CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEAR’S PLAYS (continued 3)

Titania’s exhortation to the fairies to wait upon Bottom, which is remarkable for a certain cloying sweetness in the repetition of the rhymes, is as follows:—

‘Be kind and courteous to this gentleman.

Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes,

Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,

With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries;

The honey-bags steal from the humble bees,

And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs,

And light them at the fiery glow-worm’s eyes,

To have my love to bed, and to arise:

And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,

To fan the moon-beams from his sleeping eyes;

Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.’

The sounds of the lute and of the trumpet are not more distinct than the poetry of the foregoing passage, and of the conversation between Theseus and Hippolita.

‘Theseus. Go, one of you, find out the forester,

For now our observation is perform’d;

And since we have the vaward of the day,

My love shall hear the music of my hounds.

Uncouple in the western valley, go,

Dispatch, I say, and find the forester.

We will, fair Queen, up to the mountain’s top,

And mark the musical confusion

Of hounds and echo in conjunction.

Hippolita. I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,

When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the bear

With hounds of Sparta; never did I hear

Such gallant chiding. For besides the groves,

The skies, the fountains, every region near

Seem’d all one mutual cry. I never heard

So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

247Theseus. My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,

So flew’d, so sanded, and their heads are hung

With ears that sweep away the morning dew;

Crook-knee’d and dew-lap’d, like Thessalian bulls.

Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells,

Each under each. A cry more tuneable

Was never halloo’d to, nor cheer’d with horn,

In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly:

Judge when you hear.’—

Even Titian never made a hunting-piece of a gusto so fresh and lusty, and so near the first ages of the world as this.—

It had been suggested to us, that the Midsummer Night’s Dream would do admirably to get up as a Christmas after-piece; and our prompter proposed that Mr. Kean should play the part of Bottom, as worthy of his great talents. He might, in the discharge of his duty, offer to play the lady like any of our actresses that he pleased, the lover or the tyrant like any of our actors that he pleased, and the lion like ‘the most fearful wild-fowl living.’ The carpenter, the tailor, and joiner, it was thought, would hit the galleries. The young ladies in love would interest the side-boxes; and Robin Goodfellow and his companions excite a lively fellow-feeling in the children from school. There would be two courts, an empire within an empire, the Athenian and the Fairy King and Queen, with their attendants, and with all their finery. What an opportunity for processions, for the sound of trumpets and glittering of spears! What a fluttering of urchins’ painted wings; what a delightful profusion of gauze clouds and airy spirits floating on them!

Alas the experiment has been tried, and has failed; not through the fault of Mr. Kean, who did not play the part of Bottom, nor of Mr. Liston, who did, and who played it well, but from the nature of things. The Midsummer Night’s Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand: but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled.—Poetry and the stage do not agree well together. The attempt to reconcile them in this instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum. The ideal can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective; everything there is in the foreground. That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality. Where all is left to the imagination (as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells according to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested. But the imagination cannot 248sufficiently qualify the actual impressions of the senses. Any offence given to the eye is not to be got rid of by explanation. Thus Bottom’s head in the play is a fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells: on the stage it is an ass’s head, and nothing more; certainly a very strange costume for a gentleman to appear in. Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine. Fairies are not incredible, but fairies six feet high are so. Monsters are not shocking, if they are seen at a proper distance. When ghosts appear at mid-day, when apparitions stalk along Cheapside, then may the Midsummer Night’s Dream be represented without injury at Covent Garden or at Drury Lane. The boards of a theatre and the regions of fancy are not the same thing.

ROMEO AND JULIET

Romeo and Juliet is the only tragedy which Shakespear has written entirely on a love-story. It is supposed to have been his first play, and it deserves to stand in that proud rank. There is the buoyant spirit of youth in every line, in the rapturous intoxication of hope, and in the bitterness of despair. It has been said of Romeo and Juliet by a great critic, that ‘whatever is most intoxicating in the odour of a southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous in the first opening of the rose, is to be found in this poem.’ The description is true; and yet it does not answer to our idea of the play. For if it has the sweetness of the rose, it has its freshness too; if it has the languor of the nightingale’s song, it has also its giddy transport; if it has the softness of a southern spring, it is as glowing and as bright. There is nothing of a sickly and sentimental cast. Romeo and Juliet are in love, but they are not love-sick. Every thing speaks the very soul of pleasure, the high and healthy pulse of the passions: the heart beats, the blood circulates and mantles throughout. Their courtship is not an insipid interchange of sentiments lip-deep, learnt at second-hand from poems and plays,—made up of beauties of the most shadowy kind, of ‘fancies wan that hang the pensive head,’ of evanescent smiles, and sighs that breathe not, of delicacy that shrinks from the touch, and feebleness that scarce supports itself, an elaborate vacuity of thought, and an artificial dearth of sense, spirit, truth, and nature! It is the reverse of all this. It is Shakespear all over, and Shakespear when he was young.

249We have heard it objected to Romeo and Juliet, that it is founded on an idle passion between a boy and a girl, who have scarcely seen and can have but little sympathy or rational esteem for one another, who have had no experience of the good or ills of life, and whose raptures or despair must be therefore equally groundless and fantastical. Whoever objects to the youth of the parties in this play as ‘too unripe and crude’ to pluck the sweets of love, and wishes to see a first-love carried on into a good old age, and the passions taken at the rebound, when their force is spent, may find all this done in the Stranger and in other German plays, where they do things by contraries, and transpose nature to inspire sentiment and create philosophy. Shakespear proceeded in a more strait-forward, and, we think, effectual way. He did not endeavour to extract beauty from wrinkles, or the wild throb of passion from the last expiring sigh of indifference. He did not ‘gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles.’ It was not his way. But he has given a picture of human life, such as it is in the order of nature. He has founded the passion of the two lovers not on the pleasures they had experienced, but on all the pleasures they had not experienced. All that was to come of life was theirs. At that untried source of promised happiness they slaked their thirst, and the first eager draught made them drunk with love and joy. They were in full possession of their senses and their affections. Their hopes were of air, their desires of fire. Youth is the season of love, because the heart is then first melted in tenderness from the touch of novelty, and kindled to rapture, for it knows no end of its enjoyments or its wishes. Desire has no limit but itself. Passion, the love and expectation of pleasure, is infinite, extravagant, inexhaustible, till experience comes to check and kill it. Juliet exclaims on her first interview with Romeo—

‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep.’

And why should it not? What was to hinder the thrilling tide of pleasure, which had just gushed from her heart, from flowing on without stint or measure, but experience which she was yet without? What was to abate the transport of the first sweet sense of pleasure, which her heart and her senses had just tasted, but indifference which she was yet a stranger to? What was there to check the ardour of hope, of faith, of constancy, just rising in her breast, but disappointment which she had not yet felt! As are the desires and the hopes of youthful passion, such is the keenness of its disappointments, and their baleful effect. Such is the transition in this play from the highest bliss to the lowest despair, from the nuptial couch to an 250untimely grave. The only evil that even in apprehension befalls the two lovers is the loss of the greatest possible felicity; yet this loss is fatal to both, for they had rather part with life than bear the thought of surviving all that had made life dear to them. In all this, Shakespear has but followed nature, which existed in his time, as well as now. The modern philosophy, which reduces the whole theory of the mind to habitual impressions, and leaves the natural impulses of passion and imagination out of the account, had not then been discovered; or if it had, would have been little calculated for the uses of poetry.

It is the inadequacy of the same false system of philosophy to account for the strength of our earliest attachments, which has led Mr. Wordsworth to indulge in the mystical visions of Platonism in his Ode on the Progress of Life. He has very admirably described the vividness of our impressions in youth and childhood, and how ‘they fade by degrees into the light of common day,’ and he ascribes the change to the supposition of a pre-existent state, as if our early thoughts were nearer heaven, reflections of former trails of glory, shadows of our past being. This is idle. It is not from the knowledge of the past that the first impressions of things derive their gloss and splendour, but from our ignorance of the future, which fills the void to come with the warmth of our desires, with our gayest hopes, and brightest fancies. It is the obscurity spread before it that colours the prospect of life with hope, as it is the cloud which reflects the rainbow. There is no occasion to resort to any mystical union and transmission of feeling through different states of being to account for the romantic enthusiasm of youth; nor to plant the root of hope in the grave, nor to derive it from the skies. Its root is in the heart of man: it lifts its head above the stars. Desire and imagination are inmates of the human breast. The heaven ‘that lies about us in our infancy’ is only a new world, of which we know nothing but what we wish it to be, and believe all that we wish. In youth and boyhood, the world we live in is the world of desire, and of fancy: it is experience that brings us down to the world of reality. What is it that in youth sheds a dewy light round the evening star? That makes the daisy look so bright? That perfumes the hyacinth? That embalms the first kiss of love? It is the delight of novelty, and the seeing no end to the pleasure that we fondly believe is still in store for us. The heart revels in the luxury of its own thoughts, and is unable to sustain the weight of hope and love that presses upon it.—The effects of the passion of love alone might have dissipated Mr. Wordsworth’s theory, if he means any thing more by it than an ingenious and poetical allegory. That at least is not a link in the 251chain let down from other worlds; ‘the purple light of love’ is not a dim reflection of the smiles of celestial bliss. It does not appear till the middle of life, and then seems like ‘another morn risen on mid-day.’ In this respect the soul comes into the world ‘in utter nakedness.’ Love waits for the ripening of the youthful blood. The sense of pleasure precedes the love of pleasure, but with the sense of pleasure, as soon as it is felt, come thronging infinite desires and hopes of pleasure, and love is mature as soon as born. It withers and it dies almost as soon!

