 Chapter 14 of Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, by William Haslett. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Nemo and Eva Davis. Lear. We wish that we could pass this play over and say nothing about it. All that we can say must fall short to the subject, for even of what we ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to give a description of the play itself, or of its effect upon the mind, is mere impertinence, yet we must say something. It is then the best of all Shakespeare's plays, for it is the one in which he was the most in earnest. He was here, fairly caught in the web of his own imagination. The passion which he has taken as his subject is that which strikes its root deepest into the human heart, of which the bond is the hardest to be unloosed, and the canceling and tearing to pieces of which gives the greatest revulsion to the frame, this depth of nature, this force of passion, this tug and war of the elements of our being, this firm faith, and filial piety, and the giddy anarchy and whirling tumult of the thoughts at finding this prop failing it, the contrast between the fixed, immovable basis of natural affection, and the rapid irregular starts of imagination, suddenly wrenched from all its accustomed holds and resting places in the soul. This is what Shakespeare has given, and what nobody else but he could give, so we believe. The mind of Lear, staggering between the weight of attachment and the hurried movements of passion, is like a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves, but that still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the sea, or it is like the sharp rock, circled by the eddying whirlpool that foams and beats against it, or like the solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake. The character of Lear itself is very finely conceived for the purpose. It is the only ground on which such a story could be built, for the greatest truth in effect. It is his rash haste, his violent impetuosity, his blindness to everything, but the dictates of his passions or affections, that produces all his misfortunes, that aggravates his impatience of them, that enforces our pity for him. The part which Cordelia bears in the scene is extremely beautiful. The story is almost told in the first words she utters. We see at once the precipice on which the poor old king stands from his own extravagant and credulous importunity. The indiscreet simplicity of her love, which to be sure has a little of her father's obstinacy in it, and the hollowness of her sister's pretensions. Almost the first burst of that noble tide of passion, which runs through the play, is the remonstrance of Kent to his royal master on the injustice of his sentence against his youngest daughter. Be Kent unmanorly when Lear is mad! This manly plainless, which draws down at him the displeasure of the unadvised king, is worthy of the fidelity with which he adheres to his fallen fortunes. The true character of the two eldest daughters, Regan and Goneril, they are so thoroughly hateful that we do not even like to repeat their names, breaks out in their answer to Cordelia, who desires them to treat their father well, prescribe us not our duties, their hatred of advice, being proportion to their determination to do wrong, and to their hypocritical pretensions to do right. Their deliberate hypocrisy adds the last finishing to the odiousness of their characters. It is the absence of this detestable quality that is the only relief in the character of Edmund the Bastard, and that at times reconciles us to him. We are not tempted to exaggerate the guilt of his conduct when he himself gives it up as a bad business and writes himself down plain villain. Nothing more can be said about it. His religious honesty in this respect is admirable. One speech of his is worth a million. His father Gloucester, whom he has just deluded with a forged story of his brother Edgar's designs against his life, accounts for his unnatural behavior and the strange depravity of the times from the late eclipses in the Sun and the Moon. Admin, who is in the secret, says when he is gone, this is the excellent floppery of the world that when we are sick and unfortunate, often the surfights of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the Sun, the Moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treacherous by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulters, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by divine thrusting on, an admirably evasion of whormaster man to lay his gotish disposition on the charge of a star. My father compounded my mother under the dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major. So that it follows I am rough and lecherous. I should have been what I am had the maidenliest star in the Fermanate twinkled on my bastardizing. The whole character, its careless, lighthearted villainy, contrasted with a sullen, rankerous malignity of Regan and Goneril, its connection with the conduct of the underplot in which Gloucester's persecution of one of his sons and the ingratitude of another form a counterpart to the mistakes and misfortunes of Lear, his double amour with two sisters, and the share which he has in bringing about the fatal catastrophe, are all managed with an uncommon degree of skill and power. It has been said, and we think justly, that the third act of Othello and the three first acts of Lear are Shakespeare's great masterpieces in the logic of passion, that they contain the highest examples not only of the force of individual passion, but of its dramatic vicitudes and striking effects arising from the different circumstances and characters of the person speaking. We see the ebb and flow of the feeling, its pauses and fever starts, its impatience of opposition, its accumulating force when it has time to recollect itself, the manner in which it avails itself of every passing word or gesture, its haste to repel insinuation, the alternate contraction and dilation of the soul, and all the dazzling fence of controversy, and this mortal combat with poisoned weapons aimed at the heart where each wound is fatal. We have seen in Othello how the unsuspecting frankness and impetuous passions of the more are played upon and exasperated by the artful dexterity of Iago. When the present play, that which aggravates the sense of sympathy in the reader and of uncontrollable anguish in the swollen heart of Lear, is the petrifying indifference, the cold calculating, obdurate selfishness of his daughters. His keen passions seem wedded on their stony hearts. The contrast would be too painful, the shock too great, but for the intervention of the fool, whose well-timed levity comes in to break the continuity of feeling when it can no longer be born, and to bring into play again the fibers of the heart just as they are growing rigid from overstrained excitement. The imagination is clad to take refuge in the half-comic, half-serious comments of the fool, just as the mind under the extreme anguish of a surgical operation vents itself in sallies of wit. The character was also a grotesque ornament of the barbarous times, in which alone the tragic groundwork of the story could be laid. In another point of view, it is indispensable in as much as while it is a diversion to the two great intensity of our disgust. It carries the pathos to the highest pitch of which it is capable, by showing the pitiable weakness of the old king's conduct on its irretrievable consequences in the most familiar point of view. Lear may well beat at the gate which led his folly in. After, as the fool says, he has made his daughters his mothers. The characters dropped in third act to make room for the entrance of Edgar's mad tom, which well accords with the increasing bustle and wildness of the incidents. And nothing can be more complete than the distinction between Lear's real and Edgar's assumed madness, while the resemblance in the cause of their distresses from the severing of the nearest ties of natural affection keeps up a unity of interest. Shakespeare's mastery over his subject, if it was not art, was owing to a knowledge of the connecting links of the passions and their effect upon the mind. Still more wonderful than any systematic adherence to rules, and that anticipated and outdid all the efforts of the most refined art, not inspired and rendered instinctive by genius. One of the most perfect displays of dramatic power is the first interview between Lear and his daughter, after the design difference upon him, which till one of his knights reminds him of them, his sanguine temperament, had led him to overlook. He returns with his train from hunting, and his usual impatience breaks out in his first words. Let me not stay a jot for dinner. Go, get it ready. He then encounters the faithful Kent in disguise, and retains him in a service. And the first trial of his honest duty is to trip up the heels of the officious steward, who makes so prominent and despicable a figure through the piece. On the entrance of Goneril the following dialogue takes place. Lear. How now, daughter, what makes that front latan? He thinks you are too much of late in the frown. Fool, thou wasst a pretty fellow, when thou hast no need to care for her frowning. Now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art now. I am a fool. Thou art a nothing. Yes, foresooth, I will hold my tongue to Goneril. So your face bids me, though you say nothing, mum, mum. He that keeps nor crust nor crumb, where ye of all shall want some. That's a shield-piece cod. Pointing to Lear. Goneril. Not only, sir, this year all licensed fool, but other of your insolent retinue to hourly carp and quarrel, raking forth in rank and not to be endured riots. I have thought, by making this well known unto you, to have found a safe redress, but now grow fearful, by what yourself too late have spoken done that you protect this course and put it on by your allowance. Which, if you should, the fault would not scape censure. Nor the redress's sleep, which in the tender of a wholesome wheel, might in their working do you that offence, which else were shame, that then necessity would call discreet proceeding. Fool. For you, traum-nunkle, the hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, that it had its head bit off by its young. So out went the candle, and we were left darkling. Lear. Are you our daughter? Goneril. Come, sir, I would. You would make use of that good wisdom, whereof I know you are fraught, and put away these dispositions, which have late transformed you from what you rightly are. Fool. May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse. Woop, jug, I love thee. Lear. Does any here know me? Why? This is not Lear. Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakness or his discernings are lethargy. Ha! Waking? Is not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am? Lear's shadow? I would learn that. For by the marks of sovereignty, of knowledge, and of reason, I should be false persuaded I had daughters. Your name, fair gentlewoman? Goneril. Come, sir. This admiration is much of the favour of other your new pranks. I do beseech you to understand my purposes of right. As you are old and reverend, you should be wise. Here you do keep a hundred knights and squires, men so disordered, so debauched, and bold, that this our court, infected with their manners, shows like a riotous inn, a peculiarism, and lust make it more like a tavern or a brothel than a graced palace. The shame itself to speak for instant remedy. Be then desired by her, that else will take the things she begs. A little too disquantity your train. And the remainder, that shall still depend, to be such men as may besort your age, and know themselves and you. Lear. Darkness and devils. Settle my horses, call my train together, degenerate bastard. I'll not trouble thee, yet have I left a daughter. You strike my people, and your disordered rabble makes servants of their betters. Enter Albany. Lear. Whoa, that too late repents. Oh, sir, are you come? Is it your will? Speak, sir. Prepare my horses, Albany. In gratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, more hideous when thou showest thee in a child than the sea-monster. Albany, pray, sir, be patient. Lear. Detested kite, thou liest, the goneral. My train are men of choice and rarest parts, that all particulars of duty know, and in the most exact regard support the worships of their name. Oh, most small fault, how ugly dits thou in Cordelia's show! Which, like an engine, wrenched my frame of nature from the fixed place, drew from my heart all love, and added to the gall. Oh, leer, leer, leer, beat at the gate that let thy folly end, striking his head, and thy dear judgment out. Go, go, my people! Albany, my lord, I am guiltless, as I am ignorant of what hath moved you. Lear. It may be so, my lord. Here, nature, here, dear goddess, here, suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful, and to her womb conveys sterility. Try up in her the organs of increase, and from her derogate body never spring a babe to honor her. If she must team, create her child of spleen, that it may live to be a thwart disnatured torment to her. Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth, with cadence tears, fret channels in her cheeks, turn all her mother's pains and benefits to laughter and contempt, that she may feel how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child. Away, away! Exit. Albany. Now, gods, that we adore, whereof comes this? Goneril. Never afflict yourself to know the cause, but let his disposition have that scope, that dotage, kiss it. Reenter Lear. Lear. What? Fifty of my followers at a clap. Within a fortnight. Albany. What's the matter, sir? Lear. I'll tell thee, life and death, I am ashamed that thou hast power to shake my manner thus, Goneril, that these hot tears which break from me per force should make thee worth them, blast and fox upon thee. The untented woundings of a father's curse pierce every sense about thee. Old fond eyes, between this cause again I'll pluck you out and cast you with the waters that you lose to temper clay. Is it come to this? Let it be so. Yet have I left a daughter who I am sure is kind and comfortable. When she shall hear this of thee, with her nails, she'll flay thy wolfish visage. Thou shall find that I'll resume the shape which thou dost think I have cast off forever. Exit Lear. Kent. And attendance. This is certainly fine. No wonder that Lear says after it, O let me be not mad, not mad, sweet heavens! Feeling its effects by anticipation. But fine as is this burst of rage and indignation, at the first blow aimed at his hopes and expectations, it is nothing near so fine as what follows from his double disappointment and his lingering efforts to see which of them he shall lean upon for support and find comfort in, when both his daughters turn against his age in weakness. It is with some difficulty that Lear gets to speak with his daughter Regan and her husband at Gloucester's castle. In concert with Goneril they have left their own home on purpose to avoid him. His apprehensions are fast alarmed by this circumstance, and when Gloucester, whose guest they are, urges the fiery temper of the Duke of Cornwall as an excuse for not importuning him a second time, Lear breaks out. Vengeance. Plague. Death. Confusion. Fiery? What fiery quality! Why, Gloucester, I'll speak with the Duke of Cornwall and his wife. Afterwards, feeling perhaps not well himself, he is inclined to admit their excuse from illness. But then, recollecting that they have set his messenger Kent in the stocks, all his suspicions are roused again, and he insists on seeing them. Enter Cornwall, Regan, Gloucester, and servants. Lear. Good-morrow to you both. Cornwall. Hail to your grace. Kent is set at liberty. Regan. I am glad to see your highness. Lear. Regan, I think you are. I know what reason I have to think so. If thou shouldst not be glad, I would divorce me from thy mother's tomb. Supplerking and adulterous. No, are you free to Kent? Some other time for that. Beloved Regan, thy sister's not. O Regan, she hath tied sharp toothed unkindness, like a vulture here, points to his heart. I can scarce speak to thee, though to not believe of how depraved a quality. O Regan. Regan. I pray you, sir, take patience. I have hope you less know how to value her dessert than she descends her duty. Lear. Say, how is that? Regan. I cannot think my sister in the least would fail her obligation. If, sir, perchance, she has restrained the riots of your followers, she is on such ground into such wholesome end as clears her from all blame. Lear, my curse is on her. Regan. O sir, you are old. Nature in you stands on the very verge of her confine. You should be wooled, and led by some discretion that discerns your state better than you yourself. Therefore I pray you, that to our sister you do make return, say you have wronged her, sir. Lear. Ask her forgiveness. Do you but mark how this becomes the use? Dear daughter, I confess that I am old. Age is unnecessary. On my knees I beg, that you vouch safe me raiment, bed, and food. Regan. Good sir, no more. These are unsightly tricks. Return you to my sister. Lear. Never! Regan, she hath abated me of half my train. Look, blank upon me, struck me with her tongue. Most serpent-like, upon a very heart, all the stored vengences of heaven fall on her on grateful top. Strike her young bones. You taking heirs with lameness. Cornwall. Fie, sir, fie. Lear. You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames into her scornful eyes. Infect her beauty. You fen-sucked fogs, drawn by the powerful sun. To fall and blast her pride. Regan. Oh, the blessed gods, so will you wish on me when the rash mood is on. Lear. No, Regan. Thou shall never have my curse. Thy tender hefted nature shall not give thee or to harshness. Her eyes are fierce, but thine do comfort to not burn. It is not in thee to grudge my pleasures, to cut off my train, to bandy hasty words, to scant my sizes, and, in conclusion, to oppose the bolt against my coming in. Thou better knowest the offices of nature, bond of childhood, effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude. Thy half of the kingdom, thou hast not forgot. We're in I thee endowed. Regan. Good sir, to the purpose. Trumpets within. Lear. Who put my man in the stocks? Cornwall. What trumpet's that? Enter Steward. Regan. I know it, my sisters. This approves her letter that she would soon be here. Is your lady come? Lear. This is a slave whose easy borrowed pride dwells in the fickle grace of her he follows, out, Farlett, from my sight. Cornwall. What means you, Grace? Lear. Who stocked my servant? Regan. I have good hope, thou didst not know, aunt. Who comes here? Oh, heavens. Enter Goneril. If you do love old men, if your sweets sway a low obedience, if your selves are old, make it your cause. Send down and take my part. Art not ashamed to look upon this beard to Goneril? Oh, Regan. Oh, Regan. Will thou take her by the hand? Goneril. Why not by the hand, sir? How have I offended? All's not a fence that indiscretion finds and dodage term so. Lear. Oh, sides, you are too tough. Will you yet hold? How came my man in the stocks? Cornwall. I said him there, sir. But his own disorders deserved much less advancement. Lear. You. Did