CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEAR’S PLAYS (continued 4)

‘Falstaff. You have here a goodly dwelling, and a rich.

Shallow. Barren, barren, barren; beggars all, beggars all, Sir John: marry, good air. Spread Davy, spread Davy. Well said, Davy.

Falstaff. This Davy serves you for good uses.

Shallow. A good varlet, a good varlet, a very good varlet. By the mass, I have drank too much sack at supper. A good varlet. Now sit down, now sit down. Come, cousin.’

The true spirit of humanity, the thorough knowledge of the stuff we are made of, the practical wisdom with the seeming fooleries in the whole of the garden-scene at Shallow’s country-seat, and just before in the exquisite dialogue between him and Silence on the death of old Double, have no parallel any where else. In one point of view, they are laughable in the extreme; in another they are equally affecting, if it is affecting to shew what a little thing is human life, what a poor forked creature man is!

The heroic and serious part of these two plays founded on the story 284of Henry IV. is not inferior to the comic and farcical. The characters of Hotspur and Prince Henry are two of the most beautiful and dramatic, both in themselves and from contrast, that ever were drawn. They are the essence of chivalry. We like Hotspur the best upon the whole, perhaps because he was unfortunate.—The characters of their fathers, Henry IV. and old Northumberland, are kept up equally well. Henry naturally succeeds by his prudence and caution in keeping what he has got; Northumberland fails in his enterprise from an excess of the same quality, and is caught in the web of his own cold, dilatory policy. Owen Glendower is a masterly character. It as bold and original as it is intelligible and thoroughly natural. The disputes between him and Hotspur are managed with infinite address and insight into nature. We cannot help pointing out here some very beautiful lines, where Hotspur describes the fight between Glendower and Mortimer.

——‘When on the gentle Severn’s sedgy bank,

In single opposition hand to hand,

He did confound the best part of an hour

In changing hardiment with great Glendower:

Three times they breath’d, and three times did they drink,

Upon agreement, of swift Severn’s flood;

Who then affrighted with their bloody looks,

Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,

And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank,

Blood-stained with these valiant combatants.’

The peculiarity and the excellence of Shakespear’s poetry is, that it seems as if he made his imagination the hand-maid of nature, and nature the plaything of his imagination. He appears to have been all the characters, and in all the situations he describes. It is as if either he had had all their feelings, or had lent them all his genius to express themselves. There cannot be stronger instances of this than Hotspur’s rage when Henry IV. forbids him to speak of Mortimer, his insensibility to all that his father and uncle urge to calm him, and his fine abstracted apostrophe to honour, ‘By heaven methinks it were an easy leap to pluck bright honour from the moon,’ etc. After all, notwithstanding the gallantry, generosity, good temper, and idle freaks of the mad-cap Prince of Wales, we should not have been sorry, if Northumberland’s force had come up in time to decide the fate of the battle at Shrewsbury; at least, we always heartily sympathise with Lady Percy’s grief, when she exclaims,

‘Had my sweet Harry had but half their numbers,

To-day might I (hanging on Hotspur’s neck)

Have talked of Monmouth’s grave.’

285The truth is, that we never could forgive the Prince’s treatment of Falstaff; though perhaps Shakespear knew what was best, according to the history, the nature of the times, and of the man. We speak only as dramatic critics. Whatever terror the French in those days might have of Henry V. yet, to the readers of poetry at present, Falstaff is the better man of the two. We think of him and quote him oftener.

HENRY V.

Henry V. is a very favourite monarch with the English nation, and he appears to have been also a favourite with Shakespear, who labours hard to apologise for the actions of the king, by shewing us the character of the man, as ‘the king of good fellows.’ He scarcely deserves this honour. He was fond of war and low company:—we know little else of him. He was careless, dissolute, and ambitious;—idle, or doing mischief. In private, he seemed to have no idea of the common decencies of life, which he subjected to a kind of regal licence; in public affairs, he seemed to have no idea of any rule of right or wrong, but brute force, glossed over with a little religious hypocrisy and archiepiscopal advice. His principles did not change with his situation and professions. His adventure on Gadshill was a prelude to the affair of Agincourt, only a bloodless one; Falstaff was a puny prompter of violence and outrage, compared with the pious and politic Archbishop of Canterbury, who gave the king carte blanche, in a genealogical tree of his family, to rob and murder in circles of latitude and longitude abroad—to save the possessions of the church at home. This appears in the speeches in Shakespear, where the hidden motives that actuate princes and their advisers in war and policy are better laid open than in speeches from the throne or woolsack. Henry, because he did not know how to govern his own kingdom, determined to make war upon his neighbours. Because his own title to the crown was doubtful, he laid claim to that of France. Because he did not know how to exercise the enormous power, which had just dropped into his hands, to any one good purpose, he immediately undertook (a cheap and obvious resource of sovereignty) to do all the mischief he could. Even if absolute monarchs had the wit to find out objects of laudable ambition, they could only ‘plume up their wills’ in adhering to the more sacred formula of the royal prerogative, ‘the right divine of kings to govern wrong,’ because will is only then triumphant when it is opposed to the will of others, because the pride of power is only 286then shewn, not when it consults the rights and interests of others, but when it insults and tramples on all justice and all humanity. Henry declares his resolution ‘when France is his, to bend it to his awe, or break it all to pieces’—a resolution worthy of a conqueror, to destroy all that he cannot enslave; and what adds to the joke, he lays all the blame of the consequences of his ambition on those who will not submit tamely to his tyranny. Such is the history of kingly power, from the beginning to the end of the world;—with this difference, that the object of war formerly, when the people adhered to their allegiance, was to depose kings; the object latterly, since the people swerved from their allegiance, has been to restore kings, and to make common cause against mankind. The object of our late invasion and conquest of France was to restore the legitimate monarch, the descendant of Hugh Capet, to the throne: Henry V. in his time made war on and deposed the descendant of this very Hugh Capet, on the plea that he was a usurper and illegitimate. What would the great modern catspaw of legitimacy and restorer of divine right have said to the claim of Henry and the title of the descendants of Hugh Capet? Henry V. it is true, was a hero, a King of England, and the conqueror of the king of France. Yet we feel little love or admiration for him. He was a hero, that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives: he was a king of England, but not a constitutional one, and we only like kings according to the law; lastly, he was a conqueror of the French king, and for this we dislike him less than if he had conquered the French people. How then do we like him? We like him in the play. There he is a very amiable monster, a very splendid pageant. As we like to gaze at a panther or a young lion in their cages in the Tower, and catch a pleasing horror from their glistening eyes, their velvet paws, and dreadless roar, so we take a very romantic, heroic, patriotic, and poetical delight in the boasts and feats of our younger Harry, as they appear on the stage and are confined to lines of ten syllables; where no blood follows the stroke that wounds our ears, where no harvest bends beneath horses’ hoofs, no city flames, no little child is butchered, no dead men’s bodies are found piled on heaps and festering the next morning—in the orchestra!

So much for the politics of this play; now for the poetry. Perhaps one of the most striking images in all Shakespear is that given of war in the first lines of the Prologue.

‘O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

287Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,

Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels

Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire

Crouch for employment.’

Rubens, if he had painted it, would not have improved upon this simile.

The conversation between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely, relating to the sudden change in the manners of Henry V. is among the well-known Beauties of Shakespear. It is indeed admirable both for strength and grace. It has sometimes occurred to us that Shakespear, in describing ‘the reformation’ of the Prince, might have had an eye to himself—

‘Which is a wonder how his grace should glean it,

Since his addiction was to courses vain,

His companies unletter’d, rude and shallow,

His hours fill’d up with riots, banquets, sports;

And never noted in him any study,

Any retirement, any sequestration

From open haunts and popularity.

Ely. The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,

And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best

Neighbour’d by fruit of baser quality:

And so the prince obscur’d his contemplation

Under the veil of wildness, which no doubt

Grew like the summer-grass, fastest by night,

Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty.’

This at least is as probable an account of the progress of the poet’s mind as we have met with in any of the Essays on the Learning of Shakespear.

Nothing can be better managed than the caution which the king gives the meddling Archbishop, not to advise him rashly to engage in the war with France, his scrupulous dread of the consequences of that advice, and his eager desire to hear and follow it.

‘And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord,

That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading,

Or nicely charge your understanding soul

With opening titles miscreate, whose right

Suits not in native colours with the truth.

For God doth know how many now in health

Shall drop their blood, in approbation

Of what your reverence shall incite us to.

Therefore take heed how you impawn your person,

How you awake our sleeping sword of war;

288We charge you in the name of God, take heed.

For never two such kingdoms did contend

Without much fall of blood, whose guiltless drops

Are every one a woe, a sore complaint

‘Gainst him, whose wrong gives edge unto the swords

That make such waste in brief mortality.

Under this conjuration, speak, my lord;

For we will hear, note, and believe in heart,

That what you speak, is in your conscience wash’d,

As pure as sin with baptism.’

Another characteristic instance of the blindness of human nature to every thing but its own interests, is the complaint made by the king of ‘the ill neighbourhood’ of the Scot in attacking England when she was attacking France.

‘For once the eagle England being in prey,

To her unguarded nest the weazel Scot

Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs.’