This play presents a beautiful coup-d’œil of the progress of human life. In thought it occupies years, and embraces the circle of the affections from childhood to old age. Juliet has become a great girl, a young woman since we first remember her a little thing in the idle prattle of the nurse. Lady Capulet was about her age when she became a mother, and old Capulet somewhat impatiently tells his younger visitors,

——‘I’ve seen the day,

That I have worn a visor, and could tell

A whispering tale in a fair lady’s ear,

Such as would please: ’tis gone, ’tis gone, ’tis gone.’

Thus one period of life makes way for the following, and one generation pushes another off the stage. One of the most striking passages to show the intense feeling of youth in this play is Capulet’s invitation to Paris to visit his entertainment.

‘At my poor house, look to behold this night

Earth-treading stars that make dark heav’n light;

Such comfort as do lusty young men feel

When well-apparel’d April on the heel

Of limping winter treads, even such delight

Among fresh female-buds shall you this night

Inherit at my house.’

The feelings of youth and of the spring are here blended together like the breath of opening flowers. Images of vernal beauty appear to have floated before the author’s mind, in writing this poem, in profusion. Here is another of exquisite beauty, brought in more by accident than by necessity. Montague declares of his son smit with a hopeless passion, which he will not reveal—

‘But he, his own affection’s counsellor,

Is to himself so secret and so close,

So far from sounding and discovery,

As is the bud bit with an envious worm,

Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air,

Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.’

252This casual description is as full of passionate beauty as when Romeo dwells in frantic fondness on ‘the white wonder of his Juliet’s hand.’ The reader may, if he pleases, contrast the exquisite pastoral simplicity of the above lines with the gorgeous description of Juliet when Romeo first sees her at her father’s house, surrounded by company and artificial splendour.

‘What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand

Of yonder knight?

O she doth teach the torches to burn bright;

Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night,

Like a rich jewel in an Æthiop’s ear.’

It would be hard to say which of the two garden scenes is the finest, that where he first converses with his love, or takes leave of her the morning after their marriage. Both are like a heaven upon earth; the blissful bowers of Paradise let down upon this lower world. We will give only one passage of these well known scenes to shew the perfect refinement and delicacy of Shakespear’s conception of the female character. It is wonderful how Collins, who was a critic and a poet of great sensibility, should have encouraged the common error on this subject by saying—‘But stronger Shakespear felt for man alone.’

The passage we mean is Juliet’s apology for her maiden boldness.

‘Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face;

Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek

For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night.

Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny

What I have spoke—but farewel compliment:

Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say, ay,

And I will take thee at thy word—Yet if thou swear’st,

Thou may’st prove false; at lovers’ perjuries

They say Jove laughs. Oh gentle Romeo,

If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully;

Or if thou think I am too quickly won,

I’ll frown and be perverse, and say thee nay,

So thou wilt woo: but else not for the world.

In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond;

And therefore thou may’st think my ‘haviour light;

But trust me, gentleman, I’ll prove more true

Than those that have more cunning to be strange.

I should have been more strange, I must confess

But that thou over-heard’st, ere I was ware,

My true love’s passion; therefore pardon me,

And not impute this yielding to light love,

Which the dark night hath so discovered.’

253In this and all the rest, her heart, fluttering between pleasure, hope, and fear, seems to have dictated to her tongue, and ‘calls true love spoken simple modesty.’ Of the same sort, but bolder in virgin innocence, is her soliloquy after her marriage with Romeo.

‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,

Towards Phœbus’ mansion; such a waggoner

As Phaëton would whip you to the west,

And bring in cloudy night immediately.

Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night;

That run-aways’ eyes may wink; and Romeo

Leap to these arms, untalked of, and unseen!——

Lovers can see to do their amorous rites

By their own beauties: or if love be blind,

It best agrees with night.—Come, civil night,

Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,

And learn me how to lose a winning match,

Play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods:

Hold my unmann’d blood bating in my cheeks,

With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,

Thinks true love acted, simple modesty.

Come night!—Come, Romeo! come, thou day in night;

For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night

Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.——

Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-brow’d night,

Give me my Romeo: and when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine,

That all the world shall be in love with night,

And pay no worship to the garish sun.——

O, I have bought the mansion of a love,

But not possess’d it; and though I am sold,

Not yet enjoy’d: so tedious is this day,

As is the night before some festival

To an impatient child, that hath new robes,

And may not wear them.’

We the rather insert this passage here, inasmuch as we have no doubt it has been expunged from the Family Shakespear. Such critics do not perceive that the feelings of the heart sanctify, without disguising, the impulses of nature. Without refinement themselves, they confound modesty with hypocrisy. Not so the German critic, Schlegel. Speaking of Romeo and Juliet, he says, ‘It was reserved for Shakespear to unite purity of heart and the glow of imagination, sweetness and dignity of manners and passionate violence, in one ideal picture.’ The character is indeed one of perfect truth and sweetness. It has nothing forward, nothing coy, nothing affected or coquettish 254about it;—it is a pure effusion of nature. It is as frank as it is modest, for it has no thought that it wishes to conceal. It reposes in conscious innocence on the strength of its affections. Its delicacy does not consist in coldness and reserve, but in combining warmth of imagination and tenderness of heart with the most voluptuous sensibility. Love is a gentle flame that rarifies and expands her whole being. What an idea of trembling haste and airy grace, borne upon the thoughts of love, does the Friar’s exclamation give of her, as she approaches his cell to be married—

‘Here comes the lady. Oh, so light of foot

Will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint:

A lover may bestride the gossamer,

That idles in the wanton summer air,

And yet not fall, so light is vanity.’

The tragic part of this character is of a piece with the rest. It is the heroic founded on tenderness and delicacy. Of this kind are her resolution to follow the Friar’s advice, and the conflict in her bosom between apprehension and love when she comes to take the sleeping poison. Shakespear is blamed for the mixture of low characters. If this is a deformity, it is the source of a thousand beauties. One instance is the contrast between the guileless simplicity of Juliet’s attachment to her first love, and the convenient policy of the nurse in advising her to marry Paris, which excites such indignation in her mistress. ‘Ancient damnation! oh most wicked fiend,’ etc.

Romeo is Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance of passion and sentiment in the one, that there is of thought and sentiment in the other. Both are absent and self-involved, both live out of themselves in a world of imagination. Hamlet is abstracted from every thing; Romeo is abstracted from every thing but his love, and lost in it. His ‘frail thoughts dally with faint surmise,’ and are fashioned out of the suggestions of hope, ‘the flatteries of sleep.’ He is himself only in his Juliet; she is his only reality, his heart’s true home and idol. The rest of the world is to him a passing dream. How finely is this character pourtrayed where he recollects himself on seeing Paris slain at the tomb of Juliet!—

‘What said my man, when my betossed soul

Did not attend him as we rode? I think

He told me Paris should have married Juliet.’

And again, just before he hears the sudden tidings of her death—

‘If I may trust the flattery of sleep,

My dreams presage some joyful news at hand;

255My bosom’s lord sits lightly on his throne,

And all this day an unaccustom’d spirit

Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.

I dreamt my lady came and found me dead,

(Strange dream! that gives a dead man leave to think)

And breath’d such life with kisses on my lips,

That I reviv’d and was an emperour.

Ah me! how sweet is love itself possess’d,

When but love’s shadows are so rich in joy!’

