd’s life, it is naught. In
respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in respect
that it is private, it is a very vile life. Now in respect it is in
the fields, it pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the
court, it is tedious. As it is a spare life, look you, it fits my
humour; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much against
my stomach.’

Zimmerman’s celebrated work on Solitude discovers only _half_ the sense of this passage.

There is hardly any of Shakespear’s plays that contains a greater number of passages that have been quoted in books of extracts, or a greater number of phrases that have become in a manner proverbial. If we were to give all the striking passages, we should give half the play. We will only recall a few of the most delightful to the reader’s recollection. Such are the meeting between Orlando and Adam, the exquisite appeal of Orlando to the humanity of the Duke and his company to supply him with food for the old man, and their answer, the Duke’s description of a country life, and the account of Jaques moralising on the wounded deer, his meeting with Touchstone in the forest, his apology for his own melancholy and his satirical vein, and the well-known speech on the stages of human life, the old song of ‘Blow, blow, thou winter’s wind,’ Rosalind’s description of the marks of a lover and of the progress of time with different persons, the picture of the snake wreathed round Oliver’s neck while the lioness watches her sleeping prey, and Touchstone’s lecture to the shepherd, his defence of cuckolds, and panegyric on the virtues of ‘an If.’—All of these are familiar to the reader: there is one passage of equal delicacy and beauty which may have escaped him, and with it we shall close our account of AS YOU LIKE IT. It is Phebe’s description of Ganimed at the end of the third act.

‘Think not I love him, tho’ I ask for him;
’Tis but a peevish boy, yet he talks well;—
But what care I for words! yet words do well,
When he that speaks them pleases those that hear:
It is a pretty youth; not very pretty;
But sure he’s proud, and yet his pride becomes him;
He’ll make a proper man; the best thing in him
Is his complexion; and faster than his tongue
Did make offence, his eye did heal it up:
He is not very tall, yet for his years he’s tall;
His leg is but so so, and yet ’tis well;
There was a pretty redness in his lip,
A little riper, and more lusty red
Than that mix’d in his cheek; ’twas just the difference
Betwixt the constant red and mingled damask.
There be some women, Silvius, had they mark’d him
In parcels as I did, would have gone near
To fall in love with him: but for my part
I love him not, nor hate him not; and yet
I have more cause to hate him than to love him;
For what had he to do to chide at me?’

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW is almost the only one of Shakespear’s comedies that has a regular plot, and downright moral. It is full of bustle, animation, and rapidity of action. It shews admirably how self-will is only to be got the better of by stronger will, and how one degree of ridiculous perversity is only to be driven out by another still greater. Petruchio is a madman in his senses; a very honest fellow, who hardly speaks a word of truth, and succeeds in all his tricks and impostures. He acts his assumed character to the life, with the most fantastical extravagance, with complete presence of mind, with untired animal spirits, and without a particle of ill humour from beginning to end.—The situation of poor Katherine, worn out by his incessant persecutions, becomes at last almost as pitiable as it is ludicrous, and it is difficult to say which to admire most, the unaccountableness of his actions, or the unalterableness of his resolutions. It is a character which most husbands ought to study, unless perhaps the very audacity of Petruchio’s attempt might alarm them more than his success would encourage them. What a sound must the following speech carry to some married ears!

‘Think you a little din can daunt my ears?
Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puff’d up with winds,
Rage like an angry boar, chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field?
And heav’n’s artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in a pitched battle heard
Loud larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?
And do you tell me of a woman’s tongue,
That gives not half so great a blow to hear,
As will a chesnut in a farmer’s fire?’

Not all Petruchio’s rhetoric would persuade more than ‘some dozen followers’ to be of this heretical way of thinking. He unfolds his scheme for the _Taming of the Shrew_, on a principle of contradiction, thus:—

‘I’ll woo her with some spirit when she comes.
Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain
She sings as sweetly as a nightingale;
Say that she frown, I’ll say she looks as clear
As morning roses newly wash’d with dew;
Say she be mute, and will not speak a word,
Then I’ll commend her volubility,
And say she uttereth piercing eloquence:
If she do bid me pack, I’ll give her thanks,
As though she bid me stay by her a week;
If she deny to wed, I’ll crave the day,
When I shall ask the banns, and when be married?’

He accordingly gains her consent to the match, by telling her father that he has got it; disappoints her by not returning at the time he has promised to wed her, and when he returns, creates no small consternation by the oddity of his dress and equipage. This, however, is nothing to the astonishment excited by his mad-brained behaviour at the marriage. Here is the account of it by an eye-witness:—

‘_Gremio._ Tut, she’s a lamb, a dove, a fool to him:
I’ll tell you, Sir Lucentio; when the priest
Should ask if Katherine should be his wife?
Ay, by gogs woons, quoth he; and swore so loud,
That, all amaz’d, the priest let fall the book;
And as he stooped again to take it up,
This mad-brain’d bridegroom took him such a cuff,
That down fell priest and book, and book and priest.
Now take them up, quoth he, if any list.

