CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEAR’S PLAYS (continued 5)

Gratiano is a very admirable subordinate character. He is the jester of the piece: yet one speech of his, in his own defence, contains a whole volume of wisdom.

‘Anthonio. I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,

A stage, where every one must play his part;

And mine a sad one.

Gratiano. Let me play the fool:

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come;

323And let my liver rather heat with wine,

Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.

Why should a man, whose blood is warm within,

Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?

Sleep when he wakes? and creep into the jaundice

By being peevish? I tell thee what, Anthonio—

I love thee, and it is my love that speaks;—

There are a sort of men, whose visages

Do cream and mantle like a standing pond:

And do a wilful stillness entertain,

With purpose to be drest in an opinion

Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit;

As who should say, I am Sir Oracle,

And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!

O, my Anthonio, I do know of these,

That therefore only are reputed wise,

For saying nothing; who, I am very sure,

If they should speak, would almost damn those ears,

Which hearing them, would call their brothers, fools.

I’ll tell thee more of this another time:

But fish not with this melancholy bait,

For this fool’s gudgeon, this opinion,’

Gratiano’s speech on the philosophy of love, and the effect of habit in taking off the force of passion, is as full of spirit and good sense. The graceful winding up of this play in the fifth act, after the tragic business is despatched, is one of the happiest instances of Shakespear’s knowledge of the principles of the drama. We do not mean the pretended quarrel between Portia and Nerissa and their husbands about the rings, which is amusing enough, but the conversation just before and after the return of Portia to her own house, beginning ‘How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,’ and ending ‘Peace! how the moon sleeps with Endymion, and would not be awaked.’ There is a number of beautiful thoughts crowded into that short space, and linked together by the most natural transitions.

When we first went to see Mr. Kean in Shylock, we expected to see, what we had been used to see, a decrepid old man, bent with age and ugly with mental deformity, grinning with deadly malice, with the venom of his heart congealed in the expression of his countenance, sullen, morose, gloomy, inflexible, brooding over one idea, that of his hatred, and fixed on one unalterable purpose, that of his revenge. We were disappointed, because we had taken our idea from other actors, not from the play. There is no proof there that Shylock is old, but a single line, ‘Bassanio and old Shylock, both stand forth,’—which does not imply that he is infirm with age—and the circumstance that he has a daughter marriageable, which does 324not imply that he is old at all. It would be too much to say that his body should be made crooked and deformed to answer to his mind, which is bowed down and warped with prejudices and passion. That he has but one idea, is not true; he has more ideas than any other person in the piece; and if he is intense and inveterate in the pursuit of his purpose, he shews the utmost elasticity, vigour, and presence of mind, in the means of attaining it. But so rooted was our habitual impression of the part from seeing it caricatured in the representation, that it was only from a careful perusal of the play itself that we saw our error. The stage is not in general the best place to study our author’s characters in. It is too often filled with traditional common-place conceptions of the part, handed down from sire to son, and suited to the taste of the great vulgar and the small.—‘’Tis an unweeded garden: things rank and gross do merely gender in it!’ If a man of genius comes once in an age to clear away the rubbish, to make it fruitful and wholesome, they cry, ‘’Tis a bad school: it may be like nature, it may be like Shakespear, but it is not like us.’ Admirable critics!

THE WINTER’S TALE

We wonder that Mr. Pope should have entertained doubts of the genuineness of this play. He was, we suppose, shocked (as a certain critic suggests) at the Chorus, Time, leaping over sixteen years with his crutch between the third and fourth act, and at Antigonus’s landing with the infant Perdita on the sea-coast of Bohemia. These slips or blemishes however do not prove it not to be Shakespear’s; for he was as likely to fall into them as any body; but we do not know any body but himself who could produce the beauties. The stuff of which the tragic passion is composed, the romantic sweetness, the comic humour, are evidently his. Even the crabbed and tortuous style of the speeches of Leontes, reasoning on his own jealousy, beset with doubts and fears, and entangled more and more in the thorny labyrinth, bears every mark of Shakespear’s peculiar manner of conveying the painful struggle of different thoughts and feelings, labouring for utterance, and almost strangled in the birth. For instance:—

‘Ha’ not you seen, Camillo?

(But that’s past doubt; you have, or your eye-glass

Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn) or heard,

(For to a vision so apparent, rumour

Cannot be mute) or thought (for cogitation

325Resides not within man that does not think)

My wife is slippery? If thou wilt, confess,

Or else be impudently negative,

To have nor eyes, nor ears, nor thought.’—

Here Leontes is confounded with his passion, and does not know which way to turn himself, to give words to the anguish, rage, and apprehension, which tug at his breast. It is only as he is worked up into a clearer conviction of his wrongs by insisting on the grounds of his unjust suspicions to Camillo, who irritates him by his opposition, that he bursts out into the following vehement strain of bitter indignation: yet even here his passion staggers, and is as it were oppressed with its own intensity.

‘Is whispering nothing?

Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?

Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career

Of laughter with a sigh? (a note infallible

Of breaking honesty!) horsing foot on foot?

Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?

Hours, minutes? the noon, midnight? and all eyes

Blind with the pin and web, but theirs; theirs only,

That would, unseen, be wicked? is this nothing?

Why then the world, and all that’s in’t, is nothing,

The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia’s nothing,

My wife is nothing!’

The character of Hermione is as much distinguished by its saintlike resignation and patient forbearance, as that of Paulina is by her zealous and spirited remonstrances against the injustice done to the queen, and by her devoted attachment to her misfortunes. Hermione’s restoration to her husband and her child, after her long separation from them, is as affecting in itself as it is striking in the representation. Camillo, and the old shepherd and his son, are subordinate but not uninteresting instruments in the developement of the plot, and though last, not least, comes Autolycus, a very pleasant, thriving rogue; and (what is the best feather in the cap of all knavery) he escapes with impunity in the end.

The Winter’s Tale is one of the best-acting of our author’s plays. We remember seeing it with great pleasure many years ago. It was on the night that King took leave of the stage, when he and Mrs. Jordan played together in the after-piece of the Wedding-day. Nothing could go off with more éclat, with more spirit, and grandeur of effect. Mrs. Siddons played Hermione, and in the last scene acted the painted statue to the life—with true monumental dignity and noble passion; Mr. Kemble, in Leontes, worked himself up into 326a very fine classical phrensy; and Bannister, as Autolycus, roared as loud for pity as a sturdy beggar could do who felt none of the pain he counterfeited, and was sound of wind and limb. We shall never see these parts so acted again; or if we did, it would be in vain. Actors grow old, or no longer surprise us by their novelty. But true poetry, like nature, is always young; and we still read the courtship of Florizel and Perdita, as we welcome the return of spring, with the same feelings as ever.

‘Florizel. Thou dearest Perdita,

With these forc’d thoughts, I pr’ythee, darken not

The mirth o’ the feast: or, I’ll be thine, my fair,

Or not my father’s: for I cannot be

Mine own, nor any thing to any, if

I be not thine. To this I am most constant,

Tho’ destiny say, No. Be merry, gentle;

Strangle such thoughts as these, with any thing

That you behold the while. Your guests are coming:

Lift up your countenance; as it were the day

Of celebration of that nuptial, which

We two have sworn shall come.

Perdita. O lady fortune,

Stand you auspicious!

Enter Shepherd, Clown, Mopsa, Dorcas, Servants; with Polixenes, and Camillo, disguised.

Florizel. See, your guests approach.

Address yourself to entertain them sprightly,

And let’s be red with mirth.

Shepherd. Fie, daughter! when my old wife liv’d, upon

This day, she was both pantler, butler, cook;

Both dame and servant: welcom’d all, serv’d all:

Would sing her song, and dance her turn: now here

At upper end o’ the table, now i’ the middle:

On his shoulder, and his: her face o’ fire

With labour; and the thing she took to quench it

She would to each one sip. You are retir’d,

As if you were a feasted one, and not

The hostess of the meeting. Pray you, bid

These unknown friends to us welcome; for it is

A way to make us better friends, more known.