It is worth observing that in all these plays, which give an admirable picture of the spirit of the good old times, the moral inference does not at all depend upon the nature of the actions, but on the dignity or meanness of the persons committing them. ‘The eagle England’ has a right ‘to be in prey,’ but ‘the weazel Scot’ has none ‘to come sneaking to her nest,’ which she has left to pounce upon others. Might was right, without equivocation or disguise, in that heroic and chivalrous age. The substitution of right for might, even in theory, is among the refinements and abuses of modern philosophy.

A more beautiful rhetorical delineation of the effects of subordination in a commonwealth can hardly be conceived than the following:—

‘For government, though high and low and lower,

Put into parts, doth keep in one consent,

Congruing in a full and natural close,

Like music.

——Therefore heaven doth divide

The state of man in divers functions,

Setting endeavour in continual motion;

To which is fixed, as an aim or butt,

Obedience: for so work the honey-bees;

Creatures that by a rule in nature, teach

The art of order to a peopled kingdom.

They have a king, and officers of sorts:

Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;

Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;

289Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,

Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds;

Which pillage they with merry march bring home

To the tent-royal of their emperor;

Who, busied in his majesty, surveys

The singing mason building roofs of gold;

The civil citizens kneading up the honey;

The poor mechanic porters crowding in

Their heavy burthens at his narrow gate;

The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum,

Delivering o’er to executors pale

The lazy yawning drone. I this infer,—

That many things, having full reference

To one consent, may work contrariously:

As many arrows, loosed several ways,

Come to one mark;

As many ways meet in one town;

As many fresh streams meet in one salt sea;

As many lines close in the dial’s centre;

So may a thousand actions, once a-foot,

End in one purpose, and be all well borne

Without defeat.’

Henry V. is but one of Shakespear’s second-rate plays. Yet by quoting passages, like this, from his second-rate plays alone, we might make a volume ‘rich with his praise,’

‘As is the oozy bottom of the sea

With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.’

Of this sort are the king’s remonstrance to Scroop, Grey, and Cambridge, on the detection of their treason, his address to the soldiers at the siege of Harfleur, and the still finer one before the battle of Agincourt, the description of the night before the battle, and the reflections on ceremony put into the mouth of the king.

‘O hard condition; twin-born with greatness,

Subjected to the breath of every fool,

Whose sense no more can feel but his own wringing!

What infinite heart’s ease must kings neglect,

That private men enjoy; and what have kings,

That privates have not too, save ceremony?

Save general ceremony?

And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?

What kind of God art thou, that suffer’st more

Of mortal griefs, than do thy worshippers?

What are thy rents? what are thy comings-in?

O ceremony, shew me but thy worth!

What is thy soul, O adoration?

290Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form,

Creating awe and fear in other men?

Wherein thou art less happy, being feared,

Than they in fearing.

What drink’st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,

But poison’d flattery? O, be sick, great greatness,

And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!

Think’st thou, the fiery fever will go out

With titles blown from adulation?

Will it give place to flexure and low bending?

Can’st thou, when thou command’st the beggar’s knee,

Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream,

That play’st so subtly with a king’s repose,

I am a king, that find thee: and I know,

’Tis not the balm, the sceptre, and the ball,

The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,

The enter-tissu’d robe of gold and pearl,

The farsed title running ‘fore the king,

The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp

That beats upon the high shore of this world,

No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,

Not all these, laid in bed majestical,

Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave;

Who, with a body fill’d, and vacant mind,

Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread,

Never sees horrid night, the child of hell:

But like a lacquey, from the rise to set,

Sweats in the eye of Phœbus, and all night

Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn,

Doth rise, and help Hyperion to his horse;

And follows so the ever-running year

With profitable labour, to his grave:

And, but for ceremony, such a wretch,

Winding up days with toil, and nights with sleep,

Has the forehand and vantage of a king.

The slave, a member of the country’s peace,

Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wots,

What watch the king keeps to maintain the peace,

Whose hours the peasant best advantages.’

Most of these passages are well known: there is one, which we do not remember to have seen noticed, and yet it is no whit inferior to the rest in heroic beauty. It is the account of the deaths of York and Suffolk.

‘Exeter. The duke of York commends him to your majesty.

K. Henry. Lives he, good uncle? thrice within this hour,

I saw him down; thrice up again, and fighting;

From helmet to the spur all blood he was.

291Exeter. In which array (brave soldier) doth he lie,

Larding the plain: and by his bloody side

(Yoke-fellow to his honour-owing wounds)

The noble earl of Suffolk also lies.

Suffolk first died: and York, all haggled o’er,

Comes to him, where in gore he lay insteep’d,

And takes him by the beard; kisses the gashes,

That bloodily did yawn upon his face;

And cries aloud—Tarry, dear cousin Suffolk!

My soul shall thine keep company to heaven:

Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly a-breast;

As, in this glorious and well-foughten field,

We kept together in our chivalry!

Upon these words I came, and cheer’d him up:

He smil’d me in the face, raught me his hand,

And, with a feeble gripe, says—Dear my lord,

Commend my service to my sovereign.

So did he turn, and over Suffolk’s neck

He threw his wounded arm, and kiss’d his lips;

And so, espous’d to death, with blood he seal’d

A testament of noble-ending love.’

But we must have done with splendid quotations. The behaviour of the king, in the difficult and doubtful circumstances in which he is placed, is as patient and modest as it is spirited and lofty in his prosperous fortune. The character of the French nobles is also very admirably depicted; and the Dauphin’s praise of his horse shews the vanity of that class of persons in a very striking point of view. Shakespear always accompanies a foolish prince with a satirical courtier, as we see in this instance. The comic parts of Henry V. are very inferior to those of Henry IV. Falstaff is dead, and without him, Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph, are satellites without a sun. Fluellen the Welchman is the most entertaining character in the piece. He is good-natured, brave, choleric, and pedantic. His parallel between Alexander and Harry of Monmouth, and his desire to have ‘some disputations’ with Captain Macmorris on the discipline of the Roman wars, in the heat of the battle, are never to be forgotten. His treatment of Pistol is as good as Pistol’s treatment of his French prisoner. There are two other remarkable prose passages in this play: the conversation of Henry in disguise with the three centinels on the duties of a soldier, and his courtship of Katherine in broken French. We like them both exceedingly, though the first savours perhaps too much of the king, and the last too little of the lover.

292

HENRY VI. IN THREE PARTS

During the time of the civil wars of York and Lancaster, England was a perfect bear-garden, and Shakespear has given us a very lively picture of the scene. The three parts of Henry VI. convey a picture of very little else; and are inferior to the other historical plays. They have brilliant passages; but the general ground-work is comparatively poor and meagre, the style ‘flat and unraised.’ There are few lines like the following:—

‘Glory is like a circle in the water;

Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,

Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.’

The first part relates to the wars in France after the death of Henry V. and the story of the Maid of Orleans. She is here almost as scurvily treated as in Voltaire’s Pucelle. Talbot is a very magnificent sketch: there is something as formidable in this portrait of him, as there would be in a monumental figure of him or in the sight of the armour which he wore. The scene in which he visits the Countess of Auvergne, who seeks to entrap him, is a very spirited one, and his description of his own treatment while a prisoner to the French not less remarkable.

‘Salisbury. Yet tell’st thou not how thou wert entertain’d.

Talbot. With scoffs and scorns, and contumelious taunts.

In open market-place produced they me,

To be a public spectacle to all.

Here, said they, is the terror of the French,

The scarecrow that affrights our children so.

Then broke I from the officers that led me,

And with my nails digg’d stones out of the ground,

To hurl at the beholders of my shame.

My grisly countenance made others fly,

None durst come near for fear of sudden death.

In iron walls they deem’d me not secure:

So great a fear my name amongst them spread,

That they suppos’d I could rend bars of steel,

And spurn in pieces posts of adamant.

Wherefore a guard of chosen shot I had:

They walk’d about me every minute-while;

And if I did but stir out of my bed,

Ready they were to shoot me to the heart.’

293The second part relates chiefly to the contests between the nobles during the minority of Henry, and the death of Gloucester, the good Duke Humphrey. The character of Cardinal Beaufort is the most prominent in the group: the account of his death is one of our author’s master-pieces. So is the speech of Gloucester to the nobles on the loss of the provinces of France by the King’s marriage with Margaret of Anjou. The pretensions and growing ambition of the Duke of York, the father of Richard III. are also very ably developed. Among the episodes, the tragi-comedy of Jack Cade, and the detection of the impostor Simcox are truly edifying.

The third part describes Henry’s loss of his crown: his death takes place in the last act, which is usually thrust into the common acting play of Richard III. The character of Gloucester, afterwards King Richard, is here very powerfully commenced, and his dangerous designs and long-reaching ambition are fully described in his soliloquy in the third act, beginning, ‘Aye, Edward will use women honourably.’ Henry VI. is drawn as distinctly as his high-spirited Queen, and notwithstanding the very mean figure which Henry makes as a King, we still feel more respect for him than for his wife.

