“But lo! from forth a copse that neighbours by,
A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud,” &c.
is much more admirable, but in parts less fitted for quotation.
Moreover Shakespeare had shown that he possessed fancy, considered as the
faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one
point or more of likeness, as in such a passage as this:—
“Full gently now she takes him by the hand,
A lily prisoned in a jail of snow,
Or ivory in an alabaster band:
So white a friend ingirts so white a foe!”—_Ib._
And still mounting the intellectual ladder, he had as unequivocally proved
the indwelling in his mind of imagination, or the power by which one image
or feeling is made to modify many others, and by a sort of fusion to force
many into one;—that which afterwards showed itself in such might and
energy in Lear, where the deep anguish of a father spreads the feeling of
ingratitude and cruelty over the very elements of heaven;—and which,
combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness, tends to
produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human feeling, unity,
and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its principle and fountain, who
is alone truly one. Various are the workings of this the greatest faculty
of the human mind, both passionate and tranquil. In its tranquil and
purely pleasurable operation, it acts chiefly by creating out of many
things, as they would have appeared in the description of an ordinary
mind, detailed in unimpassioned succession, a oneness, even as nature, the
greatest of poets, acts upon us, when we open our eyes upon an extended
prospect. Thus the flight of Adonis in the dusk of the evening:—
“Look! how a bright star shooteth from the sky;
So glides he in the night from Venus’ eye!”
How many images and feelings are here brought together without effort and
without discord, in the beauty of Adonis, the rapidity of his flight, the
yearning, yet hopelessness, of the enamoured gazer, while a shadowy ideal
character is thrown over the whole! Or this power acts by impressing the
stamp of humanity, and of human feelings, on inanimate or mere natural
objects:—
“Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest,
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,
And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast
The sun ariseth in his majesty,
Who doth the world so gloriously behold,
The cedar-tops and hills seem burnish’d gold.”
Or again, it acts by so carrying on the eye of the reader as to make him
almost lose the consciousness of words,—to make him see every thing
flashed, as Wordsworth has grandly and appropriately said:—
“_Flashed_ upon the inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;”—
and this without exciting any painful or laborious attention, without any
anatomy of description (a fault not uncommon in descriptive poetry),—but
with the sweetness and easy movement of nature. This energy is an absolute
essential of poetry, and of itself would constitute a poet, though not one
of the highest class;—it is, however, a most hopeful symptom, and the
_Venus and Adonis_ is one continued specimen of it.
In this beautiful poem there is an endless activity of thought in all the
possible associations of thought with thought, thought with feeling, or
with words, of feelings with feelings, and of words with words.
“Even as the sun, with purple-colour’d face,
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek’d Adonis hied him to the chase:
Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-faced suitor ’gins to woo him.”
Remark the humanizing imagery and circumstances of the first two lines,
and the activity of thought in the play of words in the fourth line. The
whole stanza presents at once the time, the appearance of the morning, and
the two persons distinctly characterised, and in six simple lines puts the
reader in possession of the whole argument of the poem.
“Over one arm the lusty courser’s rein,
Under the other was the tender boy,
Who blush’d and pouted in a dull disdain,
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy,
She red and hot, as coals of glowing fire,
He red for shame, but frosty to desire:”—
This stanza and the two following afford good instances of that poetic
power, which I mentioned above, of making every thing present to the
imagination—both the forms, and the passions which modify those forms,
either actually, as in the representations of love or anger, or other
human affections; or imaginatively, by the different manner in which
inanimate objects, or objects unimpassioned themselves, are caused to be
seen by the mind in moments of strong excitement, and according to the
kind of the excitement,—whether of jealousy, or rage, or love, in the only
appropriate sense of the word, or of the lower impulses of our nature, or
finally of the poetic feeling itself. It is, perhaps, chiefly in the power
of producing and reproducing the latter that the poet stands distinct.
The subject of the _Venus and Adonis_ is unpleasing; but the poem itself
is for that very reason the more illustrative of Shakespeare. There are
men who can write passages of deepest pathos and even sublimity on
circumstances personal to themselves and stimulative of their own
passions; but they are not, therefore, on this account poets. Read that
magnificent burst of woman’s patriotism and exultation, _Deborah’s Song of
Victory_; it is glorious, but nature is the poet there. It is quite
another matter to become all things and yet remain the same,—to make the
changeful god be felt in the river, the lion, and the flame;—this it is,
that is the true imagination. Shakespeare writes in this poem, as if he
were of another planet, charming you to gaze on the movements of Venus and
Adonis, as you would on the twinkling dances of two vernal butterflies.
