sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit. I shall shew
them in the proportion in which they appear to me, without envious
malignity or superstitious veneration. No question can be more
innocently discussed than a dead poet's pretensions to renown; and
little regard is due to that bigotry which sets candour higher than
truth.
His first defect is that to which may be imputed most of the evil in
books or in men. He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so
much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write
without any moral purpose. From his writings indeed a system of
social duty may be selected, for he that thinks reasonably must think
morally; but his precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes
no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to shew
in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons
indifferently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them
without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance.
This fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate; for it is always
a writer's duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue
independent on time or place.
The plots are often so loosely formed, that a very slight
consideration may improve them, and so carelessly pursued, that
he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design. He omits
opportunities of instructing or delighting which the train of
his story seems to force upon him, and apparently rejects those
exhibitions which would be more affecting, for the sake of those which
are more easy.
It may be observed, that in many of his plays the latter part is
evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work,
and, in view of his reward, he shortened the labour to snatch
the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most
vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or
imperfectly represented.
He had no regard to distinction of time or place, but gives to one age
or nation, without scruple, the customs, institutions, and opinions
of another, at the expence not only of likelihood, but of possibility.
These faults _Pope_ has endeavoured, with more zeal than judgment,
to transfer to his imagined interpolators. We need not wonder to find
_Hector_ quoting _Aristotle_, when we see the loves of _Theseus_
and _Hippolyta_ combined with the _Gothick_ mythology of fairies.
_Shakespeare_, indeed, was not the only violator of chronology, for in
the same age _Sidney_, who wanted not the advantages of learning, has,
in his _Arcadia_, confounded the pastoral with the feudal times,
the days of innocence, quiet and security, with those of turbulence,
violence, and adventure.
In his comick scenes he is seldom very successful, when he engages
his characters in reciprocations of smartness and contests of sarcasm;
their jests are commonly gross, and their pleasantry licentious;
neither his gentlemen nor his ladies have much delicacy, nor are
sufficiently distinguished from his clowns by any appearance of
refined manners. Whether he represented the real conversation of his
time is not easy to determine; the reign of _Elizabeth_ is commonly
supposed to have been a time of stateliness, formality and reserve;
yet perhaps the relaxations of that severity were not very elegant.
There must, however, have been always some modes of gayety preferable
to others, and a writer ought to chuse the best.
In tragedy his performance seems constantly to be worse, as his labour
is more. The effusions of passion which exigence forces out are for
the most part striking and energetick; but whenever he solicits his
invention, or strains his faculties, the offspring of his throes is
tumour, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity.
In narration he affects a disproportionate pomp of diction, and a
wearisome train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imperfectly
in many words, which might have been more plainly delivered in
few. Narration in dramatick poetry is naturally tedious, as it is
unanimated and inactive, and obstructs the progress of the action;
it should therefore always be rapid, and enlivened by frequent
interruption. _Shakespeare_ found it an encumberance, and instead of
lightening it by brevity, endeavoured to recommend it by dignity and
splendour.
His declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak, for his
power was the power of nature; when he endeavoured, like other tragick
writers, to catch opportunities of amplification, and instead of
inquiring what the occasion demanded, to show how much his stores
of knowledge could supply, he seldom escapes without the pity or
resentment of his reader.
It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy
sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he
struggles with it a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it
in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved
by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it.
Not that always where the language is intricate the thought is subtle,
or the image always great where the line is bulky; the equality of
words to things is very often neglected, and trivial sentiments and
vulgar ideas disappoint the attention, to which they are recommended
by sonorous epithets and swelling figures.
But the admirers of this great poet have never less reason to indulge
their hopes of supreme excellence, than when he seems fully resolved
to sink them in dejection, and mollify them with tender emotions by
the fall of greatness, the danger of innocence, or the crosses of
love. He is not long soft and pathetick without some idle conceit,
or contemptible equivocation. He no sooner begins to move, than he
counteracts himself; and terrour and pity, as they are rising in the
mind, are checked and blasted by sudden frigidity.
A quibble is to _Shakespeare_, what luminous vapours are to the
traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out
of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant
power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever
be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be
enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing
attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a
quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A
quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from
his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as
it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by
the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the
fatal _Cleopatra_ for which he lost the world, and was content to lose
it.
It will be thought strange, that, in enumerating the defects of this
writer, I have not yet mentioned his neglect of the unities: his
violation of those laws which have been instituted and established by
the joint authority of poets and criticks.