We have already observed that Shakespear was scarcely more remarkable for the force and marked contrasts of his characters than for the truth and subtlety with which he has distinguished those which approached the nearest to each other. For instance, the soul of Othello is hardly more distinct from that of Iago than that of Desdemona is shewn to be from Æmilia’s; the ambition of Macbeth is as distinct from the ambition of Richard III. as it is from the meekness of Duncan; the real madness of Lear is as different from the feigned madness of Edgar^[69] as from the babbling of the fool; the contrast between wit and folly in Falstaff and Shallow is not more characteristic though more obvious than the gradations of folly, loquacious or reserved, in Shallow and Silence; and again, the gallantry of Prince Henry is as little confounded with that of Hotspur as with the cowardice of Falstaff, or as the sensual and philosophic cowardice of the Knight is with the pitiful and cringing cowardice of Parolles. All these several personages were as different in Shakespear as they would have been in themselves: his imagination borrowed from the life, and every circumstance, object, motive, passion, operated there as it would in reality, and produced a world of men and women as distinct, as true and as various as those that 294exist in nature. The peculiar property of Shakespear’s imagination was this truth, accompanied with the unconsciousness of nature: indeed, imagination to be perfect must be unconscious, at least in production; for nature is so.—We shall attempt one example more in the characters of Richard II. and Henry VI.

The characters and situations of both these persons were so nearly alike, that they would have been completely confounded by a common-place poet. Yet they are kept quite distinct in Shakespear. Both were kings, and both unfortunate. Both lost their crowns owing to their mismanagement and imbecility; the one from a thoughtless, wilful abuse of power, the other from an indifference to it. The manner in which they bear their misfortunes corresponds exactly to the causes which led to them. The one is always lamenting the loss of his power which he has not the spirit to regain; the other seems only to regret that he had ever been king, and is glad to be rid of the power, with the trouble; the effeminacy of the one is that of a voluptuary, proud, revengeful, impatient of contradiction, and inconsolable in his misfortunes; the effeminacy of the other is that of an indolent, good-natured mind, naturally averse to the turmoils of ambition and the cares of greatness, and who wishes to pass his time in monkish indolence and contemplation.—Richard bewails the loss of the kingly power only as it was the means of gratifying his pride and luxury; Henry regards it only as a means of doing right, and is less desirous of the advantages to be derived from possessing it than afraid of exercising it wrong. In knighting a young soldier, he gives him ghostly advice—

‘Edward Plantagenet, arise a knight,

And learn this lesson, draw thy sword in right.’

Richard II. in the first speeches of the play betrays his real character. In the first alarm of his pride, on hearing of Bolingbroke’s rebellion, before his presumption has met with any check, he exclaims—

‘Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords:

This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones

Prove armed soldiers, ere her native king

Shall faulter under proud rebellious arms.

. . . . . .

Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm from an anointed king;

The breath of worldly man cannot depose

The Deputy elected by the Lord.

For every man that Bolingbroke hath prest,

295To lift sharp steel against our golden crown,

Heaven for his Richard hath in heavenly pay

A glorious angel; then if angels fight,

Weak men must fall; for Heaven still guards the right.’

Yet, notwithstanding this royal confession of faith, on the very first news of actual disaster, all his conceit of himself as the peculiar favourite of Providence vanishes into air.

‘But now the blood of twenty thousand men

Did triumph in my face, and they are fled.

All souls that will be safe fly from my side;

For time hath set a blot upon my pride.’

Immediately after, however, recollecting that ‘cheap defence’ of the divinity of kings which is to be found in opinion, he is for arming his name against his enemies.

‘Awake, thou coward Majesty, thou sleep’st;

Is not the King’s name forty thousand names?

Arm, arm, my name: a puny subject strikes

At thy great glory.’

King Henry does not make any such vapouring resistance to the loss of his crown, but lets it slip from off his head as a weight which he is neither able nor willing to bear; stands quietly by to see the issue of the contest for his kingdom, as if it were a game at push-pin, and is pleased when the odds prove against him.

When Richard first hears of the death of his favourites, Bushy, Bagot, and the rest, he indignantly rejects all idea of any further efforts, and only indulges in the extravagant impatience of his grief and his despair, in that fine speech which has been so often quoted:—

‘Aumerle. Where is the duke my father, with his power?

K. Richard. No matter where: of comfort no man speak:

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow in the bosom of the earth!

Let’s chuse executors, and talk of wills:

And yet not so—for what can we bequeath,

Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s,

And nothing can we call our own but death,

And that small model of the barren earth,

Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

For heaven’s sake let us sit upon the ground,

And tell sad stories of the death of Kings:

How some have been depos’d, some slain in war;

296Some haunted by the ghosts they dispossess’d;

Some poison’d by their wives, some sleeping kill’d;

All murder’d:—for within the hollow crown,

That rounds the mortal temples of a king,

Keeps death his court: and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp!

Allowing him a breath, a little scene

To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks;

Infusing him with self and vain conceit—

As if this flesh, which walls about our life,

Were brass impregnable; and, humour’d thus,

Comes at the last, and, with a little pin,

Bores through his castle wall, and—farewell king!

Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood

With solemn reverence; throw away respect,

Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while:

I live on bread like you, feel want, taste grief,

Need friends, like you;—subjected thus,

How can you say to me—I am a king?’

There is as little sincerity afterwards in his affected resignation to his fate, as there is fortitude in this exaggerated picture of his misfortunes before they have happened.

When Northumberland comes back with the message from Bolingbroke, he exclaims, anticipating the result,—

‘What must the king do now? Must he submit?

The king shall do it: must he be depos’d?

The king shall be contented; must he lose

The name of king? O’ God’s name let it go.

I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads;

My gorgeous palace for a hermitage;

My gay apparel for an alms-man’s gown;

My figur’d goblets for a dish of wood;

My sceptre for a palmer’s walking staff;

My subjects for a pair of carved saints,

And my large kingdom for a little grave—

A little, little grave, an obscure grave.’

How differently is all this expressed in King Henry’s soliloquy, during the battle with Edward’s party:—

‘This battle fares like to the morning’s war,

When dying clouds contend with growing light,

What time the shepherd blowing of his nails,

Can neither call it perfect day or night.

Here on this mole-hill will I sit me down;

297To whom God will, there be the victory!

For Margaret my Queen and Clifford too

Have chid me from the battle, swearing both

They prosper best of all when I am thence.

Would I were dead, if God’s good will were so.

For what is in this world but grief and woe?

O God! methinks it were a happy life

To be no better than a homely swain,

To sit upon a hill as I do now,

To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,

Thereby to see the minutes how they run:

How many make the hour full complete,

How many hours bring about the day,

How many days will finish up the year,

How many years a mortal man may live.

When this is known, then to divide the times;

So many hours must I tend my flock,

So many hours must I take my rest,

So many hours must I contemplate,

So many hours must I sport myself;

So many days my ewes have been with young,

So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean,

So many months ere I shall shear the fleece:

So many minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years

Past over, to the end they were created,

Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.

Ah! what a life were this! how sweet, how lovely!

Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade

To shepherds looking on their silly sheep,

Than doth a rich embroidered canopy

To kings that fear their subjects’ treachery?

O yes it doth, a thousand fold it doth.

And to conclude, the shepherds’ homely curds,

His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle,

His wonted sleep under a fresh tree’s shade,

All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,

Is far beyond a prince’s delicates,

His viands sparkling in a golden cup,

His body couched in a curious bed,

When care, mistrust, and treasons wait on him.’

This is a true and beautiful description of a naturally quiet and contented disposition, and not, like the former, the splenetic effusion of disappointed ambition.

In the last scene of Richard II. his despair lends him courage: he beats the keeper, slays two of his assassins, and dies with imprecations in his mouth against Sir Pierce Exton, who ‘had staggered his royal 298person.’ Henry, when he is seized by the deer-stealers, only reads them a moral lecture on the duty of allegiance and the sanctity of an oath; and when stabbed by Gloucester in the tower, reproaches him with his crimes, but pardons him his own death.

RICHARD III.

Richard III. may be considered as properly a stage-play: it belongs to the theatre, rather than to the closet. We shall therefore criticise it chiefly with a reference to the manner in which we have seen it performed. It is the character in which Garrick came out: it was the second character in which Mr. Kean appeared, and in which he acquired his fame. Shakespear we have always with us: actors we have only for a few seasons; and therefore some account of them may be acceptable, if not to our cotemporaries, to those who come after us, if ‘that rich and idle personage, Posterity,’ should deign to look into our writings.

It is possible to form a higher conception of the character of Richard than that given by Mr. Kean: but we cannot imagine any character represented with greater distinctness and precision, more perfectly articulated in every part. Perhaps indeed there is too much of what is technically called execution. When we first saw this celebrated actor in the part, we thought he sometimes failed from an exuberance of manner, and dissipated the impression of the general character by the variety of his resources. To be complete, his delineation of it should have more solidity, depth, sustained and impassioned feeling, with somewhat less brilliancy, with fewer glancing lights, pointed transitions, and pantomimic evolutions.

The Richard of Shakespear is towering and lofty; equally impetuous and commanding; haughty, violent, and subtle; bold and treacherous; confident in his strength as well as in his cunning; raised high by his birth, and higher by his talents and his crimes; a royal usurper, a princely hypocrite, a tyrant, and a murderer of the house of Plantagenet.

‘But I was born so high:

Our aery buildeth in the cedar’s top,

And dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun.’

The idea conveyed in these lines (which are indeed omitted in the miserable medley acted for Richard III.) is never lost sight of by Shakespear, and should not be out of the actor’s mind for a moment. 299The restless and sanguinary Richard is not a man striving to be great, but to be greater than he is; conscious of his strength of will, his power of intellect, his daring courage, his elevated station; and making use of these advantages to commit unheard-of crimes, and to shield himself from remorse and infamy.

