“I apt for love?
Let lazy idlenes fild full of wine
Heated with meates, high fedde with lustfull ease
Goe dote on culler [color]. As for me, why, death a sence,
I court the ladie?”
This is Mr. Halliwell’s note: “_Death a sence._--‘Earth a sense,’ ed.
1633. Mr. Dilke suggests: ‘For me, why, earth’s as sensible.’ The
original is not necessarily corrupt. It may mean,--why, you might as
well think Death was a sense, one of the senses. See a like phrase at p.
77.” What help we should get by thinking Death one of the senses, it
would demand another Œdipus to unriddle. Mr. Halliwell can astonish us
no longer, but we are surprised at Mr. Dilke, the very competent editor
of the “Old English Plays,” 1815. From him we might have hoped for
better things. “Death o’ sense!” is an exclamation. Throughout these
volumes we find _a_ for _o’_,--as, “a clock” for “o’clock,” “a the side”
for “o’ the side.” A similar exclamation is to be found in three other
places in the same play, where the sense is obvious. Mr. Halliwell
refers to one of them on p. 77,--“Death a man! is she delivered?” The
others are,--“Death a justice! are we in Normandy?” (p. 98); and “Death
a discretion! if I should prove a foole now,” or, as given by Mr.
Halliwell, “Death, a discretion!” Now let us apply Mr. Halliwell’s
explanation. “Death a man!” you might as well think Death was a man,
that is, one of the men!--or a discretion, that is, one of the
discretions!--or a justice, that is, one of the quorum! We trust Mr.
Halliwell may never have the editing of Bob Acres’s imprecations. “Odd’s
triggers!” he would say, “that is, as odd as, or as strange as,
triggers.”
Vol. III. p. 77, “the vote-killing mandrake.” Mr. Halliwell’s note is,
“_vote-killing_.--‘Voice-killing,’ ed. 1613. It may well be doubted
whether either be the correct reading.” He then gives a familiar
citation from Browne’s “Vulgar Errors.” “Vote-killing” may be a mere
misprint for “note-killing,” but “voice-killing” is certainly the better
reading. Either, however, makes sense. Although Sir Thomas Browne does
not allude to the deadly property of the mandrake’s shriek, yet Mr.
Halliwell, who has edited Shakespeare, might have remembered the
“Would curses kill, _as doth the mandrake’s groan_.”
(Second Part of Henry VI., Act III. Scene 2.)
and the notes thereon in the _variorum_ edition. In Jacob Grimm’s
“Deutsche Mythologie,” (Vol. II. p. 1154,) under the word _Alraun_, may
be found a full account of the superstitions concerning the mandrake.
“When it is dug up, it groans and shrieks so dreadfully that the digger
will surely die. One must, therefore, before sunrise on a Friday, having
first stopped one’s ears with wax or cotton-wool, take with him an
entirely black dog without a white hair on him, make the sign of the
cross three times over the _alraun_, and dig about it till the root
holds only by thin fibres. Then tie these by a string to the tail of the
dog, show him a piece of bread, and run away as fast as possible. The
dog runs eagerly after the bread, pulls up the root, and falls stricken
dead by its groan of pain.”
These, we believe, are the only instances in which Mr. Halliwell has
ventured to give any opinion upon the text, except as to a palpable
misprint, here and there. Two of these we have already cited. There is
one other,--“p. 46, line 10. _Iuconstant._--An error for _inconstant_.”
Wherever there is a real difficulty, he leaves us in the lurch. For
example, in “What you Will,” he prints without comment,--
“Ha! he mount Chirall on the wings of fame!”
(Vol. I. p. 239.)
which should be “mount cheval,” as it is given in Mr. Dilke’s edition
(Old English Plays, Vol. II. p. 222). We cite this, not as the worst,
but the shortest, example at hand.
Some of Mr. Halliwell’s notes are useful and interesting,--as that on
“keeling the pot,” and a few others,--but the greater part are utterly
useless. He thinks it necessary, for instance, to explain that “_to
speak pure foole_, is in sense equivalent to ‘I will speak like a pure
fool,’”--that “belkt up” means “belched up,”--that “aprecocks” means
“apricots.” He has notes also upon “meal-mouthed,” “luxuriousnesse,”
“termagant,” “fico,” “estro,” “a nest of goblets,” which indicate either
that the “ general reader” is a less intelligent person in England than
in America, or that Mr. Halliwell’s standard of scholarship is very low.
We ourselves, from our limited reading, can supply him with a reference
which will explain the allusion to the “Scotch barnacle” much better
than his citations from Sir John Maundeville and Giraldus
Cambrensis,--namely, note 8, on page 179 of a Treatise on Worms, by Dr.