Romeo’s passion for Juliet is not a first love: it succeeds and drives out his passion for another mistress, Rosaline, as the sun hides the stars. This is perhaps an artifice (not absolutely necessary) to give us a higher opinion of the lady, while the first absolute surrender of her heart to him enhances the richness of the prize. The commencement, progress, and ending of his second passion are however complete in themselves, not injured if they are not bettered by the first. The outline of the play is taken from an Italian novel; but the dramatic arrangement of the different scenes between the lovers, the more than dramatic interest in the progress of the story, the developement of the characters with time and circumstances, just according to the degree and kind of interest excited, are not inferior to the expression of passion and nature. It has been ingeniously remarked among other proofs of skill in the contrivance of the fable, that the improbability of the main incident in the piece, the administering of the sleeping-potion, is softened and obviated from the beginning by the introduction of the Friar on his first appearance culling simples and descanting on their virtues. Of the passionate scenes in this tragedy, that between the Friar and Romeo when he is told of his sentence of banishment, that between Juliet and the Nurse when she hears of it, and of the death of her cousin Tybalt (which bear no proportion in her mind, when passion after the first shock of surprise throws its weight into the scale of her affections) and the last scene at the tomb, are among the most natural and overpowering. In all of these it is not merely the force of any one passion that is given, but the slightest and most unlooked-for transitions from one to another, the mingling currents of every different feeling rising up and prevailing in turn, swayed by the master-mind of the poet, as the waves undulate beneath the gliding storm. Thus when Juliet has by her complaints encouraged the Nurse to say, ‘Shame come to Romeo,’ she instantly repels the wish, which she had herself occasioned, by answering—

‘Blister’d be thy tongue

For such a wish! He was not born to shame.

256Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit,

For ’tis a throne where honour may be crown’d

Sole monarch of the universal earth!

O, what a beast was I to chide him so?

Nurse. Will you speak well of him that kill’d your cousin?

Juliet. Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?

Ah my poor lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name,

When I, thy three-hours’ wife, have mangled it?’

And then follows on the neck of her remorse and returning fondness, that wish treading almost on the brink of impiety, but still held back by the strength of her devotion to her lord, that ‘father, mother, nay, or both were dead,’ rather than Romeo banished. If she requires any other excuse, it is in the manner in which Romeo echoes her frantic grief and disappointment in the next scene at being banished from her.—Perhaps one of the finest pieces of acting that ever was witnessed on the stage, is Mr. Kean’s manner of doing this scene and his repetition of the word, Banished. He treads close indeed upon the genius of his author.

A passage which this celebrated actor and able commentator on Shakespear (actors are the best commentators on the poets) did not give with equal truth or force of feeling was the one which Romeo makes at the tomb of Juliet, before he drinks the poison.

——‘Let me peruse this face—

Mercutio’s kinsman! noble county Paris!

What said my man, when my betossed soul

Did not attend him as we rode? I think,

He told me Paris should have married Juliet:

Said he not so? or did I dream it so?

Or am I mad, hearing him talk of Juliet,

To think it was so?——O, give me thy hand,

One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book!

I’ll bury thee in a triumphant grave——

For here lies Juliet.

. . . . .

——O, my love! my wife!

Death that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath,

Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:

Thou art not conquer’d; beauty’s ensign yet

Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks,

And Death’s pale flag is not advanced there.——

Tybalt, ly’st thou there in thy bloody sheet?

O, what more favour can I do to thee,

Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain,

To sunder his that was thine enemy?

Forgive me, cousin! Ah, dear Juliet,

Why art thou yet so fair! Shall I believe

257That unsubstantial death is amorous;

And that the lean abhorred monster keeps

Thee here in dark to be his paramour!

For fear of that, I will stay still with thee;

And never from this palace of dim night

Depart again: here, here will I remain

With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here

Will I set up my everlasting rest;

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars

From this world-wearied flesh.—Eyes, look your last!

Arms, take your last embrace! and lips, O you,

The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss

A dateless bargain to engrossing death!—

Come, bitter conduct, come unsavoury guide!

Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on

The dashing rocks my sea-sick weary bark!

Here’s to my love!—[Drinks.] O, true apothecary!

Thy drugs are quick.—Thus with a kiss I die.’

The lines in this speech, describing the loveliness of Juliet, who is supposed to be dead, have been compared to those in which it is said of Cleopatra after her death, that she looked ‘as she would take another Antony in her strong toil of grace’; and a question has been started which is the finest, that we do not pretend to decide. We can more easily decide between Shakespear and any other author, than between him and himself.—Shall we quote any more passages to shew his genius or the beauty of Romeo and Juliet? At that rate, we might quote the whole. The late Mr. Sheridan, on being shewn a volume of the Beauties of Shakespear, very properly asked—‘But where are the other eleven?’ The character of Mercutio in this play is one of the most mercurial and spirited of the productions of Shakespear’s comic muse.

LEAR

We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it. All that we can say must fall far short of the subject; or even of what we ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to give a description of the play itself or of its effect upon the mind, is mere impertinence; yet we must say something.—It is then the best of all Shakespear’s plays, for it is the one in which he was the most in earnest. He was here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination. The passion which he has taken as his subject is that which strikes its root deepest into the human heart; of which the bond is 258the hardest to be unloosed; and the cancelling and tearing to pieces of which gives the greatest revulsion to the frame. This depth of nature, this force of passion, this tug and war of the elements of our being, this firm faith in filial piety, and the giddy anarchy and whirling tumult of the thoughts at finding this prop failing it, the contrast between the fixed, immoveable basis of natural affection, and the rapid, irregular starts of imagination, suddenly wrenched from all its accustomed holds and resting-places in the soul, this is what Shakespear has given, and what nobody else but he could give. So we believe.—The mind of Lear, staggering between the weight of attachment and the hurried movements of passion, is like a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffetted by the furious waves, but that still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the sea; or it is like the sharp rock circled by the eddying whirlpool that foams and beats against it, or like the solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake.

The character of Lear itself is very finely conceived for the purpose. It is the only ground on which such a story could be built with the greatest truth and effect. It is his rash haste, his violent impetuosity, his blindness to every thing but the dictates of his passions or affections, that produces all his misfortunes, that aggravates his impatience of them, that enforces our pity for him. The part which Cordelia bears in the scene is extremely beautiful: the story is almost told in the first words she utters. We see at once the precipice on which the poor old king stands from his own extravagant and credulous importunity, the indiscreet simplicity of her love (which, to be sure, has a little of her father’s obstinacy in it) and the hollowness of her sisters’ pretensions. Almost the first burst of that noble tide of passion, which runs through the play, is in the remonstrance of Kent to his royal master on the injustice of his sentence against his youngest daughter—‘Be Kent unmannerly, when Lear is mad!’ This manly plainness, which draws down on him the displeasure of the unadvised king, is worthy of the fidelity with which he adheres to his fallen fortunes. The true character of the two eldest daughters, Regan and Gonerill (they are so thoroughly hateful that we do not even like to repeat their names) breaks out in their answer to Cordelia who desires them to treat their father well—‘Prescribe not us our duties’—their hatred of advice being in proportion to their determination to do wrong, and to their hypocritical pretensions to do right. Their deliberate hypocrisy adds the last finishing to the odiousness of their characters. It is the absence of this detestable quality that is the only relief in the character of Edmund the Bastard, and that at times reconciles us to him. We are not tempted to exaggerate the 259guilt of his conduct, when he himself gives it up as a bad business, and writes himself down ‘plain villain.’ Nothing more can be said about it. His religious honesty in this respect is admirable. One speech of his is worth a million. His father, Gloster, whom he has just deluded with a forged story of his brother Edgar’s designs against his life, accounts for his unnatural behaviour and the strange depravity of the times from the late eclipses in the sun and moon. Edmund, who is in the secret, says when he is gone—‘This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behaviour) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars: as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treacherous by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major: so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Tut! I should have been what I am, had the maidenliness star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardising.’—The whole character, its careless, light-hearted villainy, contrasted with the sullen, rancorous malignity of Regan and Gonerill, its connection with the conduct of the under-plot, in which Gloster’s persecution of one of his sons and the ingratitude of another, form a counterpart to the mistakes and misfortunes of Lear,—his double amour with the two sisters, and the share which he has in bringing about the fatal catastrophe, are all managed with an uncommon degree of skill and power.