If Mr. Kean does not entirely succeed in concentrating all the lines of the character, as drawn by Shakespear, he gives an animation, vigour, and relief to the part which we have not seen equalled. He is more refined than Cooke; more bold, varied, and original than Kemble in the same character. In some parts he is deficient in dignity, and particularly in the scenes of state business, he has by no means an air of artificial authority. There is at times an aspiring elevation, an enthusiastic rapture in his expectations of attaining the crown, and at others a gloating expression of sullen delight, as if he already clenched the bauble, and held it in his grasp. The courtship scene with Lady Anne is an admirable exhibition of smooth and smiling villainy. The progress of wily adulation, of encroaching humility, is finely marked by his action, voice and eye. He seems, like the first Tempter, to approach his prey, secure of the event, and as if success had smoothed his way before him. The late Mr. Cooke’s manner of representing this scene was more vehement, hurried, and full of anxious uncertainty. This, though more natural in general, was less in character in this particular instance. Richard should woo less as a lover than as an actor—to shew his mental superiority, and power of making others the playthings of his purposes. Mr. Kean’s attitude in leaning against the side of the stage before he comes forward to address Lady Anne, is one of the most graceful and striking ever witnessed on the stage. It would do for Titian to paint. The frequent and rapid transition of his voice from the expression of the fiercest passion to the most familiar tones of conversation was that which gave a peculiar grace of novelty to his acting on his first appearance. This has been since imitated and caricatured by others, and he himself uses the artifice more sparingly than he did. His bye-play is excellent. His manner of bidding his friends ‘Good night,’ after pausing with the point of his sword, drawn slowly backward and forward on the ground, as if considering the plan of the battle next day, is a particularly happy and natural thought. He gives to the two last acts of the play the greatest animation and effect. He fills every part of the stage; and makes up for the deficiency of his person by what has been sometimes objected to as an excess of action. The concluding scene in which he is killed by Richmond is the most brilliant of the whole. He fights at last like one drunk with wounds; and the attitude in which he stands with his hands stretched out, after 300his sword is wrested from him, has a preternatural and terrific grandeur, as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very phantoms of his despair had power to kill.—Mr. Kean has since in a great measure effaced the impression of his Richard III. by the superior efforts of his genius in Othello (his master-piece), in the murder-scene in Macbeth, in Richard II., in Sir Giles Overreach, and lastly in Oroonoko; but we still like to look back to his first performance of this part, both because it first assured his admirers of his future success, and because we bore our feeble but, at that time, not useless testimony to the merits of this very original actor, on which the town was considerably divided for no other reason than because they were original.

The manner in which Shakespear’s plays have been generally altered or rather mangled by modern mechanists, is a disgrace to the English stage. The patch-work Richard III. which is acted under the sanction of his name, and which was manufactured by Cibber, is a striking example of this remark.

The play itself is undoubtedly a very powerful effusion of Shakespear’s genius. The ground-work of the character of Richard, that mixture of intellectual vigour with moral depravity, in which Shakespear delighted to shew his strength—gave full scope as well as temptation to the exercise of his imagination. The character of his hero is almost every where predominant, and marks its lurid track throughout. The original play is however too long for representation, and there are some few scenes which might be better spared than preserved, and by omitting which it would remain a complete whole. The only rule, indeed, for altering Shakespear is to retrench certain passages which may be considered either as superfluous or obsolete, but not to add or transpose any thing. The arrangement and developement of the story, and the mutual contrast and combination of the dramatis personæ, are in general as finely managed as the developement of the characters or the expression of the passions.

This rule has not been adhered to in the present instance. Some of the most important and striking passages in the principal character have been omitted, to make room for idle and misplaced extracts from other plays; the only intention of which seems to have been to make the character of Richard as odious and disgusting as possible. It is apparently for no other purpose than to make Gloucester stab King Henry on the stage, that the fine abrupt introduction of the character in the opening of the play is lost in the tedious whining morality of the uxorious king (taken from another play);—we say tedious, because it interrupts the business of the scene, and loses its beauty and effect by having no intelligible connection with the previous 301character of the mild, well-meaning monarch. The passages which the unfortunate Henry has to recite are beautiful and pathetic in themselves, but they have nothing to do with the world that Richard has to ‘bustle in.’ In the same spirit of vulgar caricature is the scene between Richard and Lady Anne (when his wife) interpolated without any authority, merely to gratify this favourite propensity to disgust and loathing. With the same perverse consistency, Richard, after his last fatal struggle, is raised up by some Galvanic process, to utter the imprecation, without any motive but pure malignity, which Shakespear has so properly put into the mouth of Northumberland on hearing of Percy’s death. To make room for these worse than needless additions, many of the most striking passages in the real play have been omitted by the foppery and ignorance of the prompt-book critics. We do not mean to insist merely on passages which are fine as poetry and to the reader, such as Clarence’s dream, etc. but on those which are important to the understanding of the character, and peculiarly adapted for stage-effect. We will give the following as instances among several others. The first is the scene where Richard enters abruptly to the queen and her friends to defend himself:—

‘Gloucester. They do me wrong, and I will not endure it.

Who are they that complain unto the king,

That I forsooth am stern, and love them not?

By holy Paul, they love his grace but lightly,

That fill his ears with such dissentious rumours:

Because I cannot flatter and look fair,

Smile in men’s faces, smooth, deceive, and cog,

Duck with French nods, and apish courtesy,

I must be held a rancorous enemy.

Cannot a plain man live, and think no harm,

But thus his simple truth must be abus’d

With silken, sly, insinuating Jacks?

Gray. To whom in all this presence speaks your grace?

Gloucester. To thee, that hast nor honesty nor grace;

When have I injur’d thee, when done thee wrong?

Or thee? or thee? or any of your faction?

A plague upon you all!’

Nothing can be more characteristic than the turbulent pretensions to meekness and simplicity in this address. Again, the versatility and adroitness of Richard is admirably described in the following ironical conversation with Brakenbury:—

‘Brakenbury. I beseech your graces both to pardon me.

His majesty hath straitly given in charge,

That no man shall have private conference,

Of what degree soever, with your brother.

302Gloucester. E’en so, and please your worship, Brakenbury.

You may partake of any thing we say:

We speak no treason, man—we say the king

Is wise and virtuous, and his noble queen

Well strook in years, fair, and not jealous.

We say that Shore’s wife hath a pretty foot,

A cherry lip,

A bonny eye, a passing pleasing tongue;

That the queen’s kindred are made gentlefolks.

How say you, sir? Can you deny all this?

Brakenbury. With this, my lord, myself have nought to do.

Gloucester. What, fellow, naught to do with mistress Shore?

I tell you, sir, he that doth naught with her,

Excepting one, were best to do it secretly alone.

Brakenbury. What one, my lord?

Gloucester. Her husband, knave—would’st thou betray me?’

The feigned reconciliation of Gloucester with the queen’s kinsmen is also a master-piece. One of the finest strokes in the play, and which serves to shew as much as any thing the deep, plausible manners of Richard, is the unsuspecting security of Hastings, at the very time when the former is plotting his death, and when that very appearance of cordiality and good-humour on which Hastings builds his confidence arises from Richard’s consciousness of having betrayed him to his ruin. This, with the whole character of Hastings, is omitted.

Perhaps the two most beautiful passages in the original play are the farewell apostrophe of the queen to the Tower, where the children are shut up from her, and Tyrrel’s description of their death. We will finish our quotations with them.

‘Queen. Stay, yet look back with me unto the Tower;

Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes,

Whom envy hath immured within your walls;

Rough cradle for such little pretty ones,

Rude, rugged nurse, old sullen play-fellow,

For tender princes!’

The other passage is the account of their death by Tyrrel:—

‘Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn

To do this piece of ruthless butchery,

Albeit they were flesh’d villains, bloody dogs,—

Melting with tenderness and mild compassion,

Wept like to children in their death’s sad story:

O thus! quoth Dighton, lay the gentle babes;

Thus, thus, quoth Forrest, girdling one another

Within their innocent alabaster arms;

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,

303And in that summer beauty kissed each other;

A book of prayers on their pillow lay,

Which once, quoth Forrest, almost changed my mind:

But oh the devil!—there the villain stopped;

When Dighton thus told on—we smothered

The most replenished sweet work of nature,

That from the prime creation ere she framed.’

These are some of those wonderful bursts of feeling, done to the life, to the very height of fancy and nature, which our Shakespear alone could give. We do not insist on the repetition of these last passages as proper for the stage: we should indeed be loth to trust them in the mouth of almost any actor: but we should wish them to be retained in preference at least to the fantoccini exhibition of the young princes, Edward and York, bandying childish wit with their uncle.

HENRY VIII.

This play contains little action or violence of passion, yet it has considerable interest of a more mild and thoughtful cast, and some of the most striking passages in the author’s works. The character of Queen Katherine is the most perfect delineation of matronly dignity, sweetness, and resignation, that can be conceived. Her appeals to the protection of the king, her remonstrances to the cardinals, her conversations with her women, shew a noble and generous spirit accompanied with the utmost gentleness of nature. What can be more affecting than her answer to Campeius and Wolsey, who come to visit her as pretended friends.