you? Regan. I pray, you father, being weak seems so. If, till the expiration of your month, you will return and sojourn with my sister, dismissing half your train, come then to me. I am now from home and out of that provision which shall be needful for your entertainment. Lear. Return to her? And fifty men dismissed? No. Rather I abjure all roofs and choose to be a comrade with a wolf and owl, to wait against the inimity of the air, necessity sharp pinch. Return with her. Lear. Why, the hot-blooded France, that dourless took our youngest born, I could as well be brought to knee his throne, and squire like pension, beg to keep base life afoot. Return with her. Persuade me rather to be slave and sumter to this detested groom. Looking on the steward. Got a role? At your choice, sir. Lear. Now I pray thee, daughter, do not make me mad. I will not trouble thee, my child, farewell. We'll no more meet, no more see one another. But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter, or rather a disease that's in my flesh, which I must needs call mine. Thou art a bile, a plaguesore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood. But I'll not chide thee. Let shame come when it will, I do not call it. Did not bid the thunder-bearer shoot, nor tell tales of thee to hide judging Jove? Mend when thou canst. Be better at thy leisure. I can be patient. I can stay with Regan. I and my hundred knights. Regan. And not altogether so, sir. I looked not for you yet, nor am provided for your fit welcome. Give ear, sir, to my sister. For those that mingle reason with your passion must be content to think you old, and so. But she knows what she does. Lear. Is this well-spoken now? Regan. I dare avouch it, sir. What fifty followers? Isn't all well? What should you need of more? Ye are so many. Sit them both charge in danger-speak, and so great a number. How in one house should many people under two commands hold amity? Tis hard. Almost impossible. Gannaro. Why might you not, my lord? Receive attendance from those that she calls servants, or from mine. Regan. Why not, my lord? If then they chance to slack you, we would control them. If you will come to me, for now I spy a danger. I entreat you to bring but five and twenty. To no more will I give place or notice. Lear. I gave you all. Regan. And in good time you gave it. Lear. Made you my guardians, my depositaries, but kept a reservation to be followed with such a number. What? Must I come to you with five and twenty? Regan. Said you so? Regan. And speak it again, my lord. No more with me. Lear. Those wicked creatures, yet to look well favored when others are more wicked, not being the worst, stands in some rank of praise. I'll go with thee, to Gannaro. Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty, and thou art twice her love. Gannaro. Hear me, my lord, what needs you five and twenty, ten or five? To follow in a house where twice so many have a command to tend you. Regan. What need one? Lear. Oh, reason not the need. Our basis beggars are in the poorest things superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs. Man's life is cheap as beast. Thou art a lady, if only to go warm or gorgeous. Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous worst, which scarcely keeps thee warm, but for true need. You heavens, give me that patience which I need. You see me here, you gods of poor old man, as full of grief as age, wretched in both. If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts against their father, fool me not so much to bear it tamely. Touch me with noble anger. Oh, let no woman's weapons, water drops, stain my man's cheeks. No, you unnatural hags. I will have such revenges on you both that all the world shall. I will do such things. What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep? No, I'll not weep. I have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws. Or ere I'll weep. Oh, fool, I shall go mad. Exit Lear, Gloucester, Kent, and Fool. If there is anything in any author, like this yearning of the heart, these throes of tenderness, this profound expression of all that can be thought and felt in the most heart-rending situations we are glad of it, but it is in some author that we have not yet read. The scene in the storm, where he is exposed to all the fury of the elements, though grand and terrible is not so fine, but the moralizing scenes with Mad Tom, Kent, and Gloucester are upon a par with the former. His exclamation in the supposed trial scene of his daughters, see the little dogs in all, Trey, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see they bark at me, his issuing his orders, let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds a butter heart, and his reflection when he sees the misery of Edgar. Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this. Or in a style of pathos, where the extremist resources of the imagination are called in to lay open the deepest movements of the heart, which was peculiar to Shakespeare. And the same styled spirit is his interrupting the fool who asks, whether a madman be a gentleman or a yeoman, by answering, a king, a king! The indirect part that Gloucester takes in these scenes, where his generosity leads him to relieve Lear and resent the cruelty of his daughters, at the very time that he is himself instigated to seek the life of his son, and suffering under the sting of his supposed ingratitude, is a striking accompaniment to the situation of Lear. Indeed, the manner in which the threads of the story are woven together is almost as wonderful in the way of art as the carrying on the tide of passion, still varying and unimpaired, is on the score of nature. Among the remarkable instances of this kind are Edgar's meeting with his old blind father, the deception he practices upon him when he pretends to lead him to the top of Dovercliffe. Come on, sir, here's the place, to prevent his ending his life in miseries together. His encounter with a perfidious steward whom he kills, and is finding the letter from Goneril to his brother upon him, which leads to the final catastrophe, and brings the wheel of justice full circle home to the guilty parties. The bustle and rapid succession of events in the last scene is surprising, but the meeting between Lear and Cordelia is by far the most affecting part of them. It has all the wildness of poetry, and all the heartfelt truth of nature. The previous account of her reception of the news of his unkind treatment, her involuntary approaches to her sisters. Shame, lady, shame! Lear's backwardness to see his daughter, the picture of the desolate state to which he is reduced. Alack, tizzy, why he was met even now as mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud. Only prepare the way for Anne Highton, her expectation of what follows, and assuredly, this expectation is not disappointed, when through the tender care of Cordelia he revives Enric Lexer. Cordelia. How does my well, Lord? How fares your majesty? Lear, you too me wrong to take me out of the grave. Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears do scald like molten lead. Cordelia. Sir, do you know me? Lear, you are a spirit, I know. When did you die? Cordelia. Still still far wide. Physician, he's scarce awake, let him alone a while. Lear, where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight? I mightly abused. I should even die with pity to see another thus. I know not what to say. I will not swear these are my hands. Let's see. I feel this pinprick, what I were assured of my condition. Cordelia. Oh, look upon me, sir, and hold your hands in benediction o'er me. No, sir, you must not kneel. Lear, pray do not mock me. I'm a very foolish fond old man, forescoring upward, not an hour more nor less, and to deal plainly I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Me thinks I should know you and know this man, yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant of what place this is, and all the skill I have remembers not these garments, nor I know not where I did lodge last night. I do not laugh at me, for, as I am a man, I think this lady to be my child Cordelia. Cordelia. And so I am. I am. Almost equal to this an awful beauty is their consolation of each other when, after the triumph of their enemies, they are led to prison. Cordelia. We are not the first, who with best meaning have incurred the worst. For thee, oppressive king, am I cast down. Myself could also out frown, false fortunes frown. Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters? Lear. No. No. No. No. Let's await a prison. We too alone will sing like birds in the cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live and pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues talk of court news, and we'll talk with them too. Who loses, who wins, who's in, who's out, and take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God's spies, and we'll wear out in a walled prison packs and sex of great ones, that to ebb and flow by the moon. Edmund. Take them away. Lear. Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods themselves throw incense. The concluding events are sad, painfully sad, but the pathos is extreme. The oppression of the feelings is relieved by the very interest we take in the misfortunes of others, and by the reflections to which they give birth. Cordelia is hanged in prison by the orders of the bastard Edmund, which are known too late to be countermanded, and Lear dies brokenhearted, lamenting over her. Lear. And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life? Thou, no breath at all. Oh, thou wilt come no more. Never, never, never, never, never. Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir. He dies, and indeed we feel the truth of what Kent says on the occasion. Vex not his ghost. Oh, let him pass. He hates him. That would upon the rack of the rough world stretch him out longer. Yet a happy ending has been contrived for this play, which is approved of by Dr. Johnson and condemned by Schlegel. A better authority than either on any subject in which poetry and feeling are concerned has given it in favor of Shakespeare, in some remarks on the acting of Lear, with which we shall conclude this account. The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery with which they mimic the storm, which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements than any actor can be to represent Lear. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual. The explosion of his passions are terrible as a volcano. They are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that rich see his mind with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on, even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weaknesses, the impotence of rage. While we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear. We are in his mind. We are sustained by a grandeur, which baffles the malice of daughters and storms, and the aberrations of his reason. We discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, emethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers as the wind blows where it listeth, at will on the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with the sublime identification of his age, with that of the heavens themselves? When and his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that they themselves are old. What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show. It is too hard and stony. It must have love scenes and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter. She must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of his leviton, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw it out more easily. A happy ending. As if the living martyred him that Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this putter and preparation? Why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting his guilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misuse station, as if at his years and with his experience anything was left but to die. Footnote. See an article called Theatrialia in the Second Volume of the Reflector by Charles Lamb. Four things have struck us in reading Lear. One. That poetry is an interesting study for this reason, that it relates to whatever is most interesting in human life. Whoever therefore has a contempt for poetry has a contempt for himself and humanity. Two. That the language of poetry is superior to the language of painting because the strongest of our recollections relate to feelings not to faces. Three. That the greatest strength of genius is shown in describing the strongest passions for the power of the imagination in works of invention must be in proportion to the force of the natural impressions which are the subject of them. Four. That the circumstance which balances the pleasure against the pain and tragedy is that in proportion to the greatness of the evil is our sense and desire of the opposite good excited and that our sympathy with actual suffering is lost in the strong impulse given to our natural affections and carried away with a swelling tide of passion that gushes from and relieves the heart. End of Lear. Chapter 16 of Characters of Shakespeare's Plays by William Haslett. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Nemo and Eva Davis. Henry IV in two parts. If Shakespeare's fondness for the ludicrous sometimes led to faults in his tragedies, which was not often the case, he is made us amends by the character of Falstaff. This is perhaps the most substantial comic character that ever was invented. Sir John carries the most portly presence in the mind's eye, and in him, not to speak it profanely, we behold the fullness of the spirit of wit and humor bodily. We are as well acquainted with this person as is mine, and his jokes come upon us, who have double force and relish in the quantity of flesh through which they make their way as he shakes his fat sides of laughter, or lards the lean earth as he walks along. Other comic characters seem, if we approach and handle them, to resolve themselves into air, into thin air, but this is embodied and palpable to the grossest apprehension. It lies three fingers deep upon the ribs. It plays about the lungs and the diaphragm of all the force of animal enjoyment. His body is like a good estate to his mind, from which he receives rents and revenues of profit and pleasure in kind, according to its extent, and the richness of the soil. Wit is often a meager substitute for pleasurable sensation, an effusion of spleen and petty spite at the comforts of other, from feeling none in itself. Falstaff's wit is an emanation of a fine constitution, an exuberance of good humor and good nature, an overflowing of his love of laughter and good fellowship, a giving vent to his heart's ease and over-contentment with himself and others. He would not be in character if he were not so fat as he is, for there is the greatest keeping in the boundless luxury of his imagination and the pampered self-indulgence of his physical appetites. He manures and nourishes his mind with chess, as he does his body with sack and sugar. He carves out his jokes as he would a capon or a haunch of venison, where there is cut and come again and pours out upon them the oil of gladness, his tongue drops fatness, and in the chambers of his brain it snows of meat and drink. He keeps up perpetual holiday and open house, and we live with him in a round of invitations to a rump and dozen. Yet we are not to suppose that he was a mere sensualist. All this is as much an imagination as in reality. His sensuality does not engross and stupefies other faculties, but ascends me into the brain, clears away all the dull crude vapours that envire in it, and makes it full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes. His imagination keeps up the ball after his senses have done with it. He seems to have even a greater enjoyment of the freedom from restraint of good cheer, of his ease, of his vanity, and the ideal exaggerated descriptions which he gives of them, then, in fact. He never fails to enrich his discourses with illusions to eating and drinking, but we never see him at table. He carries his own larder about with him, and he is himself a ton of man. His pulling out the bottle in the field of battle is a joke to show his contempt for glory accompanied with danger, his systematic adherence to his Epicurean philosophy in the most trying circumstances. Again, such is his deliberate exaggeration of his own vices, that it does not seem quite certain whether the account of his hostess's bill found in his pocket, with such an out-of-the-way charge for capons and sack, with only one half penny worth of bread, was not put there by himself as a trick to humor the jest upon his favorite propensities, and as a conscious character of himself. He is represented as a liar, a braggart, a coward, a glutton, etc., and yet we are not offended but delighted with him, for he is all these as much to amuse others as to gratify himself. He openly assumes all these characters to show the humorous part of them. The unrestrained indulgence of his own ease, appetites, and convenience, has neither malice nor hypocrisy in it. In a word, he is an actor in himself almost as much as upon the stage, and we no more object to the character of all staff in a moral point of view than we should think of bringing an excellent comedian, who should represent him to the life before one of the police offices. We only consider the number of pleasant lights in which he puts certain foibles. The more pleasant as they are opposed to the received rules and necessary restraints of society, and do not trouble ourselves about the consequences resulting from them, for no mischievous consequences do result. Sir John is old as well as fat, which gives a melancholy retrospective tinge to the character, and by the disparity between his inclinations and his capacity for enjoyment makes it still more ludicrous and fantastical. The secret to Falstaff's wit is for the most part a masterly presence of mind, an absolute self-possession, which nothing can disturb. His repartees are involuntary suggestions of his self-love, instinctive evasions of everything that threatens to interrupt the career of his triumphant jollity and self-complacency. His very size floats him out of all his difficulties in a sea of rich conceits, and he turns round on the pivot of his convenience with every occasion and at a moment's warning. His natural repugnance to every unpleasant thought or circumstance of itself makes light of objections and provokes the most extravagant and licentious answers in his own justification. His indifference to truth puts no check upon his invention, and the more improbable and unexpected his contrivances are, the more happily does he seem to be delivered to them, the anticipation of their effect acting as a stimulus to the gait of his fancy. The success of one adventurous sally gives him spirits to undertake another. He deals always in round numbers, and his exaggeration excuses are open, palpable, monstrous as the father that begets them. His dissolute carelessness of what he says discovers itself in the first dialogue with the Prince. False staff. By the Lord thou saest true lad, and is not mine hoses of the tavern a most sweet wench. Prince Henry, as the honey of Hibla, my old lad of