It has been said, and we think justly, that the third act of Othello and the three first acts of Lear, are Shakespear’s great master-pieces in the logic of passion: that they contain the highest examples not only of the force of individual passion, but of its dramatic vicissitudes and striking effects arising from the different circumstances and characters of the persons speaking. We see the ebb and flow of the feeling, its pauses and feverish starts, its impatience of opposition, its accumulating force when it has time to recollect itself, the manner in which it avails itself of every passing word or gesture, its haste to repel insinuation, the alternate contraction and dilatation of the soul, and all ‘the dazzling fence of controversy’ in this mortal combat with poisoned weapons, aimed at the heart, where each wound is fatal. We have seen in Othello, how the unsuspecting frankness and impetuous passions of the Moor are played upon and exasperated by the artful dexterity of Iago. In the present play, that which aggravates the sense of sympathy in the reader, and of uncontroulable anguish in the 260swoln heart of Lear, is the petrifying indifference, the cold, calculating, obdurate selfishness of his daughters. His keen passions seem whetted on their stony hearts. The contrast would be too painful, the shock too great, but for the intervention of the Fool, whose well-timed levity comes in to break the continuity of feeling when it can no longer be borne, and to bring into play again the fibres of the heart just as they are growing rigid from overstrained excitement. The imagination is glad to take refuge in the half-comic, half-serious comments of the Fool, just as the mind under the extreme anguish of a surgical operation vents itself in sallies of wit. The character was also a grotesque ornament of the barbarous times, in which alone the tragic ground-work of the story could be laid. In another point of view it is indispensable, inasmuch as while it is a diversion to the too great intensity of our disgust, it carries the pathos to the highest pitch of which it is capable, by shewing the pitiable weakness of the old king’s conduct and its irretrievable consequences in the most familiar point of view. Lear may well ‘beat at the gate which let his folly in,’ after, as the Fool says, ‘he has made his daughters his mothers.’ The character is dropped in the third act to make room for the entrance of Edgar as Mad Tom, which well accords with the increasing bustle and wildness of the incidents; and nothing can be more complete than the distinction between Lear’s real and Edgar’s assumed madness, while the resemblance in the cause of their distresses, from the severing of the nearest ties of natural affection, keeps up a unity of interest. Shakespear’s mastery over his subject, if it was not art, was owing to a knowledge of the connecting links of the passions, and their effect upon the mind, still more wonderful than any systematic adherence to rules, and that anticipated and outdid all the efforts of the most refined art, not inspired and rendered instinctive by genius.

One of the most perfect displays of dramatic power is the first interview between Lear and his daughter, after the designed affronts upon him, which till one of his knights reminds him of them, his sanguine temperament had led him to overlook. He returns with his train from hunting, and his usual impatience breaks out in his first words, ‘Let me not stay a jot for dinner; go, get it ready.’ He then encounters the faithful Kent in disguise, and retains him in his service; and the first trial of his honest duty is to trip up the heels of the officious Steward who makes so prominent and despicable a figure through the piece. On the entrance of Gonerill the following dialogue takes place:—

‘Lear. How now, daughter? what makes that frontlet on?

Methinks, you are too much of late i’ the frown.

261Fool. Thou wast a pretty fellow, when thou had’st no need to care for her frowning; now thou art an O without a figure: I am better than thou art now; I am a fool, thou art nothing.——Yes, forsooth, I will hold my tongue; [To Gonerill], so your face bids me, though you say nothing. Mum, mum.

He that keeps nor crust nor crum,

Weary of all, shall want some.——

That’s a sheal’d peascod! |[Pointing to Lear.|

Gonerill. Not only, sir, this your all-licens’d fool,

But other of your insolent retinue

Do hourly carp and quarrel; breaking forth

In rank and not-to-be-endured riots.

I had thought, by making this well known unto you,

To have found a safe redress; but now grow fearful,

By what yourself too late have spoke and done,

That you protect this course, and put it on

By your allowance; which if you should, the fault

Would not ‘scape censure, nor the redresses sleep,

Which in the tender of a wholesome weal,

Might in their working do you that offence,

(Which else were shame) that then necessity

Would call discreet proceeding.

Fool. For you trow, nuncle,

The hedge sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,

That it had its head bit off by its young.

So out went the candle, and we were left darkling.

Lear. Are you our daughter?

Gonerill. Come, sir,

I would, you would make use of that good wisdom

Whereof I know you are fraught; and put away

These dispositions, which of late transform you

From what you rightly are.

Fool. May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse?

——Whoop, Jug, I love thee.

Lear. Does any here know me?—Why, this is not Lear:

Does Lear walk thus? speak thus?—Where are his eyes?

Either his notion weakens, or his discernings

Are lethargy’d——Ha! waking?—’Tis not so.——

Who is it that can tell me who I am?—Lear’s shadow?

I would learn that: for by the marks

Of sov’reignty, of knowledge, and of reason,

I should be false persuaded I had daughters.——

Your name, fair gentlewoman?

Gonerill. Come, sir:

This admiration is much o’ the favour

Of other your new pranks. I do beseech you

To understand my purposes aright:

262As you are old and reverend, you should be wise:

Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires;

Men so disorder’d, so debauch’d, and bold,

That this our court, infected with their manners,

Shews like a riotous inn: epicurism and lust

Make it more like a tavern, or a brothel,

Than a grac’d palace. The shame itself doth speak

For instant remedy: be then desir’d

By her, that else will take the thing she begs,

A little to disquantity your train;

And the remainder, that shall still depend,

To be such men as may besort your age,

And know themselves and you.

Lear. Darkness and devils!——

Saddle my horses; call my train together.——

Degenerate bastard! I’ll not trouble thee;

Yet have I left a daughter.

Gonerill. You strike my people; and your disorder’d rabble

Make servants of their betters.

Enter Albany.

Lear. Woe, that too late repents—O, sir, are you come?

Is it your will? speak, sir.—Prepare my horses.—— |[To Albany.|

Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend,

More hideous, when thou shew’st thee in a child,

Than the sea-monster!

Albany. Pray, sir, be patient.

Lear. Detested kite! thou liest. |[To Gonerill.|

My train are men of choice and rarest parts,

That all particulars of duty know;

And in the most exact regard support

The worships of their name.——O most small fault,

How ugly didst thou in Cordelia shew!

Which, like an engine, wrench’d my frame of nature

From the fixt place; drew from my heart all love,

And added to the gall. O Lear, Lear, Lear!

Beat at the gate, that let thy folly in, |[Striking his head.|

And thy dear judgment out!——Go, go, my people!

Albany. My lord, I am guiltless, as I am ignorant

Of what hath mov’d you.

Lear. It may be so, my lord——

Hear, nature, hear! dear goddess, hear!

Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend

To make this creature fruitful!

Into her womb convey sterility;

Dry up in her the organs of increase;

And from her derogate body never spring

263A babe to honour her! If she must teem,

Create her child of spleen: that it may live,

To be a thwart disnatur’d torment to her!

Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth;

With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;

Turn all her mother’s pains, and benefits,

To laughter and contempt; that she may feel

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child!——Away, away! |[Exit.|

Albany. Now, gods, that we adore, whereof comes this?

Gonerill. Never afflict yourself to know the cause;

But let his disposition have that scope

That dotage gives it.

Re-enter Lear.

Lear. What, fifty of my followers at a clap!

Within a fortnight!

Albany. What’s the matter, sir?

Lear. I’ll tell thee; life and death! I am asham’d

That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus: |[To Gonerill.|

That these hot tears, which break from me perforce,

Should make thee worth them.——Blasts and fogs upon thee!

The untented woundings of a father’s curse

Pierce every sense about thee!——Old fond eyes

Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck you out;

And cast you, with the waters that you lose,

To temper clay.——Ha! is it come to this?

Let it be so:——Yet have I left a daughter,

Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable;

When she shall hear this of thee, with her nails

She’ll flea thy wolfish visage. Thou shalt find,

That I’ll resume the shape, which thou dost think

I have cast off for ever. |[Exeunt Lear, Kent, and Attendants.’|

This is certainly fine: no wonder that Lear says after it, ‘O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heavens,’ feeling its effects by anticipation; but fine as is this burst of rage and indignation at the first blow aimed at his hopes and expectations, it is nothing near so fine as what follows from his double disappointment, and his lingering efforts to see which of them he shall lean upon for support and find comfort in, when both his daughters turn against his age and weakness. It is with some difficulty that Lear gets to speak with his daughter Regan, and her husband, at Gloster’s castle. In concert with Gonerill they have left their own home on purpose to avoid him. His apprehensions are first alarmed by this circumstance, and 264when Gloster, whose guests they are, urges the fiery temper of the Duke of Cornwall as an excuse for not importuning him a second time, Lear breaks out—

‘Vengeance! Plague! Death! Confusion!——

Fiery? What quality? Why, Gloster, Gloster,

I’d speak with the Duke of Cornwall, and his wife.’

Afterwards, feeling perhaps not well himself, he is inclined to admit their excuse from illness, but then recollecting that they have set his messenger (Kent) in the stocks, all his suspicions are roused again, and he insists on seeing them.

‘Enter Cornwall, Regan, Gloster, and Servants.

Lear. Good-morrow to you both.

Cornwall. Hail to your grace! |[Kent is set at liberty.|

Regan. I am glad to see your highness.

Lear. Regan, I think you are; I know what reason

I have to think so: if thou should’st not be glad,

I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb,

Sepulch’ring an adultress.——O, are you free? |[To Kent.|

Some other time for that.——Beloved Regan,

Thy sister’s naught: O Regan, she hath tied

Sharp-tooth’d unkindness, like a vulture, here——

|[Points to his heart.|

I can scarce speak to thee; thou’lt not believe,

Of how deprav’d a quality——O Regan!

Regan. I pray you, sir, take patience; I have hope

You less know how to value her desert,

Than she to scant her duty.