——‘Nay, forsooth, my friends,

They that must weigh out my afflictions,

They that my trust must grow to, live not here;

They are, as all my comforts are, far hence,

In mine own country, lords.’

Dr. Johnson observes of this play, that ‘the meek sorrows and virtuous distress of Katherine have furnished some scenes, which may be justly numbered among the greatest efforts of tragedy. But the genius of Shakespear comes in and goes out with Katherine. Every other part may be easily conceived and easily written.’ This is easily said; but with all due deference to so great a reputed authority as that of Johnson, it is not true. For instance, the scene of Buckingham led to execution is one of the most affecting and natural 304in Shakespear, and one to which there is hardly an approach in any other author. Again, the character of Wolsey, the description of his pride and of his fall, are inimitable, and have, besides their gorgeousness of effect, a pathos, which only the genius of Shakespear could lend to the distresses of a proud, bad man, like Wolsey. There is a sort of child-like simplicity in the very helplessness of his situation, arising from the recollection of his past overbearing ambition. After the cutting sarcasms of his enemies on his disgrace, against which he bears up with a spirit conscious of his own superiority, he breaks out into that fine apostrophe—

‘Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness!

This is the state of man; to-day he puts forth

The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms,

And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;

The third day comes a frost, a killing frost;

And—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely

His greatness is a ripening—nips his root,

And then he falls, as I do. I have ventur’d,

Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,

These many summers in a sea of glory;

But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride

At length broke under me; and now has left me,

Weary and old with service, to the mercy

Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me.

Vain pomp and glory of the world, I hate ye!

I feel my heart new open’d: O how wretched

Is that poor man, that hangs on princes’ favours!

There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to,

That sweet aspect of princes, and our ruin,

More pangs and fears than war and women have;

And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,

Never to hope again!’—

There is in this passage, as well as in the well-known dialogue with Cromwell which follows, something which stretches beyond commonplace; nor is the account which Griffiths gives of Wolsey’s death less Shakespearian; and the candour with which Queen Katherine listens to the praise of ‘him whom of all men while living she hated most’ adds the last graceful finishing to her character.

Among other images of great individual beauty might be mentioned the description of the effect of Ann Boleyn’s presenting herself to the crowd at her coronation.

——‘While her grace sat down

To rest awhile, some half an hour or so,

In a rich chair of state, opposing freely

305The beauty of her person to the people.

Believe me, sir, she is the goodliest woman

That ever lay by man. Which when the people

Had the full view of, such a noise arose

As the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest,

As loud and to as many tunes.’

The character of Henry VIII. is drawn with great truth and spirit. It is like a very disagreeable portrait, sketched by the hand of a master. His gross appearance, his blustering demeanour, his vulgarity, his arrogance, his sensuality, his cruelty, his hypocrisy, his want of common decency and common humanity, are marked in strong lines. His traditional peculiarities of expression complete the reality of the picture. The authoritative expletive, ‘Ha!’ with which he intimates his indignation or surprise, has an effect like the first startling sound that breaks from a thunder-cloud. He is of all the monarchs in our history the most disgusting: for he unites in himself all the vices of barbarism and refinement, without their virtues. Other kings before him (such as Richard III.) were tyrants and murderers out of ambition or necessity: they gained or established unjust power by violent means: they destroyed their enemies, or those who barred their access to the throne or made its tenure insecure. But Henry VIII.‘s power is most fatal to those whom he loves: he is cruel and remorseless to pamper his luxurious appetites: bloody and voluptuous; an amorous murderer; an uxorious debauchee. His hardened insensibility to the feelings of others is strengthened by the most profligate self-indulgence. The religious hypocrisy, under which he masks his cruelty and his lust, is admirably displayed in the speech in which he describes the first misgivings of his conscience and its increasing throes and terrors, which have induced him to divorce his queen. The only thing in his favour in this play is his treatment of Cranmer: there is also another circumstance in his favour, which is his patronage of Hans Holbein.—It has been said of Shakespear—‘No maid could live near such a man.’ It might with as good reason be said—‘No king could live near such a man.’ His eye would have penetrated through the pomp of circumstance and the veil of opinion. As it is, he has represented such persons to the life—his plays are in this respect the glass of history—he has done them the same justice as if he had been a privy counsellor all his life, and in each successive reign. Kings ought never to be seen upon the stage. In the abstract, they are very disagreeable characters: it is only while living that they are ‘the best of kings.’ It is their power, their splendour, it is the apprehension of the personal consequences of their favour or their hatred that dazzles the imagination and suspends the judgment of their 306favourites or their vassals; but death cancels the bond of allegiance and of interest; and seen as they were, their power and their pretensions look monstrous and ridiculous. The charge brought against modern philosophy as inimical to loyalty is unjust, because it might as well be brought against other things. No reader of history can be a lover of kings. We have often wondered that Henry VIII. as he is drawn by Shakespear, and as we have seen him represented in all the bloated deformity of mind and person, is not hooted from the English stage.

KING JOHN

King John is the last of the historical plays we shall have to speak of; and we are not sorry that it is. If we are to indulge our imaginations, we had rather do it upon an imaginary theme; if we are to find subjects for the exercise of our pity and terror, we prefer seeking them in fictitious danger and fictitious distress. It gives a soreness to our feelings of indignation or sympathy, when we know that in tracing the progress of sufferings and crimes, we are treading upon real ground, and recollect that the poet’s dream ‘denoted a foregone conclusion‘—irrevocable ills, not conjured up by fancy, but placed beyond the reach of poetical justice. That the treachery of King John, the death of Arthur, the grief of Constance, had a real truth in history, sharpens the sense of pain, while it hangs a leaden weight on the heart and the imagination. Something whispers us that we have no right to make a mock of calamities like these, or to turn the truth of things into the puppet and plaything of our fancies. ‘To consider thus’ may be ‘to consider too curiously’; but still we think that the actual truth of the particular events, in proportion as we are conscious of it, is a drawback on the pleasure as well as the dignity of tragedy.

King John has all the beauties of language and all the richness of the imagination to relieve the painfulness of the subject. The character of King John himself is kept pretty much in the background; it is only marked in by comparatively slight indications. The crimes he is tempted to commit are such as are thrust upon him rather by circumstances and opportunity than of his own seeking: he is here represented as more cowardly than cruel, and as more contemptible than odious. The play embraces only a part of his history. There are however few characters on the stage that excite more disgust and loathing. He has no intellectual grandeur or strength of character to shield him from the indignation which his immediate conduct 307provokes: he stands naked and defenceless, in that respect, to the worst we can think of him: and besides, we are impelled to put the very worst construction on his meanness and cruelty by the tender picture of the beauty and helplessness of the object of it, as well as by the frantic and heart-rending pleadings of maternal despair. We do not forgive him the death of Arthur, because he had too late revoked his doom and tried to prevent it; and perhaps because he has himself repented of his black design, our moral sense gains courage to hate him the more for it. We take him at his word, and think his purposes must be odious indeed, when he himself shrinks back from them. The scene in which King John suggests to Hubert the design of murdering his nephew is a master-piece of dramatic skill, but it is still inferior, very inferior to the scene between Hubert and Arthur, when the latter learns the orders to put out his eyes. If any thing ever was penned, heart-piercing, mixing the extremes of terror and pity, of that which shocks and that which soothes the mind, it is this scene. We will give it entire, though perhaps it is tasking the reader’s sympathy too much.

‘Enter Hubert and Executioner.

Hubert. Heat me these irons hot, and look you stand

Within the arras; when I strike my foot

Upon the bosom of the ground, rush forth

And bind the boy, which you shall find with me,

Fast to the chair: be heedful: hence, and watch.

Executioner. I hope your warrant will bear out the deed.

Hubert. Uncleanly scruples! fear not you; look to’t.—

Young lad, come forth; I have to say with you.

Enter Arthur.

Arthur. Good morrow, Hubert.

Hubert. Morrow, little Prince.

Arthur. As little prince (having so great a title

To be more prince) as may be. You are sad.

Hubert. Indeed I have been merrier.

Arthur. Mercy on me!

Methinks no body should be sad but I;

Yet I remember when I was in France,

Young gentlemen would be as sad as night,

Only for wantonness. By my Christendom,

So were I out of prison, and kept sheep,

I should be merry as the day is long.

And so I would be here, but that I doubt

My uncle practises more harm to me.

He is afraid of me, and I of him.

308Is it my fault that I was Geoffrey’s son?

Indeed it is not, and I would to heav’n

I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert.

Hubert. If I talk to him, with his innocent prate

He will awake my mercy, which lies dead;

Therefore I will be sudden, and dispatch. |[Aside.|

Arthur. Are you sick, Hubert? you look pale to-day?

In sooth, I would you were a little sick,

That I might sit all night and watch with you.

Alas, I love you more than you do me.

Hubert. His words do take possession of my bosom.

Read here, young Arthur— |[Shewing a paper.|

How now, foolish rheum, |[Aside.|

Turning dis-piteous torture out of door!

I must be brief, lest resolution drop

Out at mine eyes in tender womanish tears.—

Can you not read it? Is it not fair writ?

Arthur. Too fairly, Hubert, for so foul effect.

Must you with irons burn out both mine eyes?