Come, quench your blushes; and present yourself

That which you are, mistress o’ the feast. Come on,

And bid us welcome to your sheep-shearing,

As your good flock shall prosper.

Perdita. Sir, welcome! |[To Polixenes and Camillo.|

It is my father’s will I should take on me

The hostess-ship o’ the day: you’re welcome, sir!

327Give me those flowers there, Dorcas.—Reverend sirs,

For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep

Seeming, and savour, all the winter long:

Grace and remembrance be unto you both,

And welcome to our shearing!

Polixenes. Shepherdess,

(A fair one are you) well you fit our ages

With flowers of winter.

Perdita. Sir, the year growing ancient,

Not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth

Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o’ the season

Are our carnations, and streak’d gilly-flowers,

Which some call nature’s bastards: of that kind

Our rustic garden’s barren; and I care not

To get slips of them.

Polixenes. Wherefore, gentle maiden,

Do you neglect them?

Perdita. For I have heard it said

There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares

With great creating nature.

Polixenes. Say, there be:

Yet nature is made better by no mean,

But nature makes that mean: so, o’er that art

Which you say, adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry

A gentler scyon to the wildest stock;

And make conceive a bark of baser kind

By bud of nobler race. This is an art

Which does mend nature, change it rather: but

The art itself is nature.

Perdita. So it is.^[71]

Polixenes. Then make your garden rich in gilly-flowers,

And do not call them bastards.

Perdita. I’ll not put

The dibble in earth, to set one slip of them;^[71]

No more than, were I painted, I would wish

This youth should say, ‘twere well; and only therefore

Desire to breed by me.—Here’s flowers for you;

Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram;

The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun,

And with him rises, weeping: these are flowers

Of middle summer, and, I think, they are given

To men of middle age. You are very welcome.

Camillo. I should leave grazing, were I of your flock,

And only live by gazing.

Perdita. Out, alas!

You’d be so lean, that blasts of January

328Would blow you through and through. Now my fairest friends,

I would I had some flowers o’ the spring, that might

Become your time of day; and your’s, and your’s,

That wear upon your virgin branches yet

Your maiden-heads growing: O Proserpina,

For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let’st fall

From Dis’s waggon! daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty: violets dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,

Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses,

That die unmarried, ere they can behold

Bright Phœbus in his strength (a malady

Most incident to maids); bold oxlips, and

The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds,

The fleur-de-lis being one! O, these I lack

To make you garlands of; and my sweet friend

To strow him o’er and o’er.

Florizel. What, like a corse?

Perdita. No, like a bank, for love to lie and play on;

Not like a corse; or if—not to be buried,

But quick, and in mine arms. Come take your flowers;

Methinks, I play as I have seen them do

In Whitsun pastorals: sure this robe of mine

Does change my disposition.

Florizel. What you do,

Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet,

I’d have you do it ever: when you sing,

I’d have you buy and sell so; so, give alms;

Pray, so; and for the ordering your affairs,

To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you

A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do

Nothing but that: move still, still so,

And own no other function. Each your doing,

So singular in each particular,

Crowns what you’re doing in the present deeds,

That all your acts are queens.

Perdita. O Doricles,

Your praises are too large; but that your youth

And the true blood, which peeps forth fairly through it,

Do plainly give you out an unstained shepherd;

With wisdom I might fear, my Doricles,

You woo’d me the false way.

Florizel. I think you have

As little skill to fear, as I have purpose

To put you to’t. But come, our dance, I pray:

Your hand, my Perdita: so turtles pair,

That never mean to part.

Perdita. I’ll swear for ‘em.

329Polixenes. This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever

Ran on the green-sward; nothing she does, or seems,

But smacks of something greater than herself,

Too noble for this place.

Camillo. He tells her something

That makes her blood look out: good sooth she is

The queen of curds and cream.’

This delicious scene is interrupted by the father of the prince discovering himself to Florizel, and haughtily breaking off the intended match between his son and Perdita. When Polixenes goes out, Perdita says,

‘Even here undone:

I was not much afraid; for once or twice

I was about to speak; and tell him plainly,

The self-same sun that shines upon his court,

Hides not his visage from our cottage, but

Looks on’t alike. Wilt please you, sir, be gone? |[To Florizel.|

I told you what would come of this. Beseech you,

Of your own state take care: this dream of mine,

Being now awake, I’ll queen it no inch farther,

But milk my ewes and weep.’

As Perdita, the supposed shepherdess, turns out to be the daughter of Hermione, and a princess in disguise, both feelings of the pride of birth and the claims of nature are satisfied by the fortunate event of the story, and the fine romance of poetry is reconciled to the strictest court-etiquette.

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

All’s Well that Ends Well is one of the most pleasing of our author’s comedies. The interest is however more of a serious than of a comic nature. The character of Helen is one of great sweetness and delicacy. She is placed in circumstances of the most critical kind, and has to court her husband both as a virgin and a wife: yet the most scrupulous nicety of female modesty is not once violated. There is not one thought or action that ought to bring a blush into her cheeks, or that for a moment lessens her in our esteem. Perhaps the romantic attachment of a beautiful and virtuous girl to one placed above her hopes by the circumstances of birth and fortune, was never so exquisitely expressed as in the reflections which she utters when 330young Roussillon leaves his mother’s house, under whose protection she has been brought up with him, to repair to the French king’s court.

‘Helena. Oh, were that all—I think not on my father,

And these great tears grace his remembrance more

Than those I shed for him. What was he like?

I have forgot him. My imagination

Carries no favour in it, but Bertram’s.

I am undone, there is no living, none

If Bertram be away. It were all one

That I should love a bright particular star,

And think to wed it; he is so above me:

In his bright radiance and collateral light

Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.

Th’ ambition in my love thus plagues itself;

The hind that would be mated by the lion,

Must die for love. ’Twas pretty, tho’ a plague,

To see him every hour, to sit and draw

His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls

In our heart’s table: heart too capable

Of every line and trick of his sweet favour.

But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous fancy

Must sanctify his relics.’

The interest excited by this beautiful picture of a fond and innocent heart is kept up afterwards by her resolution to follow him to France, the success of her experiment in restoring the king’s health, her demanding Bertram in marriage as a recompense, his leaving her in disdain, her interview with him afterwards disguised as Diana, a young lady whom he importunes with his secret addresses, and their final reconciliation when the consequences of her stratagem and the proofs of her love are fully made known. The persevering gratitude of the French king to his benefactress, who cures him of a languishing distemper by a prescription hereditary in her family, the indulgent kindness of the Countess, whose pride of birth yields, almost without a struggle, to her affection for Helen, the honesty and uprightness of the good old lord Lafeu, make very interesting parts of the picture. The wilful stubbornness and youthful petulance of Bertram are also very admirably described. The comic part of the play turns on the folly, boasting, and cowardice of Parolles, a parasite and hanger-on of Bertram’s, the detection of whose false pretensions to bravery and honour forms a very amusing episode. He is first found out by the old lord Lafeu, who says, ‘The soul of this man is in his clothes’; and it is proved afterwards that his heart is in his tongue, and that both are false and hollow. The adventure of ‘the bringing off of his drum’ has become proverbial as a satire on all ridiculous and blustering 331undertakings which the person never means to perform: nor can any thing be more severe than what one of the bye-standers remarks upon what Parolles says of himself, ‘Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?’ Yet Parolles himself gives the best solution of the difficulty afterwards when he is thankful to escape with his life and the loss of character; for, so that he can live on, he is by no means squeamish about the loss of pretensions, to which he had sense enough to know he had no real claim, and which he had assumed only as a means to live.

‘Parolles. Yet I am thankful: if my heart were great,

‘Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more,

But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft

As captain shall. Simply the thing I am

Shall make me live: who knows himself a braggart,

Let him fear this; for it shall come to pass,

That every braggart shall be found an ass.