Lear. Say, how is that?

Regan. I cannot think my sister in the least

Would fail her obligation; if, sir, perchance,

She have restrain’d the riots of your followers,

’Tis on such ground, and to such wholesome end,

As clears her from all blame.

Lear. My curses on her!

Regan. O, sir, you are old;

Nature in you stands on the very verge

Of her confine: you should be rul’d, and led

By some discretion, that discerns your state

Better than you yourself: therefore, I pray you,

That to our sister you do make return;

Say, you have wrong’d her, sir.

Lear. Ask her forgiveness?

Do you but mark how this becomes the use?

Dear daughter, I confess that I am old;

265Age is unnecessary; on my knees I beg,

That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.

Regan. Good sir, no more; these are unsightly tricks:

Return you to my sister.

Lear. Never, Regan:

She hath abated me of half my train;

Look’d blank upon me; struck me with her tongue,

Most serpent-like, upon the very heart:——

All the stor’d vengeances of heaven fall

On her ungrateful top! Strike her young bones,

You taking airs, with lameness!

Cornwall. Fie, sir, fie!

Lear. You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames

Into her scornful eyes! Infect her beauty,

You fen-suck’d fogs, drawn by the powerful sun,

To fall, and blast her pride!

Regan. O the blest gods!

So will you wish on me, when the rash mood is on.

Lear. No, Regan, thou shalt never have my curse;

Thy tender-hefted nature shall not give

Thee o’er to harshness; her eyes are fierce, but thine

Do comfort, and not burn: ’Tis not in thee

To grudge my pleasures, to cut off my train,

To bandy hasty words, to scant my sizes,

And, in conclusion, to oppose the bolt

Against my coming in: thou better know’st

The offices of nature, bond of childhood,

Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude;

Thy half o’ the kingdom thou hast not forgot,

Wherein I thee endow’d.

Regan. Good sir, to the purpose. |[Trumpets within.|

Lear. Who put my man i’ the stocks?

Cornwall. What trumpet’s that?

Enter Steward.

Regan. I know’t, my sister’s: this approves her letter,

That she would soon be here.—Is your lady come?

Lear. This is a slave, whose easy-borrow’d pride

Dwells in the fickle grace of her he follows:——

Out, Varlet, from my sight!

Cornwall. What means your grace?

Lear. Who stock’d my servant? Regan, I have good hope

Thou did’st not know on’t.——Who comes here? O heavens,

Enter Gonerill.

If you do love old men, if your sweet sway

Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,

Make it your cause; send down, and take my part!—

266Art not asham’d to look upon this beard?— |[To Gonerill.|

O, Regan, wilt thou take her by the hand?

Gonerill. Why not by the hand, sir? How have I offended?

All’s not offence, that indiscretion finds,

And dotage terms so.

Lear. O, sides, you are too tough!

Will you yet hold?—How came my man i’ the stocks?

Cornwall. I set him there, sir: but his own disorders

Deserv’d much less advancement.

Lear. You! did you?

Regan. I pray you, father, being weak, seem so.

If, till the expiration of your month,

You will return and sojourn with my sister,

Dismissing half your train, come then to me;

I am now from home, and out of that provision

Which shall be needful for your entertainment.

Lear. Return to her, and fifty men dismiss’d?

No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose

To be a comrade with the wolf and owl——

To wage against the enmity o’ the air,

Necessity’s sharp pinch!——Return with her!

Why, the hot-blooded France, that dowerless took

Our youngest born, I could as well be brought

To knee his throne, and squire-like pension beg

To keep base life afoot.——Return with her!

Persuade me rather to be slave and sumpter

To this detested groom. |[Looking on the Steward.|

Gonerill. At your choice, sir.

Lear. Now, I pr’ythee, daughter, do not make me mad;

I will not trouble thee, my child; farewell:

We’ll no more meet, no more see one another:——

But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter;

Or, rather, a disease that’s in my flesh,

Which I must needs call mine: thou art a bile,

A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle,

In my corrupted blood. But I’ll not chide thee;

Let shame come when it will, I do not call it:

I did not bid the thunder-bearer shoot,

Nor tell tales of thee to high-judging Jove:

Mend when thou canst; be better, at thy leisure:

I can be patient; I can stay with Regan,

I, and my hundred knights.

Regan. Not altogether so, sir;

I look’d not for you yet, nor am provided

For your fit welcome: Give ear, sir, to my sister;

For those that mingle reason with your passion

Must be content to think you old, and so——

But she knows what she does.

Lear. Is this well spoken now?

267Regan. I dare avouch it, sir: What, fifty followers?

Is it not well? What should you need of more?

Yea, or so many? Sith that both charge and danger

Speak ‘gainst so great a number? How, in one house,

Should many people, under two commands,

Hold amity? ’Tis hard; almost impossible.

Gonerill. Why might not you, my lord, receive attendance

From those that she calls servants, or from mine?

Regan. Why not, my lord? If then they chanc’d to slack you,

We would controul them: if you will come to me

(For now I spy a danger) I entreat you

To bring but five-and-twenty; to no more

Will I give place, or notice.

Lear. I gave you all——

Regan. And in good time you gave it.

Lear. Made you my guardians, my depositaries;

But kept a reservation to be follow’d

With such a number: what, must I come to you

With five-and-twenty, Regan! said you so?

Regan. And speak it again, my lord: no more with me.

Lear. Those wicked creatures yet do look well-favour’d,

When others are more wicked; not being the worst,

Stands in some rank of praise:——I’ll go with thee; |[To Gonerill.|

Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty,

And thou art twice her love.

Gonerill. Hear me, my lord;

What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,

To follow in a house, where twice so many

Have a command to tend you?

Regan. What need one?

Lear. O, reason not the need: our basest beggars

Are in the poorest thing superfluous:

Allow not nature more than nature needs,

Man’s life is cheap as beast’s: thou art a lady;

If only to go warm were gorgeous,

Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st;

Which scarcely keeps thee warm.——But, for true need——

You heavens, give me that patience which I need!

You see me here, you gods; a poor old man,

As full of grief as age; wretched in both!

If it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts

Against their father, fool me not so much

To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger!

O, let no woman’s weapons, water-drops,

Stain my man’s cheeks!——No, you unnatural hags,

I will have such revenges on you both,

That all the world shall——I will do such things——

What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be

268The terrors of the earth. You think, I’ll weep:

No, I’ll not weep:——

I have full cause of weeping; but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,

Or e’er I’ll weep:——O, fool, I shall go mad!——

|[Exeunt Lear, Gloster, Kent, and Fool.’|

If there is any thing in any author like this yearning of the heart, these throes of tenderness, this profound expression of all that can be thought and felt in the most heart-rending situations, we are glad of it; but it is in some author that we have not read.

The scene in the storm, where he is exposed to all the fury of the elements, though grand and terrible, is not so fine, but the moralising scenes with Mad Tom, Kent, and Gloster, are upon a par with the former. His exclamation in the supposed trial-scene of his daughters, ‘See the little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see they bark at me,’ his issuing his orders, ‘Let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart,’ and his reflection when he sees the misery of Edgar, ‘Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this,’ are in a style of pathos, where the extremest resources of the imagination are called in to lay open the deepest movements of the heart, which was peculiar to Shakespear. In the same style and spirit is his interrupting the Fool who asks ‘whether a madman be a gentleman or a yeoman,’ by answering ‘A king, a king.—

The indirect part that Gloster takes in these scenes where his generosity leads him to relieve Lear and resent the cruelty of his daughters, at the very time that he is himself instigated to seek the life of his son, and suffering under the sting of his supposed ingratitude, is a striking accompaniment to the situation of Lear. Indeed, the manner in which the threads of the story are woven together is almost as wonderful in the way of art as the carrying on the tide of passion, still varying and unimpaired, is on the score of nature. Among the remarkable instances of this kind are Edgar’s meeting with his old blind father; the deception he practises upon him when he pretends to lead him to the top of Dover-cliff—‘Come on, sir, here’s the place,’ to prevent his ending his life and miseries together; his encounter with the perfidious Steward whom he kills, and his finding the letter from Gonerill to his brother upon him which leads to the final catastrophe, and brings the wheel of Justice ‘full circle home’ to the guilty parties. The bustle and rapid succession of events in the last scenes is surprising. But the meeting between Lear and Cordelia is by far the most affecting part of them. It has all the wildness of poetry, and all the heart-felt truth of nature. The 269previous account of her reception of the news of his unkind treatment, her involuntary reproaches to her sisters, ‘Shame, ladies, shame,’ Lear’s backwardness to see his daughter, the picture of the desolate state to which he is reduced, ‘Alack, ’tis he; why he was met even now, as mad as the vex’d sea, singing aloud,’ only prepare the way for and heighten our expectation of what follows, and assuredly this expectation is not disappointed when through the tender care of Cordelia he revives and recollects her.