Hubert. Young boy, I must.

Arthur. And will you?

Hubert. And I will.

Arthur. Have you the heart? When your head did but ache,

I knit my handkerchief about your brows,

(The best I had, a princess wrought it me)

And I did never ask it you again;

And with my hand at midnight held your head;

And like the watchful minutes to the hour,

Still and anon chear’d up the heavy time,

Saying, what lack you? and where lies your grief?

Or, what good love may I perform for you?

Many a poor man’s son would have lain still,

And ne’er have spoke a loving word to you;

But you at your sick service had a prince.

Nay, you may think my love was crafty love,

And call it cunning. Do, and if you will:

If heav’n be pleas’d that you must use me ill,

Why then you must——Will you put out mine eyes?

These eyes, that never did, and never shall,

So much as frown on you?

Hubert. I’ve sworn to do it;

And with hot irons must I burn them out.

Arthur. Oh if an angel should have come to me,

And told me Hubert should put out mine eyes,

I would not have believ’d a tongue but Hubert’s.

Hubert. Come forth; do as I bid you. |[Stamps, and the men enter.|

Arthur. O save me, Hubert, save me! my eyes are out

Ev’n with the fierce looks of these bloody men.

Hubert. Give me the iron, I say, and bind him here.

309Arthur. Alas, what need you be so boist’rous rough?

I will not struggle, I will stand stone-still.

For heav’n’s sake, Hubert, let me not be bound!

Nay, hear me, Hubert! drive these men away,

And I will sit as quiet as a lamb:

I will not stir, nor wince, nor speak a word,

Nor look upon the iron angrily:

Thrust but these men away, and I’ll forgive you,

Whatever torment you do put me to.

Hubert. Go, stand within; let me alone with him.

Executioner. I am best pleas’d to be from such a deed. |[Exit.|

Arthur. Alas, I then have chid away my friend.

He hath a stern look, but a gentle heart;

Let him come back, that his compassion may

Give life to yours.

Hubert. Come, boy, prepare yourself.

Arthur. Is there no remedy?

Hubert. None, but to lose your eyes.

Arthur. O heav’n! that there were but a mote in yours,

A grain, a dust, a gnat, a wand’ring hair,

Any annoyance in that precious sense!

Then, feeling what small things are boist’rous there,

Your vile intent must needs seem horrible.

Hubert. Is this your promise? go to, hold your tongue.

Arthur. Let me not hold my tongue; let me not, Hubert;

Or, Hubert, if you will, cut out my tongue,

So I may keep mine eyes. O spare mine eyes!

Though to no use, but still to look on you.

Lo, by my troth, the instrument is cold,

And would not harm me.

Hubert. I can heat it, boy.

Arthur. No, in good sooth, the fire is dead with grief,

Being create for comfort, to be us’d

In undeserv’d extremes; see else yourself,

There is no malice in this burning coal;

The breath of heav’n hath blown its spirit out,

And strew’d repentant ashes on its head.

Hubert. But with my breath I can revive it, boy.

Arthur. All things that you shall use to do me wrong,

Deny their office; only you do lack

That mercy which fierce fire and iron extend,

Creatures of note for mercy-lacking uses.

Hubert. Well, see to live; I will not touch thine eyes

For all the treasure that thine uncle owns:

Yet I am sworn, and I did purpose, boy,

With this same very iron to burn them out.

Arthur. O, now you look like Hubert. All this while

You were disguised.

Hubert. Peace; no more. Adieu,

310Your uncle must not know but you are dead.

I’ll fill these dogged spies with false reports:

And, pretty child, sleep doubtless and secure,

That Hubert, for the wealth of all the world,

Will not offend thee.

Arthur. O heav’n! I thank you, Hubert.

Hubert. Silence, no more; go closely in with me;

Much danger do I undergo for thee. |[Exeunt.’|

His death afterwards, when he throws himself from his prison walls, excites the utmost pity for his innocence and friendless situation, and well justifies the exaggerated denunciations of Falconbridge to Hubert, whom he suspects wrongfully of the deed.

‘There is not yet so ugly a fiend of hell

As thou shalt be, if thou did’st kill this child.

—If thou did’st but consent

To this most cruel act, do but despair:

And if thou want’st a cord, the smallest thread

That ever spider twisted from her womb

Will strangle thee; a rush will be a beam

To hang thee on: or would’st thou drown thyself,

Put but a little water in a spoon,

And it shall be as all the ocean,

Enough to stifle such a villain up.’

The excess of maternal tenderness, rendered desperate by the fickleness of friends and the injustice of fortune, and made stronger in will, in proportion to the want of all other power, was never more finely expressed than in Constance. The dignity of her answer to King Philip, when she refuses to accompany his messenger, ‘To me and to the state of my great grief, let kings assemble,’ her indignant reproach to Austria for deserting her cause, her invocation to death, ‘that love of misery,’ however fine and spirited, all yield to the beauty of the passage, where, her passion subsiding into tenderness, she addresses the Cardinal in these words:—

‘Oh father Cardinal, I have heard you say

That we shall see and know our friends in heav’n:

If that be, I shall see my boy again,

For since the birth of Cain, the first male child,

To him that did but yesterday suspire,

There was not such a gracious creature born.

But now will canker-sorrow eat my bud,

And chase the native beauty from his cheek,

And he will look as hollow as a ghost,

As dim and meagre as an ague’s fit,

And so he’ll die; and rising so again,

311When I shall meet him in the court of heav’n,

I shall not know him; therefore never, never

Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.

K. Philip. You are as fond of grief as of your child.

Constance. Grief fills the room up of my absent child:

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me;

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts;

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

Then have I reason to be fond of grief.’

The contrast between the mild resignation of Queen Katherine to her own wrongs, and the wild, uncontroulable affliction of Constance for the wrongs which she sustains as a mother, is no less naturally conceived than it is ably sustained throughout these two wonderful characters.

The accompaniment of the comic character of the Bastard was well chosen to relieve the poignant agony of suffering, and the cold cowardly policy of behaviour in the principal characters of this play. Its spirit, invention, volubility of tongue and forwardness in action, are unbounded. Aliquando sufflaminandus erat, says Ben Jonson of Shakespear. But we should be sorry if Ben Jonson had been his licenser. We prefer the heedless magnanimity of his wit infinitely to all Jonson’s laborious caution. The character of the Bastard’s comic humour is the same in essence as that of other comic characters in Shakespear; they always run on with good things and are never exhausted; they are always daring and successful. They have words at will, and a flow of wit like a flow of animal spirits. The difference between Falconbridge and the others is that he is a soldier, and brings his wit to bear upon action, is courageous with his sword as well as tongue, and stimulates his gallantry by his jokes, his enemies feeling the sharpness of his blows and the sting of his sarcasms at the same time. Among his happiest sallies are his descanting on the composition of his own person, his invective against ‘commodity, tickling commodity,’ and his expression of contempt for the Archduke of Austria, who had killed his father, which begins in jest but ends in serious earnest. His conduct at the siege of Angiers shews that his resources were not confined to verbal retorts.—The same exposure of the policy of courts and camps, of kings, nobles, priests, and cardinals, takes place here as in the other plays we have gone through, and we shall not go into a disgusting repetition.

This, like the other plays taken from English history, is written in a remarkably smooth and flowing style, very different from some of the tragedies, Macbeth, for instance. The passages consist of a 312series of single lines, not running into one another. This peculiarity in the versification, which is most common in the three parts of Henry VI. has been assigned as a reason why those plays were not written by Shakespear. But the same structure of verse occurs in his other undoubted plays, as in Richard II. and in King John. The following are instances:—

‘That daughter there of Spain, the lady Blanch,

Is near to England; look upon the years

Of Lewis the dauphin, and that lovely maid.

If lusty love should go in quest of beauty,

Where should he find it fairer than in Blanch?

If zealous love should go in search of virtue,

Where should he find it purer than in Blanch?

If love ambitious sought a match of birth,

Whose veins bound richer blood than lady Blanch?

Such as she is, in beauty, virtue, birth,

Is the young dauphin every way complete:

If not complete of, say he is not she;

And she again wants nothing, to name want,

If want it be not, that she is not he.

He is the half part of a blessed man,

Left to be finished by such as she;

And she a fair divided excellence,

Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.

O, two such silver currents, when they join,

Do glorify the banks that bound them in:

And two such shores to two such streams made one,

Two such controuling bounds, shall you be, kings,

To these two princes, if you marry them.’

Another instance, which is certainly very happy as an example of the simple enumeration of a number of particulars, is Salisbury’s remonstrance against the second crowning of the king.

‘Therefore to be possessed with double pomp,

To guard a title that was rich before;

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,

To throw a perfume on the violet,

To smooth the ice, to add another hue

Unto the rainbow, or with taper light

To seek the beauteous eye of heav’n to garnish;

Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.’

