their turn, that their only chance of safety is in being able to
rival the romantic school. It is now already dead--it has been
slain by the copyists; imitations at second and third hand have
filled us with an insurmountable disgust. It will revive--of this
there can be no doubt; but its revival must be under a new and
transformed appearance, released from the shackles by which it
has been unreasonably entangled, free in its movements, prepared
to enter upon a new career.
This service must be rendered to it by the existing romantic
school.
{294}
That will be a happy time when we shall be able to see these two
schools flourishing in the presence of each other, in a
reasonable degree of independence, governed, each for itself, by
the laws appropriate to its true nature, and distributing with
lavish hand the beauties which are their own native growths.
But it will be said, Do you then believe that the classic school
has an actual existence--that it is not a mistake, a folly, as
has been so often declared? Assuredly, we believe this. Do you
think that the romantic school has its laws, and that it does not
consist in the abnegation of all laws? Far from it. You do not
regard as laws of the classic school those rules about which so
much noise has been made? Not at all.
Explain yourself, then. Where is the line of demarkation between
the two schools to be drawn? What is your idea of the classic,
what of the romantic school? What are those laws of which you
speak?
These are questions which we would very gladly answer; but time
presses, and the amount of space which can be allotted to us in a
review of this kind is already more than exhausted. We must,
then, of necessity delay our answer till another opportunity.
Moreover, the adherents of the romantic school have now a
favorable breeze; and as besides, they do not lack expertness to
find pretexts, the occasion will not long be wanting to us.
{295}
Historical Dramas.
Shakspeare did not write his historical dramas in chronological
order, and with the intention of reproducing upon the stage the
great events and characters of the history of England, as they
had been successively developed in fact. He had no idea of
working on so general and systematic a plan. He composed his
plays just according as some particular circumstance either
suggested the idea, or inspired the whim, or imposed the
necessity of composing them, never troubling himself about the
chronology of the subjects, or about the uniform whole which
certain works might form. He has introduced upon the stage nearly
all the history of England from the thirteenth to the sixteenth
century, from John Lackland to Henry VIII.; beginning with King
Henry VI. and the fifteenth century, then ascending to King John
and the thirteenth century, and finally ending with Henry VIII.
and the sixteenth century, after having several times transposed
the order of both centuries and kings. The following is the
dramatic chronology of his six historical dramas, according to
his most learned commentators, and among others, Mr. Malone:
1. The First Part of King Henry VI. (1422-1461), composed in 1569.
2. The Second Part of King Henry VI., composed in 1591.
3. The Third Part of King Henry VI., composed in 1591.
4. King John (1199-1216), composed in 1596.
5. King Richard II. (1377-1399), composed in 1597.
6. King Richard III. (1483-1485), composed in 1597.
7. The First Part of King Henry IV. (1399-1413), composed in 1598.
8. The Second Part of King Henry IV., composed in 1598.
9. King Henry V. (1413-1422), composed in 1599.
10. King Henry VIII. (1509-1547), composed in 1601.
{296}
But, after having indicated with precision the chronological
order of the composition of Shakspeare's historical dramas, we
must, in order properly to appreciate their character and
dramatic connection, replace them in the true order of events.
This I have done in the notices which I have written on these
dramas; and thus alone can we really behold the genius of
Shakspeare unfolding and giving new life to the history of his
country.
{297}
[Transcriber's note: Guizot presents a history of John
Lackland in "A Popular History of England, From the Earliest
Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria", Volume I, Chapter VIII.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61647/pg61647-images.html#Page_182.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_monarchs.]
King John.
(1596.)
In choosing the reign of John Lackland as the subject of a
tragedy, Shakspeare imposed upon himself the necessity of not
scrupulously respecting history. A reign in which, as Hume says,
"England was baffled and affronted in every enterprise," could
not be represented in its true colors before an English public
and an English court; and the only recollection of King John to
which the nation could attach any value--I refer to Magna
Charta--was not a topic likely to interest, in any great degree,
such a queen as Elizabeth. Shakspeare's play accordingly presents
only a summary of the last years of this disgraceful reign; and
the skill of the poet is employed to conceal the character of his
principal personage without disfiguring it, and to dissemble the
color of events without altogether changing it. The only fact
concerning which Shakspeare has distinctly adopted a resolution
to substitute invention for truth is the relation of King John to
France; and assuredly, all the illusions of national vanity were
necessary to enable Shakspeare to describe, and the English to
witness, Philip Augustus succumbing beneath the ascendency of
John Lackland.