‘Cordelia. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty!

Lear. You do me wrong, to take me out o’ the grave:

Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound

Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like molten lead.

Cordelia. Sir, do you know me?

Lear. You are a spirit I know: when did you die?

Cordelia. Still, still, far wide!

Physician. He’s scarce awake; let him alone awhile.

Lear. Where have I been? Where am I?—Fair daylight?——

I am mightily abus’d.—I should even die with pity,

To see another thus.—I know not what to say.——

I will not swear these are my hands:—let’s see;

I feel this pin prick. ‘Would I were assured

Of my condition.

Cordelia. O, look upon me, sir,

And hold your hands in benediction o’er me:——

No, sir, you must not kneel.

Lear. Pray, do not mock me:

I am a very foolish fond old man,

Fourscore and upward;

And, to deal plainly,

I fear, I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks, I shou’d know you, and know this man;

Yet I am doubtful: for I am mainly ignorant

What place this is; and all the skill I have

Remembers not these garments; nor I know not

Where I did lodge last night: do not laugh at me;

For, as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child Cordelia.

Cordelia. And so I am, I am!’

Almost equal to this in awful beauty is their consolation of each other when, after the triumph of their enemies, they are led to prison.

‘Cordelia. We are not the first,

Who, with best meaning, have incurr’d the worst.

270For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;

Myself could else out-frown false fortune’s frown.—

Shall we not see these daughters, and these sisters?

Lear. No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison:

We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,

And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too—

Who loses, and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;—

And take upon us the mystery of things,

As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,

In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,

That ebb and flow by the moon.

Edmund. Take them away.

Lear. Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,

The gods themselves throw incense.’

The concluding events are sad, painfully sad; but their pathos is extreme. The oppression of the feelings is relieved by the very interest we take in the misfortunes of others, and by the reflections to which they give birth. Cordelia is hanged in prison by the orders of the bastard Edmund, which are known too late to be countermanded, and Lear dies broken-hearted, lamenting over her.

‘Lear. And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never!——

Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.’

He dies, and indeed we feel the truth of what Kent says on the occasion—

‘Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him,

That would upon the rack of this rough world

Stretch him out longer.’

Yet a happy ending has been contrived for this play, which is approved of by Dr. Johnson and condemned by Schlegel. A better authority than either, on any subject in which poetry and feeling are concerned, has given it in favour of Shakespear, in some remarks on the acting of Lear, with which we shall conclude this account:

‘The Lear of Shakespear cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery with which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements than any actor can 271be to represent Lear. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual; the explosions of his passions are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that rich sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage—while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear;—we are in his mind; we are sustained by a grandeur, which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will on the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that “they themselves are old!” What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it shew: it is too hard and stony: it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the shew-men of the scene, to draw it about more easily. A happy ending!—as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through,—the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world’s burden after, why all this pudder and preparation—why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station,—as if at his years and with his experience, any thing was left but to die.’^[68]

Four things have struck us in reading Lear:

1. That poetry is an interesting study, for this reason, that it relates to whatever is most interesting in human life. Whoever therefore has a contempt for poetry, has a contempt for himself and humanity.

2. That the language of poetry is superior to the language of painting; because the strongest of our recollections relate to feelings, not to faces.

3. That the greatest strength of genius is shewn in describing the strongest passions: for the power of the imagination, in works of invention, must be in proportion to the force of the natural impressions, which are the subject of them.

4. That the circumstance which balances the pleasure against the 272pain in tragedy is, that in proportion to the greatness of the evil, is our sense and desire of the opposite good excited; and that our sympathy with actual suffering is lost in the strong impulse given to our natural affections, and carried away with the swelling tide of passion, that gushes from and relieves the heart.

RICHARD II.

Richard II. is a play little known compared with Richard III. which last is a play that every unfledged candidate for theatrical fame chuses to strut and fret his hour upon the stage in; yet we confess that we prefer the nature and feeling of the one to the noise and bustle of the other; at least, as we are so often forced to see it acted. In Richard II. the weakness of the king leaves us leisure to take a greater interest in the misfortunes of the man. After the first act, in which the arbitrariness of his behaviour only proves his want of resolution, we see him staggering under the unlooked-for blows of fortune, bewailing his loss of kingly power, not preventing it, sinking under the aspiring genius of Bolingbroke, his authority trampled on, his hopes failing him, and his pride crushed and broken down under insults and injuries, which his own misconduct had provoked, but which he has not courage or manliness to resent. The change of tone and behaviour in the two competitors for the throne according to their change of fortune, from the capricious sentence of banishment passed by Richard upon Bolingbroke, the suppliant offers and modest pretensions of the latter on his return to the high and haughty tone with which he accepts Richard’s resignation of the crown after the loss of all his power, the use which he makes of the deposed king to grace his triumphal progress through the streets of London, and the final intimation of his wish for his death, which immediately finds a servile executioner, is marked throughout with complete effect and without the slightest appearance of effort. The steps by which Bolingbroke mounts the throne are those by which Richard sinks into the grave. We feel neither respect nor love for the deposed monarch; for he is as wanting in energy as in principle: but we pity him, for he pities himself. His heart is by no means hardened against himself, but bleeds afresh at every new stroke of mischance, and his sensibility, absorbed in his own person, and unused to misfortune, is not only tenderly alive to its own sufferings, but without the fortitude to bear them. He is, however, human in his distresses; for to feel pain, and sorrow, weakness, disappointment, remorse and 273anguish, is the lot of humanity, and we sympathize with him accordingly. The sufferings of the man make us forget that he ever was a king.

The right assumed by sovereign power to trifle at its will with the happiness of others as a matter of course, or to remit its exercise as a matter of favour, is strikingly shewn in the sentence of banishment so unjustly pronounced on Bolingbroke and Mowbray, and in what Bolingbroke says when four years of his banishment are taken off, with as little reason.

‘How long a time lies in one little word!

Four lagging winters and four wanton springs

End in a word: such is the breath of kings.’

A more affecting image of the loneliness of a state of exile can hardly be given than by what Bolingbroke afterwards observes of his having ‘sighed his English breath in foreign clouds’; or than that conveyed in Mowbray’s complaint at being banished for life.

‘The language I have learned these forty years,

My native English, now I must forego;

And now my tongue’s use is to me no more

Than an unstringed viol or a harp,

Or like a cunning instrument cas’d up,

Or being open, put into his hands

That knows no touch to tune the harmony.

I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,

Too far in years to be a pupil now.’—

How very beautiful is all this, and at the same time how very English too!

Richard II. may be considered as the first of that series of English historical plays, in which ‘is hung armour of the invincible knights of old,’ in which their hearts seem to strike against their coats of mail, where their blood tingles for the fight, and words are but the harbingers of blows. Of this state of accomplished barbarism the appeal of Bolingbroke and Mowbray is an admirable specimen. Another of these ‘keen encounters of their wits,’ which serve to whet the talkers’ swords, is where Aumerle answers in the presence of Bolingbroke to the charge which Bagot brings against him of being an accessory in Gloster’s death.

‘Fitzwater. If that thy valour stand on sympathies,

There is my gage, Aumerle, in gage to thine;

By that fair sun that shows me where thou stand’st,

I heard thee say, and vauntingly thou spak’st it,

274That thou wert cause of noble Gloster’s death.

If thou deny’st it twenty times thou liest,

And I will turn thy falsehood to thy heart

Where it was forged, with my rapier’s point.

Aumerle. Thou dar’st not, coward, live to see the day.

Fitzwater. Now, by my soul, I would it were this hour.

Aumerle. Fitzwater, thou art damn’d to hell for this.

Percy. Aumerle, thou liest; his honour is as true,

In this appeal, as thou art all unjust;

And that thou art so, there I throw my gage

To prove it on thee, to the extremest point

Of mortal breathing. Seize it, if thou dar’st.

Aumerle. And if I do not, may my hands rot off,

And never brandish more revengeful steel

Over the glittering helmet of my foe.

Who sets me else? By heav’n, I’ll throw at all.

I have a thousand spirits in my breast,

To answer twenty thousand such as you.

Surry. My lord Fitzwater, I remember well

The very time Aumerle and you did talk.

Fitzwater. My lord, ’tis true: you were in presence then:

And you can witness with me, this is true.

Surry. As false, by heav’n, as heav’n itself is true.

Fitzwater. Surry, thou liest.

Surry. Dishonourable boy,

That lie shall lye so heavy on my sword,

That it shall render vengeance and revenge,

Till thou the lie-giver and that lie rest

In earth as quiet as thy father’s skull.

In proof whereof, there is mine honour’s pawn:

Engage it to the trial, if thou dar’st.