313

TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL

This is justly considered as one of the most delightful of Shakespear’s comedies. It is full of sweetness and pleasantry. It is perhaps too good-natured for comedy. It has little satire, and no spleen. It aims at the ludicrous rather than the ridiculous. It makes us laugh at the follies of mankind, not despise them, and still less bear any ill-will towards them. Shakespear’s comic genius resembles the bee rather in its power of extracting sweets from weeds or poisons, than in leaving a sting behind it. He gives the most amusing exaggeration of the prevailing foibles of his characters, but in a way that they themselves, instead of being offended at, would almost join in to humour; he rather contrives opportunities for them to shew themselves off in the happiest lights, than renders them contemptible in the perverse construction of the wit or malice of others.—There is a certain stage of society in which people become conscious of their peculiarities and absurdities, affect to disguise what they are, and set up pretensions to what they are not. This gives rise to a corresponding style of comedy, the object of which is to detect the disguises of self-love, and to make reprisals on these preposterous assumptions of vanity, by marking the contrast between the real and the affected character as severely as possible, and denying to those, who would impose on us for what they are not, even the merit which they have. This is the comedy of artificial life, of wit and satire, such as we see it in Congreve, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, etc. To this succeeds a state of society from which the same sort of affectation and pretence are banished by a greater knowledge of the world or by their successful exposure on the stage; and which by neutralising the materials of comic character, both natural and artificial, leaves no comedy at all—but the sentimental. Such is our modern comedy. There is a period in the progress of manners anterior to both these, in which the foibles and follies of individuals are of nature’s planting, not the growth of art or study; in which they are therefore unconscious of them themselves, or care not who knows them, if they can but have their whim out; and in which, as there is no attempt at imposition, the spectators rather receive pleasure from humouring the inclinations of the persons they laugh at, than wish to give them pain by exposing their absurdity. This may be called the comedy of nature, and it is the comedy which we generally find in Shakespear.—Whether the analysis here given be just or not, the spirit of his comedies is evidently 314quite distinct from that of the authors above mentioned, as it is in its essence the same with that of Cervantes, and also very frequently of Molière, though he was more systematic in his extravagance than Shakespear. Shakespear’s comedy is of a pastoral and poetical cast. Folly is indigenous to the soil, and shoots out with native, happy, unchecked luxuriance. Absurdity has every encouragement afforded it; and nonsense has room to flourish in. Nothing is stunted by the churlish, icy hand of indifference or severity. The poet runs riot in a conceit, and idolises a quibble. His whole object is to turn the meanest or rudest objects to a pleasurable account. The relish which he has of a pun, or of the quaint humour of a low character, does not interfere with the delight with which he describes a beautiful image, or the most refined love. The clown’s forced jests do not spoil the sweetness of the character of Viola; the same house is big enough to hold Malvolio, the Countess, Maria, Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew Ague-cheek. For instance, nothing can fall much lower than this last character in intellect or morals: yet how are his weaknesses nursed and dandled by Sir Toby into something ‘high fantastical,’ when on Sir Andrew’s commendation of himself for dancing and fencing, Sir Toby answers—‘Wherefore are these things hid? Wherefore have these gifts a curtain before them? Are they like to take dust like mistress Moll’s picture? Why dost thou not go to church in a galliard, and come home in a coranto? My very walk should be a jig! I would not so much as make water but in a cinque-pace. What dost thou mean? Is this a world to hide virtues in? I did think by the excellent constitution of thy leg, it was framed under the star of a galliard!’—How Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and the Clown afterwards chirp over their cups, how they ‘rouse the night-owl in a catch, able to draw three souls out of one weaver!’ What can be better than Sir Toby’s unanswerable answer to Malvolio, ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’—In a word, the best turn is given to every thing, instead of the worst. There is a constant infusion of the romantic and enthusiastic, in proportion as the characters are natural and sincere: whereas, in the more artificial style of comedy, every thing gives way to ridicule and indifference, there being nothing left but affectation on one side, and incredulity on the other.—Much as we like Shakespear’s comedies, we cannot agree with Dr. Johnson that they are better than his tragedies; nor do we like them half so well. If his inclination to comedy sometimes led him to trifle with the seriousness of tragedy, the poetical and impassioned passages are the best parts of his comedies. The great and secret charm of Twelfth Night is the character of Viola. Much as we like catches and cakes 315and ale, there is something that we like better. We have a friendship for Sir Toby; we patronise Sir Andrew; we have an understanding with the Clown, a sneaking kindness for Maria and her rogueries; we feel a regard for Malvolio, and sympathise with his gravity, his smiles, his cross garters, his yellow stockings, and imprisonment in the stocks. But there is something that excites in us a stronger feeling than all this—it is Viola’s confession of her love.

‘Duke. What’s her history?

Viola. A blank, my lord, she never told her love:

She let concealment, like a worm i’ th’ bud,

Feed on her damask cheek: she pin’d in thought,

And with a green and yellow melancholy,

She sat like Patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

We men may say more, swear more, but indeed,

Our shews are more than will; for still we prove

Much in our vows, but little in our love.

Duke. But died thy sister of her love, my boy?

Viola. I am all the daughters of my father’s house,

And all the brothers too;—and yet I know not.’—

Shakespear alone could describe the effect of his own poetry.

‘Oh, it came o’er the ear like the sweet south

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour.’

What we so much admire here is not the image of Patience on a monument, which has been generally quoted, but the lines before and after it. ‘They give a very echo to the seat where love is throned.’ How long ago it is since we first learnt to repeat them; and still, still they vibrate on the heart, like the sounds which the passing wind draws from the trembling strings of a harp left on some desert shore! There are other passages of not less impassioned sweetness. Such is Olivia’s address to Sebastian, whom she supposes to have already deceived her in a promise of marriage.

‘Blame not this haste of mine: if you mean well,

Now go with me and with this holy man

Into the chantry by: there before him,

And underneath that consecrated roof,

Plight me the full assurance of your faith,

That my most jealous and too doubtful soul

May live at peace.’

We have already said something of Shakespear’s songs. One of 316the most beautiful of them occurs in this play, with a preface of his own to it.

‘Duke. O fellow, come, the song we had last night.

Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;

The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,

And the free maids that weave their thread with bones,

Do use to chaunt it: it is silly sooth,

And dallies with the innocence of love,

Like the old age.

SONG.

Come away, come away, death,

And in sad cypress let me be laid;

Fly away, fly away, breath;

I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,

O prepare it;

My part of death no one so true

Did share it.

Not a flower, not a flower sweet,

On my black coffin let there be strewn;

Not a friend, not a friend greet

My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown:

A thousand thousand sighs to save,

Lay me, O! where

Sad true-love never find my grave,

To weep there.’

Who after this will say that Shakespear’s genius was only fitted for comedy? Yet after reading other parts of this play, and particularly the garden-scene where Malvolio picks up the letter, if we were to say that his genius for comedy was less than his genius for tragedy, it would perhaps only prove that our own taste in such matters is more saturnine than mercurial.

‘Enter Maria.

Sir Toby. Here comes the little villain:—How now, my nettle of India?

Maria. Get ye all three into the box-tree: Malvolio’s coming down this walk: he has been yonder i’ the sun, practising behaviour to his own shadow this half hour: observe him, for the love of mockery; for I know this letter will make a contemplative idiot of him. Close, in the name of jesting! Lie thou there; for here come’s the trout that must be caught with tickling.

[They hide themselves. Maria throws down a letter, and Exit.

317Enter Malvolio.

Malvolio. ’Tis but fortune; all is fortune. Maria once told me, she did affect me; and I have heard herself come thus near, that, should she fancy, it should be one of my complexion. Besides, she uses me with a more exalted respect than any one else that follows her. What should I think on’t?

Sir Toby. Here’s an over-weening rogue!

Fabian. O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him; how he jets under his advanced plumes!

Sir Andrew. ‘Slight, I could so beat the rogue:—

Sir Toby. Peace, I say.

Malvolio. To be count Malvolio;—

Sir Toby. Ah, rogue!

Sir Andrew. Pistol him, pistol him.

Sir Toby. Peace, peace!

Malvolio. There is example for’t; the lady of the Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe.

Sir Andrew. Fie on him, Jezebel!

Fabian. O, peace! now he’s deeply in; look, how imagination blows him.

Malvolio. Having been three months married to her, sitting in my chair of state,——

Sir Toby. O for a stone bow, to hit him in the eye!

Malvolio. Calling my officers about me, in my branch’d velvet gown; having come from a day-bed, where I have left Olivia sleeping.

Sir Toby. Fire and brimstone!

Fabian. O peace, peace!

Malvolio. And then to have the humour of state: and after a demure travel of regard,——telling them, I know my place, as I would they should do theirs,—to ask for my kinsman Toby.——

Sir Toby. Bolts and shackles!

Fabian. O, peace, peace, peace! now, now.

Malvolio. Seven of my people, with an obedient start, make out for him; I frown the while; and, perchance, wind up my watch, or play with some rich jewel. Toby approaches; curtsies there to me.

Sir Toby. Shall this fellow live?

Fabian. Though our silence be drawn from us with cares, yet peace.

Malvolio. I extend my hand to him thus, quenching my familiar smile with an austere regard to controul.

Sir Toby. And does not Toby take you a blow o’ the lips then?

Malvolio. Saying—Cousin Toby, my fortunes having cast me on your niece, give me this prerogative of speech;—

Sir Toby. What, what?

Malvolio. You must amend your drunkenness.

Fabian. Nay, patience, or we break the sinews of our plot.

Malvolio. Besides, you waste the treasure of your time with a foolish knight—

Sir Andrew. That’s me, I warrant you.

Malvolio. One Sir Andrew——

Sir Andrew. I knew, ’twas I; for many do call me fool.