Rust sword, cool blushes, and Parolles live

Safest in shame; being fool’d, by fool’ry thrive;

There’s place and means for every man alive.

I’ll after them.’

The story of All’s Well that Ends Well, and of several others of Shakespear’s plays, is taken from Boccacio. The poet has dramatised the original novel with great skill and comic spirit, and has preserved all the beauty of character and sentiment without improving upon it, which was impossible. There is indeed in Boccacio’s serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite refinement of sentiment, which is hardly to be met with in any other prose writer whatever. Justice has not been done him by the world. He has in general passed for a mere narrator of lascivious tales or idle jests. This character probably originated in his obnoxious attacks on the monks, and has been kept up by the grossness of mankind, who revenged their own want of refinement on Boccacio, and only saw in his writings what suited the coarseness of their own tastes. But the truth is, that he has carried sentiment of every kind to its very highest purity and perfection. By sentiment we would here understand the habitual workings of some one powerful feeling, where the heart reposes almost entirely upon itself, without the violent excitement of opposing duties or untoward circumstances. In this way, nothing ever came up to the story of Frederigo Alberigi and his Falcon. The perseverance in attachment, the spirit of gallantry and generosity displayed in it, has no parallel in the history of heroical sacrifices. The feeling is so unconscious too, and involuntary, is brought out in such small, unlooked-for, and unostentatious circumstances, as to show it to 332have been woven into the very nature and soul of the author. The story of Isabella is scarcely less fine, and is more affecting in the circumstances and in the catastrophe. Dryden has done justice to the impassioned eloquence of the Tancred and Sigismunda; but has not given an adequate idea of the wild preternatural interest of the story of Honoria. Cimon and Iphigene is by no means one of the best, notwithstanding the popularity of the subject. The proof of unalterable affection given in the story of Jeronymo, and the simple touches of nature and picturesque beauty in the story of the two holiday lovers, who were poisoned by tasting of a leaf in the garden at Florence, are perfect master-pieces. The epithet of Divine was well bestowed on this great painter of the human heart. The invention implied in his different tales is immense: but we are not to infer that it is all his own. He probably availed himself of all the common traditions which were floating in his time, and which he was the first to appropriate. Homer appears the most original of all authors—probably for no other reason than that we can trace the plagiarism no farther. Boccacio has furnished subjects to numberless writers since his time, both dramatic and narrative. The story of Griselda is borrowed from his Decameron by Chaucer; as is the Knight’s Tale (Palamon and Arcite) from his poem of the Theseid.

LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

If we were to part with any of the author’s comedies, it should be this. Yet we should be loth to part with Don Adriano de Armado, that mighty potentate of nonsense, or his page, that handful of wit; with Nathaniel the curate, or Holofernes the schoolmaster, and their dispute after dinner on ‘the golden cadences of poesy’; with Costard the clown, or Dull the constable. Biron is too accomplished a character to be lost to the world, and yet he could not appear without his fellow courtiers and the king: and if we were to leave out the ladies, the gentlemen would have no mistresses. So that we believe we may let the whole play stand as it is, and we shall hardly venture to ‘set a mark of reprobation on it.’ Still we have some objections to the style, which we think savours more of the pedantic spirit of Shakespear’s time than of his own genius; more of controversial divinity, and the logic of Peter Lombard, than of the inspiration of the Muse. It transports us quite as much to the manners of the court, and the quirks of courts of law, as to the scenes of nature or the fairy-land of his own imagination. Shakespear has 333set himself to imitate the tone of polite conversation then prevailing among the fair, the witty, and the learned, and he has imitated it but too faithfully. It is as if the hand of Titian had been employed to give grace to the curls of a full-bottomed periwig, or Raphael had attempted to give expression to the tapestry figures in the House of Lords. Shakespear has put an excellent description of this fashionable jargon into the mouth of the critical Holofernes ‘as too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it’; and nothing can be more marked than the difference when he breaks loose from the trammels he had imposed on himself, ‘as light as bird from brake,’ and speaks in his own person. We think, for instance, that in the following soliloquy the poet has fairly got the start of Queen Elizabeth and her maids of honour:—

‘Biron. O! and I forsooth in love,

I that have been love’s whip;

A very beadle to an amorous sigh:

A critic; nay, a night-watch constable,

A domineering pedant o’er the boy,

Than whom no mortal more magnificent.

This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,

This signior Junio, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid,

Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,

Th’ anointed sovereign of sighs and groans:

Liege of all loiterers and malecontents,

Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces,

Sole imperator, and great general

Of trotting parators (O my little heart!)

And I to be a corporal of his field,

And wear his colours like a tumbler’s hoop?

What? I love! I sue! I seek a wife!

A woman, that is like a German clock,

Still a repairing; ever out of frame;

And never going aright, being a watch,

And being watch’d, that it may still go right?

Nay, to be perjur’d, which is worst of all:

And among three to love the worst of all,

A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,

With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes;

Ay, and by heav’n, one that will do the deed,

Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard;

And I to sigh for her! to watch for her!

To pray for her! Go to; it is a plague

That Cupid will impose for my neglect

Of his almighty dreadful little might.

Well, I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, and groan:

Some men must love my lady, and some Joan.’

334The character of Biron drawn by Rosaline and that which Biron gives of Boyet are equally happy. The observations on the use and abuse of study, and on the power of beauty to quicken the understanding as well as the senses, are excellent. The scene which has the greatest dramatic effect is that in which Biron, the king, Longaville, and Dumain, successively detect each other and are detected in their breach of their vow and in their profession of attachment to their several mistresses, in which they suppose themselves to be overheard by no one. The reconciliation between these lovers and their sweethearts is also very good, and the penance which Rosaline imposes on Biron, before he can expect to gain her consent to marry him, full of propriety and beauty.

‘Rosaline. Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron,

Before I saw you: and the world’s large tongue

Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks;

Full of comparisons, and wounding flouts;

Which you on all estates will execute,

That lie within the mercy of your wit.

To weed this wormwood from your faithful brain;

And therewithal to win me, if you please,

(Without the which I am not to be won)

You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day

Visit the speechless sick, and still converse

With groaning wretches; and your task shall be,

With all the fierce endeavour of your wit,

T’ enforce the pained impotent to smile.

Biron. To move wild laughter in the throat of death?

It cannot be: it is impossible:

Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

Rosaline. Why, that’s the way to choke a gibing spirit,

Whose influence is begot of that loose grace,

Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools:

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear

Of him that hears it; never in the tongue

Of him that makes it: then, if sickly ears,

Deaf’d with the clamours of their own dear groans,

Will hear your idle scorns, continue then,

And I will have you, and that fault withal;

But, if they will not, throw away that spirit,

And I shall find you empty of that fault,

Right joyful of your reformation.

Biron. A twelvemonth? Well, befall what will befall,

I’ll jest a twelvemonth in an hospital.’

The famous cuckoo-song closes the play: but we shall add no more criticisms: ‘the words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.’

335

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

This admirable comedy used to be frequently acted till of late years. Mr. Garrick’s Benedick was one of his most celebrated characters; and Mrs. Jordan, we have understood, played Beatrice very delightfully. The serious part is still the most prominent here, as in other instances that we have noticed. Hero is the principal figure in the piece, and leaves an indelible impression on the mind by her beauty, her tenderness, and the hard trial of her love. The passage in which Claudio first makes a confession of his affection towards her, conveys as pleasing an image of the entrance of love into a youthful bosom as can well be imagined.

‘Oh, my lord,

When you went onward with this ended action,

I look’d upon her with a soldier’s eye,

That lik’d, but had a rougher task in hand

Than to drive liking to the name of love;

But now I am return’d, and that war-thoughts

Have left their places vacant; in their rooms

Come thronging soft and delicate desires,

All prompting me how fair young Hero is,

Saying, I lik’d her ere I went to wars.’

