“Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky;
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry’s death!
Henry the fifth, too famous to live long!
England ne’er lost a king of so much worth.”
Read aloud any two or three passages in blank verse even from
Shakespeare’s earliest dramas, as _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, or _Romeo and
Juliet_; and then read in the same way this speech, with especial
attention to the metre; and if you do not feel the impossibility of the
latter having been written by Shakespeare, all I dare suggest is, that you
may have ears,—for so has another animal,—but an ear you cannot have, _me
judice_.
“Richard III.”
This play should be contrasted with _Richard II._ Pride of intellect is
the characteristic of Richard, carried to the extent of even boasting to
his own mind of his villany, whilst others are present to feed his pride
of superiority; as in his first speech, act ii. sc. 1. Shakespeare here,
as in all his great parts, developes in a tone of sublime morality the
dreadful consequences of placing the moral, in subordination to the mere
intellectual, being. In Richard there is a predominance of irony,
accompanied with apparently blunt manners to those immediately about him,
but formalised into a more set hypocrisy towards the people as represented
by their magistrates.
“Lear.”
Of all Shakespeare’s plays _Macbeth_ is the most rapid, _Hamlet_ the
slowest, in movement. _Lear_ combines length with rapidity,—like the
hurricane and the whirlpool, absorbing while it advances. It begins as a
stormy day in summer, with brightness; but that brightness is lurid, and
anticipates the tempest.
It was not without forethought, nor is it without its due significance,
that the division of Lear’s kingdom is in the first six lines of the play
stated as a thing already determined in all its particulars, previously to
the trial of professions, as the relative rewards of which the daughters
were to be made to consider their several portions. The strange, yet by no
means unnatural, mixture of selfishness, sensibility, and habit of feeling
derived from, and fostered by, the particular rank and usages of the
individual;—the intense desire of being intensely beloved,—selfish, and
yet characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature
alone;—the self-supportless leaning for all pleasure on another’s
breast;—the craving after sympathy with a prodigal disinterestedness,
frustrated by its own ostentation, and the mode and nature of its
claims;—the anxiety, the distrust, the jealousy, which more or less
accompany all selfish affections, and are amongst the surest
contradistinctions of mere fondness from true love, and which originate
Lear’s eager wish to enjoy his daughter’s violent professions, whilst the
inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive
right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason;—these facts,
these passions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is
founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found
implied, in these first four or five lines of the play. They let us know
that the trial is but a trick; and that the grossness of the old king’s
rage is in part the natural result of a silly trick suddenly and most
unexpectedly baffled and disappointed.
It may here be worthy of notice, that _Lear_ is the only serious
performance of Shakespeare, the interest and situations of which are
derived from the assumption of a gross improbability; whereas Beaumont and
Fletcher’s tragedies are, almost all of them, founded on some out of the
way accident or exception to the general experience of mankind. But
observe the matchless judgment of our Shakespeare. First, improbable as
the conduct of Lear is in the first scene, yet it was an old story rooted
in the popular faith,—a thing taken for granted already, and consequently
without any of the effects of improbability. Secondly, it is merely the
canvass for the characters and passions,—a mere occasion for,—and not, in
the manner of Beaumont and Fletcher, perpetually recurring as the cause,
and _sine qua non_ of,—the incidents and emotions. Let the first scene of
this play have been lost, and let it only be understood that a fond father
had been duped by hypocritical professions of love and duty on the part of
two daughters to disinherit the third, previously, and deservedly, more
dear to him;—and all the rest of the tragedy would retain its interest
undiminished, and be perfectly intelligible.
The accidental is nowhere the groundwork of the passions, but that which
is catholic, which in all ages has been, and ever will be, close and
native to the heart of man,—parental anguish from filial ingratitude, the
genuineness of worth, though coffined in bluntness, and the execrable
vileness of a smooth iniquity. Perhaps I ought to have added the _Merchant
of Venice_; but here too the same remarks apply. It was an old tale; and
substitute any other danger than that of the pound of flesh (the
circumstance in which the improbability lies), yet all the situations and
the emotions appertaining to them remain equally excellent and
appropriate. Whereas take away from the _Mad Lover_ of Beaumont and
Fletcher the fantastic hypothesis of his engagement to cut out his own
heart, and have it presented to his mistress, and all the main scenes must
go with it.
Kotzebue is the German Beaumont and Fletcher, without their poetic powers,
and without their _vis comica_. But, like them, he always deduces his
situations and passions from marvellous accidents, and the trick of
bringing one part of our moral nature to counteract another; as our pity
for misfortune and admiration of generosity and courage to combat our
condemnation of guilt as in adultery, robbery, and other heinous
crimes;—and, like them too, he excels in his mode of telling a story
clearly and interestingly, in a series of dramatic dialogues. Only the
trick of making tragedy-heroes and heroines out of shopkeepers and
barmaids was too low for the age, and too unpoetic for the genius, of
Beaumont and Fletcher, inferior in every respect as they are to their
great predecessor and contemporary. How inferior would they have appeared,
had not Shakespeare existed for them to imitate;—which in every play, more
or less, they do, and in their tragedies most glaringly:—and yet—(O shame!
shame!)—they miss no opportunity of sneering at the divine man, and
sub-detracting from his merits!