the castle, and is not a buff jerken a most sweet robe of dirns. False staff. How now, how now, mad wag, what in thy quips and thy quiddities, what a plague have I to do with a buff jerken! Prince Henry, why, what a pox have I to do with mine hoses of the tavern! In the same scene he afterwards affects melancholy from pure satisfaction of heart and professes reform, because it is the farthest thing in the world from his thoughts. He is no qualms of conscious, and therefore would as soon talk of them as of anything else when the humor takes him. False staff. But how, I prithee, trouble be no more vanity! I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought, and an old lord of council raided me the other day in the street about you, sir. But I marked him not, and yet he talked very wisely, and in the street too. Prince Henry, thou didst well, for wisdom cries out in the street, and no man regards it. False staff. O thou hast dominable iteration, an art indeed able to corrupt a saint! Thou hast done much harm unto me, how? God forgive thee for it. Before I knew thee, how? I knew nothing, and now I am, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked. I must give over this life, and I will give it over by the lord, and I do not. I am a villain. I'll be damned for never a king, son, and christendom. Prince Henry, where shall we take a purse tomorrow, Jack? False staff. Where thou wilt, lad? I'll make one, and I do not. Call me villain and baffle me. Prince Henry, I see good amendment of life in thee, from praying to purse-taking. False staff. Why, how? Tis my vocation, how? Tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation. Of the other prominent passages, his account of his pretended resistance to the robbers, who grew from four men in Buckrum, into eleven, as the imagination of his own valor increased with his relating it. His getting off when the truth is discovered, by pretending he knew the prince. The scene in which, in the person of the old king, he lectures the prince and gives himself a good character, the soliloquy on honor and description of his new raised recruits, his meeting with the chief justice, his abuse of the prince and poins who overhear him, to dull tearsheet, his reconciliation of Mrs. Quickly, who has arrested him for an old debt in whom he persuades to pawn her plate to lend him ten pounds more, and the scenes which shallow and silent are all inibitable. Of all of them, the scene in which false staff plays the part first of the king and then of Prince Henry is the one that has been the most often quoted. We must quote it once more in illustration of our remarks. False staff. Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendeth thy time, but also how thou art accompanied. For thou the chamomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted the sooner it wears. That thou art my son, I have partly thy mother's word, partly my own opinion, a chiefly, a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip that doth warrant me. If then thou be son to me, here lies the point. Why, being son to me, art thou so pointed at? Shaft the blessed son of heaven prove a miker in each blackberries? A question not to be asked. Shaft the son of England prove a thief and take purses? A question not to be asked. There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of Pitch. This Pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile, so doth the company thou keepest. For, Harry, now I do not speak to thee and drink, but in tears, not in pleasure, but in passion, not in words only, but in woes also. And yet there is a virtuous man whom I have often noted in thy company, but I know not his name. Prince Henry, what manner of man, and it like your Majesty. False staff, a good portly man in faith, and a corpulent of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage, and, as I think, is age some fifty, or by a lady implying to threescore. And now I do remember me. His name is false staff. If that man should be ludely given, he deceiveth me, for, Harry, I see virtue in his looks. If then the fruit may be known by the tree, as the tree by the fruit, then preemptorily I speak it. There is virtue in that false staff, him keep with, the rest banish. And tell me now, thou naughty varlet, tell me, where has thou been this month? Prince Henry, does thou speak like a king? Do thou stand for me, and I'll play my father? False staff, depose me, if thou dusted half so gravely, so majestically, both in word and matter, hang me up by the heels for a rabbit-sucker, or a polterer's hair. Prince Henry, well, here I am set. False staff, and here I stand, judge my masters. Prince Henry, now, Harry, whence come you? False staff, my noble lord, from east cheap. Prince Henry, the complaints I hear of thee are grievous. False staff, it's the blood, my lord, they are false. Nay, I'll tickle ye for a young prince in faith. Prince Henry, Swearest thou, ungracious boy, henceforth nare look on me. Thou art violently carried away from grace. There is a devil who haunts thee, in the likeness of a fat old man, a ton of man as thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting hutch of beastliness, that swan parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted manning-tree ox with a pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that gray iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years? Wherein is he good, but to taste sack and drink it? Wherein neat and cleanly, but to carve a capon and eat it? Wherein cunning, but in craft? Wherein crafty, but in villainy? Wherein villainous, but in all things? Wherein worthy, but in nothing? False staff, why would your grace would take me with you? Who means your grace? Prince Henry, that villainous, abominable, misleader of youth, false staff, that old white-bearded Satan. False staff, my lord, the man I know! Prince Henry, I know thou dust. False staff, but to say, I know more harm in him than in myself, would say more than I know. Though that he is old, no more the pity, his white hairs do witness it, but that he is, saving your reference, a whore-master, that I utterly deny. If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned. If to be fat be to be hated, then pharaohs lean kind are to be loved. No, my good lord, banish pito, banish bardov, banish poins, but for sweet Jack false staff, kind Jack false staff, true Jack false staff, valiant Jack false staff, and therefore, more valiant being as he is, old Jack false staff, banish not him thy Harry's company, banish plump Jack, and banish all the world. Prince Henry, I do, I will. Knocking and hostess and bardov go out. Re-enter bardov, running. Bardov. Oh, my lord, my lord, the sheriff, with the most monstrous watch, is at the door. False staff. Out, you rogue, play out the play! I have much to say on the behalf of that false staff. One of the most characteristic descriptions of Sir John is that which Mrs. Quickly gives of him when he asks her, What is the gross sum that I owe thee? Hostess. Amari, if thou wart an honest man, thyself and the money too, thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-guilt garplet, sitting in my dolphin chamber, at the round table, by a sea coal fire on Wednesday in a witson week, when the prince broke thy head for likening his father to a singing man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound to marry me, and to make me my lady thy wife. Can so deny it? Did not good-wife Geach, the butcher's wife, come in then, and call me gossip quickly, coming into our own mess of vinegar, telling us she had a good dish of prawns, whereby thou didst desire to eat some, whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound, and it's thou not, when she was gone downstairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such poor people, saying that ere long they should call me madam, and it's thou not kiss me, and bid me fetch thee thirties shillings, I put thee now to my book oath, deny it if thou canst. This scene is to us the most convincing proof of all staff's power, of gaining over the goodwill of those he was familiar with, except indeed Bartolf's somewhat profane exclamation, and hearing the account of his death. Would I were with him, wheresoever he is, whether in heaven or in hell? One of the topics of exulting superiority over others most common in Sir John's mouth is his corpulence, and the exterior marks of good living which he carries about him, thus turning his vices into commodity. He accounts for the friendship between the prints and poins, from their legs being both of bigness, and compares just as shallow to a man made after supper of a cheese-paring. There cannot be a more striking gradation of character than that between false staff and shallow, and shallow in silence. It seems difficult at first to fall lower than the squire, but this fool, great as he is, finds an admirer and humble foil in his cousin's silence. Vain of his acquaintance with Sir John, who makes a bud of him, he exclaims, Would cousin's silence that thou had seen that which this night and I have seen? I, Master Shallow, we have heard the chimes at midnight, says Sir John. To false staff's observation, I did not think Master Silence had been a man of this metal. Silence answers, Who I? I have been married twice and once or now. What an idea is here conveyed of a prodigality of living. What good husbandry and economical self-denial in his pleasures! What a stock of lively recollections! It is curious that Shakespeare has ridiculed in just a shallow, who was, in some authority under the king, that disposition to unmeaning tautology, which is the regal infirmity of later times, in which, may