In the scene at the altar, when Claudio, urged on by the villain Don John, brings the charge of incontinence against her, and as it were divorces her in the very marriage-ceremony, her appeals to her own conscious innocence and honour are made with the most affecting simplicity.

‘Claudio. No, Leonato,

I never tempted her with word too large,

But, as a brother to his sister, shew’d

Bashful sincerity, and comely love.

Hero. And seem’d I ever otherwise to you?

Claudio. Out on thy seeming, I will write against it:

You seem to me as Dian in her orb,

As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown;

But you are more intemperate in your blood

Than Venus, or those pamper’d animals

That rage in savage sensuality.

Hero. Is my lord well, that he doth speak so wide?

Leonato. Are these things spoken, or do I but dream?

John. Sir, they are spoken, and these things are true.

Benedick. This looks not like a nuptial.

Hero. True! O God!’

336The justification of Hero in the end, and her restoration to the confidence and arms of her lover, is brought about by one of those temporary consignments to the grave of which Shakespear seems to have been fond. He has perhaps explained the theory of this predilection in the following lines:—

‘Friar. She dying, as it must be so maintain’d,

Upon the instant that she was accus’d,

Shall be lamented, pity’d, and excus’d,

Of every hearer: for it so falls out,

That what we have we prize not to the worth,

While we enjoy it; but being lack’d and lost,

Why then we rack the value; then we find

The virtue, that possession would not shew us

Whilst it was ours.—So will it fare with Claudio;

When he shall hear she dy’d upon his words,

The idea of her love shall sweetly creep

Into his study of imagination;

And every lovely organ of her life

Shall come apparel’d in more precious habit,

More moving, delicate, and full of life,

Into the eye and prospect of his soul,

Than when she liv’d indeed.’

The principal comic characters in Much Ado about Nothing, Benedick and Beatrice, are both essences in their kind. His character as a woman-hater is admirably supported, and his conversion to matrimony is no less happily effected by the pretended story of Beatrice’s love for him. It is hard to say which of the two scenes is the best, that of the trick which is thus practised on Benedick, or that in which Beatrice is prevailed on to take pity on him by overhearing her cousin and her maid declare (which they do on purpose) that he is dying of love for her. There is something delightfully picturesque in the manner in which Beatrice is described as coming to hear the plot which is contrived against herself—

‘For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs

Close by the ground, to hear our conference.’

In consequence of what she hears (not a word of which is true) she exclaims when these good-natured informants are gone,

‘What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?

Stand I condemn’d for pride and scorn so much?

Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride adieu!

No glory lives behind the back of such.

337And, Benedick, love on, I will requite thee;

Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand;

If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee

To bind our loves up in an holy band:

For others say thou dost deserve; and I

Believe it better than reportingly.’

And Benedick, on his part, is equally sincere in his repentance with equal reason, after he has heard the grey-beard, Leonato, and his friend, ‘Monsieur Love,’ discourse of the desperate state of his supposed inamorata.

‘This can be no trick; the conference was sadly borne.—They have the truth of this from Hero. They seem to pity the lady; it seems her affections have the full bent. Love me! why, it must be requited. I hear how I am censur’d: they say, I will bear myself proudly, if I perceive the love come from her; they say too, that she will rather die than give any sign of affection.—I did never think to marry: I must not seem proud:—happy are they that hear their detractions, and can put them to mending. They say, the lady is fair; ’tis a truth, I can bear them witness: and virtuous;—’tis so, I cannot reprove it: and wise—but for loving me:—by my troth it is no addition to her wit;—nor no great argument of her folly, for I will be horribly in love with her.—I may chance to have some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on me, because I have rail’d so long against marriage: but doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth, that he cannot endure in his age.—Shall quips, and sentences, and these paper bullets of the brain, awe a man from the career of his humour? No: the world must be peopled. When I said, I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were marry’d.—Here comes Beatrice: by this day, she’s a fair lady: I do spy some marks of love in her.

The beauty of all this arises from the characters of the persons so entrapped. Benedick is a professed and staunch enemy to marriage, and gives very plausible reasons for the faith that is in him. And as to Beatrice, she persecutes him all day with her jests (so that he could hardly think of being troubled with them at night) she not only turns him but all other things into jest, and is proof against everything serious.

‘Hero. Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes,

Misprising what they look on; and her wit

Values itself so highly, that to her

All matter else seems weak: she cannot love,

Nor take no shape nor project of affection,

She is so self-endeared.

Ursula. Sure, I think so;

And therefore, certainly, it were not good

She knew his love, lest she make sport at it.

338Hero. Why, you speak truth: I never yet saw man,

How wise, how noble, young, how rarely featur’d,

But she would spell him backward: if fair-fac’d,

She’d swear the gentleman should be her sister;

If black, why, nature, drawing of an antick,

Made a foul blot: if tall, a lance ill-headed;

If low, an agate very vilely cut:

If speaking, why, a vane blown with all winds;

If silent, why, a block moved with none.

So turns she every man the wrong side out;

And never gives to truth and virtue that

Which simpleness and merit purchaseth.’

These were happy materials for Shakespear to work on, and he has made a happy use of them. Perhaps that middle point of comedy was never more nicely hit in which the ludicrous blends with the tender, and our follies, turning round against themselves in support of our affections, retain nothing but their humanity.

Dogberry and Verges in this play are inimitable specimens of quaint blundering and misprisions of meaning; and are a standing record of that formal gravity of pretension and total want of common understanding, which Shakespear no doubt copied from real life, and which in the course of two hundred years appear to have ascended from the lowest to the highest offices in the state.

AS YOU LIKE IT

Shakespear has here converted the forest of Arden into another Arcadia, where they ‘fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.’ It is the most ideal of any of this author’s plays. It is a pastoral drama, in which the interest arises more out of the sentiments and characters than out of the actions or situations. It is not what is done, but what is said, that claims our attention. Nursed in solitude, ‘under the shade of melancholy boughs,’ the imagination grows soft and delicate, and the wit runs riot in idleness, like a spoiled child, that is never sent to school. Caprice and fancy reign and revel here, and stern necessity is banished to the court. The mild sentiments of humanity are strengthened with thought and leisure; the echo of the cares and noise of the world strikes upon the ear of those ‘who have felt them knowingly,’ softened by time and distance. ‘They hear the tumult, and are still.’ The very air of the place seems to breathe a spirit of philosophical poetry: to stir the thoughts, to touch the heart with pity, as the drowsy forest rustles 339to the sighing gale. Never was there such beautiful moralising, equally free from pedantry or petulance.

‘And this their life, exempt from public haunts,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.’

Jaques is the only purely contemplative character in Shakespear. He thinks, and does nothing. His whole occupation is to amuse his mind, and he is totally regardless of his body and his fortunes. He is the prince of philosophical idlers; his only passion is thought; he sets no value upon any thing but as it serves as food for reflection. He can ‘suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs’; the motley fool, ‘who morals on the time,’ is the greatest prize he meets with in the forest. He resents Orlando’s passion for Rosalind as some disparagement of his own passion for abstract truth; and leaves the Duke, as soon as he is restored to his sovereignty, to seek his brother out who has quitted it, and turned hermit.

—‘Out of these convertites

There is much matter to be heard and learnt.’

Within the sequestered and romantic glades of the forest of Arden, they find leisure to be good and wise, or to play the fool and fall in love. Rosalind’s character is made up of sportive gaiety and natural tenderness: her tongue runs the faster to conceal the pressure at her heart. She talks herself out of breath, only to get deeper in love. The coquetry with which she plays with her lover in the double character which she has to support is managed with the nicest address. How full of voluble, laughing grace is all her conversation with Orlando—

—‘In heedless mazes running

With wanton haste and giddy cunning.’

How full of real fondness and pretended cruelty is her answer to him when he promises to love her ‘For ever and a day!’

‘Say a day without the ever: no, no, Orlando, men are April when they woo, December when they wed: maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives: I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen; more clamorous than a parrot against rain; more new-fangled than an ape; more giddy in my desires than a monkey; I will weep for nothing like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry; I will laugh like a hyen, and that when you are inclined to sleep.