Ramesey, court physician to Charles II.
* * * * *
We turn now to Mr. Hazlitt’s edition of Webster. We wish he had chosen
Chapman; for Mr. Dyce’s Webster is hardly out of print, and, we believe,
has just gone through a second and revised edition. Webster was a far
more considerable man than Marston, and infinitely above him in genius.
Without the poetic nature of Marlowe, or Chapman’s somewhat unwieldy
vigor of thought, he had that inflammability of mind which, untempered
by a solid understanding, made his plays a strange mixture of vivid
expression, incoherent declamation, dramatic intensity, and extravagant
conception of character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, a
great dramatist. Shakespeare is the only one of that age. Marlowe had a
rare imagination, a delicacy of sense that made him the teacher of
Shakespeare and Milton in versification, and was, perhaps, as purely a
poet as any that England has produced; but his mind had no
balance-wheel. Chapman abounds in splendid enthusiasms of diction, and
now and then dilates our imaginations with suggestions of profound
poetic depth. Ben Jonson was a conscientious and intelligent workman,
whose plays glow, here and there, with the golden pollen of that poetic
feeling with which his age impregnated all thought and expression; but
his leading characteristic, like that of his great namesake, Samuel, was
a hearty common sense, which fitted him rather to be a great critic than
a great poet. He had a keen and ready eye for the comic in situation,
but no humor. Fletcher was as much a poet as fancy and sentiment can
make any man. Only Shakespeare wrote comedy and tragedy with truly ideal
elevation and breadth. Only Shakespeare had that true sense of humor
which, like the universal solvent sought by the alchemists, so fuses
together all the elements of a character, (as in Falstaff,) that any
question of good or evil, of dignified or ridiculous, is silenced by the
apprehension of its thorough humanity. Rabelais shows gleams of it in
Panurge; but, in our opinion, no man ever possessed it in an equal
degree with Shakespeare, except Cervantes; no man has since shown
anything like an approach to it, (for Molière’s quality was comic power
rather than humor,) except Sterne, Fielding, and perhaps Richter. Only
Shakespeare was endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose
point of rest was midway between the imagination and the
understanding,--that perfectly unruffled brain which reflected all
objects with almost inhuman impartiality,--that outlook whose range was
ecliptical, dominating all zones of human thought and action,--that
power of veri-similar conception which could take away Richard III. from
History, and Ulysses from Homer,--and that creative faculty whose equal
touch is alike vivifying in Shallow and in Lear. He alone never seeks in
abnormal and monstrous characters to evade the risks and
responsibilities of absolute truthfulness, nor to stimulate a jaded
imagination by Caligulan horrors of plot. He is never, like many of his
fellow-dramatists, confronted with unnatural Frankensteins of his own
making, whom he must get off his hands as best he may. Given a human
foible, he can incarnate it in the nothingness of Slender, or make it
loom gigantic through the tragic twilight of Hamlet. We are tired of the
vagueness which classes all the Elizabethan playwrights together as
“great dramatists,”--as if Shakespeare did not differ from them in kind
as well as in degree. Fine poets some of them were; but though
imagination and the power of poetic expression are, singly, not uncommon
gifts, and even in combination not without secular examples, yet it is
the rarest of earthly phenomena to find them joined with those faculties
of perception, arrangement, and plastic instinct in the loving union
which alone makes a great dramatic poet possible. We suspect that
Shakespeare will long continue the only specimen of the genus. His
contemporaries, in their comedies, either force what they call “a humor”
till it becomes fantastical, or hunt for jokes, like rat-catchers, in
the sewers of human nature and of language. In their tragedies they
become heavy without grandeur, like Jonson, or mistake the stilts for
the cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster too often do. Every new edition of
an Elizabethan dramatist is but the putting of another witness into the
box to prove the inaccessibility of Shakespeare’s stand-point as poet
and artist.