Finally, in this poem and the _Rape of Lucrece_, Shakespeare gave ample
proof of his possession of a most profound, energetic, and philosophical
mind, without which he might have pleased, but could not have been a great
dramatic poet. Chance and the necessity of his genius combined to lead him
to the drama his proper province: in his conquest of which we should
consider both the difficulties which opposed him, and the advantages by
which he was assisted.
Shakespeare’s Judgment equal to his Genius.
Thus then Shakespeare appears, from his _Venus and Adonis_ and _Rape of
Lucrece_ alone, apart from all his great works, to have possessed all the
conditions of the true poet. Let me now proceed to destroy, as far as may
be in my power, the popular notion that he was a great dramatist by mere
instinct, that he grew immortal in his own despite, and sank below men of
second or third rate power, when he attempted aught beside the drama—even
as bees construct their cells and manufacture their honey to admirable
perfection; but would in vain attempt to build a nest. Now this mode of
reconciling a compelled sense of inferiority with a feeling of pride,
began in a few pedants, who having read that Sophocles was the great model
of tragedy, and Aristotle the infallible dictator of its rules, and
finding that the _Lear_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_ and other master-pieces were
neither in imitation of Sophocles, nor in obedience to Aristotle,—and not
having (with one or two exceptions) the courage to affirm, that the
delight which their country received from generation to generation, in
defiance of the alterations of circumstances and habits, was wholly
groundless,—took upon them, as a happy medium and refuge, to talk of
Shakespeare as a sort of beautiful _lusus naturæ_, a delightful
monster,—wild, indeed, and without taste or judgment, but like the
inspired idiots so much venerated in the East, uttering, amid the
strangest follies, the sublimest truths. In nine places out of ten in
which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of “wild,”
“irregular,” “pure child of nature,” &c. If all this be true, we must
submit to it; though to a thinking mind it cannot but be painful to find
any excellence, merely human, thrown out of all human analogy, and thereby
leaving us neither rules for imitation, nor motives to imitate;—but if
false, it is a dangerous falsehood;—for it affords a refuge to secret
self-conceit,—enables a vain man at once to escape his reader’s
indignation by general swoln panegyrics, and merely by his _ipse dixit_ to
treat, as contemptible, what he has not intellect enough to comprehend, or
soul to feel, without assigning any reason, or referring his opinion to
any demonstrative principle;—thus leaving Shakespeare as a sort of grand
Lama, adored indeed, and his very excrements prized as relics, but with no
authority or real influence. I grieve that every late voluminous edition
of his works would enable me to substantiate the present charge with a
variety of facts, one-tenth of which would of themselves exhaust the time
allotted to me. Every critic, who has or has not made a collection of
black letter books—in itself a useful and respectable amusement,—puts on
the seven-league boots of self-opinion, and strides at once from an
illustrator into a supreme judge, and blind and deaf, fills his
three-ounce phial at the waters of Niagara; and determines positively the
greatness of the cataract to be neither more nor less than his three-ounce
phial has been able to receive.
I think this a very serious subject. It is my earnest desire—my passionate
endeavour—to enforce at various times and by various arguments and
instances the close and reciprocal connection of just taste with pure
morality. Without that acquaintance with the heart of man, or that
docility and childlike gladness to be made acquainted with it, which those
only can have, who dare look at their own hearts—and that with a
steadiness which religion only has the power of reconciling with sincere
humility;—without this, and the modesty produced by it, I am deeply
convinced that no man, however wide his erudition, however patient his
antiquarian researches, can possibly understand, or be worthy of
understanding, the writings of Shakespeare.
Assuredly that criticism of Shakespeare will alone be genial which is
reverential. The Englishman who, without reverence—a proud and
affectionate reverence—can utter the name of William Shakespeare, stands
disqualified for the office of critic. He wants one at least of the very
senses, the language of which he is to employ, and will discourse at best
but as a blind man, while the whole harmonious creation of light and shade
with all its subtle interchange of deepening and dissolving colours rises
in silence to the silent _fiat_ of the uprising Apollo. However inferior
in ability I may be to some who have followed me, I own I am proud that I
was the first in time who publicly demonstrated to the full extent of the
position, that the supposed irregularity and extravagances of Shakespeare
were the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had
not the dimensions of the swan. In all the successive courses of lectures
delivered by me, since my first attempt at the Royal Institution, it has
been, and it still remains, my object, to prove that in all points from
the most important to the most minute, the judgment of Shakespeare is
commensurate with his genius,—nay, that his genius reveals itself in his
judgment, as in its most exalted form. And the more gladly do I recur to
this subject from the clear conviction, that to judge aright, and with
distinct consciousness of the grounds of our judgment, concerning the
works of Shakespeare, implies the power and the means of judging rightly
of all other works of intellect, those of abstract science alone excepted.