Orlando. But will my Rosalind do so?

Rosalind. By my life she will do as I do.’

340The silent and retired character of Celia is a necessary relief to the provoking loquacity of Rosalind, nor can anything be better conceived or more beautifully described than the mutual affection between the two cousins:—

—‘We still have slept together,

Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, eat together,

And wheresoe’r we went, like Juno’s swans,

Still we went coupled and inseparable.’

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

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

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

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

There is hardly any of Shakespear’s plays that contains a greater number of passages that have been quoted in books of extracts, or a greater number of phrases that have become in a manner proverbial. If we were to give all the striking passages, we should give half the play. We will only recall a few of the most delightful to the reader’s recollection. Such are the meeting between Orlando and Adam, the exquisite appeal of Orlando to the humanity of the Duke and his company to supply him with food for the old man, and their answer, the Duke’s description of a country life, and the account of Jaques 341moralising on the wounded deer, his meeting with Touchstone in the forest, his apology for his own melancholy and his satirical vein, and the well-known speech on the stages of human life, the old song of ‘Blow, blow, thou winter’s wind,’ Rosalind’s description of the marks of a lover and of the progress of time with different persons, the picture of the snake wreathed round Oliver’s neck while the lioness watches her sleeping prey, and Touchstone’s lecture to the shepherd, his defence of cuckolds, and panegyric on the virtues of ‘an If.’—All of these are familiar to the reader: there is one passage of equal delicacy and beauty which may have escaped him, and with it we shall close our account of As You Like It. It is Phebe’s description of Ganimed at the end of the third act.

‘Think not I love him, tho’ I ask for him;

’Tis but a peevish boy, yet he talks well;—

But what care I for words! yet words do well,

When he that speaks them pleases those that hear:

It is a pretty youth; not very pretty;

But sure he’s proud, and yet his pride becomes him;

He’ll make a proper man; the best thing in him

Is his complexion; and faster than his tongue

Did make offence, his eye did heal it up:

He is not very tall, yet for his years he’s tall;

His leg is but so so, and yet ’tis well;

There was a pretty redness in his lip,

A little riper, and more lusty red

Than that mix’d in his cheek; ’twas just the difference

Betwixt the constant red and mingled damask.

There be some women, Silvius, had they mark’d him

In parcels as I did, would have gone near

To fall in love with him: but for my part

I love him not, nor hate him not; and yet

I have more cause to hate him than to love him;

For what had he to do to chide at me?’

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

The Taming of the Shrew is almost the only one of Shakespear’s comedies that has a regular plot, and downright moral. It is full of bustle, animation, and rapidity of action. It shews admirably how self-will is only to be got the better of by stronger will, and how one degree of ridiculous perversity is only to be driven out by another still greater. Petruchio is a madman in his senses; a very honest 342fellow, who hardly speaks a word of truth, and succeeds in all his tricks and impostures. He acts his assumed character to the life, with the most fantastical extravagance, with complete presence of mind, with untired animal spirits, and without a particle of ill humour from beginning to end.—The situation of poor Katherine, worn out by his incessant persecutions, becomes at last almost as pitiable as it is ludicrous, and it is difficult to say which to admire most, the unaccountableness of his actions, or the unalterableness of his resolutions. It is a character which most husbands ought to study, unless perhaps the very audacity of Petruchio’s attempt might alarm them more than his success would encourage them. What a sound must the following speech carry to some married ears!

‘Think you a little din can daunt my ears?

Have I not in my time heard lions roar?

Have I not heard the sea, puff’d up with winds,

Rage like an angry boar, chafed with sweat?

Have I not heard great ordnance in the field?

And heav’n’s artillery thunder in the skies?

Have I not in a pitched battle heard

Loud larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?

And do you tell me of a woman’s tongue,

That gives not half so great a blow to hear,

As will a chesnut in a farmer’s fire?’

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

‘I’ll woo her with some spirit when she comes.

Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain

She sings as sweetly as a nightingale;

Say that she frown, I’ll say she looks as clear

As morning roses newly wash’d with dew;

Say she be mute, and will not speak a word,

Then I’ll commend her volubility,

And say she uttereth piercing eloquence:

If she do bid me pack, I’ll give her thanks,

As though she bid me stay by her a week;

If she deny to wed, I’ll crave the day,

When I shall ask the banns, and when be married?’

He accordingly gains her consent to the match, by telling her father that he has got it; disappoints her by not returning at the time he has promised to wed her, and when he returns, creates no small consternation by the oddity of his dress and equipage. This, however, 343is nothing to the astonishment excited by his mad-brained behaviour at the marriage. Here is the account of it by an eye-witness:—

‘Gremio. Tut, she’s a lamb, a dove, a fool to him:

I’ll tell you, Sir Lucentio; when the priest

Should ask if Katherine should be his wife?

Ay, by gogs woons, quoth he; and swore so loud,

That, all amaz’d, the priest let fall the book;

And as he stooped again to take it up,

This mad-brain’d bridegroom took him such a cuff,

That down fell priest and book, and book and priest.

Now take them up, quoth he, if any list.

Tranio. What said the wench when he rose up again?

Gremio. Trembled and shook; for why, he stamp’d and swore,

As if the vicar meant to cozen him.

But after many ceremonies done,

He calls for wine; a health, quoth he; as if

He’ad been aboard carousing with his mates

After a storm; quaft off the muscadel,

And threw the sops all in the sexton’s face;

Having no other cause but that his beard

Grew thin and hungerly, and seem’d to ask

His sops as he was drinking. This done, he took

The bride about the neck, and kiss’d her lips

With such a clamourous smack, that at their parting

All the church echoed: and I seeing this,

Came thence for very shame; and after me,

I know, the rout is coming;—

Such a mad marriage never was before.’

The most striking and at the same time laughable feature in the character of Petruchio throughout, is the studied approximation to the intractable character of real madness, his apparent insensibility to all external considerations, and utter indifference to every thing but the wild and extravagant freaks of his own self-will. There is no contending with a person on whom nothing makes any impression but his own purposes, and who is bent on his own whims just in proportion as they seem to want common sense. With him a thing’s being plain and reasonable is a reason against it. The airs he gives himself are infinite, and his caprices as sudden as they are groundless. The whole of his treatment of his wife at home is in the same spirit of ironical attention and inverted gallantry. Every thing flies before his will, like a conjuror’s wand, and he only metamorphoses his wife’s temper by metamorphosing her senses and all the objects she sees, at a word’s speaking. Such are his insisting that it is the moon and not the sun which they see, etc. This extravagance reaches its most pleasant and poetical height in the scene where, on their return 344to her father’s, they meet old Vincentio, whom Petruchio immediately addresses as a young lady:—

‘Petruchio. Good morrow, gentle mistress, where away?

Tell me, sweet Kate, and tell me truly too,

Hast thou beheld a fresher gentlewoman?

Such war of white and red within her cheeks;

What stars do spangle heaven with such beauty,

As those two eyes become that heav’nly face?

Fair lovely maid, once more good day to thee:

Sweet Kate, embrace her for her beauty’s sake.

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

Katherine. Young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet,

Whither away, or where is thy abode?

Happy the parents of so fair a child;

Happier the man whom favourable stars

Allot thee for his lovely bed-fellow.

Petruchio. Why, how now, Kate, I hope thou art not mad:

This is a man, old, wrinkled, faded, wither’d,

And not a maiden, as thou say’st he is.

Katherine. Pardon, old father, my mistaken eyes

That have been so bedazed with the sun

That everything I look on seemeth green.

Now I perceive thou art a reverend father.’

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

‘The mathematics, and the metaphysics,

Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you:

No profit grows, where is no pleasure ta’en:

In brief, sir, study what you most affect.’

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

‘Tranio, I saw her coral lips to move,

And with her breath she did perfume the air:

Sacred and sweet was all I saw in her.’