For his other deviations from the art of writing I resign him to
critical justice, without making any other demand in his favour, than
that which must be indulged to all human excellence: that his
virtues be rated with his failings: But, from the censure which this
irregularity may bring upon him, I shall, with due reverence to that
learning which I must oppose, adventure to try how I can defend him.
His histories, being neither tragedies nor comedies are not subject to
any of their laws; nothing more is necessary to all the praise which
they expect, than that the changes of action be so prepared as to
be understood, that the incidents be various and affecting, and
the characters consistent, natural, and distinct. No other unity is
intended, and therefore none is to be sought.
In his other works he has well enough preserved the unity of action.
He has not, indeed, an intrigue regularly perplexed and regularly
unravelled: he does not endeavour to hide his design only to discover
it, for this is seldom the order of real events, and _Shakespeare_
is the poet of nature: But his plan has commonly what _Aristotle_
requires, a beginning, a middle, and an end; one event is concatenated
with another, and the conclusion follows by easy consequence. There
are perhaps some incidents that might be spared, as in other poets
there is much talk that only fills up time upon the stage; but the
general system makes gradual advances, and the end of the play is the
end of expectation.
To the unities of time and place he has shewn no regard; and perhaps a
nearer view of the principles on which they stand will diminish their
value, and withdraw from them the veneration which, from the time of
_Corneille_, they have very generally received, by discovering
that they have given more trouble to the poet, than pleasure to the
auditor.
The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from
the supposed necessity of making the drama credible. The criticks
hold it impossible, that an action of months or years can be possibly
believed to pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose
himself to sit in the theatre, while ambassadors go and return between
distant kings while armies are levied and towns besieged, while an
exile wanders and returns, or till he whom they saw courting his
mistress, shall lament the untimely fall of his son. The mind revolts
from evident falsehood, and fiction loses its force when it departs
from the resemblance of reality.
From the narrow limitation of time necessarily arises the contraction
of place. The spectator, who knows that he saw the first act at
_Alexandria_, cannot suppose that he sees the next at _Rome_, at a
distance to which not the dragons of _Medea_ could, in so short a
time, have transported him; he knows with certainty that he has not
changed his place, and he knows that place cannot change itself; that
what was a house cannot become a plain; that what was _Thebes_ can
never be _Persepolis_.
Such is the triumphant language with which a critick exults over the
misery of an irregular poet, and exults commonly without resistance
or reply. It is time therefore to tell him by the authority of
_Shakespeare_, that he assumes, as an unquestionable principle,
a position, which, while his breath is forming it into words,
his understanding pronounces to be false. It is false, that any
representation is mistake for reality; that any dramatick fable in
its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever
credited.
The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour
at _Alexandria_, and the next at _Rome_, supposes, that when the play
opens, the spectator really imagines himself at _Alexandria_, and
believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to _Egypt_,
and that he lives in the days of _Antony_ and _Cleopatra_. Surely he
that imagines this may imagine more. He that can take the stage at one
time for the palace of the _Ptolemies_, may take it in half an hour
for the promontory of _Actium_. Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has
no certain limitation; if the spectator can be once persuaded,
that his old acquaintance are _Alexander_ and _Cæsar_, that a room
illuminated with candles is the plain of _Pharsalia_, or the bank of
_Granicus_, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason,
or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may despise the
circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no reason why a mind
thus wandering in extacy should count the clock, or why an hour should
not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the
stage a field.
The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and
know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage,
and that the players are only players. They came to hear a certain
number of lines recited with just gesture and elegant modulation. The
lines relate to some action, and an action must be in some place;
but the different actions that complete a story may be in places very
remote from each other; and where is the absurdity of allowing that
space to represent first _Athens_, and then _Sicily_, which was always
known to be neither _Sicily_ nor _Athens_, but a modern theatre?
By supposition, as place is introduced, times may be extended; the
time required by the fable elapses for the most part between the acts;
for, of so much of the action as is represented, the real and poetical
duration is the same. If, in the first act, preparations for war
against _Mithridates_ are represented to be made in _Rome_, the event
of the war may, without absurdity, be represented, in the catastrophe,
as happening in _Pontus_; we know that there is neither war, nor
preparation for war; we know that we are neither in _Rome_ nor
_Pontus_; that neither _Mithridates_ nor _Lucullus_ are before us. The
drama exhibits successive imitations of successive actions; and why
may not the second imitation represent an action that happened years
after the first, if it be so connected with it, that nothing but time
can be supposed to intervene? Time is, of all modes of existence, most
obsequious to the imagination; a lapse of years is as easily conceived
as a passage of hours. In contemplation we easily contract the time of
real actions, and therefore willingly permit it to be contracted when
we only see their imitation.