It is a painful truth, that not only individuals, but even whole nations,
are ofttimes so enslaved to the habits of their education and immediate
circumstances, as not to judge disinterestedly even on those subjects, the
very pleasure arising from which consists in its disinterestedness,
namely, on subjects of taste and polite literature. Instead of deciding
concerning their own modes and customs by any rule of reason, nothing
appears rational, becoming, or beautiful to them, but what coincides with
the peculiarities of their education. In this narrow circle, individuals
may attain to exquisite discrimination, as the French critics have done in
their own literature; but a true critic can no more be such without
placing himself on some central point, from which he may command the
whole,—that is, some general rule, which, founded in reason, or the
faculties common to all men, must therefore apply to each,—than an
astronomer can explain the movements of the solar system without taking
his stand in the sun. And let me remark, that this will not tend to
produce despotism, but, on the contrary, true tolerance, in the critic. He
will, indeed, require, as the spirit and substance of a work, something
true in human nature itself, and independent of all circumstances; but in
the mode of applying it, he will estimate genius and judgment according to
the felicity with which the imperishable soul of intellect shall have
adapted itself to the age, the place, and the existing manners. The error
he will expose, lies in reversing this, and holding up the mere
circumstances as perpetual to the utter neglect of the power which can
alone animate them. For art cannot exist without, or apart from nature;
and what has man of his own to give to his fellow man, but his own
thoughts and feelings, and his observations, so far as they are modified
by his own thoughts or feelings?
Let me, then, once more submit this question to minds emancipated alike
from national, or party, or sectarian prejudice:—Are the plays of
Shakespeare works of rude uncultivated genius, in which the splendour of
the parts compensates, if aught can compensate, for the barbarous
shapelessness and irregularity of the whole?—Or is the form equally
admirable with the matter, and the judgment of the great poet not less
deserving our wonder than his genius?—Or, again, to repeat the question in
other words:—is Shakespeare a great dramatic poet on account only of those
beauties and excellences which he possesses in common with the ancients,
but with diminished claims to our love and honour to the full extent of
his differences from them?—Or are these very differences additional proofs
of poetic wisdom, at once results and symbols of living power as
contrasted with lifeless mechanism—of free and rival originality as
contradistinguished from servile imitation, or, more accurately, a blind
copying of effects, instead of a true imitation of the essential
principles?—Imagine not that I am about to oppose genius to rules. No! the
comparative value of these rules is the very cause to be tried. The spirit
of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe
itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty. It must embody
in order to reveal itself; but a living body is of necessity an organized
one; and what is organization but the connection of parts in and for a
whole, so that each part is at once end and means?—This is no discovery of
criticism;—it is a necessity of the human mind; and all nations have felt
and obeyed it, in the invention of metre, and measured sounds, as the
vehicle and _involucrum_ of poetry—itself a fellow-growth from the same
life,—even as the bark is to the tree!
No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is
there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless;
for it is even this that constitutes it genius—the power of acting
creatively under laws of its own origination. How then comes it that not
only single _Zoili_, but whole nations have combined in unhesitating
condemnation of our great dramatist, as a sort of African nature, rich in
beautiful monsters—as a wild heath where islands of fertility look the
greener from the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now shine
out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their parasitic growth,
so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed without snapping the
flower?—In this statement I have had no reference to the vulgar abuse of
Voltaire, save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions of
Shakespeare’s own commentators and (so they would tell you) almost
idolatrous admirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the
confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic,
when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not
necessarily arising out of the properties of the material;—as when to a
mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when
hardened. The organic form, on the other hand is innate; it shapes, as it
developes, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one
and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is,
such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in
diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms;—each exterior is the
physiognomy of the being within,—its true image reflected and thrown out
from the concave mirror;—and even such is the appropriate excellence of
her chosen poet, of our own Shakespeare,—himself a nature humanized, a
genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit
wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.
I greatly dislike beauties and selections in general; but as proof
positive of his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakespeare by
this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human
faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the
coincidence of the two (a feeling _sui generis et demonstratio
demonstrationum_) called the conscience, the understanding or prudence,
wit, fancy, imagination, judgment,—and then of the objects on which these
are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming caprices
of nature, the realities and the capabilities, that is, the actual and the
ideal, of the human mind, conceived as an individual or as a social being,
as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise, or in a war-field of
temptation;—and then compare with Shakespeare under each of these heads
all or any of the writers in prose and verse that have ever lived! Who,
that is competent to judge, doubts the result?—And ask your own hearts—ask
your own common-sense—to conceive the possibility of this man being—I say
not, the drunken savage of that wretched sciolist, whom Frenchmen, to
their shame, have honoured before their elder and better worthies,—but the
anomalous, the wild, the irregular, genius of our daily criticism! What!
are we to have miracles in sport?—Or, I speak reverently, does God choose
idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man?
Recapitulation, And Summary Of the Characteristics of Shakespeare’s
Dramas.