_Tranio._ What said the wench when he rose up again?

_Gremio._ Trembled and shook; for why, he stamp’d and swore,
As if the vicar meant to cozen him.
But after many ceremonies done,
He calls for wine; a health, quoth he; as if
He’ad been aboard carousing with his mates
After a storm; quaft off the muscadel,
And threw the sops all in the sexton’s face;
Having no other cause but that his beard
Grew thin and hungerly, and seem’d to ask
His sops as he was drinking. This done, he took
The bride about the neck, and kiss’d her lips
With such a clamourous smack, that at their parting
All the church echoed: and I seeing this,
Came thence for very shame; and after me,
I know, the rout is coming;—
Such a mad marriage never was before.’

The most striking and at the same time laughable feature in the character of Petruchio throughout, is the studied approximation to the intractable character of real madness, his apparent insensibility to all external considerations, and utter indifference to every thing but the wild and extravagant freaks of his own self-will. There is no contending with a person on whom nothing makes any impression but his own purposes, and who is bent on his own whims just in proportion as they seem to want common sense. With him a thing’s being plain and reasonable is a reason against it. The airs he gives himself are infinite, and his caprices as sudden as they are groundless. The whole of his treatment of his wife at home is in the same spirit of ironical attention and inverted gallantry. Every thing flies before his will, like a conjuror’s wand, and he only metamorphoses his wife’s temper by metamorphosing her senses and all the objects she sees, at a word’s speaking. Such are his insisting that it is the moon and not the sun which they see, etc. This extravagance reaches its most pleasant and poetical height in the scene where, on their return to her father’s, they meet old Vincentio, whom Petruchio immediately addresses as a young lady:—

‘_Petruchio._ Good morrow, gentle mistress, where away?
Tell me, sweet Kate, and tell me truly too,
Hast thou beheld a fresher gentlewoman?
Such war of white and red within her cheeks;
What stars do spangle heaven with such beauty,
As those two eyes become that heav’nly face?
Fair lovely maid, once more good day to thee:
Sweet Kate, embrace her for her beauty’s sake.

_Hortensio._ He’ll make the man mad to make a woman of him.

_Katherine._ Young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet,
Whither away, or where is thy abode?
Happy the parents of so fair a child;
Happier the man whom favourable stars
Allot thee for his lovely bed-fellow.

_Petruchio._ Why, how now, Kate, I hope thou art not mad:
This is a man, old, wrinkled, faded, wither’d,
And not a maiden, as thou say’st he is.

_Katherine._ Pardon, old father, my mistaken eyes
That have been so bedazed with the sun
That everything I look on seemeth green.
Now I perceive thou art a reverend father.’

The whole is carried off with equal spirit, as if the poet’s comic Muse had wings of fire. It is strange how one man could be so many things; but so it is. The concluding scene, in which trial is made of the obedience of the new-married wives (so triumphantly for Petruchio) is a very happy one.—In some parts of this play there is a little too much about music-masters and masters of philosophy. They were things of greater rarity in those days than they are now. Nothing however can be better than the advice which Tranio gives his master for the prosecution of his studies:—

‘The mathematics, and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you:
No profit grows, where is no pleasure ta’en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.’

We have heard the _Honey-Moon_ called ‘an elegant Katherine and Petruchio.’ We suspect we do not understand this word _elegant_ in the sense that many people do. But in our sense of the word, we should call Lucentio’s description of his mistress elegant.

‘Tranio, I saw her coral lips to move,
And with her breath she did perfume the air:
Sacred and sweet was all I saw in her.’

When Biondello tells the same Lucentio for his encouragement, ‘I knew a wench married in an afternoon as she went to the garden for parsley to stuff a rabbit, and so may you, sir’—there is nothing elegant in this, and yet we hardly know which of the two passages is the best.

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW is a play within a play. It is supposed to be a play acted for the benefit of Sly the tinker, who is made to believe himself a lord, when he wakes after a drunken brawl. The character of Sly and the remarks with which he accompanies the play are as good as the play itself. His answer when he is asked how he likes it, ‘Indifferent well; ’tis a good piece of work, would ‘twere done,’ is in good keeping, as if he were thinking of his Saturday night’s job. Sly does not change his tastes with his new situation, but in the midst of splendour and luxury still calls out lustily and repeatedly ‘for a pot o’ the smallest ale.’ He is very slow in giving up his personal identity in his sudden advancement.—‘I am Christophero Sly, call not me honour nor lordship. I ne’er drank sack in my life: and if you give me any conserves, give me conserves of beef: ne’er ask me what raiment I’ll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs, nor no more shoes than feet, nay, sometimes more feet than shoes, or such shoes as my toes look through the over-leather.—What, would you make me mad? Am not I Christophero Sly, old Sly’s son of Burton-heath, by birth a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot, if she know me not; if she say I am not fourteen-pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lying’st knave in Christendom.’