345When Biondello tells the same Lucentio for his encouragement, ‘I knew a wench married in an afternoon as she went to the garden for parsley to stuff a rabbit, and so may you, sir’—there is nothing elegant in this, and yet we hardly know which of the two passages is the best.

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

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

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

This is a play as full of genius as it is of wisdom. Yet there is an original sin in the nature of the subject, which prevents us from taking a cordial interest in it. ‘The height of moral argument’ which the author has maintained in the intervals of passion or blended with the more powerful impulses of nature, is hardly surpassed in any of his plays. But there is in general a want of passion; the affections 346are at a stand; our sympathies are repulsed and defeated in all directions. The only passion which influences the story is that of Angelo; and yet he seems to have a much greater passion for hypocrisy than for his mistress. Neither are we greatly enamoured of Isabella’s rigid chastity, though she could not act otherwise than she did. We do not feel the same confidence in the virtue that is ‘sublimely good’ at another’s expense, as if it had been put to some less disinterested trial. As to the Duke, who makes a very imposing and mysterious stage-character, he is more absorbed in his own plots and gravity than anxious for the welfare of the state; more tenacious of his own character than attentive to the feelings and apprehensions of others. Claudio is the only person who feels naturally; and yet he is placed in circumstances of distress which almost preclude the wish for his deliverance. Mariana is also in love with Angelo, whom we hate. In this respect, there may be said to be a general system of cross-purposes between the feelings of the different characters and the sympathy of the reader or the audience. This principle of repugnance seems to have reached its height in the character of Master Barnardine, who not only sets at defiance the opinions of others, but has even thrown off all self-regard,—‘one that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, and to come.’ He is a fine antithesis to the morality and the hypocrisy of the other characters of the play. Barnardine is Caliban transported from Prospero’s wizard island to the forests of Bohemia or the prisons of Vienna. He is the creature of bad habits as Caliban is of gross instincts. He has however a strong notion of the natural fitness of things, according to his own sensations—‘He has been drinking hard all night, and he will not be hanged that day’—and Shakespear has let him off at last. We do not understand why the philosophical German critic, Schlegel, should be so severe on those pleasant persons, Lucio, Pompey, and Master Froth, as to call them ‘wretches.’ They appear all mighty comfortable in their occupations, and determined to pursue them, ‘as the flesh and fortune should serve.’ A very good exposure of the want of self-knowledge and contempt for others, which is so common in the world, is put into the mouth of Abhorson, the jailor, when the Provost proposes to associate Pompey with him in his office—‘A bawd, sir? Fie upon him, he will discredit our mystery.’ And the same answer will serve in nine instances out of ten to the same kind of remark, ‘Go to, sir, you weigh equally; a feather will turn the scale.’ Shakespear was in one sense the least moral of all writers; for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies; and his talent consisted 347in sympathy with human nature, in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations. The object of the pedantic moralist is to find out the bad in everything: his was to shew that ‘there is some soul of goodness in things evil.’ Even Master Barnardine is not left to the mercy of what others think of him; but when he comes in, speaks for himself, and pleads his own cause, as well as if counsel had been assigned him. In one sense, Shakespear was no moralist at all: in another, he was the greatest of all moralists. He was a moralist in the same sense in which nature is one. He taught what he had learnt from her. He shewed the greatest knowledge of humanity with the greatest fellow-feeling for it.

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

‘Claudio. Let me know the point.

Isabella. O, I do fear thee, Claudio: and I quake,

Lest thou a feverous life should’st entertain,

And six or seven winters more respect

Than a perpetual honour. Dar’st thou die?

The sense of death is most in apprehension;

And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,

In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great

As when a giant dies.

Claudio. Why give you me this shame?

Think you I can a resolution fetch

From flowery tenderness; if I must die,

I will encounter darkness as a bride,

And hug it in mine arms.

Isabella. There spake my brother! there my father’s grave

Did utter forth a voice! Yes, thou must die:

Thou art too noble to conserve a life

In base appliances. This outward-sainted deputy—

Whose settled visage and deliberate word

Nips youth i’ the head, and follies doth emmew,

As faulcon doth the fowl—is yet a devil.

Claudio. The princely Angelo?

Isabella. Oh, ’tis the cunning livery of hell,

The damned’st body to invest and cover

In princely guards! Dost thou think, Claudio,

If I would yield him my virginity,

Thou might’st be freed?

Claudio. Oh, heavens! it cannot be.

Isabella. Yes, he would give it thee, for this rank offence,

So to offend him still: this night’s the time

That I should do what I abhor to name,

Or else thou dy’st to-morrow.

348Claudio. Thou shalt not do’t.

Isabella. Oh, were it but my life,

I’d throw it down for your deliverance

As frankly as a pin.

Claudio. Thanks, dear Isabel.

Isabella. Be ready, Claudio, for your death to-morrow.

Claudio. Yes.—Has he affections in him,

That thus can make him bite the law by the nose?

When he would force it, sure it is no sin;

Or of the deadly seven it is the least.

Isabella. Which is the least?

Claudio. If it were damnable, he, being so wise,

Why would he for the momentary trick

Be perdurably fin’d? Oh, Isabel!

Isabella. What says my brother?

Claudio. Death is a fearful thing.

Isabella. And shamed life a hateful.

Claudio. Aye, but to die, and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendant world; or to be worse than worst

Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts

Imagine howling!—’tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life,

That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment

Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

Isabella. Alas! alas!

Claudio. Sweet sister, let me live:

What sin you do to save a brother’s life,

Nature dispenses with the deed so far,

That it becomes a virtue.’

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

—‘Reason thus with life,—

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing,

That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,

Servile to all the skyey influences

That do this habitation, where thou keep’st,

Hourly afflict; merely, thou art death’s fool;

349For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun,

And yet run’st toward him still: thou art not noble;

For all the accommodations, that thou bear’st,

Are nurs’d by baseness: thou art by no means valiant;

For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork

Of a poor worm: thy best of rest is sleep,

And that thou oft provok’st; yet grossly fear’st

Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;

For thou exist’st on many a thousand grains

That issue out of dust: happy thou art not;

For what thou hast not, still thou striv’st to get;

And what thou hast, forget’st: thou art not certain;

For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,

After the moon: if thou art rich, thou art poor;

For, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows

Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey,

And death unloads thee: friend thou hast none;

For thy own bowels, which do call thee sire,

The mere effusion of thy proper loins,

Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,

For ending thee no sooner; thou hast nor youth, nor age;

But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep,

Dreaming on both: for all thy blessed youth

Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms

Of palsied eld; and when thou art old, and rich,

Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,

To make thy riches pleasant. What’s yet in this,

That bears the name of life? Yet in this life

Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,

That makes these odds all even.’

THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR

The Merry Wives of Windsor is no doubt a very amusing play, with a great deal of humour, character, and nature in it: but we should have liked it much better, if any one else had been the hero of it, instead of Falstaff. We could have been contented if Shakespear had not been ‘commanded to shew the knight in love.’ Wits and philosophers, for the most part, do not shine in that character; and Sir John himself, by no means, comes off with flying colours. Many people complain of the degradation and insults to which Don Quixote is so frequently exposed in his various adventures. But what are the unconscious indignities which he suffers, compared with the sensible mortifications which Falstaff is made to bring upon himself? 350What are the blows and buffetings which the Don receives from the staves of the Yanguesian carriers or from Sancho Panza’s more hard-hearted hands, compared with the contamination of the buck-basket, the disguise of the fat woman of Brentford, and the horns of Herne the hunter, which are discovered on Sir John’s head? In reading the play, we indeed wish him well through all these discomfitures, but it would have been as well if he had not got into them. Falstaff in the Merry Wives of Windsor is not the man he was in the two parts of Henry IV. His wit and eloquence have left him. Instead of making a butt of others, he is made a butt of by them. Neither is there a single particle of love in him to excuse his follies: he is merely a designing, bare-faced knave, and an unsuccessful one. The scene with Ford as Master Brook, and that with Simple, Slender’s man, who comes to ask after the Wise Woman, are almost the only ones in which his old intellectual ascendancy appears. He is like a person recalled to the stage to perform an unaccustomed and ungracious part; and in which we perceive only ‘some faint sparks of those flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the hearers in a roar.’ But the single scene with Doll Tearsheet, or Mrs. Quickly’s account of his desiring ‘to eat some of housewife Reach’s prawns,’ and telling her ‘to be no more so familiarity with such people,’ is worth the whole of the Merry Wives of Windsor put together. Ford’s jealousy, which is the main spring of the comic incidents, is certainly very well managed. Page, on the contrary, appears to be somewhat uxorious in his disposition; and we have pretty plain indications of the effect of the characters of the husbands on the different degrees of fidelity in their wives. Mrs. Quickly makes a very lively go-between, both between Falstaff and his Dulcineas, and Anne Page and her lovers, and seems in the latter case so intent on her own interest as totally to overlook the intentions of her employers. Her master, Dr. Caius, the Frenchman, and her fellow-servant Jack Rugby, are very completely described. This last-mentioned person is rather quaintly commended by Mrs. Quickly as ‘an honest, willing, kind fellow, as ever servant shall come in house withal, and I warrant you, no tell-tale, nor no breed-bate; his worst fault is, that he is given to prayer; he is something peevish that way; but nobody but has his fault.’ The Welch Parson, Sir Hugh Evans (a title which in those days was given to the clergy) is an excellent character in all respects. He is as respectable as he is laughable. He has ‘very good discretions, and very odd humours.’ The duel-scene with Caius gives him an opportunity to shew his ‘cholers and his tremblings of mind,’ his valour and his melancholy, in an irresistible manner. In the dialogue, 351which at his mother’s request he holds with his pupil, William Page, to shew his progress in learning, it is hard to say whether the simplicity of the master or the scholar is the greatest. Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol, are but the shadows of what they were; and Justice Shallow himself has little of his consequence left. But his cousin, Slender, makes up for the deficiency. He is a very potent piece of imbecility. In him the pretensions of the worthy Gloucestershire family are well kept up, and immortalised. He and his friend Sackerson and his book of songs and his love of Anne Page and his having nothing to say to her can never be forgotten. It is the only first-rate character in the play: but it is in that class. Shakespear is the only writer who was as great in describing weakness as strength.

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

This comedy is taken very much from the Menæchmi of Plautus, and is not an improvement on it. Shakespear appears to have bestowed no great pains on it, and there are but a few passages which bear the decided stamp of his genius. He seems to have relied on his author, and on the interest arising out of the intricacy of the plot. The curiosity excited is certainly very considerable, though not of the most pleasing kind. We are teazed as with a riddle, which notwithstanding we try to solve. In reading the play, from the sameness of the names of the two Antipholises and the two Dromios, as well from their being constantly taken for each other by those who see them, it is difficult, without a painful effort of attention, to keep the characters distinct in the mind. And again, on the stage, either the complete similarity of their persons and dress must produce the same perplexity whenever they first enter, or the identity of appearance which the story supposes, will be destroyed. We still, however, having a clue to the difficulty, can tell which is which, merely from the practical contradictions which arise, as soon as the different parties begin to speak; and we are indemnified for the perplexity and blunders into which we are thrown by seeing others thrown into greater and almost inextricable ones.—This play (among other considerations) leads us not to feel much regret that Shakespear was not what is called a classical scholar. We do not think his forte would ever have lain in imitating or improving on what others invented, so much as in inventing for himself, and perfecting what he invented,—not perhaps by the omission of faults, but by the addition of the highest excellencies. His own genius was strong 352enough to bear him up, and he soared longest and best on unborrowed plumes.—The only passage of a very Shakespearian cast in this comedy is the one in which the Abbess, with admirable characteristic artifice, makes Adriana confess her own misconduct in driving her husband mad.

‘Abbess. How long hath this possession held the man?

Adriana. This week he hath been heavy, sour, sad,

And much, much different from the man he was;

But, till this afternoon, his passion

Ne’er brake into extremity of rage.

Abbess. Hath he not lost much wealth by wreck at sea?

Bury’d some dear friend? Hath not else his eye

Stray’d his affection in unlawful love?

A sin prevailing much in youthful men,

Who give their eyes the liberty of gazing.

Which of these sorrows is he subject to?

Adriana. To none of these, except it be the last:

Namely, some love, that drew him oft from home.

Abbess. You should for that have reprehended him.

Adriana. Why, so I did.

Abbess. But not rough enough.

Adriana. As roughly as my modesty would let me.

Abbess. Haply, in private.

Adriana. And in assemblies too.

Abbess. Aye, but not enough.

Adriana. It was the copy of our conference:

In bed, he slept not for my urging it;

At board, he fed not for my urging it;

Alone it was the subject of my theme;

In company, I often glanc’d at it;

Still did I tell him it was vile and bad.

Abbess. And therefore came it that the man was mad:

The venom’d clamours of a jealous woman

Poison more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.

It seems, his sleeps were hinder’d by thy railing:

And therefore comes it that his head is light.

Thou say’st his meat was sauc’d with thy upbraidings:

Unquiet meals make ill digestions,

Therefore the raging fire of fever bred:

And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?

Thou say’st his sports were hinder’d by thy brawls:

Sweet recreation barr’d, what doth ensue,

But moody and dull melancholy,

Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair;

And, at her heels, a huge infectious troop

Of pale distemperatures, and foes to life?

In food, in sport, and life-preserving rest

353To be disturb’d, would mad or man or beast:

The consequence is then, thy jealous fits

Have scar’d thy husband from the use of wits.

Luciana. She never reprehended him but mildly,

When he demeaned himself rough, rude, and wildly.—

Why bear you these rebukes, and answer not?

Adriana. She did betray me to my own reproof.’

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

‘They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-fac’d villain,

A meer anatomy, a mountebank,

A thread-bare juggler and a fortune-teller;

A needy, hollow-ey’d, sharp-looking wretch,

A living dead man.’

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

DOUBTFUL PLAYS OF SHAKESPEAR

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

‘All the editors, with the exception of Capell, are unanimous in rejecting Titus Andronicus as unworthy of Shakespear, though they always allow it to be printed with the other pieces, as the scape-goat, as it were, of their abusive criticism. The correct method in such an investigation is first to examine into the external grounds, evidences, etc. and to weigh their worth; and then to adduce the internal reasons derived from the quality of the work. The critics of Shakespear follow a course directly the reverse of this; they set out with a preconceived opinion against a piece, and seek, in justification of this opinion, to render the historical grounds suspicious, and to set them aside. Titus Andronicus is to be found in the first folio edition of Shakespear’s works, which it was known was conducted by Heminge and Condell, for many years his friends and fellow-managers of the same theatre. Is it possible to persuade ourselves that they would not have known if a piece in their repertory did or did not actually belong to Shakespear? And are we to lay to the charge of these honourable men a designed fraud in this single case, when we know that they did not shew themselves so very desirous of scraping everything together which went by the name of Shakespear, but, as it appears, merely gave those plays of which they had manuscripts in hand? Yet the following circumstance is still stronger: George Meres, a contemporary and admirer of Shakespear, mentions Titus Andronicus in an enumeration of his works, in the year 1598. Meres was personally acquainted with the poet, and so very intimately, that 354the latter read over to him his Sonnets before they were printed. I cannot conceive that all the critical scepticism in the world would be sufficient to get over such a testimony.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘5. Thomas, Lord Cromwell.

‘6. Sir John Oldcastle—First Part.

‘7. A Yorkshire Tragedy.