In lectures, of which amusement forms a large part of the object, there
are some peculiar difficulties. The architect places his foundation out of
sight, and the musician tunes his instrument before he makes his
appearance; but the lecturer has to try his chords in the presence of the
assembly; an operation not likely, indeed, to produce much pleasure, but
yet indispensably necessary to a right understanding of the subject to be
developed.
Poetry in essence is as familiar to barbarous as to civilized nations. The
Laplander and the savage Indian are cheered by it as well as the
inhabitants of London and Paris;—its spirit takes up and incorporates
surrounding materials, as a plant clothes itself with soil and climate,
whilst it exhibits the working of a vital principle within independent of
all accidental circumstances. And to judge with fairness of an author’s
works, we ought to distinguish what is inward and essential from what is
outward and circumstantial. It is essential to poetry that it be simple,
and appeal to the elements and primary laws of our nature; that it be
sensuous, and by its imagery elicit truth at a flash; that it be
impassioned, and be able to move our feelings and awaken our affections.
In comparing different poets with each other, we should inquire which have
brought into the fullest play our imagination and our reason, or have
created the greatest excitement and produced the completest harmony. If we
consider great exquisiteness of language and sweetness of metre alone, it
is impossible to deny to Pope the character of a delightful writer; but
whether he be a poet, must depend upon our definition of the word; and,
doubtless, if everything that pleases be poetry, Pope’s satires and
epistles must be poetry. This, I must say, that poetry, as distinguished
from other modes of composition, does not rest in metre, and that it is
not poetry, if it make no appeal to our passions or our imagination. One
character belongs to all true poets, that they write from a principle
within, not originating in any thing without; and that the true poet’s
work in its form, its shapings, and its modifications, is distinguished
from all other works that assume to belong to the class of poetry, as a
natural from an artificial flower, or as the mimic garden of a child from
an enamelled meadow. In the former the flowers are broken from their stems
and stuck into the ground; they are beautiful to the eye and fragrant to
the sense, but their colours soon fade, and their odour is transient as
the smile of the planter;—while the meadow may be visited again and again
with renewed delight; its beauty is innate in the soil, and its bloom is
of the freshness of nature.
The next ground of critical judgment, and point of comparison, will be as
to how far a given poet has been influenced by accidental circumstances.
As a living poet must surely write, not for the ages past, but for that in
which he lives, and those which are to follow, it is on the one hand
natural that he should not violate, and on the other necessary that he
should not depend on, the mere manners and modes of his day. See how
little does Shakespeare leave us to regret that he was born in his
particular age! The great æra in modern times was what is called the
Restoration of Letters;—the ages preceding it are called the dark ages;
but it would be more wise, perhaps, to call them the ages in which we were
in the dark. It is usually overlooked that the supposed dark period was
not universal, but partial and successive, or alternate; that the dark age
of England was not the dark age of Italy, but that one country was in its
light and vigour, whilst another was in its gloom and bondage. But no
sooner had the Reformation sounded through Europe like the blast of an
archangel’s trumpet, than from king to peasant there arose an enthusiasm
for knowledge; the discovery of a manuscript became the subject of an
embassy; Erasmus read by moonlight, because he could not afford a torch,
and begged a penny, not for the love of charity, but for the love of
learning. The three great points of attention were religion, morals, and
taste; men of genius, as well as men of learning, who in this age need to
be so widely distinguished, then alike became copyists of the ancients;
and this, indeed, was the only way by which the taste of mankind could be
improved, or their understandings informed. Whilst Dante imagined himself
a humble follower of Virgil, and Ariosto of Homer, they were both
unconscious of that greater power working within them, which in many
points carried them beyond their supposed originals. All great discoveries
bear the stamp of the age in which they are made;—hence we perceive the
effects of the purer religion of the moderns visible for the most part in
their lives; and in reading their works we should not content ourselves
with the mere narratives of events long since passed, but should learn to
apply their maxims and conduct to ourselves.
Having intimated that times and manners lend their form and pressure to
genius, let me once more draw a slight parallel between the ancient and
modern stage,—the stages of Greece and of England. The Greeks were
polytheists; their religion was local; almost the only object of all their
knowledge, art, and taste, was their gods; and, accordingly, their
productions were, if the expression may be allowed, statuesque, whilst
those of the moderns are picturesque. The Greeks reared a structure,
which, in its parts, and as a whole, filled the mind with the calm and
elevated impression of perfect beauty, and symmetrical proportion. The
moderns also produced a whole—a more striking whole; but it was by
blending materials, and fusing the parts together. And as the Pantheon is
to York Minster or Westminster Abbey, so is Sophocles compared with
Shakespeare; in the one a completeness, a satisfaction, an excellence, on
which the mind rests with complacency; in the other a multitude of
interlaced materials, great and little, magnificent and mean, accompanied,
indeed, with the sense of a falling short of perfection, and yet, at the
same time, so promising of our social and individual progression, that we
would not, if we could, exchange it for that repose of the mind which
dwells on the forms of symmetry in the acquiescent admiration of grace.