{298}
Such a picture might indeed have been presented to John himself
when--living in total inactivity at Rouen, while Philip was
regaining all his possessions in France--he vauntingly said, "Let
the French go on; I will retake in a day what it has cost them
years to acquire." All that which, in Shakspeare's play, is
relative to the war with France, seems to have been invented in
justification of this gasconade of the most cowardly and insolent
of princes.
In the rest of the drama, the action itself, and the indication
of facts which it was impossible to dissemble, are sufficient to
give us a glimpse of a character into the inmost recesses of
which the poet did not venture to penetrate, and into which he
could not have penetrated without disgust. But such a personage,
and so constrained a manner of description, were not capable of
producing a great dramatic effect; and Shakspeare has therefore
concentrated the interest of his drama upon the fate of young
Arthur, and has devolved upon Faulconbridge that original and
brilliant part in which we feel that he takes delight, and which
he never refuses to introduce into any of his works.
Shakspeare has presented the young Duke of Bretagne to us at that
age at which it first became necessary to assert his rights after
the death of King Richard--that is, at about twelve years old. We
know that at the period to which Shakspeare's tragedy refers
Arthur was about twenty-five or twenty-six, and that he was
already married, and an object of interest from his amiable and
brilliant qualities, when he was taken prisoner by his uncle; but
the poet felt how much more interesting the exhibition of
weakness in conflict with cruelty became when exemplified in a
child. And besides, if Arthur had not been a child, it would not
have been allowable to put forward his mother in his place; and,
by suppressing Constance, Shakspeare would, perhaps, have
deprived us of the most pathetic picture that he ever drew of
maternal love--one of the feelings of which he evinced the
profoundest appreciation.
{299}
But, at the same time that he rendered the fact more touching, he
lessened the horror which it inspires by diminishing the atrocity
of the crime. The most generally received opinion is, that Hubert
de Bourg, who had promised to put Arthur to death only that he
might save him, had, in fact, deceived the cruelty of his uncle
by false reports and a pretended burial; but that John, on being
informed of the truth, first withdrew Arthur from the Castle of
Falaise, in which he was confined under Hubert's guardianship,
and transferred him to the Castle of Rouen, whither he proceeded
at night, and by water, had his nephew conveyed into his boat,
stabbed him with his own hand, tied a stone to his body, and
threw him into the river. Such an image would naturally be
rejected by a true poet. Independently of the necessity of
absolving his principal personage of so odious a crime,
Shakspeare perceived how much more dramatic and conformable to
the general nature of man the cowardly remorse of John, when he
perceived the danger in which he was plunged by the report of his
nephew's death, would be, than this excess of brutal ferocity;
and certainly, the fine scene between John and Hubert, after the
withdrawal of the lords, is amply sufficient to justify his
choice. Besides, the picture which Shakspeare presents had too
strong a hold upon his imagination, and had acquired too much
reality in his eyes, for him not to be conscious that, after the
incomparable scene in which Arthur obtains his safety from
Hubert, it would be impossible to endure the idea of any human
being laying hands on this poor child, and forcing him again to
undergo the agony from which he has just escaped.
{300}
The poet also knew that the sight of Arthur's death, although
less cruel, would be intolerable if accompanied, in the minds of
the spectators, by the anguish which the thought of Constance
would add to it; and he is, therefore, careful to inform us of
the death of the mother before making us witness the death of the
child; just as if, when his genius had conceived, to a certain
degree, the painfulness of any particular feeling or passion, his
tender heart became alarmed at it, and sought to modify it for
its own sake. Whatever misfortune Shakspeare may depict, he
almost invariably leads us to anticipate a still greater
misfortune, before which his mind recoils, and which he spares us
the unhappiness of beholding.
The character of the bastard Faulconbridge was suggested to
Shakspeare by a drama of Rowley's, entitled "The Troublesome
Reign of King John," which appeared in 1591, that is, five years
before Shakspeare's play, which was composed, it is believed, in
1596. Rowley's play was reprinted in 1611, with Shakspeare's name
attached to it--rather a common trick of the booksellers and
publishers of that time. This circumstance, and the extent to
which Shakspeare has borrowed from this work, has led several
critics to believe that he had had a hand in it, and that "The
Life and Death of King John" was only a recast of the first work;
but it does not appear that this supposition has any foundation
in fact.
According to his custom, while borrowing whatever he pleased from
Rowley, Shakspeare has added great beauties to his original, and
has retained nearly all its errors.