This is honest. ‘The Slies are no rogues,’ as he says of himself. We have a great predilection for this representative of the family; and what makes us like him the better is, that we take him to be of kin (not many degrees removed) to Sancho Panza.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

This is a play as full of genius as it is of wisdom. Yet there is an original sin in the nature of the subject, which prevents us from taking a cordial interest in it. ‘The height of moral argument’ which the author has maintained in the intervals of passion or blended with the more powerful impulses of nature, is hardly surpassed in any of his plays. But there is in general a want of passion; the affections are at a stand; our sympathies are repulsed and defeated in all directions. The only passion which influences the story is that of Angelo; and yet he seems to have a much greater passion for hypocrisy than for his mistress. Neither are we greatly enamoured of Isabella’s rigid chastity, though she could not act otherwise than she did. We do not feel the same confidence in the virtue that is ‘sublimely good’ at another’s expense, as if it had been put to some less disinterested trial. As to the Duke, who makes a very imposing and mysterious stage-character, he is more absorbed in his own plots and gravity than anxious for the welfare of the state; more tenacious of his own character than attentive to the feelings and apprehensions of others. Claudio is the only person who feels naturally; and yet he is placed in circumstances of distress which almost preclude the wish for his deliverance. Mariana is also in love with Angelo, whom we hate. In this respect, there may be said to be a general system of cross-purposes between the feelings of the different characters and the sympathy of the reader or the audience. This principle of repugnance seems to have reached its height in the character of Master Barnardine, who not only sets at defiance the opinions of others, but has even thrown off all self-regard,—‘one that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, and to come.’ He is a fine antithesis to the morality and the hypocrisy of the other characters of the play. Barnardine is Caliban transported from Prospero’s wizard island to the forests of Bohemia or the prisons of Vienna. He is the creature of bad habits as Caliban is of gross instincts. He has however a strong notion of the natural fitness of things, according to his own sensations—‘He has been drinking hard all night, and he will not be hanged that day’—and Shakespear has let him off at last. We do not understand why the philosophical German critic, Schlegel, should be so severe on those pleasant persons, Lucio, Pompey, and Master Froth, as to call them ‘wretches.’ They appear all mighty comfortable in their occupations, and determined to pursue them, ‘as the flesh and fortune should serve.’ A very good exposure of the want of self-knowledge and contempt for others, which is so common in the world, is put into the mouth of Abhorson, the jailor, when the Provost proposes to associate Pompey with him in his office—‘A bawd, sir? Fie upon him, he will discredit our mystery.’ And the same answer will serve in nine instances out of ten to the same kind of remark, ‘Go to, sir, you weigh equally; a feather will turn the scale.’ Shakespear was in one sense the least moral of all writers; for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies; and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature, in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations. The object of the pedantic moralist is to find out the bad in everything: his was to shew that ‘there is some soul of goodness in things evil.’ Even Master Barnardine is not left to the mercy of what others think of him; but when he comes in, speaks for himself, and pleads his own cause, as well as if counsel had been assigned him. In one sense, Shakespear was no moralist at all: in another, he was the greatest of all moralists. He was a moralist in the same sense in which nature is one. He taught what he had learnt from her. He shewed the greatest knowledge of humanity with the greatest fellow-feeling for it.

One of the most dramatic passages in the present play is the interview between Claudio and his sister, when she comes to inform him of the conditions on which Angelo will spare his life.

‘_Claudio._ Let me know the point.

_Isabella._ O, I do fear thee, Claudio: and I quake,
Lest thou a feverous life should’st entertain,
And six or seven winters more respect
Than a perpetual honour. Dar’st thou die?
The sense of death is most in apprehension;
And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.

_Claudio._ Why give you me this shame?
Think you I can a resolution fetch
From flowery tenderness; if I must die,
I will encounter darkness as a bride,
And hug it in mine arms.

_Isabella._ There spake my brother! there my father’s grave
Did utter forth a voice! Yes, thou must die:
Thou art too noble to conserve a life
In base appliances. This outward-sainted deputy—
Whose settled visage and deliberate word
Nips youth i’ the head, and follies doth emmew,
As faulcon doth the fowl—is yet a devil.

_Claudio._ The princely Angelo?

_Isabella._ Oh, ’tis the cunning livery of hell,
The damned’st body to invest and cover
In princely guards! Dost thou think, Claudio,
If I would yield him my virginity,
Thou might’st be freed?

_Claudio._ Oh, heavens! it cannot be.

_Isabella._ Yes, he would give it thee, for this rank offence,
So to offend him still: this night’s the time
That I should do what I abhor to name,
Or else thou dy’st to-morrow.

_Claudio._ Thou shalt not do’t.

_Isabella._ Oh, were it but my life,
I’d throw it down for your deliverance
As frankly as a pin.

_Claudio._ Thanks, dear Isabel.

_Isabella._ Be ready, Claudio, for your death to-morrow.

_Claudio._ Yes.—Has he affections in him,
That thus can make him bite the law by the nose?
When he would force it, sure it is no sin;
Or of the deadly seven it is the least.

_Isabella._ Which is the least?

_Claudio._ If it were damnable, he, being so wise,
Why would he for the momentary trick
Be perdurably fin’d? Oh, Isabel!