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

‘There have been still farther ascribed to him:—1st. The Merry Devil of Edmonton, a comedy in one act, printed in Dodsley’s old plays. This 356has certainly some appearances in its favour. It contains a merry landlord, who bears a great similarity to the one in the Merry Wives of Windsor. However, at all events, though an ingenious, it is but a hasty sketch. 2d. The Accusation of Paris. 3d. The Birth of Merlin. 4th. Edward the Third. 5th. The Fair Emma. 6th. Mucedorus. 7th. Arden of Feversham. I have never seen any of these, and cannot therefore say anything respecting them. From the passages cited, I am led to conjecture that the subject of Mucedorus is the popular story of Valentine and Orson; a beautiful subject which Lope de Vega has also taken for a play. Arden of Feversham is said to be a tragedy on the story of a man, from whom the poet was descended by the mother’s side. If the quality of the piece is not too directly at variance with this claim, the circumstance would afford an additional probability in its favour. For such motives were not foreign to Shakespear: he treated Henry the Seventh, who bestowed lands on his forefathers for services performed by them, with a visible partiality.

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

We agree to the truth of this last observation, but not to the justice of its application to some of the plays here mentioned. It is true that Shakespear’s best works are very superior to those of Marlow, or Heywood, but it is not true that the best of the doubtful plays above enumerated are superior or even equal to the best of theirs. The Yorkshire Tragedy, which Schlegel speaks of as an undoubted production of our author’s, is much more in the manner of Heywood than of Shakespear. The effect is indeed overpowering, but the mode of producing it is by no means poetical. The praise which Schlegel gives to Thomas, Lord Cromwell, and to Sir John Oldcastle, is altogether exaggerated. They are very indifferent compositions, which have not the slightest pretensions to rank with Henry V. or Henry VIII. We suspect that the German critic was not very well acquainted with the dramatic contemporaries of Shakespear, or aware of their general merits; and that he accordingly mistakes a resemblance in style and manner for an equal degree of excellence. Shakespear differed from the other writers of his age not in the mode of treating his subjects, but in the grace and power which he displayed in them. The reason assigned by a literary friend of Schlegel’s for supposing The Puritan; or, the Widow of Watling Street, to be Shakespear’s, viz. that it is in the style of Ben Jonson, that is to say, in a style just the reverse of his own, is not very satisfactory to a 357plain English understanding. Locrine, and The London Prodigal, if they were Shakespear’s at all, must have been among the sins of his youth. Arden of Feversham contains several striking passages, but the passion which they express is rather that of a sanguine temperament than of a lofty imagination; and in this respect they approximate more nearly to the style of other writers of the time than to Shakespear’s. Titus Andronicus is certainly as unlike Shakespear’s usual style as it is possible. It is an accumulation of vulgar physical horrors, in which the power exercised by the poet bears no proportion to the repugnance excited by the subject. The character of Aaron the Moor is the only thing which shews any originality of conception; and the scene in which he expresses his joy ‘at the blackness and ugliness of his child begot in adultery,’ the only one worthy of Shakespear. Even this is worthy of him only in the display of power, for it gives no pleasure. Shakespear managed these things differently. Nor do we think it a sufficient answer to say that this was an embryo or crude production of the author. In its kind it is full grown, and its features decided and overcharged. It is not like a first imperfect essay, but shews a confirmed habit, a systematic preference of violent effect to everything else. There are occasional detached images of great beauty and delicacy, but these were not beyond the powers of other writers then living. The circumstance which inclines us to reject the external evidence in favour of this play being Shakespear’s is, that the grammatical construction is constantly false and mixed up with vulgar abbreviations, a fault that never occurs in any of his genuine plays. A similar defect, and the halting measure of the verse are the chief objections to Pericles of Tyre, if we except the far-fetched and complicated absurdity of the story. The movement of the thoughts and passions has something in it not unlike Shakespear, and several of the descriptions are either the original hints of passages which Shakespear has ingrafted on his other plays, or are imitations of them by some contemporary poet. The most memorable idea in it is in Marina’s speech, where she compares the world to ‘a lasting storm, hurrying her from her friends.’

POEMS AND SONNETS

Our idolatry of Shakespear (not to say our admiration) ceases with his plays. In his other productions, he was a mere author, though not a common author. It was only by representing others, that he became himself. He could go out of himself, and express the soul of Cleopatra; but in his own person, he appeared to be always 358waiting for the prompter’s cue. In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed inspired; in expressing his own, he was a mechanic. The licence of an assumed character was necessary to restore his genius to the privileges of nature, and to give him courage to break through the tyranny of fashion, the trammels of custom. In his plays, he was ‘as broad and casing as the general air’: in his poems, on the contrary, he appears to be ‘cooped, and cabined in’ by all the technicalities of art, by all the petty intricacies of thought and language, which poetry had learned from the controversial jargon of the schools, where words had been made a substitute for things. There was, if we mistake not, something of modesty, and a painful sense of personal propriety at the bottom of this. Shakespear’s imagination, by identifying itself with the strongest characters in the most trying circumstances, grappled at once with nature, and trampled the littleness of art under his feet: the rapid changes of situation, the wide range of the universe, gave him life and spirit, and afforded full scope to his genius; but returned into his closet again, and having assumed the badge of his profession, he could only labour in his vocation, and conform himself to existing models. The thoughts, the passions, the words which the poet’s pen, ‘glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,’ lent to others, shook off the fetters of pedantry and affectation; while his own thoughts and feelings, standing by themselves, were seized upon as lawful prey, and tortured to death according to the established rules and practice of the day. In a word, we do not like Shakespear’s poems, because we like his plays: the one, in all their excellencies, are just the reverse of the other. It has been the fashion of late to cry up our author’s poems, as equal to his plays: this is the desperate cant of modern criticism. We would ask, was there the slightest comparison between Shakespear, and either Chaucer or Spenser, as mere poets? Not any.—The two poems of Venus and Adonis and of Tarquin and Lucrece appear to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold. The author seems all the time to be thinking of his verses, and not of his subject,—not of what his characters would feel, but of what he shall say; and as it must happen in all such cases, he always puts into their mouths those things which they would be the last to think of, and which it shews the greatest ingenuity in him to find out. The whole is laboured, up-hill work. The poet is perpetually singling out the difficulties of the art to make an exhibition of his strength and skill in wrestling with them. He is making perpetual trials of them as if his mastery over them were doubted. The images, which are often striking, are generally applied to things which they are the least like: so that they 359do not blend with the poem, but seem stuck upon it, like splendid patch-work, or remain quite distinct from it, like detached substances, painted and varnished over. A beautiful thought is sure to be lost in an endless commentary upon it. The speakers are like persons who have both leisure and inclination to make riddles on their own situation, and to twist and turn every object or incident into acrostics and anagrams. Everything is spun out into allegory; and a digression is always preferred to the main story. Sentiment is built up upon plays of words; the hero or heroine feels, not from the impulse of passion, but from the force of dialectics. There is besides a strange attempt to substitute the language of painting for that of poetry, to make us see their feelings in the faces of the persons; and again, consistently with this, in the description of the picture in Tarquin and Lucrece, those circumstances are chiefly insisted on, which it would be impossible to convey except by words. The invocation to opportunity in the Tarquin and Lucrece is full of thoughts and images, but at the same time it is overloaded by them. The concluding stanza expresses all our objections to this kind of poetry:—

‘Oh! idle words, servants to shallow fools;

Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators;

Busy yourselves in skill-contending schools;

Debate when leisure serves with dull debaters;

To trembling clients be their mediators:

For me I force not argument a straw,

Since that my case is past all help of law.’

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

‘Round hoof’d, short jointed, fetlocks shag and long,

Broad breast, full eyes, small head, and nostril wide,

High crest, short ears, strait legs, and passing strong,

Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide,

Look what a horse should have, he did not lack,

Save a proud rider on so proud a back.’

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

‘And their heads are hung

With ears that sweep away the morning dew’—

and he will perceive at once what we mean by the difference between Shakespear’s own poetry, and that of his plays. We prefer the 360Passionate Pilgrim very much to the Lover’s Complaint. It has been doubted whether the latter poem is Shakespear’s.