be supposed, he acquired from talking to his cousin's silence and receiving no answers. False staff, you have here a goodly dwelling and a rich! Shallow. Baron, Baron, Baron, beggars all, beggars all, Sir John. Mary, good air, spread Davey, spread Davey, well said Davey. False staff, this Davey serves you for good uses. Shallow. A good varlet, a good varlet, a very good varlet. By the mass I have drank too much sockets supper, a good varlet. Now sit down, now sit down, come, cousin. The true spirit of humanity, the thorough knowledge of the stuff we are made of, the practical wisdom, with the seeming fulleries in the whole of the garden seen at Shallow's country seat, and just before in the exquisite dialogue between him and silence on the death of old double, have no parallel anywhere else. In one point of view, they are laughable in the extreme. In another, they are equally affecting. If it is affecting to show what a little thing is human life, what a poor forked creature man is. The heroic and serious part of these two plays, founded on the story of Henry IV, is not inferior to the comic and farcical. The characters of Hotspur and Prince Henry are two of the most beautiful and dramatic, both in themselves and from contrast that ever were drawn. They are the essence of chivalry. We like Hotspur the best, upon the whole, perhaps because he was unfortunate. The characters of their fathers, Henry IV and old Northumberland, are kept up equally well. Henry naturally succeeds by his prudence and caution in keeping what he has got. Northumberland fails in his enterprise, from an excess of the same quality, and is caught in the web of his own cold, dilatory policy. Owen Glendauer is a masterly character. It is as bold and original as it is intelligible and thoroughly natural. The disputes between him and Hotspur are managed with infinite address and insight into nature. We cannot help pointing out here some very beautiful lines where Hotspur describes the fight between Glendauer and Mortimer. When on the gentle sovereign Seji Bank, in single opposition hand to hand, he did confound the best part of an hour in changing part of it with great Glendauer. Three times they breathed, and three times did they drink, upon agreement of swift sovereign's flood, who then, affrighted with their bloody looks, ran fearfully among the trembling reeds and hid his crisp head in the hollow bank, blood stained with these valiant combatants. The peculiarity and the excellence of Shakespeare's poetry is that it seems as if he made his imagination the handmaid of nature, and nature, the plaything of his imagination. He appears to have been all the characters, and in all the situations he describes. It is as if either he had had all their feelings or had lent them all his genius to express themselves. There cannot be stronger instances of this than Hotspur's rage when Henry IV forbids him to speak of Mortimer, his insensibility to all that his father and uncle urged to calm him, and his fine abstracted apostrophe to honor. By heaven, me thinks, it were an easy leap to pluck bright downer from the moon, etc. After all, notwithstanding the gallantry, generosity, good temper, and idle freaks of the madcap Prince of Wales, we should not have been sorry if Northumberland's force had come up in time to decide the fate of the battle at Shrewsbury. At least, we always heartily sympathize with Lady Percy's grief when she exclaims, Had my sweet Harry had but half their numbers, today might I, hanging on Hotspur's neck, have talked of Monmouth's grave. The truth is that we never could forgive the Prince's treatment of Falstaff, though perhaps Shakespeare knew what was best, according to the history, the nature of the times, and of the man. We speak only as dramatic critics. Whatever terror the French in those days might have of Henry V, yet, to the readers of poetry present, Falstaff is the better man of the two. We think of him in, quote, him oftener, end of Henry IV, in two parts. Chapter 17 Of Characters of Shakespeare's Plays by William Haslett. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Nemo, Henry V. Henry V is a very favorite monarch with the English nation. And he appears to have been also a favorite with Shakespeare, who labors hard to apologize for the actions of the king by showing us the character of the man as the king of good fellows. He scarcely deserves this honor. He was fond of war and low company. We know little else of him. He was careless, dissolute, and ambitious. Idle are doing mischief. In private he seemed to have no idea of the common decencies of life, which he subjected to a kind of regal license. In public affairs he seemed to have no idea of any rule of right or wrong. But brute force glossed over with a little religious hypocrisy, and arch-episcopal advice. His principles did not change with the situation and professions. His adventure on Gadsell was a prelude to the affair of Anjancourt, only a bloodless one. Falstaff was a puny prompter of violence and outrage, compared with a pious and politic archbishop of Canterbury, who gave the king carte blanche in a genealogical tree of his family to rob and murder in circles of latitude and longitude abroad, to save the possessions of the church at home. This appears in the speeches in Shakespeare, where the hidden motives that actuate princes and their advisers in war and policy are better laid open than in speeches from the throne or woolsack. Henry, because he did not know how to govern his own kingdom, determined to make war upon his neighbors. Because his own title to the crown was doubtful, he laid claim to that of France. Because he did not know how to exercise the enormous power which had just dropped into his hands to any one good purpose, he immediately undertook, a cheap and obvious resource of sovereignty, to do all the mischief he could. Even if absolute monarchs had the wit to find out objects of laudable ambition, they could only plume up their wills in adhering to the more sacred formula of the royal prerogative, the right divine of kings to govern wrong. Because will is only then triumphant when it is opposed to the will of others. Because the pride of power is only then shown, not when it consults the rights and interests of others, but when it insults and tramples on all justice and all humanity. Henry declares his resolution when France is his to bend it to his awe or break it all to pieces. A resolution worthy of a conqueror to destroy all that he cannot enslave, and what adds to the joke, he lays all the blame of the consequences of his ambition on those who will not submit tamely to his tyranny, such as the history of kingly power, from the beginning to the end of the world, with this difference, that the object of war formally, when the people adhered to their allegiance, was to depose kings, the object laterally, since the people swerved from their allegiance, has been to restore kings, and to make common cause against mankind. The object of our late invasion and conquest of France was to restore the legitimate monarch, the descendant of Hugh Capet to the throne. Henry V in his time made war on and deposed the descendant of this very Hugh Capet, on the plea that he was a usurper and illegitimate. What would the great modern catspaw of legitimacy and restore of divine right have said to the claim of Henry and the title of the descendants of Hugh Capet? Henry V it is true was a hero, a king of England, and the conqueror of the king of France. Yet we feel little love or admiration for him. He was a hero, that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives. He was a king of England, but not a constitutional one. And we only like kings according to the law. Lastly, he was a conqueror of the French king, and for this we dislike him less than if he had conquered the French people. How then do we like him? We like him in the play. There he is a very amiable monster, a very splendid pageant, as we like to gaze at a panther or young lion in their cages in the tower, and catch a pleasing horror from their glistening eyes, their velvet paws, and dreadless roar. So we take a very romantic, heroic, patriotic, and poetical delight in the boast and feats of our younger Harry, as they appear on the stage and are confined to lines of ten syllables, where no blood follows the stroke that wounds our ears, where no harvest bends beneath horses' hooves, no city flames, no little child is butchered, no dead men's bodies are found piled on heaps and festering the next morning in the orchestra. So much for the politics of this play, now for the poetry. Perhaps one of the most striking images in all Shakespeare is that given of war in the first lines of the prologue. O, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention, a kingdom first age, princes to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene. Then should the war like Harry, like himself, assume the port of Mars, and, at his heels, leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire crouch for employment. Rubens, if he had painted it, would not have improved upon the simile. The conversation between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Eli, relating to the sudden change in the manners of Henry V, is among the well-known beauties of Shakespeare. It is indeed admirable, both for strength and grace. It has sometimes occurred to us that Shakespeare, in describing the Reformation of the Prince, might have had an eye to himself, which is a wonder how his grace should glean it, since his addiction was to course's vein. His company's unlettered, rude and shallow, his hours filled up with riots, banquets, sports, and never noted