_Isabella._ What says my brother?

_Claudio._ Death is a fearful thing.

_Isabella._ And shamed life a hateful.

_Claudio._ Aye, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling!—’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life,
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

_Isabella._ Alas! alas!

_Claudio._ Sweet sister, let me live:
What sin you do to save a brother’s life,
Nature dispenses with the deed so far,
That it becomes a virtue.’

What adds to the dramatic beauty of this scene and the effect of Claudio’s passionate attachment to life is, that it immediately follows the Duke’s lecture to him, in the character of the Friar, recommending an absolute indifference to it.

—‘Reason thus with life,—
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing,
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences
That do this habitation, where thou keep’st,
Hourly afflict; merely, thou art death’s fool;
For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun,
And yet run’st toward him still: thou art not noble;
For all the accommodations, that thou bear’st,
Are nurs’d by baseness: thou art by no means valiant;
For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
Of a poor worm: thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provok’st; yet grossly fear’st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist’st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust: happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou striv’st to get;
And what thou hast, forget’st: thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon: if thou art rich, thou art poor;
For, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows
Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee: friend thou hast none;
For thy own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner; thou hast nor youth, nor age;
But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep,
Dreaming on both: for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld; and when thou art old, and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What’s yet in this,
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.’

THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR

THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR is no doubt a very amusing play, with a great deal of humour, character, and nature in it: but we should have liked it much better, if any one else had been the hero of it, instead of Falstaff. We could have been contented if Shakespear had not been ‘commanded to shew the knight in love.’ Wits and philosophers, for the most part, do not shine in that character; and Sir John himself, by no means, comes off with flying colours. Many people complain of the degradation and insults to which Don Quixote is so frequently exposed in his various adventures. But what are the unconscious indignities which he suffers, compared with the sensible mortifications which Falstaff is made to bring upon himself? What are the blows and buffetings which the Don receives from the staves of the Yanguesian carriers or from Sancho Panza’s more hard-hearted hands, compared with the contamination of the buck-basket, the disguise of the fat woman of Brentford, and the horns of Herne the hunter, which are discovered on Sir John’s head? In reading the play, we indeed wish him well through all these discomfitures, but it would have been as well if he had not got into them. Falstaff in the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR is not the man he was in the two parts of _Henry IV._ His wit and eloquence have left him. Instead of making a butt of others, he is made a butt of by them. Neither is there a single particle of love in him to excuse his follies: he is merely a designing, bare-faced knave, and an unsuccessful one. The scene with Ford as Master Brook, and that with Simple, Slender’s man, who comes to ask after the Wise Woman, are almost the only ones in which his old intellectual ascendancy appears. He is like a person recalled to the stage to perform an unaccustomed and ungracious part; and in which we perceive only ‘some faint sparks of those flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the hearers in a roar.’ But the single scene with Doll Tearsheet, or Mrs. Quickly’s account of his desiring ‘to eat some of housewife Reach’s prawns,’ and telling her ‘to be no more so familiarity with such people,’ is worth the whole of the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR put together. Ford’s jealousy, which is the main spring of the comic incidents, is certainly very well managed. Page, on the contrary, appears to be somewhat uxorious in his disposition; and we have pretty plain indications of the effect of the characters of the husbands on the different degrees of fidelity in their wives. Mrs. Quickly makes a very lively go-between, both between Falstaff and his Dulcineas, and Anne Page and her lovers, and seems in the latter case so intent on her own interest as totally to overlook the intentions of her employers. Her master, Dr. Caius, the Frenchman, and her fellow-servant Jack Rugby, are very completely described. This last-mentioned person is rather quaintly commended by Mrs. Quickly as ‘an honest, willing, kind fellow, as ever servant shall come in house withal, and I warrant you, no tell-tale, nor no breed-bate; his worst fault is, that he is given to prayer; he is something peevish that way; but nobody but has his fault.’ The Welch Parson, Sir Hugh Evans (a title which in those days was given to the clergy) is an excellent character in all respects. He is as respectable as he is laughable. He has ‘very good discretions, and very odd humours.’ The duel-scene with Caius gives him an opportunity to shew his ‘cholers and his tremblings of mind,’ his valour and his melancholy, in an irresistible manner. In the dialogue, which at his mother’s request he holds with his pupil, William Page, to shew his progress in learning, it is hard to say whether the simplicity of the master or the scholar is the greatest. Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol, are but the shadows of what they were; and Justice Shallow himself has little of his consequence left. But his cousin, Slender, makes up for the deficiency. He is a very potent piece of imbecility. In him the pretensions of the worthy Gloucestershire family are well kept up, and immortalised. He and his friend Sackerson and his book of songs and his love of Anne Page and his having nothing to say to her can never be forgotten. It is the only first-rate character in the play: but it is in that class. Shakespear is the only writer who was as great in describing weakness as strength.