This general characteristic of the ancient and modern drama might be
illustrated by a parallel of the ancient and modern music;—the one
consisting of melody arising from a succession only of pleasing
sounds,—the modern embracing harmony also, the result of combination, and
the effect of a whole.
I have said, and I say it again, that great as was the genius of
Shakespeare, his judgment was at least equal to it. Of this any one will
be convinced, who attentively considers those points in which the dramas
of Greece and England differ, from the dissimilitude of circumstances by
which each was modified and influenced. The Greek stage had its origin in
the ceremonies of a sacrifice, such as of the goat to Bacchus, whom we
most erroneously regard as merely the jolly god of wine;—for among the
ancients he was venerable, as the symbol of that power which acts without
our consciousness in the vital energies of nature—the _vinum mundi_—as
Apollo was that of the conscious agency of our intellectual being. The
heroes of old, under the influences of this Bacchic enthusiasm, performed
more than human actions; hence tales of the favourite champions soon
passed into dialogue. On the Greek stage the chorus was always before the
audience; the curtain was never dropped, as we should say; and change of
place being therefore, in general, impossible, the absurd notion of
condemning it merely as improbable in itself was never entertained by any
one. If we can believe ourselves at Thebes in one act, we may believe
ourselves at Athens in the next.
If a story lasts twenty-four hours or twenty-four years, it is equally
improbable. There seems to be no just boundary but what the feelings
prescribe. But on the Greek stage, where the same persons were perpetually
before the audience, great judgment was necessary in venturing on any such
change. The poets never, therefore, attempted to impose on the senses by
bringing places to men, but they did bring men to places, as in the
well-known instance in the _Eumenides_, where, during an evident
retirement of the chorus from the orchestra, the scene is changed to
Athens, and Orestes is first introduced in the temple of Minerva, and the
chorus of Furies come in afterwards in pursuit of him.
In the Greek drama there were no formal divisions into scenes and acts;
there were no means, therefore, of allowing for the necessary lapse of
time between one part of the dialogue and another, and unity of time in a
strict sense was, of course, impossible. To overcome that difficulty of
accounting for time, which is effected on the modern stage by dropping a
curtain, the judgment and great genius of the ancients supplied music and
measured motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the vacuity. In the
story of the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus, the capture of Troy is supposed to
be announced by a fire lighted on the Asiatic shore, and the transmission
of the signal by successive beacons to Mycenæ. The signal is first seen at
the 21st line, and the herald from Troy itself enters at the 486th, and
Agamemnon himself at the 783rd line. But the practical absurdity of this
was not felt by the audience, who, in imagination stretched minutes into
hours, while they listened to the lofty narrative odes of the chorus which
almost entirely filled up the interspace. Another fact deserves attention
here, namely, that regularly on the Greek stage a drama, or acted story,
consisted in reality of three dramas, called together a trilogy, and
performed consecutively in the course of one day. Now you may conceive a
tragedy of Shakespeare’s as a trilogy connected in one single
representation. Divide _Lear_ into three parts, and each would be a play
with the ancients; or take the three Æschylean dramas of _Agamemnon_, and
divide them into, or call them, as many acts, and they together would be
one play. The first act would comprise the usurpation of Ægisthus, and the
murder of Agamemnon; the second, the revenge of Orestes, and the murder of
his mother; and the third, the penance and absolution of
Orestes;—occupying a period of twenty-two years.
The stage in Shakespeare’s time was a naked room with a blanket for a
curtain; but he made it a field for monarchs. That law of unity, which has
its foundations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but in nature
itself, the unity of feeling, is everywhere and at all times observed by
Shakespeare in his plays. Read _Romeo and Juliet_;—all is youth and
spring;—youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies;—spring
with its odours, its flowers, and its transiency; it is one and the same
feeling that commences, goes through, and ends the play. The old men, the
Capulets and Montagues, are not common old men; they have an eagerness, a
heartiness, a vehemence, the effect of spring; with Romeo, his change of
passion, his sudden marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects of
youth;—whilst in Juliet love has all that is tender and melancholy in the
nightingale, all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in
the freshness of spring; but it ends with a long deep sigh like the last
breeze of the Italian evening. This unity of feeling and character
pervades every drama of Shakespeare.
It seems to me that his plays are distinguished from those of all other
dramatic poets by the following characteristics:—
1. Expectation in preference to surprise. It is like the true reading of
the passage—“God said, Let there be light, and there was _light_;”—not,
there _was_ light. As the feeling with which we startle at a shooting star
compared with that of watching the sunrise at the pre-established moment,
such and so low is surprise compared with expectation.