Webster’s most famous works are “The Duchess of Malfy” and “Vittoria
Corombona,” but we are strongly inclined to call “The Devil’s Law-Case”
his best play. The two former are in a great measure answerable for the
“spasmodic” school of poets, since the extravagances of a man of genius
are as sure of imitation as the equable self-possession of his higher
moments is incapable of it. Webster had, no doubt, the primal requisite
of a poet, imagination, but in him it was truly untamed, and Aristotle’s
admirable distinction between the _Horrible_ and the _Terrible_ in
tragedy was never better illustrated and confirmed than in the “Duchess”
and “Vittoria.” His nature had something of the sleuth-hound quality in
it, and a plot, to keep his mind eager on the trail, must be sprinkled
with fresh blood at every turn. We do not forget all the fine things
that Lamb has said of Webster, but, when Lamb wrote, the Elizabethan
drama was an El Dorado, whose micaceous sand, even, was treasured as
auriferous,--and no wonder, in a generation which admired the “Botanic
Garden.” Webster is the Gherardo della Notte of his day, and himself
calls his “Vittoria Corombona” a “night-piece.” Though he had no
conception of Nature in its large sense, as something pervading a whole
character and making it consistent with itself, nor of Art, as that
which dominates an entire tragedy and makes all the characters foils to
each other and tributaries to the catastrophe, yet there are flashes of
Nature in his plays, struck out by the collisions of passion, and
dramatic intensities of phrase for which it would be hard to find the
match. The “prithee, undo this button” of Lear, by which Shakespeare
makes us feel the swelling of the old king’s heart, and that the bodily
results of mental anguish have gone so far as to deaden for the moment
all intellectual consciousness and forbid all expression of grief, is
hardly finer than the broken verse which Webster puts into the mouth of
Ferdinand when he sees the body of his sister, murdered by his own
procurement:--
“Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young.”
He has not the condensing power of Shakespeare, who squeezed meaning
into a phrase with an hydraulic press, but he could carve a cherry-stone
with any of the _concettisti_, and abounds in imaginative quaintnesses
that are worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic tersenesses that remind us of
Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases of the purest
crystallization. Here are a few examples:--
“Oh, if there be another world i’ th’ moon,
As some fantastics dream, I could wish all _men_,
The whole race of them, for their inconstancy,
Sent thither to people that!”
(Old Chaucer was yet slier. After saying that Lamech was the first
faithless lover, he adds,--
“And he invented _tents_, unless men lie,”--
implying that he was the prototype of nomadic men.)
“Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds:
In the trenches, for the soldier; in the wakeful study,
For the scholar; in the furrows of the sea,
For men of our profession [merchants]; all of which
Arise and spring up honor.”
(“Of all which,” Mr. Hazlitt prints it.)
“Poor Jolenta! should she hear of this,
She would not after the report keep fresh
So long as flowers on graves.”
“For sin and shame are ever tied together
With Gordian knots of such a strong thread spun,
They cannot without violence be undone.”
“One whose mind
Appears more like a ceremonious chapel
Full of sweet music, than a thronging presence.”
“What is death?
The safest trench i’ th’ world to keep man free
From Fortune’s gunshot.”
“It has ever been my opinion
That there are none love perfectly indeed,
But those that hang or drown themselves for love,”
says Julio, anticipating Butler’s
“But he that drowns, or blows out ’s brains,
The Devil’s in him, if he feigns.”
He also anticipated La Rochefoucauld and Byron in their apophthegm
concerning woman’s last love. In “The Devil’s Law-Case,” Leonora says,--
“For, as we love our youngest children best,
So the last fruit of our affection,
Wherever we bestow it, is most strong,
Most violent, most unresistible;
Since ’t is, indeed, our latest harvest-home,
Last merriment ’fore winter.”
In editing Webster, Mr. Hazlitt had the advantage (except in a single
doubtful play) of a predecessor in the Rev. Alexander Dyce, beyond all
question the best living scholar of the literature of the times of
Elizabeth and James I. If he give no proof of remarkable fitness for his
task, he seems, at least, to have been diligent and painstaking. His
notes are short and to the point, and--which we consider a great
merit--at the foot of the page. If he had added a glossarial index, we
should have been still better pleased. Mr. Hazlitt seems to have read
over the text with some care, and he has had the good sense to modernize
the orthography, or, as he says, has “observed the existing standard of
spelling throughout.” Yet--for what reason we cannot imagine--he prints
“I” for “ay,” taking the pains to explain it every time in a note, and
retains “banquerout” and “coram” apparently for the sake of telling us
that they mean “bankrupt” and “quorum.” He does not seem to have a quick
ear for scansion, which would sometimes have assisted him to the true
reading. We give an example or two:--
“The obligation wherein we all stood bound
Cannot be concealed [_cancelled_] without great reproach.”
“The realm, not they,
Must be regarded. Be [we] strong and bold,
We are the people’s factors.”
“Shall not be o’erburdened [_overburdened_] in our reign
“A merry heart
And a good stomach to [a] feast are all.”
“Have her meat serv’d up by bawds and ruffians” [_dele_ “up.”]
“Brother or father
In [a] dishonest suit, shall be to me.”
“What’s she in Rome your greatness cannot awe.
Or your rich purse purchase? Promises and threats.”
[_dele_ the second “your.”]
“Through clouds of envy and disast [rous] change.”
“The Devil drives, ’tis [it is] full time to go.”