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

This comedy is taken very much from the Menæchmi of Plautus, and is not an improvement on it. Shakespear appears to have bestowed no great pains on it, and there are but a few passages which bear the decided stamp of his genius. He seems to have relied on his author, and on the interest arising out of the intricacy of the plot. The curiosity excited is certainly very considerable, though not of the most pleasing kind. We are teazed as with a riddle, which notwithstanding we try to solve. In reading the play, from the sameness of the names of the two Antipholises and the two Dromios, as well from their being constantly taken for each other by those who see them, it is difficult, without a painful effort of attention, to keep the characters distinct in the mind. And again, on the stage, either the complete similarity of their persons and dress must produce the same perplexity whenever they first enter, or the identity of appearance which the story supposes, will be destroyed. We still, however, having a clue to the difficulty, can tell which is which, merely from the practical contradictions which arise, as soon as the different parties begin to speak; and we are indemnified for the perplexity and blunders into which we are thrown by seeing others thrown into greater and almost inextricable ones.—This play (among other considerations) leads us not to feel much regret that Shakespear was not what is called a classical scholar. We do not think his _forte_ would ever have lain in imitating or improving on what others invented, so much as in inventing for himself, and perfecting what he invented,—not perhaps by the omission of faults, but by the addition of the highest excellencies. His own genius was strong enough to bear him up, and he soared longest and best on unborrowed plumes.—The only passage of a very Shakespearian cast in this comedy is the one in which the Abbess, with admirable characteristic artifice, makes Adriana confess her own misconduct in driving her husband mad.

‘_Abbess._ How long hath this possession held the man?

_Adriana._ This week he hath been heavy, sour, sad,
And much, much different from the man he was;
But, till this afternoon, his passion
Ne’er brake into extremity of rage.

_Abbess._ Hath he not lost much wealth by wreck at sea?
Bury’d some dear friend? Hath not else his eye
Stray’d his affection in unlawful love?
A sin prevailing much in youthful men,
Who give their eyes the liberty of gazing.
Which of these sorrows is he subject to?

_Adriana._ To none of these, except it be the last:
Namely, some love, that drew him oft from home.

_Abbess._ You should for that have reprehended him.

_Adriana._ Why, so I did.

_Abbess._ But not rough enough.

_Adriana._ As roughly as my modesty would let me.

_Abbess._ Haply, in private.

_Adriana._ And in assemblies too.

_Abbess._ Aye, but not enough.

_Adriana._ It was the copy of our conference:
In bed, he slept not for my urging it;
At board, he fed not for my urging it;
Alone it was the subject of my theme;
In company, I often glanc’d at it;
Still did I tell him it was vile and bad.

_Abbess._ And therefore came it that the man was mad:
The venom’d clamours of a jealous woman
Poison more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.
It seems, his sleeps were hinder’d by thy railing:
And therefore comes it that his head is light.
Thou say’st his meat was sauc’d with thy upbraidings:
Unquiet meals make ill digestions,
Therefore the raging fire of fever bred:
And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?
Thou say’st his sports were hinder’d by thy brawls:
Sweet recreation barr’d, what doth ensue,
But moody and dull melancholy,
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair;
And, at her heels, a huge infectious troop
Of pale distemperatures, and foes to life?
In food, in sport, and life-preserving rest
To be disturb’d, would mad or man or beast:
The consequence is then, thy jealous fits
Have scar’d thy husband from the use of wits.

_Luciana._ She never reprehended him but mildly,
When he demeaned himself rough, rude, and wildly.—
Why bear you these rebukes, and answer not?

_Adriana._ She did betray me to my own reproof.’

Pinch the conjuror is also an excrescence not to be found in Plautus. He is indeed a very formidable anachronism.

‘They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-fac’d villain,
A meer anatomy, a mountebank,
A thread-bare juggler and a fortune-teller;
A needy, hollow-ey’d, sharp-looking wretch,
A living dead man.’

This is exactly like some of the Puritanical portraits to be met with in Hogarth.

DOUBTFUL PLAYS OF SHAKESPEAR

We shall give for the satisfaction of the reader what the celebrated German critic, Schlegel, says on this subject, and then add a very few remarks of our own.

‘All the editors, with the exception of Capell, are unanimous in
rejecting _Titus Andronicus_ as unworthy of Shakespear, though they
always allow it to be printed with the other pieces, as the
scape-goat, as it were, of their abusive criticism. The correct
method in such an investigation is first to examine into the
external grounds, evidences, etc. and to weigh their worth; and then
to adduce the internal reasons derived from the quality of the work.
The critics of Shakespear follow a course directly the reverse of
this; they set out with a preconceived opinion against a piece, and
seek, in justification of this opinion, to render the historical
grounds suspicious, and to set them aside. _Titus Andronicus_ is to
be found in the first folio edition of Shakespear’s works, which it
was known was conducted by Heminge and Condell, for many years his
friends and fellow-managers of the same theatre. Is it possible to
persuade ourselves that they would not have known if a piece in
their repertory did or did not actually belong to Shakespear? And
are we to lay to the charge of these honourable men a designed fraud
in this single case, when we know that they did not shew themselves
so very desirous of scraping everything together which went by the
name of Shakespear, but, as it appears, merely gave those plays of
which they had manuscripts in hand? Yet the following circumstance
is still stronger: George Meres, a contemporary and admirer of
Shakespear, mentions _Titus Andronicus_ in an enumeration of his
works, in the year 1598. Meres was personally acquainted with the
poet, and so very intimately, that the latter read over to him his
Sonnets before they were printed. I cannot conceive that all the
critical scepticism in the world would be sufficient to get over
such a testimony.