2. Signal adherence to the great law of nature, that all opposites tend to
attract and temper each other. Passion in Shakespeare generally displays
libertinism, but involves morality; and if there are exceptions to this,
they are, independently of their intrinsic value, all of them indicative
of individual character, and, like the farewell admonitions of a parent,
have an end beyond the parental relation. Thus the Countess’s beautiful
precepts to Bertram, by elevating her character, raise that of Helena her
favourite, and soften down the point in her which Shakespeare does not
mean us not to see, but to see and to forgive, and at length to justify.
And so it is in Polonius, who is the personified memory of wisdom no
longer actually possessed. This admirable character is always
misrepresented on the stage. Shakespeare never intended to exhibit him as
a buffoon; for although it was natural that Hamlet—a young man of fire and
genius, detesting formality, and disliking Polonius on political grounds,
as imagining that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation—should
express himself satirically, yet this must not be taken as exactly the
poet’s conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character
had arisen from long habits of business; but take his advice to Laertes,
and Ophelia’s reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was meant
to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties,—his
recollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of human
nature, whilst what immediately takes place before him, and escapes from
him, is indicative of weakness.
But as in Homer all the deities are in armour, even Venus; so in
Shakespeare all the characters are strong. Hence real folly and dulness
are made by him the vehicles of wisdom. There is no difficulty for one
being a fool to imitate a fool; but to be, remain, and speak like a wise
man and a great wit, and yet so as to give a vivid representation of a
veritable fool,—_hic labor, hoc opus est_. A drunken constable is not
uncommon, nor hard to draw; but see and examine what goes to make up a
Dogberry.
3. Keeping at all times in the high road of life. Shakespeare has no
innocent adulteries, no interesting incests, no virtuous vice;—he never
renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest,
or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher, the
Kotzebues of the day. Shakespeare’s fathers are roused by ingratitude, his
husbands stung by unfaithfulness; in him, in short, the affections are
wounded in those points in which all may, nay, must, feel. Let the
morality of Shakespeare be contrasted with that of the writers of his own,
or the succeeding age, or of those of the present day, who boast their
superiority in this respect. No one can dispute that the result of such a
comparison is altogether in favour of Shakespeare;—even the letters of
women of high rank in his age were often coarser than his writings. If he
occasionally disgusts a keen sense of delicacy, he never injures the mind;
he neither excites, nor flatters, passion, in order to degrade the subject
of it; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carries
on warfare against virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no
wickedness, through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate.
In Shakespeare vice never walks as in twilight; nothing is purposely out
of its place;—he inverts not the order of nature and propriety,—does not
make every magistrate a drunkard or glutton, nor every poor man meek,
humane, and temperate; he has no benevolent butchers, nor any sentimental
rat-catchers.
4. Independence of the dramatic interest on the plot. The interest in the
plot is always in fact on account of the characters, not _vice versa_, as
in almost all other writers; the plot is a mere canvass and no more. Hence
arises the true justification of the same stratagem being used in regard
to Benedict and Beatrice,—the vanity in each being alike. Take away from
the _Much Ado about Nothing_ all that which is not indispensable to the
plot, either as having little to do with it, or, at best, like Dogberry
and his comrades, forced into the service, when any other less ingeniously
absurd watchmen and night-constables would have answered the mere
necessities of the action;—take away Benedict, Beatrice, Dogberry, and the
reaction of the former on the character of Hero,—and what will remain? In
other writers the main agent of the plot is always the prominent
character; in Shakespeare it is so, or is not so, as the character is in
itself calculated, or not calculated, to form the plot. Don John is the
main-spring of the plot of this play; but he is merely shown and then
withdrawn.
5. Independence of the interest on the story as the ground-work of the
plot. Hence Shakespeare never took the trouble of inventing stories. It
was enough for him to select from those that had been already invented or
recorded such as had one or other, or both, of two recommendations,
namely, suitableness to his particular purpose, and their being parts of
popular tradition,—names of which we had often heard, and of their
fortunes, and as to which all we wanted was, to see the man himself. So it
is just the man himself—the Lear, the Shylock, the Richard—that
Shakespeare makes us for the first time acquainted with. Omit the first
scene in _Lear_, and yet everything will remain; so the first and second
scenes in the _Merchant of Venice_. Indeed it is universally true.