Fitzwater. How fondly dost thou spur a forward horse:

If I dare eat or drink, or breathe or live,

I dare meet Surry in a wilderness,

And spit upon him, whilst I say he lies,

And lies, and lies: there is my bond of faith,

To tie thee to thy strong correction.

As I do hope to thrive in this new world,

Aumerle is guilty of my true appeal.’

The truth is, that there is neither truth nor honour in all these noble persons: they answer words with words, as they do blows with blows, in mere self defence: nor have they any principle whatever but that of courage in maintaining any wrong they dare commit, or any falsehood which they find it useful to assert. How different were these noble knights and ‘barons bold’ from their more refined descendants in the present day, who, instead of deciding questions of right by brute force, refer everything to convenience, 275fashion, and good breeding! In point of any abstract love of truth or justice, they are just the same now that they were then.

The characters of old John of Gaunt and of his brother York, uncles to the King, the one stern and foreboding, the other honest, good-natured, doing all for the best, and therefore doing nothing, are well kept up. The speech of the former, in praise of England, is one of the most eloquent that ever was penned. We should perhaps hardly be disposed to feed the pampered egotism of our countrymen by quoting this description, were it not that the conclusion of it (which looks prophetic) may qualify any improper degree of exultation.

‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,

This earth of Majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-Paradise,

This fortress built by nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war;

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house

Against the envy of less happy lands:

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,

Fear’d for their breed and famous for their birth,

Renowned for their deeds as far from home,

(For Christian service and true chivalry)

As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry

Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s son;

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leas’d out (I die pronouncing it)

Like to a tenement or pelting farm.

England bound in with the triumphant sea,

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious surge

Of wat’ry Neptune, is bound in with shame,

With inky-blots and rotten parchment bonds.

That England that was wont to conquer others,

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.’

The character of Bolingbroke, afterwards Henry IV. is drawn with a masterly hand:—patient for occasion, and then steadily availing himself of it, seeing his advantage afar off, but only seizing on it when he has it within his reach, humble, crafty, bold, and aspiring, encroaching by regular but slow degrees, building power on opinion, and cementing opinion by power. His disposition is first unfolded 276by Richard himself, who however is too self-willed and secure to make a proper use of his knowledge.

‘Ourself and Bushy, Bagot here and Green,

Observed his courtship of the common people:

How he did seem to dive into their hearts,

With humble and familiar courtesy,

What reverence he did throw away on slaves;

Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles,

And patient under-bearing of his fortune,

As ‘twere to banish their affections with him.

Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench;

A brace of draymen bid God speed him well,

And had the tribute of his supple knee,

With thanks my countrymen, my loving friends;

As were our England in reversion his,

And he our subjects’ next degree in hope.’

Afterwards, he gives his own character to Percy, in these words:

‘I thank thee, gentle Percy, and be sure

I count myself in nothing else so happy,

As in a soul rememb’ring my good friends;

And as my fortune ripens with thy love,

It shall be still thy true love’s recompense.’

We know how he afterwards kept his promise. His bold assertion of his own rights, his pretended submission to the king, and the ascendancy which he tacitly assumes over him without openly claiming it, as soon as he has him in his power, are characteristic traits of this ambitious and politic usurper. But the part of Richard himself gives the chief interest to the play. His folly, his vices, his misfortunes, his reluctance to part with the crown, his fear to keep it, his weak and womanish regrets, his starting tears, his fits of hectic passion, his smothered majesty, pass in succession before us, and make a picture as natural as it is affecting. Among the most striking touches of pathos are his wish ‘O that I were a mockery king of snow to melt away before the sun of Bolingbroke,’ and the incident of the poor groom who comes to visit him in prison, and tells him how ‘it yearned his heart that Bolingbroke upon his coronation-day rode on Roan Barbary.’ We shall have occasion to return hereafter to the character of Richard II. in speaking of Henry VI. There is only one passage more, the description of his entrance into London with Bolingbroke, which we should like to quote here, if it had not been so used and worn out, so thumbed and got by rote, so praised and painted; but its beauty surmounts all these considerations.

277‘Duchess. My lord, you told me you would tell the rest,

When weeping made you break the story off

Of our two cousins coming into London.

York. Where did I leave?

Duchess. At that sad stop, my lord,

Where rude misgovern’d hands, from window tops,

Threw dust and rubbish on king Richard’s head.

York. Then, as I said, the duke, great Bolingbroke,

Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed,

Which his aspiring rider seem’d to know,

With slow, but stately pace, kept on his course,

While all tongues cried—God save thee, Bolingbroke!

You would have thought the very windows spake,

So many greedy looks of young and old

Through casements darted their desiring eyes

Upon his visage; and that all the walls,

With painted imag’ry, had said at once—

Jesu preserve thee! welcome, Bolingbroke!

Whilst he, from one side to the other turning,

Bare-headed, lower than his proud steed’s neck,

Bespake them thus—I thank you, countrymen:

And thus still doing thus he pass’d along.

Duchess. Alas, poor Richard! where rides he the while?

York. As in a theatre, the eyes of men,

After a well-grac’d actor leaves the stage,

Are idly bent on him that enters next,

Thinking his prattle to be tedious:

Even so, or with much more contempt, men’s eyes

Did scowl on Richard; no man cried God save him!

No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home:

But dust was thrown upon his sacred head!

Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off—

His face still combating with tears and smiles,

The badges of his grief and patience—

That had not God, for some strong purpose, steel’d

The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted,

And barbarism itself have pitied him.’

HENRY IV IN TWO PARTS

If Shakespear’s fondness for the ludicrous sometimes led to faults in his tragedies (which was not often the case) he has made us amends by the character of Falstaff. This is perhaps the most substantial comic character that ever was invented. Sir John carries a most portly presence in the mind’s eye; and in him, not to speak it 278profanely, ‘we behold the fulness of the spirit of wit and humour bodily.’ We are as well acquainted with his person as his mind, and his jokes come upon us with double force and relish from the quantity of flesh through which they make their way, as he shakes his fat sides with laughter, or ‘lards the lean earth as he walks along.’ Other comic characters seem, if we approach and handle them, to resolve themselves into air, ‘into thin air’; but this is embodied and palpable to the grossest apprehension: it lies ‘three fingers deep upon the ribs,’ it plays about the lungs and the diaphragm with all the force of animal enjoyment. His body is like a good estate to his mind, from which he receives rents and revenues of profit and pleasure in kind, according to its extent, and the richness of the soil. Wit is often a meagre substitute for pleasurable sensation; an effusion of spleen and petty spite at the comforts of others, from feeling none in itself. Falstaff’s wit is an emanation of a fine constitution; an exuberance of good-humour and good-nature; an overflowing of his love of laughter and good-fellowship; a giving vent to his heart’s ease, and over-contentment with himself and others. He would not be in character, if he were not so fat as he is; for there is the greatest keeping in the boundless luxury of his imagination and the pampered self-indulgence of his physical appetites. He manures and nourishes his mind with jests, as he does his body with sack and sugar. He carves out his jokes, as he would a capon or a haunch of venison, where there is cut and come again; and pours out upon them the oil of gladness. His tongue drops fatness, and in the chambers of his brain ‘it snows of meat and drink.’ He keeps up perpetual holiday and open house, and we live with him in a round of invitations to a rump and dozen.—Yet we are not to suppose that he was a mere sensualist. All this is as much in imagination as in reality. His sensuality does not engross and stupify his other faculties, but ‘ascends me into the brain, clears away all the dull, crude vapours that environ it, and makes it full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes.’ His imagination keeps up the ball after his senses have done with it. He seems to have even a greater enjoyment of the freedom from restraint, of good cheer, of his ease, of his vanity, in the ideal exaggerated description which he gives of them, than in fact. He never fails to enrich his discourse with allusions to eating and drinking, but we never see him at table. He carries his own larder about with him, and he is himself ‘a tun of man.’ His pulling out the bottle in the field of battle is a joke to shew his contempt for glory accompanied with danger, his systematic adherence to his Epicurean philosophy in the most trying circumstances. Again, such is his deliberate exaggeration of his own vices, that it 279does not seem quite certain whether the account of his hostess’s bill, found in his pocket, with such an out-of-the-way charge for capons and sack with only one halfpenny-worth of bread, was not put there by himself as a trick to humour the jest upon his favourite propensities, and as a conscious caricature of himself. He is represented as a liar, a braggart, a coward, a glutton, etc. and yet we are not offended but delighted with him; for he is all these as much to amuse others as to gratify himself. He openly assumes all these characters to shew the humourous part of them. The unrestrained indulgence of his own ease, appetites, and convenience, has neither malice nor hypocrisy in it. In a word, he is an actor in himself almost as much as upon the stage, and we no more object to the character of Falstaff in a moral point of view than we should think of bringing an excellent comedian, who should represent him to the life, before one of the police offices. We only consider the number of pleasant lights in which he puts certain foibles (the more pleasant as they are opposed to the received rules and necessary restraints of society) and do not trouble ourselves about the consequences resulting from them, for no mischievous consequences do result. Sir John is old as well as fat, which gives a melancholy retrospective tinge to the character; and by the disparity between his inclinations and his capacity for enjoyment, makes it still more ludicrous and fantastical.