It will be asked, how the drama moves, if it is not credited. It is
credited with all the credit due to a drama. It is credited, whenever
it moves, as a just picture of a real original; as representing to the
auditor what he would himself feel, if he were to do or suffer what
is there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The reflection that
strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but
that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed. If there be
any fallacy, it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy
ourselves unhappy for a moment; but we rather lament the possibility
than suppose the presence of misery, as a mother weeps over her babe,
when she remembers that death may take it from her. The delight of
tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction; if we thought
murders and treasons real, they would please no more.
Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken
for realities, but because they bring realities to mind. When the
imagination is recreated by a painted landscape, the trees are not
supposed capable to give us shade, or the fountains coolness; but we
consider, how we should be pleased with such fountains playing beside
us, and such woods waving over us. We are agitated in reading the
history of _Henry_ the Fifth, yet no man takes his book for the
field of _Agencourt_. A dramatick exhibition is a book recited with
concomitants that encrease or diminish its effect. Familiar comedy is
often more powerful in the theatre, than on the page; imperial
tragedy is always less. The humour of _Petruchio_ may be heightened
by grimace; but what voice or what gesture can hope to add dignity or
force to the soliloquy of _Cato_.
A play read, affects the mind like a play acted. It is therefore
evident, that the action is not supposed to be real; and it follows,
that between the acts a longer or shorter time may be allowed to pass,
and that no more account of space or duration is to be taken by the
auditor of a drama, than by the reader of a narrative, before whom may
pass in an hour the life of a hero, or the revolutions of an empire.
Whether _Shakespeare_ knew the unities, and rejected them by design,
or deviated from them by happy ignorance, it is, I think, impossible
to decide, and useless to enquire. We may reasonably suppose, that,
when he rose to notice, he did not want the counsels and admonitions
of scholars and criticks, and that he at last deliberately persisted
in a practice, which he might have begun by chance. As nothing is
essential to the fable, but unity of action, and as the unities
of time and place arise evidently from false assumptions, and, by
circumscribing the extent of the drama, lessen its variety, I cannot
think it much to be lamented, that they were not known by him, or
not observed: Nor, if such another poet could arise, should I very
vehemently reproach him, that his first act passed at _Venice_, and
his next in _Cyprus_. Such violations of rules merely positive, become
the comprehensive genius of _Shakespeare_, and such censures are
suitable to the minute and slender criticism of _Voltaire_:
Non usque adeo permiscuit imis
Longus summa dies, ut non, si voce Metelli
Serventur leges, malint a Cæsare tolli.
Yet when I speak thus slightly of dramatick rules, I cannot but
recollect how much wit and learning may be produced against me; before
such authorities I am afraid to stand, not that I think the present
question one of those that are to be decided by mere authority, but
because it is to be suspected, that these precepts have not been so
easily received but for better reasons than I have yet been able to
find. The result of my enquiries, in which it would be ludicrous to
boast of impartiality, is, that the unities of time and place are not
essential to a just drama, that though they may sometimes conduce to
pleasure, they are always to be sacrificed to the nobler beauties
of variety and instruction; and that a play, written with nice
observation of critical rules, is to be contemplated as an elaborate
curiosity, as the product of superfluous and ostentatious art, by
which is shewn, rather what is possible, than what is necessary.
He that, without diminution of any other excellence, shall preserve
all the unities unbroken, deserves the like applause with the
architect, who shall display all the orders of architecture in a
citadel; without any deduction from its strength; but the principal
beauty of a citadel is to exclude the enemy; and the greatest graces
of a play, are to copy nature and instruct life.
Perhaps what I have here not dogmatically but deliberatively written,
may recal the principles of the drama to a new examination. I am
almost frighted at my own temerity; and when I estimate the fame and
the strength of those that maintain the contrary opinion, am ready to
sink down in reverential silence; as _Æneas_ withdrew from the defence
of _Troy_, when he saw _Neptune_ shaking the wall, and _Juno_ heading
the besiegers.