{301}
Thus, Rowley supposed that it was the Duke of Austria who killed
Richard Cœur-de-Lion, and at the same time he makes the Duke of
Austria perish by the hand of Faulconbridge, an historical
personage whom Matthew Paris mentions under the name of Falcasius
de Breaute, the natural son of King Richard, and who, according
to Holinshed, slew the Viscount of Limoges, in revenge for the
death of his father, who, it is well known, was killed at the
siege of Chaluz, a fortress belonging to that nobleman. In order
to reconcile Holinshed's version with his own, Rowley has made
Limoges the family name of the Duke of Austria, whom he
designates as "Limoges, duke of Austria." Shakspeare has copied
him exactly in this part of his story. He also attributes the
murder of Richard to the Duke of Austria; in his play, also, the
Duke of Austria falls by the hand of Faulconbridge; and, as
regards the confusion of the two personages, it would appear that
Shakspeare was as unscrupulous about it as Rowley, if we may
judge from Constance's speech to the Duke of Austria in the first
scene of the third act, in which she addresses him as "O Lymoges!
O Austria!" The character of Faulconbridge is one of those
creations of Shakspeare's genius in which we discover the nature
of all times and of all countries. Faulconbridge is the true
soldier, the soldier of fortune, personally recognizing no
inflexible duty but that which he owes to the chief to whom he
has devoted his life, and from whom he has received the rewards
of his valor; and yet a stranger to none of those feelings upon
which other duties are founded, and even obeying the instincts of
natural rectitude whenever they do not come into contradiction
with the vow of implicit fidelity and submission to which his
existence, and even his conscience, is devoted. He will be
humane, generous, and just, whenever this vow does not ordain him
to practice inhumanity, injustice, and bad faith; he forms a
correct judgment of the things to which he is subject, and is in
error only regarding the necessity of subjecting himself to them.
{302}
He is as skillful as he is brave, and does not alienate his
judgment while renouncing its guidance: he is a man of powerful
nature, whom circumstances, and the necessity of employing his
activity in some way or other, have reduced to a moral
inferiority, from which a calmer disposition, and profounder
reflections upon the true destination of man, would most probably
have preserved him. But, with the fault of not having sought the
objects of his fidelity and devotion in a sufficiently lofty
sphere, Faulconbridge possesses the eminent merit of unchangeable
fidelity and devotion, two singularly lofty virtues, both as
regards the feeling from which they emanate and the great actions
of which they may be the source. His language is, like his
conduct, the result of a mixture of good sense and ardor of
imagination, which frequently involves his reason in a jumble of
words very natural to men of Faulconbridge's profession and
character; being incessantly exposed to the shock of the most
violent scenes and actions, they can not find in ordinary
language the means of conveying the impressions which compose the
habit of their life.
The general style of the play is less firm and decided in color
than that of several other tragedies by the same poet; the
contexture of the work is also rather vague and feeble, but this
is the result of the absence of one leading idea, which should
continually direct all the parts of the drama toward the same
centre. The only idea of this kind which can be discerned in
"King John" is the hatred of foreign dominion gaining the victory
over the hatred of tyrannical usurpation. In order for this idea
to be salient, and constantly to occupy the mind of the
spectator, it would be necessary for it to be reproduced in every
direction, and for every thing to contribute to give conspicuity
to the misfortune of a conflict between the two feelings.
{303}
But this plan, which would be rather vast for a dramatic work,
was, moreover, irreconcilable with the reserve which Shakspeare
had imposed upon himself with regard to the character of the
king; and thus a great part of the play is passed in discussions
of but little interest, and in the remainder the events are not
well arranged; the lords change sides too lightly, first on
account of the death of Arthur, and afterward from motives of
personal alarm, which does not present their return to the cause
of England under a sufficiently honorable point of view. The
poisoning of King John, moreover, is not prepared with that care
which Shakspeare usually bestows upon the foundation and
justification of the slightest circumstances in his dramas; and
there is nothing to indicate the motive which could have led the
monk to commit so desperate an action, as at that moment John was
reconciled to Rome. The tradition from which Shakspeare has
borrowed this apocryphal anecdote ascribes the monk's conduct to
a desire to revenge an offensive epithet which the king had used
regarding him. We can not tell what could have induced Shakspeare
to adopt this story, which he has turned to so little account;
perhaps he desired to mingle with John's last moments something
of infernal suffering, without having recourse to remorse, which,
in fact, would not have been in more accordance with the real
character of this contemptible prince than with the modified
delineation of it which the poet has supplied.
{304}
[Transcriber's note: Guizot presents a history of Richard II
in "A Popular History of England, From the Earliest
Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria", Volume I, Chapter XII.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61647/pg61647-images.html#Page_335.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_monarchs.]