in him any study, any retirement, any sequestration from open haunts and popularity. Eli. The strawberry grows underneath the nettle, and wholesome berries thrive and ripen best, enabred by fruit of baser quality, and so the Prince obscured his contemplation under the veil of wildness, which no doubt grew, like the summer grass, fastest by night, unseen yet crescent in his faculty. This, at least, is as probable an account of the progress of the poet's mind as we have met with in any of the essays on the learning of Shakespeare. Nothing can be better managed than the caution which the King gives the meddling Archbishop, not to advise him rashly to engage in the war with France, his scrupulous dread of the consequences of that advice, and his eager desire to hear and follow it. And God forbid, my dear and faithful Lord, that you should fashion rest or bow your reading, or nicely charge your understanding soul, with opening titles miscreant, whose right suits not to native colors, with a truth. For God doth know how many now in health shall drop their blood, an approbation of what your reverence shall incite us to. Therefore take heed how you impawn your person, how you awake our sleeping sword of war. We charge you in the name of God, take heed, for never two such kingdoms did contend without much fall of blood, whose guiltless drops are every one a woe, a sore complaint against him, whose wrong gives edge onto the swords that make such waste in brief mortality. Under this conjuration speak, my lord, for we will hear, note, and believe in heart that what you speak is in your conscious washed, as pure as sin with baptism. Another characteristic instance of the blindness of human nature to everything but its own interests is the complaint made by the king of the ill neighborhood of the Scott in attacking England when she was attacking France. For once the eagle England being in prey to her unguarded nest the weasel Scott comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs. It is worth observing that in all these plays, which give an admirable picture of the spirit of the good old times, the moral inference does not at all depend upon the nature of the actions, but on the dignity or meanness of the persons committing them. The eagle England has a right to be in prey, but the weasel Scott has none to come sneaking to her nest, which she has left to pounce upon others. Might was right without equivocation or disguise and that heroic and chivalrous age. The substitution of right for might even in theory is among the refinements and abuses of modern philosophy. A more beautiful rhetorical delineation of the effects of subordination in a Commonwealth can hardly be conceived than the following. For government, though high and low and lower, put into parts doth keep in one consent, congruing in a full and natural close like music. Therefore heaven doth divide the state of man in diverse functions, setting endeavor in continual motion to which is fixed as an aim or but obedience, for so work the honeybees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the art of order to a people kingdom. They have a king and officers of sorts, where some, like magistrates, correct at home, others, like merchants, venture trade abroad, others, like soldiers, armed in their stings, make boot upon the summer's velvet buds, which pillage they with meery march bring home to the tent royal of their emperor, who, busied in his majesty, surveys the singing mason, building roofs of gold, the civil citizens kneading up the honey, the poor mechanic porters crowding in their heavy burdens at his narrow gate, the sad eyed justice with his surly hum, delivering ore to executor's pale the lazy yawning drone. I disinfer that many things, having full reference to one consent, may work contrariously, as many arrows loosed several ways fly to one mark, as many several ways meet in one town, as many fresh streams meet in one salt sea, as many lines close in the dial center, so may a thousand actions once a foot, and in one purpose, and be all well born without defeat. Henry V is but one of Shakespeare's second rate plays, yet by quoting passages like this, from his second rate plays alone, we might make a volume rich with his praise, as is the oozy bottom of this sea with sunken rack and sumless treasuries. Of this sort are the king's remonstrance to Scroop Gray in Cambridge, on the detection of their treason, his address to the soldiers at the Siege of Harfleur, and the still finer one before the battle of Agincourt, the description of the night before the battle, and the reflections on ceremony put into the mouth of the king. O hard condition, twin born with greatness, subjected to the breath of every fool, whose sense no more can feel but his own ringing. What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect, that private men enjoy? And what have kings, that privates have not too, save ceremony? Save general ceremony. In what art thou, thou idle ceremony? What kind of god art thou, that suffereth more of mortal griefs than do thy worshipers? What are thy rents? What are thy comings in? O ceremony, show me but thy worth. What is thy soul, O adoration? Art thou ought else but place, degree, and form, creating awe in fear in other men? Wherein thou art less happy, being feared, than they in fearing? What drinkest thou off, instead of homage sweet, but poisoned flattery? O be sick, great greatness, and bid thy ceremony give thee cure. Thinkest thou, the fiery fever will go out, with titles blown from adulation? Will it give place to flexure and lobe bending? Can'tst thou, when thou commandest the beggar's knee, command the health of it? No. Thou proud dream, that play so subtly with a king's repose? I am a king, that find thee and I know, tis not the balm, the scepter, and the ball, the sword, the mace, the crown imperial, the enter-tissued robe of golden pearl, the farced title running for the king, the throny sits on, nor the tide of pomp, that beats upon the high shore of this world? No. Not all these. Thrice gorgeous ceremony. Not all these, laid in bed majestical, can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, who, with a body filled and vacant mine, gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread, never sees horrid night the child of hell. But, like a lackey, from rise to set, sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night sleeps in Elysium, next day after dawn doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse, and follows so the ever-running year with profitable labor to his grave. And, but for ceremony such a wretch, winding up days with toil and nights with sleep, has the forehand advantage of a king. The slave, a member of the country's peace, enjoys it, but in gross brain little watts, what watch the king keeps to maintain the peace, whose hours the peasant best advantages. Most of these passages are well known. There is one, which we do not remember to have seen noticed, and yet it is no wit inferior to the rest in heroic beauty. It is the account of the deaths of York and Suffolk. Exeter. The Duke of York commends him to your Majesty. King Henry. Livesey good uncle, thrice within this hour, I saw him down, thrice up again, and fighting, from helmet to the spur all bloody was. Exeter. In which array brave soldier doth he lie, larding the plain, and by his bloody side, York fellow to his honor-owning wounds, the noble earl of Suffolk also lies. Suffolk first died, and York, all haggled ore, comes to him, wherein gore he lay and steeped, and takes him by the beard, kisses the gashes that bloodily did yawn upon his face, and cries aloud, Tarry, dear cousin Suffolk, my soul shall thine keep company to heaven. Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly abreast, as in this glorious and well-foughtened field we kept together in our chivalry. Upon these words I came, and cheered him up. He smiled me in the face, wrought me his hand, and, with a feeble gripe, says, Dear my lord, commend my service to my sovereign. So did he turn, and over Suffolk's neck he threw his wounded arm and kissed his lips, and so espoused to death with blood he sealed at testament of noble ending love. But we must have done with splendid quotations. Behavior of the king and the difficult and doubtful circumstances in which he is placed is as patient and modest as it is spirited lofty in his prosperous fortune. The character of the French nobles is also very admirably depicted, and the doffin's praise of his horse shows the vanity of that class of persons in a very striking point of view. Shakespeare always accompanies a foolish prince with a satirical courtierre, as we see in this instance. The comic parts of Henry V are very inferior to those of Henry IV. Falstaff is dead, and without him, Pistol, Nymn, and Bardolf are satellites without a son. Fluellen the Welshman is the most entertaining character in the piece. He is good-natured, brave, collarque, and pedantic. His parallel between Alexander and Harry of Monmouth and his desire to have some disputations with Captain McMorris on the discipline of the Roman Wars in the heat of the battle are never to be forgotten. His treatment of Pistol is as good as Pistol's treatment of his French prisoner. There are two other remarkable prose passages in this play. The conversation of Henry in disguise with the three sentinels on the duties of a soldier and his courtship of Catherine in broken French. We like them both exceedingly, though the first savers perhaps too much of the king, and the last too little of the lover. End of Henry V Chapter 18 of Characters of Shakespeare's Plays by William Haslett