Those whom my arguments cannot persuade to give their approbation
to the judgment of _Shakespeare_, will easily, if they consider the
condition of his life, make some allowance for his ignorance.
Every man's performances, to be rightly estimated, must be compared
with the state of the age in which he lived, and with his own
particular opportunities; and though to the reader a book be not worse
or better for the circumstances of the authour, yet as there is always
a silent reference of human works to human abilities, and as the
enquiry, how far man may extend his designs, or how high he may rate
his native force, is of far greater dignity than in what rank we shall
place any particular performance, curiosity is always busy to discover
the instruments, as well as to survey the workmanship, to know how
much is to be ascribed to original powers, and how much to casual and
adventitious help. The palaces of _Peru_ or _Mexico_ were certainly
mean and incommodious habitations, if compared to the houses
of _European_ monarchs; yet who could forbear to view them with
astonishment, who remembered that they were built without the use of
iron?
The _English_ nation, in the time of _Shakespeare_, was yet
struggling to emerge from barbarity. The philology of _Italy_ had
been transplanted hither in the reign of _Henry_ the Eighth; and
the learned languages had been successfully cultivated by _Lilly,
Linacer_, and _More_; by _Pole, Cheke_, and _Gardiner_; and afterwards
by _Smith, Clerk, Haddon_, and _Ascham_. Greek was now taught to boys
in the principal schools; and those who united elegance with learning,
read, with great diligence, the _Italian_ and _Spanish_ poets. But
literature was yet confined to professed scholars, or to men and women
of high rank. The publick was gross and dark; and to be able to read
and write, was an accomplishment still valued for its rarity.
Nations, like individuals, have their infancy. A people newly awakened
to literary curiosity, being yet unacquainted with the true state
of things, knows not how to judge of that which is proposed as its
resemblance. Whatever is remote from common appearances is always
welcome to vulgar, as to childish credulity; and of a country
unenlightened by learning, the whole people is the vulgar. The study
of those who then aspired to plebeian learning was laid out upon
adventures, giants, dragons, and enchantments. _The Death of Arthur
was_ the favourite volume.
The mind, which has feasted on the luxurious wonders of fiction, has
no taste of the insipidity of truth. A play which imitated only
the common occurrences of the world, would, upon the admirers of
_Palmerin_ and _Guy_ of _Warwick_, have made little impression; he
that wrote for such an audience was under the necessity of looking
round for strange events and fabulous transactions, and that
incredibility, by which maturer knowledge is offended, was the chief
recommendation of writings, to unskilful curiosity.
Our authour's plots are generally borrowed from novels, and it is
reasonable to suppose, that he chose the most popular, such as were
read by many, and related by more; for his audience could not have
followed him through the intricacies of the drama, had they not held
the thread of the story in their hands.
The stories, which we now find only in remoter authours, were in his
time accessible and familiar. The fable of _As you like it_, which is
supposed to be copied from _Chaucer's_ Gamelyn, was a little pamphlet
of those times; and old Mr. _Cibber_ remembered the tale of _Hamlet_
in plain _English_ prose, which the criticks have now to seek in _Saxo
Grammaticus._
His _English_ histories he took from _English_ chronicles and
_English_ ballads; and as the ancient writers were made known to
his countrymen by versions, they supplied him with new subjects; he
dilated some of _Plutarch's_ lives into plays, when they had been
translated by _North_.
His plots, whether historical or fabulous, are always crouded with
incidents, by which the attention of a rude people was more easily
caught than by sentiment or argumentation; and such is the power of
the marvellous even over those who despise it, that every man finds
his mind more strongly seized by the tragedies of _Shakespeare_ than
of any other writer; others please us by particular speeches, but he
always makes us anxious for the event, and has perhaps excelled all
but _Homer_ in securing the first purpose of a writer, by exciting
restless and unquenchable curiosity and compelling him that reads his
work to read it through. The shows and bustle with which his plays
abound have the same original. As knowledge advances, pleasure passes
from the eye to the ear, but returns, as it declines, from the ear to
the eye. Those to whom our authour's labours were exhibited had more
skill in pomps or processions than in poetical language, and perhaps
wanted some visible and discriminated events, as comments on the
dialogue. He knew how he should most please; and whether his practice
is more agreeable to nature, or whether his example has prejudiced the
nation, we still find that on our stage something must be done as
well as said, and inactive declamation is very coldly heard, however
musical or elegant, passionate or sublime.