King Richard II.
(1597.)
In proportion as Shakspeare advances toward the more modern times
of the history of his country, the chronicles upon which he
relies for information coincide more exactly with historical
truth; and already, in "The Life and Death of King Richard III.,"
the details furnished him by Holinshed differ only in a slight
degree from the historical data which have been handed down to us
as authentic. With the exception of the queen, who is a pure
invention of the poet's imagination, and passing over the
chronological disorder occasioned by Shakspeare's negligence in
keeping events at a proper distance from each other, the facts
contained in this tragedy differ in no respect from historical
narratives of the same period, except with regard to the kind of
death which Richard suffered. Holinshed, who copied other
chroniclers, supplied Shakspeare with the story which he has
followed; but the most probable opinion, and that which is in
most accordance with the care taken publicly to expose Richard's
body after his death, is, that he was left to die of hunger. This
attention to evade, at least, the material appearances of crime,
while caring little to avoid suspicion, was beginning to be
introduced into the ferocious politics of these times; and
Richard himself had stifled, beneath a mattress, the Duke of
Gloucester, whom he held prisoner in Calais, and had afterward
announced that he had died of an attack of apoplexy.
{305}
Besides Shakspeare's tendency to follow implicitly the historical
guide whom he had once adopted, this version allowed him to
preserve to the character of Bolingbroke that interest with which
he has invested it, both in this drama and in the two parts of
"King Henry IV." The choice between different versions of the
same story, is, moreover, the least contested and the least
contestable privilege of dramatic authors.
The tragedy of "Richard II." is then, generally speaking,
sufficiently conformable to history; and the manner in which the
poet has described the deposition of Richard, and the accession
to the throne of Henry of Lancaster, appears singularly in
accordance with what Hume says on the subject: "Henry IV. became
king, nobody could tell how or wherefore." But it would be
necessary to be like Hume, entirely unacquainted with the sight
of revolutions, to be puzzled to say how and why the Duke of
Lancaster, after having acted for some time in the name of the
king, whom he kept prisoner, finally established himself without
difficulty in his place. Shakspeare did not think it necessary to
explain this; Richard left Flint Castle with the title of king,
in the retinue of Bolingbroke; and we next see him signing his
own deposition. The poet does not in any way indicate to us what
has passed; but in order not to guess how the fall of Richard was
accomplished it would be necessary for us to have very ill
understood the picture presented to us of his first degradation;
and the conversation of the gardener with his servants completes
the description by revealing to us its effects upon public
opinion.
{306}
It was a characteristic of Shakspeare's art to make us present at
every part of the event; and he always transports us to the scene
in which he strikes his most decisive blows, while at a distance
from our view the action pursues its course, and contents itself
with meeting us again when it has reached its consummation.
Although this tragedy is entitled "The Life and Death of King
Richard II.," it only comprises the last two years of that
prince's reign, and contains only a single event, namely, his
downfall--the catastrophe toward which every circumstance tends
from the very outset of the play. This event has been considered
under different aspects, and a rather singular anecdote has
revealed to us the existence of another tragedy on the same
subject, anterior, as it would appear, to Shakspeare's drama, and
treated in an altogether different point of view. Some of the
partisans of the Earl of Essex, on the day preceding his
extravagant enterprise, procured the performance of a tragedy in
which, as in Shakspeare's drama, Richard II. was deposed and put
to death on the stage. The actors having represented to them that
the play was entirely out of fashion, and would not attract a
sufficient audience to cover the expense of the performance, Sir
Gilly Merrick, one of the confederates, gave them forty shillings
above the receipts. This fact was mentioned at the trial of Sir
Gilly, and served to procure his condemnation.
The conspiracy of the Earl of Essex occurred in 1601, and
Shakspeare's tragedy appeared, it is believed, in the year 1597.
Notwithstanding this precedence, no one will be disposed to
suspect that one of Shakspeare's plays could have figured in a
factious enterprise against Elizabeth. Besides, the drama in
question seems to have been known by the name of "Henry IV.," and
not by that of "Richard II.;" and there is reason to believe that
the history of Henry IV. was its true subject, and Richard's
death only an incident.
{307}
But in order to remove every kind of doubt, it is sufficient to
read Shakspeare's tragedy; the doctrine of divine right is
incessantly presented in it, accompanied by that interest which
is excited by the aspect of the misfortunes of fallen greatness.
If the poet has not given to the usurper that odious physiognomy
which produces hatred and the dramatic passions, it is sufficient
to read history to understand the cause of this.