The secret of Falstaff’s wit is for the most part a masterly presence of mind, an absolute self-possession, which nothing can disturb. His repartees are involuntary suggestions of his self-love; instinctive evasions of every thing that threatens to interrupt the career of his triumphant jollity and self-complacency. His very size floats him out of all his difficulties in a sea of rich conceits; and he turns round on the pivot of his convenience, with every occasion and at a moment’s warning. His natural repugnance to every unpleasant thought or circumstance, of itself makes light of objections, and provokes the most extravagant and licentious answers in his own justification. His indifference to truth puts no check upon his invention, and the more improbable and unexpected his contrivances are, the more happily does he seem to be delivered of them, the anticipation of their effect acting as a stimulus to the gaiety of his fancy. The success of one adventurous sally gives him spirits to undertake another: he deals always in round numbers, and his exaggerations and excuses are ‘open, palpable, monstrous as the father that begets them.’ His dissolute carelessness of what he says discovers itself in the first dialogue with the Prince.

‘Falstaff. By the lord, thou say’st true, lad; and is not mine hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench?

280P. Henry. As the honey of Hibla, my old lad of the castle; and is not a buff-jerkin a most sweet robe of durance?

Falstaff. How now, how now, mad wag, what in thy quips and thy quiddities? what a plague have I to do with a buff-jerkin?

P. Henry. Why, what a pox have I to do with mine hostess of the tavern?’

In the same scene he afterwards affects melancholy, from pure satisfaction of heart, and professes reform, because it is the farthest thing in the world from his thoughts. He has no qualms of conscience, and therefore would as soon talk of them as of anything else when the humour takes him.

‘Falstaff. But Hal, I pr’ythee trouble me no more with vanity. I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought: an old lord of council rated me the other day in the street about you, sir; but I mark’d him not, and yet he talked very wisely, and in the street too.

P. Henry. Thou didst well, for wisdom cries out in the street, and no man regards it.

Falstaff. O, thou hast damnable iteration, and art indeed able to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm unto me, Hal; God forgive thee for it. Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing, and now I am, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked. I must give over this life, and I will give it over, by the lord; an I do not, I am a villain. I’ll be damn’d for never a king’s son in Christendom.

P. Henry. Where shall we take a purse to-morrow, Jack?

Falstaff. Where thou wilt, lad, I’ll make one; an I do not, call me villain, and baffle me.

P. Henry. I see good amendment of life in thee, from praying to purse-taking.

Falstaff. Why, Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal. ’Tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.’

Of the other prominent passages, his account of his pretended resistance to the robbers, ‘who grew from four men in buckram into eleven’ as the imagination of his own valour increased with his relating it, his getting off when the truth is discovered by pretending he knew the Prince, the scene in which in the person of the old king he lectures the prince and gives himself a good character, the soliloquy on honour, and description of his new-raised recruits, his meeting with the chief justice, his abuse of the Prince and Poins, who overhear him, to Doll Tearsheet, his reconciliation with Mrs. Quickly who has arrested him for an old debt, and whom he persuades to pawn her plate to lend him ten pounds more, and the scenes with Shallow and Silence, are all inimitable. Of all of them, the scene in which 281Falstaff plays the part, first, of the King, and then of Prince Henry, is the one that has been the most often quoted. We must quote it once more in illustration of our remarks.

‘Falstaff. Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, but also how thou art accompanied: for though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears. That thou art my son, I have partly thy mother’s word, partly my own opinion; but chiefly, a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me. If then thou be son to me, here lies the point;——Why, being son to me, art thou so pointed at? Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a micher, and eat blackberries? A question not to be ask’d. Shall the son of England prove a thief, and take purses? a question not to be ask’d. There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch: this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile; so doth the company thou keepest: for, Harry, now I do not speak to thee in drink, but in tears; not in pleasure, but in passion; not in words only, but in woes also:—and yet there is a virtuous man, whom I have often noted in thy company, but I know not his name.

P. Henry. What manner of man, an it like your majesty?

Falstaff. A goodly portly man, i’faith, and a corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage; and, as I think, his age some fifty, or, by’r-lady, inclining to threescore; and now I do remember me, his name is Falstaff: if that man should be lewdly given, he deceiveth me; for, Harry, I see virtue in his looks. If then the fruit may be known by the tree, as the tree by the fruit, then peremptorily I speak it, there is virtue in that Falstaff: him keep with, the rest banish. And tell me now, thou naughty varlet, tell me, where hast thou been this month?

P. Henry. Dost thou speak like a king? Do thou stand for me, and I’ll play my father.

Falstaff. Depose me? if thou dost it half so gravely, so majestically, both in word and matter, hang me up by the heels for a rabbit-sucker, or a poulterer’s hare.

P. Henry. Well, here I am set.

Falstaff. And here I stand:—judge, my masters.

P. Henry. Now, Harry, whence come you?

Falstaff. My noble lord, from Eastcheap.

P. Henry. The complaints I hear of thee are grievous.

Falstaff. S’blood, my lord, they are false:—nay, I ‘ll tickle ye for a young prince, i’faith.

P. Henry. Swearest thou, ungracious boy? henceforth ne’er look on me. Thou art violently carried away from grace: there is a devil haunts thee, in the likeness of a fat old man; a tun of man is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swoln parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuft cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manning-tree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years? wherein is he good, but to taste sack and drink it? wherein neat 282and cleanly, but to carve a capon and eat it? wherein cunning, but in craft? wherein crafty, but in villainy? wherein villainous, but in all things? wherein worthy, but in nothing?

Falstaff. I would, your grace would take me with you; whom means your grace?

P. Henry. That villainous, abominable mis-leader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan.

Falstaff. My lord, the man I know.

P. Henry. I know thou dost.

Falstaff. But to say, I know more harm in him than in myself, were to say more than I know. That he is old (the more the pity) his white hairs do witness it: but that he is (saving your reverence) a whore-master, that I utterly deny. If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! if to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned: if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved. No, my good lord; banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins: but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, being as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry’s company; banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.

P. Henry. I do, I will.

[Knocking; and Hostess and Bardolph go out.

Re-enter Bardolph, running.

Bardolph. O, my lord, my lord; the sheriff, with a most monstrous watch, is at the door.

Falstaff. Out, you rogue! play out the play: I have much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff.’

One of the most characteristic descriptions of Sir John is that which Mrs. Quickly gives of him when he asks her ‘What is the gross sum that I owe thee?’

‘Hostess. Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself, and the money too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire on Wednesday in Whitsun-week, when the prince broke thy head for likening his father to a singing man of Windsor; thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me, and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher’s wife, come in then, and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling us, she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst desire to eat some; whereby I told thee, they were ill for a green wound? And didst thou not, when she was gone down stairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such poor people; saying, that ere long they should call me madam? And didst thou not kiss me, and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings? I put thee now to thy book-oath; deny it, if thou canst.’

This scene is to us the most convincing proof of Falstaff’s power of gaining over the good will of those he was familiar with, except indeed 283Bardolph’s somewhat profane exclamation on hearing the account of his death, ‘Would I were with him, wheresoe’er he is, whether in heaven or hell.’

One of the topics of exulting superiority over others most common in Sir John’s mouth is his corpulence and the exterior marks of good living which he carries about him, thus ‘turning his vices into commodity.’ He accounts for the friendship between the Prince and Poins, from ‘their legs being both of a bigness’; and compares Justice Shallow to ‘a man made after supper of a cheese-paring.’ There cannot be a more striking gradation of character than that between Falstaff and Shallow, and Shallow and Silence. It seems difficult at first to fall lower than the squire; but this fool, great as he is, finds an admirer and humble foil in his cousin Silence. Vain of his acquaintance with Sir John, who makes a butt of him, he exclaims, ‘Would, cousin Silence, that thou had’st seen that which this knight and I have seen!’—‘Aye, Master Shallow, we have heard the chimes at midnight,’ says Sir John. To Falstaff’s observation ‘I did not think Master Silence had been a man of this mettle,’ Silence answers, ‘Who, I? I have been merry twice and once ere now.’ What an idea is here conveyed of a prodigality of living? What good husbandry and economical self-denial in his pleasures? What a stock of lively recollections? It is curious that Shakespear has ridiculed in Justice Shallow, who was ‘in some authority under the king,’ that disposition to unmeaning tautology which is the regal infirmity of later times, and which, it may be supposed, he acquired from talking to his cousin Silence, and receiving no answers.