‘This tragedy, it is true, is framed according to a false idea of
the tragic, which by an accumulation of cruelties and enormities
degenerates into the horrible, and yet leaves no deep impression
behind: the story of Tereus and Philomela is heightened and
overcharged under other names, and mixed up with the repast of
Atreus and Thyestes, and many other incidents. In detail there is no
want of beautiful lines, bold images, nay, even features which
betray the peculiar conception of Shakespear. Among these we may
reckon the joy of the treacherous Moor at the blackness and ugliness
of his child begot in adultery; and in the compassion of Titus
Andronicus, grown childish through grief, for a fly which had been
struck dead, and his rage afterwards when he imagines he discovers
in it his black enemy, we recognize the future poet of _Lear_. Are
the critics afraid that Shakespear’s fame would be injured, were it
established that in his early youth he ushered into the world a
feeble and immature work? Was Rome the less the conqueror of the
world because Remus could leap over its first walls? Let any one
place himself in Shakespear’s situation at the commencement of his
career. He found only a few indifferent models, and yet these met
with the most favourable reception, because men are never difficult
to please in the novelty of an art before their taste has become
fastidious from choice and abundance. Must not this situation have
had its influence on him before he learned to make higher demands on
himself, and, by digging deeper in his own mind, discovered the
richest veins of a noble metal? It is even highly probable that he
must have made several failures before getting into the right path.
Genius is in a certain sense infallible, and has nothing to learn;
but art is to be learned, and must be acquired by practice and
experience. In Shakespear’s acknowledged works we find hardly any
traces of his apprenticeship, and yet an apprenticeship he certainly
had. This every artist must have, and especially in a period where
he has not before him the example of a school already formed. I
consider it as extremely probable, that Shakespear began to write
for the theatre at a much earlier period than the one which is
generally stated, namely, not till after the year 1590. It appears
that, as early as the year 1584, when only twenty years of age, he
had left his paternal home and repaired to London. Can we imagine
that such an active head would remain idle for six whole years
without making any attempt to emerge by his talents from an
uncongenial situation? That in the dedication of the poem of Venus
and Adonis he calls it, ‘the first heir of his invention,’ proves
nothing against the supposition. It was the first which he printed;
he might have composed it at an earlier period; perhaps, also, he
did not include theatrical labours, as they then possessed but
little literary dignity. The earlier Shakespear began to compose for
the theatre, the less are we enabled to consider the immaturity and
imperfection of a work as a proof of its spuriousness in opposition
to historical evidence, if we only find in it prominent features of
his mind. Several of the works rejected as spurious, may still have
been produced in the period betwixt _Titus Andronicus_, and the
earliest of the acknowledged pieces.

‘At last, Steevens published seven pieces ascribed to Shakespear in
two supplementary volumes. It is to be remarked, that they all
appeared in print in Shakespear’s life-time, with his name prefixed
at full length. They are the following:—

‘1. _Locrine._ The proofs of the genuineness of this piece are not
altogether unambiguous; the grounds for doubt, on the other hand,
are entitled to attention. However, this question is immediately
connected with that respecting _Titus Andronicus_, and must be at
the same time resolved in the affirmative or negative.

‘2. _Pericles, Prince of Tyre._ This piece was acknowledged by
Dryden, but as a youthful work of Shakespear. It is most undoubtedly
his, and it has been admitted into several of the late editions. The
supposed imperfections originate in the circumstance, that
Shakespear here handled a childish and extravagant romance of the
old poet Gower, and was unwilling to drag the subject out of its
proper sphere. Hence he even introduces Gower himself, and makes him
deliver a prologue entirely in his antiquated language and
versification. This power of assuming so foreign a manner is at
least no proof of helplessness.

‘3. _The London Prodigal._ If we are not mistaken, Lessing
pronounced this piece to be Shakespear’s, and wished to bring it on
the German stage.

‘4. _The Puritan; or, the Widows of Watling Street._ One of my
literary friends, intimately acquainted with Shakespear, was of
opinion that the poet must have wished to write a play for once in
the style of Ben Jonson, and that in this way we must account for
the difference between the present piece and his usual manner. To
follow out this idea however would lead to a very nice critical
investigation.