6. Interfusion of the lyrical—that which in its very essence is
poetical—not only with the dramatic, as in the plays of Metastasio, where
at the end of the scene comes the _aria_ as the _exit_ speech of the
character,—but also in and through the dramatic. Songs in Shakespeare are
introduced as songs only, just as songs are in real life, beautifully as
some of them are characteristic of the person who has sung or called for
them, as Desdemona’s “Willow,” and Ophelia’s wild snatches, and the sweet
carollings in _As You Like It_. But the whole of the _Midsummer Night’s
Dream_ is one continued specimen of the dramatised lyrical. And observe
how exquisitely the dramatic of Hotspur;—
“Marry, and I’m glad on’t with all my heart;
I’d rather be a kitten and cry—mew.” &c.
melts away into the lyric of Mortimer;—
“I understand thy looks: that pretty Welsh
Which thou pourest down from these swelling heavens,
I am too perfect in,” &c.
_Henry IV._ part i. act iii, sc. 1.
7. The characters of the _dramatis personæ_, like those in real life, are
to be inferred by the reader;—they are not told to him. And it is well
worth remarking that Shakespeare’s characters, like those in real life,
are very commonly misunderstood, and almost always understood by different
persons in different ways. The causes are the same in either case. If you
take only what the friends of the character say, you may be deceived, and
still more so, if that which his enemies say; nay, even the character
himself sees himself through the medium of his character, and not exactly
as he is. Take all together, not omitting a shrewd hint from the clown or
the fool, and perhaps your impression will be right; and you may know
whether you have in fact discovered the poet’s own idea, by all the
speeches receiving light from it, and attesting its reality by reflecting
it.
Lastly, in Shakespeare the heterogeneous is united, as it is in nature.
You must not suppose a pressure or passion always acting on or in the
character!—passion in Shakespeare is that by which the individual is
distinguished from others, not that which makes a different kind of him.
Shakespeare followed the main march of the human affections. He entered
into no analysis of the passions or faiths of men, but assured himself
that such and such passions and faiths were grounded in our common nature,
and not in the mere accidents of ignorance or disease. This is an
important consideration, and constitutes our Shakespeare the morning star,
the guide and the pioneer, of true philosophy.
Outline Of An Introductory Lecture Upon Shakespeare.
Of that species of writing termed tragi-comedy, much has been produced and
doomed to the shelf. Shakespeare’s comic are continually reacting upon his
tragic characters. Lear, wandering amidst the tempest, has all his
feelings of distress increased by the overflowings of the wild wit of the
Fool, as vinegar poured upon wounds exacerbates their pain. Thus, even his
comic humour tends to the development of tragic passion.
The next characteristic of Shakespeare is his keeping at all times in the
high road of life, &c. Another evidence of his exquisite judgment is, that
he seizes hold of popular tales; _Lear_ and the _Merchant of Venice_ were
popular tales, but are so excellently managed, that both are the
representations of men in all countries and of all times.
His dramas do not arise absolutely out of some one extraordinary
circumstance, the scenes may stand independently of any such one
connecting incident, as faithful representations of men and manners. In
his mode of drawing characters there are no pompous descriptions of a man
by himself; his character is to be drawn, as in real life, from the whole
course of the play, or out of the mouths of his enemies or friends. This
may be exemplified in Polonius, whose character has been often
misrepresented. Shakespeare never intended him for a buffoon, &c.
Another excellence of Shakespeare, in which no writer equals him, is in
the language of nature. So correct is it, that we can see ourselves in
every page. The style and manner have also that felicity, that not a
sentence can be read, without its being discovered if it is Shakespearian.
In observation of living characters—of landlords and postilions—Fielding
has great excellence; but in drawing from his own heart, and depicting
that species of character, which no observation could teach, he failed in
comparison with Richardson, who perpetually places himself, as it were, in
a day-dream. Shakespeare excels in both. Witness the accuracy of character
in Juliet’s name; while for the great characters of Iago, Othello, Hamlet,
Richard III., to which he could never have seen anything similar, he seems
invariably to have asked himself—How should I act or speak in such
circumstances? His comic characters are also peculiar. A drunken constable
was not uncommon; but he makes folly a vehicle for wit, as in Dogberry:
everything is a _sub-stratum_ on which his genius can erect the mightiest
superstructure.
To distinguish that which is legitimate in Shakespeare from what does not
belong to him, we must observe his varied images symbolical of novel
truth, thrusting by, and seeming to trip up each other, from an
impetuosity of thought, producing a flowing metre, and seldom closing with
the line. In _Pericles_, a play written fifty years before, but altered by
Shakespeare, his additions may be recognised to half a line, from the
metre, which has the same perfection in the flowing continuity of
interchangeable metrical pauses in his earliest plays, as in _Love’s
Labour’s Lost_.
Lastly, contrast his _morality_ with the writers of his own or of the
succeeding age, &c. If a man speak injuriously of our friend, our
vindication of him is naturally warm. Shakespeare has been accused of
profaneness. I for my part have acquired from perusal of him, a habit of
looking into my own heart, and am confident that Shakespeare is an author
of all others the most calculated to make his readers better as well as
wiser.