Malvolio. What employment have we here? |[Taking up the letter.’|

318The letter and his comments on it are equally good. If poor Malvolio’s treatment afterwards is a little hard, poetical justice is done in the uneasiness which Olivia suffers on account of her mistaken attachment to Cesario, as her insensibility to the violence of the Duke’s passion is atoned for by the discovery of Viola’s concealed love of him.

THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA

This is little more than the first outlines of a comedy loosely sketched in. It is the story of a novel dramatised with very little labour or pretension; yet there are passages of high poetical spirit, and of inimitable quaintness of humour, which are undoubtedly Shakespear’s, and there is throughout the conduct of the fable a careless grace and felicity which marks it for his. One of the editors (we believe Mr. Pope) remarks in a marginal note to the Two Gentlemen of Verona—

‘It is observable (I know not for what cause) that the style of this comedy is less figurative, and more natural and unaffected than the greater part of this author’s, though supposed to be one of the first he wrote.’

Yet so little does the editor appear to have made up his mind upon this subject, that we find the following note to the very next (the second) scene.

‘This whole scene, like many others in these plays (some of which I believe were written by Shakespear, and others interpolated by the players) is composed of the lowest and most trifling conceits, to be accounted for only by the gross taste of the age he lived in: Populo ut placerent. I wish I had authority to leave them out, but I have done all I could, set a mark of reprobation upon them, throughout this edition.’

It is strange that our fastidious critic should fall so soon from praising to reprobating. The style of the familiar parts of this comedy is indeed made up of conceits—low they may be for what we know, but then they are not poor, but rich ones. The scene of Launce with his dog (not that in the second, but that in the fourth act) is a perfect treat in the way of farcical drollery and invention; nor do we think Speed’s manner of proving his master to be in love deficient in wit or sense, though the style may be criticised as not simple enough for the modern taste.

‘Valentine. Why, how know you that I am in love?

Speed. Marry, by these special marks: first, you have learned, like Sir Protheus, to wreathe your arms like a malcontent, to relish a love-song 319like a robin-red-breast, to walk alone like one that had the pestilence, to sigh like a school-boy that had lost his ABC, to weep like a young wench that had buried her grandam, to fast like one that takes diet, to watch like one that fears robbing, to speak puling like a beggar at Hallowmas. You were wont, when you laughed, to crow like a cock; when you walked, to walk like one of the lions; when you fasted, it was presently after dinner; when you looked sadly, it was for want of money; and now you are metamorphosed with a mistress, that when I look on you, I can hardly think you my master.’

The tender scenes in this play, though not so highly wrought as in some others, have often much sweetness of sentiment and expression. There is something pretty and playful in the conversation of Julia with her maid, when she shews such a disposition to coquetry about receiving the letter from Protheus; and her behaviour afterwards and her disappointment, when she finds him faithless to his vows, remind us at a distance of Imogen’s tender constancy. Her answer to Lucetta, who advises her against following her lover in disguise, is a beautiful piece of poetry.

‘Lucetta. I do not seek to quench your love’s hot fire,

But qualify the fire’s extremest rage,

Lest it should burn above the bounds of reason.

Julia. The more thou damm’st it up, the more it burns;

The current that with gentle murmur glides,

Thou know’st, being stopp’d, impatiently doth rage;

But when his fair course is not hindered,

He makes sweet music with th’ enamell’d stones,

Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge

He overtaketh in his pilgrimage:

And so by many winding nooks he strays,

With willing sport, to the wild ocean.^[70]

Then let me go, and hinder not my course;

I’ll be as patient as a gentle stream,

And make a pastime of each weary step,

Till the last step have brought me to my love;

And there I’ll rest, as after much turmoil,

A blessed soul doth in Elysium.’

If Shakespear indeed had written only this and other passages in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, he would almost have deserved Milton’s praise of him—

‘And sweetest Shakespear, Fancy’s child,

Warbles his native wood-notes wild.’

But as it is, he deserves rather more praise than this.

320

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

This is a play that in spite of the change of manners and prejudices still holds undisputed possession of the stage. Shakespear’s malignant has outlived Mr. Cumberland’s benevolent Jew. In proportion as Shylock has ceased to be a popular bugbear, ‘baited with the rabble’s curse,’ he becomes a half-favourite with the philosophical part of the audience, who are disposed to think that Jewish revenge is at least as good as Christian injuries. Shylock is a good hater; ‘a man no less sinned against than sinning.’ If he carries his revenge too far, yet he has strong grounds for ‘the lodged hate he bears Anthonio,’ which he explains with equal force of eloquence and reason. He seems the depositary of the vengeance of his race; and though the long habit of brooding over daily insults and injuries has crusted over his temper with inveterate misanthropy, and hardened him against the contempt of mankind, this adds but little to the triumphant pretensions of his enemies. There is a strong, quick, and deep sense of justice mixed up with the gall and bitterness of his resentment. The constant apprehension of being burnt alive, plundered, banished, reviled, and trampled on, might be supposed to sour the most forbearing nature, and to take something from that ‘milk of human kindness,’ with which his persecutors contemplated his indignities. The desire of revenge is almost inseparable from the sense of wrong; and we can hardly help sympathising with the proud spirit, hid beneath his ‘Jewish gaberdine,’ stung to madness by repeated undeserved provocations, and labouring to throw off the load of obloquy and oppression heaped upon him and all his tribe by one desperate act of ‘lawful’ revenge, till the ferociousness of the means by which he is to execute his purpose, and the pertinacity with which he adheres to it, turn us against him; but even at last, when disappointed of the sanguinary revenge with which he had glutted his hopes, and exposed to beggary and contempt by the letter of the law on which he had insisted with so little remorse, we pity him, and think him hardly dealt with by his judges. In all his answers and retorts upon his adversaries, he has the best not only of the argument but of the question, reasoning on their own principles and practice. They are so far from allowing of any measure of equal dealing, of common justice or humanity between themselves and the Jew, that even when they come to ask a favour of him, and Shylock reminds them that ‘on such a day they spit upon him, another spurned him, another called him dog, and for these curtesies request he’ll lend them so much monies’—Anthonio, 321his old enemy, instead of any acknowledgment of the shrewdness and justice of his remonstrance, which would have been preposterous in a respectable Catholic merchant in those times, threatens him with a repetition of the same treatment—

‘I am as like to call thee so again,

To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.’

After this, the appeal to the Jew’s mercy, as if there were any common principle of right and wrong between them, is the rankest hypocrisy, or the blindest prejudice; and the Jew’s answer to one of Anthonio’s friends, who asks him what his pound of forfeit flesh is good for, is irresistible—

To bait fish withal; if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgrac’d me, and hinder’d me of half a million, laughed at my losses, mock’d at my gains, scorn’d my nation, thwarted my bargains, cool’d my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes; hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer that a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? why revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.’

The whole of the trial-scene, both before and after the entrance of Portia, is a master-piece of dramatic skill. The legal acuteness, the passionate declamations, the sound maxims of jurisprudence, the wit and irony interspersed in it, the fluctuations of hope and fear in the different persons, and the completeness and suddenness of the catastrophe, cannot be surpassed. Shylock, who is his own counsel, defends himself well, and is triumphant on all the general topics that are urged against him, and only fails through a legal flaw. Take the following as an instance:—

‘Shylock. What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?

You have among you many a purchas’d slave,

Which like your asses, and your dogs, and mules,

You use in abject and in slavish part,

Because you bought them:—shall I say to you,

Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?

Why sweat they under burdens? let their beds

Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates

322Be season’d with such viands? you will answer,

The slaves are ours:—so do I answer you:

The pound of flesh, which I demand of him,

Is dearly bought, is mine, and I will have it:

If you deny me, fie upon your law!

There is no force in the decrees of Venice:

I stand for judgment: answer; shall I have it?’

The keenness of his revenge awakes all his faculties; and he beats back all opposition to his purpose, whether grave or gay, whether of wit or argument, with an equal degree of earnestness and self-possession. His character is displayed as distinctly in other less prominent parts of the play, and we may collect from a few sentences the history of his life—his descent and origin, his thrift and domestic economy, his affection for his daughter, whom he loves next to his wealth, his courtship and his first present to Leah, his wife! ‘I would not have parted with it’ (the ring which he first gave her) ‘for a wilderness of monkies!’ What a fine Hebraism is implied in this expression!

Portia is not a very great favourite with us; neither are we in love with her maid, Nerissa. Portia has a certain degree of affectation and pedantry about her, which is very unusual in Shakespear’s women, but which perhaps was a proper qualification for the office of a ‘civil doctor,’ which she undertakes and executes so successfully. The speech about Mercy is very well; but there are a thousand finer ones in Shakespear. We do not admire the scene of the caskets: and object entirely to the Black Prince, Morocchius. We should like Jessica better if she had not deceived and robbed her father, and Lorenzo, if he had not married a Jewess, though he thinks he has a right to wrong a Jew. The dialogue between this newly-married couple by moonlight, beginning ‘On such a night,’ etc. is a collection of classical elegancies. Launcelot, the Jew’s man, is an honest fellow. The dilemma in which he describes himself placed between his ‘conscience and the fiend,’ the one of which advises him to run away from his master’s service and the other to stay in it, is exquisitely humourous.