‘5. _Thomas, Lord Cromwell._

‘6. _Sir John Oldcastle—First Part._

‘7. _A Yorkshire Tragedy._

‘The three last pieces are not only unquestionably Shakespear’s, but
in my opinion they deserve to be classed among his best and maturest
works.—Steevens admits at last, in some degree, that they are
Shakespear’s, as well as the others, excepting _Locrine_, but he
speaks of all of them with great contempt, as quite worthless
productions. This condemnatory sentence is not however in the
slightest degree convincing, nor is it supported by critical acumen.
I should like to see how such a critic would, of his own natural
suggestion, have decided on Shakespear’s acknowledged master-pieces,
and what he would have thought of praising in them, had the public
opinion not imposed on him the duty of admiration. _Thomas, Lord
Cromwell_, and _Sir John Oldcastle_, are biographical dramas, and
models in this species: the first is linked, from its subject, to
_Henry the Eighth_, and the second to _Henry the Fifth_. The second
part of _Oldcastle_ is wanting; I know not whether a copy of the old
edition has been discovered in England, or whether it is lost. _The
Yorkshire Tragedy_ is a tragedy in one act, a dramatised tale of
murder: the tragical effect is overpowering, and it is extremely
important to see how poetically Shakespear could handle such a
subject.

‘There have been still farther ascribed to him:—1st. _The Merry
Devil of Edmonton_, a comedy in one act, printed in Dodsley’s old
plays. This has certainly some appearances in its favour. It
contains a merry landlord, who bears a great similarity to the one
in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_. However, at all events, though an
ingenious, it is but a hasty sketch. 2d. _The Accusation of Paris._
3d. _The Birth of Merlin._ 4th. _Edward the Third._ 5th. _The Fair
Emma._ 6th. _Mucedorus._ 7th. _Arden of Feversham._ I have never
seen any of these, and cannot therefore say anything respecting
them. From the passages cited, I am led to conjecture that the
subject of _Mucedorus_ is the popular story of Valentine and Orson;
a beautiful subject which Lope de Vega has also taken for a play.
_Arden of Feversham_ is said to be a tragedy on the story of a man,
from whom the poet was descended by the mother’s side. If the
quality of the piece is not too directly at variance with this
claim, the circumstance would afford an additional probability in
its favour. For such motives were not foreign to Shakespear: he
treated Henry the Seventh, who bestowed lands on his forefathers for
services performed by them, with a visible partiality.

‘Whoever takes from Shakespear a play early ascribed to him, and
confessedly belonging to his time, is unquestionably bound to
answer, with some degree of probability, this question: who has then
written it? Shakespear’s competitors in the dramatic walk are pretty
well known, and if those of them who have even acquired a
considerable name, a Lilly, a Marlow, a Heywood, are still so very
far below him, we can hardly imagine that the author of a work,
which rises so high beyond theirs, would have remained
unknown.’—_Lectures on Dramatic Literature_, vol. ii. page 252.

We agree to the truth of this last observation, but not to the justice of its application to some of the plays here mentioned. It is true that Shakespear’s best works are very superior to those of Marlow, or Heywood, but it is not true that the best of the doubtful plays above enumerated are superior or even equal to the best of theirs. _The Yorkshire Tragedy_, which Schlegel speaks of as an undoubted production of our author’s, is much more in the manner of Heywood than of Shakespear. The effect is indeed overpowering, but the mode of producing it is by no means poetical. The praise which Schlegel gives to _Thomas, Lord Cromwell_, and to _Sir John Oldcastle_, is altogether exaggerated. They are very indifferent compositions, which have not the slightest pretensions to rank with _Henry V._ or _Henry VIII._ We suspect that the German critic was not very well acquainted with the dramatic contemporaries of Shakespear, or aware of their general merits; and that he accordingly mistakes a resemblance in style and manner for an equal degree of excellence. Shakespear differed from the other writers of his age not in the mode of treating his subjects, but in the grace and power which he displayed in them. The reason assigned by a literary friend of Schlegel’s for supposing _The Puritan; or, the Widow of Watling Street_, to be Shakespear’s, viz. that it is in the style of Ben Jonson, that is to say, in a style just the reverse of his own, is not very satisfactory to a plain English understanding. _Locrine_, and _The London Prodigal_, if they were Shakespear’s at all, must have been among the sins of his youth. _Arden of Feversham_ contains several striking passages, but the passion which they express is rather that of a sanguine temperament than of a lofty imagination; and in this respect they approximate more nearly to the style of other writers of the time than to Shakespear’s. _Titus Andronicus_ is certainly as unlike Shakespear’s usual style as it is possible. It is an accumulation of vulgar physical horrors, in which the power exercised by the poet bears no proportion to the repugnance excited by the subject. The character of Aaron the Moor is the only thing which shews any originality of conception; and the scene in which he expresses his joy ‘at the blackness and ugliness of his child begot in adultery,’ the only one worthy of Shakespear. Even this is worthy of him only in the display of power, for it gives no pleasure. Shakespear managed these things differently. Nor do we think it a sufficient answer to say that this was an embryo or crude production of the author. In its kind it is full grown, and its features decided and overcharged. It is not like a first imperfect essay, but shews a confirmed habit, a systematic preference of violent effect to everything else. There are occasional detached images of great beauty and delicacy, but these were not beyond the powers of other writers then living. The circumstance which inclines us to reject the external evidence in favour of this play being Shakespear’s is, that the grammatical construction is constantly false and mixed up with vulgar abbreviations, a fault that never occurs in any of his genuine plays. A similar defect, and the halting measure of the verse are the chief objections to _Pericles of Tyre_, if we except the far-fetched and complicated absurdity of the story. The movement of the thoughts and passions has something in it not unlike Shakespear, and several of the descriptions are either the original hints of passages which Shakespear has ingrafted on his other plays, or are imitations of them by some contemporary poet. The most memorable idea in it is in Marina’s speech, where she compares the world to ‘a lasting storm, hurrying her from her friends.’