* * * * *
Shakespeare, possessed of wit, humour, fancy, and imagination, built up an
outward world from the stores within his mind, as the bee finds a hive
from a thousand sweets gathered from a thousand flowers. He was not only a
great poet but a great philosopher. Richard III., Iago, and Falstaff are
men who reverse the order of things, who place intellect at the head,
whereas it ought to follow, like Geometry, to prove and to confirm. No
man, either hero or saint, ever acted from an unmixed motive; for let him
do what he will rightly, still Conscience whispers “it is your duty.”
Richard, laughing at conscience and sneering at religion, felt a
confidence in his intellect, which urged him to commit the most horrid
crimes, because he felt himself, although inferior in form and shape,
superior to those around him; he felt he possessed a power which they had
not. Iago, on the same principle, conscious of superior intellect, gave
scope to his envy, and hesitated not to ruin a gallant, open, and generous
friend in the moment of felicity, because he was not promoted as he
expected. Othello was superior in place, but Iago felt him to be inferior
in intellect, and, unrestrained by conscience, trampled upon him.
Falstaff, not a degraded man of genius, like Burns, but a man of degraded
genius, with the same consciousness of superiority to his companions,
fastened himself on a young Prince, to prove how much his influence on an
heir-apparent would exceed that of a statesman. With this view he
hesitated not to adopt the most contemptible of all characters, that of an
open and professed liar: even his sensuality was subservient to his
intellect: for he appeared to drink sack, that he might have occasion to
show off his wit. One thing, however, worthy of observation, is the
perpetual contrast of labour in Falstaff to produce wit, with the ease
with which Prince Henry parries his shafts; and the final contempt which
such a character deserves and receives from the young king, when Falstaff
exhibits the struggle of inward determination with an outward show of
humility.
Order Of Shakespeare’s Plays.
Various attempts have been made to arrange the plays of Shakespeare, each
according to its priority in time, by proofs derived from external
documents. How unsuccessful these attempts have been might easily be
shewn, not only from the widely different results arrived at by men, all
deeply versed in the black-letter books, old plays, pamphlets, manuscript
records, and catalogues of that age, but also from the fallacious and
unsatisfactory nature of the facts and assumptions on which the evidence
rests. In that age, when the press was chiefly occupied with controversial
or practical divinity,—when the law, the Church, and the State engrossed
all honour and respectability,—when a degree of disgrace, _levior quædam
infamiæ macula_, was attached to the publication of poetry, and even to
have sported with the Muse, as a private relaxation, was supposed to be—a
venial fault, indeed, yet—something beneath the gravity of a wise
man,—when the professed poets were so poor, that the very expenses of the
press demanded the liberality of some wealthy individual, so that
two-thirds of Spenser’s poetic works, and those most highly praised by his
learned admirers and friends, remained for many years in manuscript, and
in manuscript perished,—when the amateurs of the stage were comparatively
few, and therefore for the greater part more or less known to each
other,—when we know that the plays of Shakespeare, both during and after
his life, were the property of the stage, and published by the players,
doubtless according to their notions of acceptability with the visitants
of the theatre,—in such an age, and under such circumstances, can an
allusion or reference to any drama or poem in the publication of a
contemporary be received as conclusive evidence, that such drama or poem
had at that time been published? Or, further, can the priority of
publication itself prove anything in favour of actually prior composition?
We are tolerably certain, indeed, that the _Venus and Adonis_, and the
_Rape of Lucrece_, were his two earliest poems, and though not printed
until 1593, in the twenty-ninth year of his age, yet there can be little
doubt that they had remained by him in manuscript many years. For Mr.
Malone has made it highly probable that he had commenced as a writer for
the stage in 1591, when he was twenty-seven years old, and Shakespeare
himself assures us that the _Venus and Adonis_ was the first heir of his
invention.
Baffled, then, in the attempt to derive any satisfaction from outward
documents, we may easily stand excused if we turn our researches towards
the internal evidences furnished by the writings themselves, with no other
positive _data_ than the known facts that the _Venus and Adonis_ was
printed in 1593, the _Rape of Lucrece_ in 1594, and that the _Romeo and
Juliet_ had appeared in 1595,—and with no other presumptions than that the
poems, his very first productions, were written many years earlier—(for
who can believe that Shakespeare could have remained to his twenty-ninth
or thirtieth year without attempting poetic composition of any kind?),—and
that between these and _Romeo and Juliet_ there had intervened one or two
other dramas, or the chief materials, at least of them, although they may
very possibly have appeared after the success of the _Romeo and Juliet_,
and some other circumstances, had given the poet an authority with the
proprietors, and created a prepossession in his favour with the theatrical
audiences.