“Adultery! it is the lightest ill
I will commit. A race of wicked acts
Shall flow out of my anger, and o’erspread
The world’s wide face, which no posterity
Shall e’er approve, nor yet keep silent,” &c.
The more we reflect and examine, examine and reflect, the more astonished
shall we be at the immense superiority of Shakespeare over his
contemporaries;—and yet what contemporaries!—giant minds indeed! Think of
Jonson’s erudition, and the force of learned authority in that age; and
yet, in no genuine part of Shakespeare’s works is there to be found such
an absurd rant and ventriloquism as this, and too, too many other passages
ferruminated by Jonson from Seneca’s tragedies, and the writings of the
later Romans. I call it ventriloquism, because Sejanus is a puppet, out of
which the poet makes his own voice appear to come.
Act v. Scene of the sacrifice to Fortune.
This scene is unspeakably irrational. To believe, and yet to scoff at, a
present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been
made to suspect priestcraft and a secret conspiracy against him.
“Volpone.”
This admirable, indeed, but yet more wonderful than admirable, play is,
from the fertility and vigour of invention, character, language, and
sentiment, the strongest proof how impossible it is to keep up any
pleasurable interest in a tale, in which there is no goodness of heart in
any of the prominent characters. After the third act, this play becomes
not a dead, but a painful, weight on the feelings. _Zeluco_ is an instance
of the same truth. Bonario and Celia should have been made in some way or
other principals in the plot; which they might have been, and the objects
of interest, without having been made characters. In novels, the person in
whose fate you are most interested, is often the least marked character of
the whole. If it were possible to lessen the paramountcy of Volpone
himself, a most delightful comedy might be produced, by making Celia the
ward or niece of Corvino, instead of his wife, and Bonario her lover.
“Apicæne.”
This is to my feelings the most entertaining of old Ben’s comedies, and,
more than any other, would admit of being brought out anew, if under the
management of a judicious and stage-understanding playwright; and an
actor, who had studied Morose, might make his fortune.