POEMS AND SONNETS

Our idolatry of Shakespear (not to say our admiration) ceases with his plays. In his other productions, he was a mere author, though not a common author. It was only by representing others, that he became himself. He could go out of himself, and express the soul of Cleopatra; but in his own person, he appeared to be always waiting for the prompter’s cue. In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed inspired; in expressing his own, he was a mechanic. The licence of an assumed character was necessary to restore his genius to the privileges of nature, and to give him courage to break through the tyranny of fashion, the trammels of custom. In his plays, he was ‘as broad and casing as the general air’: in his poems, on the contrary, he appears to be ‘cooped, and cabined in’ by all the technicalities of art, by all the petty intricacies of thought and language, which poetry had learned from the controversial jargon of the schools, where words had been made a substitute for things. There was, if we mistake not, something of modesty, and a painful sense of personal propriety at the bottom of this. Shakespear’s imagination, by identifying itself with the strongest characters in the most trying circumstances, grappled at once with nature, and trampled the littleness of art under his feet: the rapid changes of situation, the wide range of the universe, gave him life and spirit, and afforded full scope to his genius; but returned into his closet again, and having assumed the badge of his profession, he could only labour in his vocation, and conform himself to existing models. The thoughts, the passions, the words which the poet’s pen, ‘glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,’ lent to others, shook off the fetters of pedantry and affectation; while his own thoughts and feelings, standing by themselves, were seized upon as lawful prey, and tortured to death according to the established rules and practice of the day. In a word, we do not like Shakespear’s poems, because we like his plays: the one, in all their excellencies, are just the reverse of the other. It has been the fashion of late to cry up our author’s poems, as equal to his plays: this is the desperate cant of modern criticism. We would ask, was there the slightest comparison between Shakespear, and either Chaucer or Spenser, as mere poets? Not any.—The two poems of Venus and Adonis and of Tarquin and Lucrece appear to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold. The author seems all the time to be thinking of his verses, and not of his subject,—not of what his characters would feel, but of what he shall say; and as it must happen in all such cases, he always puts into their mouths those things which they would be the last to think of, and which it shews the greatest ingenuity in him to find out. The whole is laboured, up-hill work. The poet is perpetually singling out the difficulties of the art to make an exhibition of his strength and skill in wrestling with them. He is making perpetual trials of them as if his mastery over them were doubted. The images, which are often striking, are generally applied to things which they are the least like: so that they do not blend with the poem, but seem stuck upon it, like splendid patch-work, or remain quite distinct from it, like detached substances, painted and varnished over. A beautiful thought is sure to be lost in an endless commentary upon it. The speakers are like persons who have both leisure and inclination to make riddles on their own situation, and to twist and turn every object or incident into acrostics and anagrams. Everything is spun out into allegory; and a digression is always preferred to the main story. Sentiment is built up upon plays of words; the hero or heroine feels, not from the impulse of passion, but from the force of dialectics. There is besides a strange attempt to substitute the language of painting for that of poetry, to make us _see_ their feelings in the faces of the persons; and again, consistently with this, in the description of the picture in Tarquin and Lucrece, those circumstances are chiefly insisted on, which it would be impossible to convey except by words. The invocation to opportunity in the Tarquin and Lucrece is full of thoughts and images, but at the same time it is overloaded by them. The concluding stanza expresses all our objections to this kind of poetry:—

‘Oh! idle words, servants to shallow fools;
Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators;
Busy yourselves in skill-contending schools;
Debate when leisure serves with dull debaters;
To trembling clients be their mediators:
For me I force not argument a straw,
Since that my case is past all help of law.’

The description of the horse in Venus and Adonis has been particularly admired, and not without reason:—

‘Round hoof’d, short jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eyes, small head, and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, strait legs, and passing strong,
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide,
Look what a horse should have, he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back.’

Now this inventory of perfections shews great knowledge of the horse; and is good matter-of-fact poetry. Let the reader but compare it with a speech in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ where Theseus describes his hounds—

‘And their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew’—

and he will perceive at once what we mean by the difference between Shakespear’s own poetry, and that of his plays. We prefer the Passionate Pilgrim very much to the Lover’s Complaint. It has been doubted whether the latter poem is Shakespear’s.

Of the Sonnets we do not well know what to say. The subject of them seems to be somewhat equivocal; but many of them are highly beautiful in themselves, and interesting as they relate to the state of the personal feelings of the author. The following are some of the most striking:—

CONSTANCY