To return to _Lear_. Having thus in the fewest words, and in a natural
reply to as natural a question,—which yet answers the secondary purpose of
attracting our attention to the difference or diversity between the
characters of Cornwall and Albany,—provided the _prémisses_ and _data_, as
it were, for our after insight into the mind and mood of the person, whose
character, passions, and sufferings are the main subject-matter of the
play;—from Lear, the _persona patiens_ of his drama, Shakespeare passes
without delay to the second in importance, the chief agent and prime
mover, and introduces Edmund to our acquaintance, preparing us with the
same felicity of judgment, and in the same easy and natural way, for his
character in the seemingly casual communication of its origin and
occasion. From the first drawing up of the curtain Edmund has stood before
us in the united strength and beauty of earliest manhood. Our eyes have
been questioning him. Gifted as he is with high advantages of person, and
further endowed by nature with a powerful intellect and a strong energetic
will, even without any concurrence of circumstances and accident, pride
will necessarily be the sin that most easily besets him. But Edmund is
also the known and acknowledged son of the princely Gloster: he,
therefore, has both the germ of pride, and the conditions best fitted to
evolve and ripen it into a predominant feeling. Yet hitherto no reason
appears why it should be other than the not unusual pride of person,
talent, and birth,—a pride auxiliary, if not akin, to many virtues, and
the natural ally of honourable impulses. But alas! in his own presence his
own father takes shame to himself for the frank avowal that he is his
father,—he has “blushed so often to acknowledge him that he is now brazed
to it!” Edmund hears the circumstances of his birth spoken of with a most
degrading and licentious levity,—his mother described as a wanton by her
own paramour, and the remembrance of the animal sting, the low criminal
gratifications connected with her wantonness and prostituted beauty,
assigned as the reason why “the whoreson must be acknowledged!” This, and
the consciousness of its notoriety; the gnawing conviction that every show
of respect is an effort of courtesy, which recalls, while it represses, a
contrary feeling;—this is the ever trickling flow of wormwood and gall
into the wounds of pride,—the corrosive _virus_ which inoculates pride
with a venom not its own, with envy, hatred, and a lust for that power
which in its blaze of radiance would hide the dark spots on his disc,—with
pangs of shame personally undeserved, and therefore felt as wrongs, and
with a blind ferment of vindictive working towards the occasions and
causes, especially towards a brother, whose stainless birth and lawful
honours were the constant remembrancers of his own debasement, and were
ever in the way to prevent all chance of its being unknown, or overlooked
and forgotten. Add to this, that with excellent judgment, and provident
for the claims of the moral sense,—for that which, relatively to the
drama, is called poetic justice, and as the fittest means for reconciling
the feelings of the spectators to the horrors of Gloster’s after
sufferings,—at least, of rendering them somewhat less unendurable—(for I
will not disguise my conviction, that in this one point the tragic in this
play has been urged beyond the outermost mark and _ne plus ultra_ of the
dramatic);—Shakespeare has precluded all excuse and palliation of the
guilt incurred by both the parents of the base-born Edmund, by Gloster’s
confession that he was at the time a married man, and already blest with a
lawful heir of his fortunes. The mournful alienation of brotherly love,
occasioned by the law of primogeniture in noble families, or rather by the
unnecessary distinctions engrafted thereon, and this in children of the
same stock, is still almost proverbial on the continent,—especially, as I
know from my own observation, in the south of Europe,—and appears to have
been scarcely less common in our own island before the Revolution of 1688,
if we may judge from the characters and sentiments so frequent in our
elder comedies. There is the younger brother, for instance, in Beaumont
and Fletcher’s play of the _Scornful Lady_, on the one side, and Oliver in
Shakespeare’s _As You Like It_, on the other. Need it be said how heavy an
aggravation, in such a case, the stain of bastardy must have been, were it
only that the younger brother was liable to hear his own dishonour and his
mother’s infamy related by his father with an excusing shrug of the
shoulders, and in a tone betwixt waggery and shame!
By the circumstances here enumerated as so many predisposing causes,
Edmund’s character might well be deemed already sufficiently explained;
and our minds prepared for it. But in this tragedy the story or fable
constrained Shakespeare to introduce wickedness in an outrageous form in
the persons of Regan and Goneril. He had read nature too heedfully not to
know that courage, intellect, and strength of character are the most
impressive forms of power, and that to power in itself, without reference
to any moral end, an inevitable admiration and complacency appertains,
whether it be displayed in the conquests of a Buonaparte or Tamerlane, or
in the foam and the thunder of a cataract. But in the exhibition of such a
character it was of the highest importance to prevent the guilt from
passing into utter monstrosity,—which again depends on the presence or
absence of causes and temptations sufficient to account for the
wickedness, without the necessity of recurring to a thorough fiendishness
of nature for its origination. For such are the appointed relations of
intellectual power to truth, and of truth to goodness, that it becomes
both morally and poetically unsafe to present what is admirable—what our
nature compels us to admire—in the mind, and what is most detestable in
the heart, as co-existing in the same individual without any apparent
connection, or any modification of the one by the other. That Shakespeare
has in one instance, that of Iago, approached to this, and that he has
done it successfully, is perhaps the most astonishing proof of his genius,
and the opulence of its resources. But in the present tragedy, in which he
was compelled to present a Goneril and a Regan, it was most carefully to
be avoided;—and therefore the only one conceivable addition to the
inauspicious influences on the preformation of Edmund’s character is
given, in the information that all the kindly counteractions to the
mischievous feelings of shame, which might have been derived from
co-domestication with Edgar and their common father, had been cut off by
his absence from home, and foreign education from boyhood to the present
time, and a prospect of its continuance, as if to preclude all risk of his
interference with the father’s views for the elder and legitimate son:—
“He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again.”