This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Nemo Henry VI in three parts. During the time of the Civil Wars of York and Lancaster, England was a perfect bear garden, and Shakespeare has given us a very lively picture of the scene. The three parts of Henry VI convey a picture of very little else and are inferior to the other historical plays. They have brilliant passages, but the general groundwork is comparatively poor and meagre, the style flat and unraised. There are few lines like the following. Glory is like a circle in the water, which never ceaseth to enlarge itself till by broad spreading it disperses to naught. The first part relates to the wars in France after the death of Henry V and the story of the maid of Orleans. She is here almost escurvelly treated as in Voltaire's Pucelle. Talbot is a very magnificent sketch. There is something as formidable in this portrait of him as there would be in a monumental figure of him or in the sight of the armor which he wore. The scene in which he visits the Countess of Auvergne who seeks to entrap him is a very spirited one and his description of his own treatment while a prisoner to the French not less remarkable. Salisbury Yet tells thou not how thou wert entertained Talbot, with scoffs and scorns and contemptualist taunts, in open marketplace produced they me to be a public spectacle to all. Here, said they, is the terror of the French, the scarecrow that affrights our children so. Then broke I from the officers that led me and with my nails dig stones out of the ground to hurl at the beholders of my shame. My grizzly countenance made others fly, non-durse come near for fear of sudden death. In iron walls they deemed to me not secure. So great fear my name amongst them spread that they supposed I could rend bars of steel and spurn in pieces post of adamant. Wherefore, a guard of chosen shot I had, they walked about me every minute while, and if I did but stir out of my bed ready they were to shoot me to the heart. The second part relates chiefly to the contest between the nobles during the minority of Henry and the death of Gloucester, the good Duke Humphrey. The character of Cardinal Bufort is the most prominent in the group. The count of his death is one of our author's masterpieces. So is the speech of Gloucester to the nobles on the loss of the provinces of France by the king's marriage with Margaret de Vangeau. The pretensions and growing ambition of the Duke of York, the father of Richard III, are also very ably developed. Among the episodes, the tragic comedy of Jack Cade and the detection of the imposter Simcox are truly edifying. The third part describes Henry's loss of his crown. His death takes place in the last act, which is usually thrust into the common acting play over to the third. The character of Gloucester, afterwards King Richard, is here very powerfully commenced, and his dangerous designs and long-reaching ambition are fully described in a soliloquy in the third act, beginning. I, Edward, will use women honorably. Henry VI is drawn as distinctly as his high-spirited queen, and notwithstanding the very mean figure which Henry makes as a king, we still feel more respect for him than for his wife. We have already observed that Shakespeare was scarcely more remarkable for the force and marked contrast of his characters than for the truth and subtlety which he has distinguished those which approach the nears to each other. For instance, the soul of Othello is hardly more distinct from that of Iago than that of Desdemona is shown to be from Emilius. The ambition of Macbeth is as distinct from the ambition of her to the third, as it is from the meekness of Duncan. The real madness of Lear is as different from the faint madness of Edgar as from the babbling of the fool, Footnote. There is another instance of the name distinction in Hamlet and Ophelia. Hamlet's pretended madness would make a very good real madness in any other author. End, Footnote. The contrast between wit and folly in Falstaff and shallow is not more characteristic, though more obvious, than the gradations of folly, loquaciousness or reserved in shallow and silence. And again, the gallantry of Prince Henry is as little confounded with that of Hotspur as with a cowardice of Falstaff, or as the sensual and philosophic cowardice of the night is with the pitiful and cringing cowardice of Paroles. All these several personages were as different in Shakespeare as they would have been in themselves. His imagination borrowed from the life in every circumstance. Object, motive, passion, operated there as it would in reality and produced a world of men and women as distinct, as true and as various, is those that exist in nature. The peculiar property of Shakespeare's imagination was this truth. Accompanied with the unconsciousness of nature, indeed, imagination to be perfect must be unconscious, at least in production, for nature is so. We shall attempt one example more in the Characters of Richard II and Henry VI. The Characters and situations of both these persons were so nearly alike that they would have been completely confounded by a commonplace poet. Yet they are kept quite distinct in Shakespeare. Both were kings and both unfortunate. Both lost their crowns owing to their mismanagement in inviscility, the one from a thoughtless willful abuse of power, the other from an indifference to it. The manner in which they bear their misfortunes corresponds exactly to the causes which led to them. The one is always lamenting the loss of his power, which he is not the spirit to regain. The other seems only to regret that he had ever been king and is glad to be rid of the power with the trouble. The effeminacy of the one is that of a vulturey, proud, revengeful, impatient of contradiction, and inconsolable in his misfortunes. The effeminacy of the other is that of an indolent, good-natured mind, naturally averse to the turmoil of ambition in the cares of greatness, and who wishes to pass his time in monkish indolence and contemplation. Richard bewails the loss of the kingly power only as it was the means of gratifying his pride and luxury. Henry regards it only as a means of doing right, and is less desirous of the advantages to be derived from possessing it than afraid of exercising it wrong. And nighting a young soldier, he gives him ghostly advice. Edward Plantagenet arise a night and learn this lesson. Draw thy sword and write. Richard II, in the first speeches of the play, portrays his real character. In the first alarm of his pride, unhearing a bow-and-brook's rebellion, before his presumption has met with any check, he exclaims, Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords, this earth shall have a feeling, and these stones prove armed soldiers, ere her native king shall falter under proud rebellious arms. Not all the water in the rough, rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king. The breath of worldly man cannot depose the deputy elected by the lord. For every man the bow-and-brook hath pressed to lift sharp steel against our golden crown, heaven for his Richard hath in heavenly pay a glorious angel. Then, if angels fight, weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right. Yet, notwithstanding this royal confession of faith, on the very first news of actual disaster, all his conceit of himself, as the peculiar favorite of Providence, vanishes into error. But now the blood of twenty thousand men did triumph in my face, and they are fled. All souls that will be safe fly from my side, for time hath settled blot upon my pride. Immediately after, however, recollecting that cheap defense of the divinity of kings, which is to be found in opinion, he is for arming his name against his enemies. Awake, thou coward majesty, thou sleepest! This is not the king's name forty thousand names. Arm, arm my name, a puny subject strikes at thy great glory. King Henry does not make any such papering resistance to the loss of his crown, but lets it slip from off his head as a weight, which he is neither able nor willing to bear. Stands quietly by to see the issue of the contest for his kingdom, as if it were a game at Pushpin, and is pleased when the odds prove against him. When Richard first hears of the death of his favorites, Bushy, Bagot, and the rest, he indignantly rejects all idea of any further efforts, and only indulges in the extravagant impatience of his grief and his despair, in that fine speech which has been so often quoted. Amuril, where's the duke my father with his power? King Richard, no matter where, of comfort no man speak, let's talk of graves of worms and epitaphs, make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes write sorrow in the bosom of the earth. Let's choose executors, and talk of wills, and yet not so, for what can we bequeath save our deposed bodies to the ground? Our lands, our lives, and all our bowling-brooks, and nothing can we call our own but death, and that small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our bones. For heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of kings, how some have been deposed, some slain in war, some haunted by the ghost they dispossessed, some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed, all murdered. For within the holy crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king keeps death his court, and there the antics sits scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, allowing him a breath, a little seen, to monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks, infusing him with self and vain conceit. As if this flesh, which walls about our life were brass impregnable and humored thus, comes at the last, and with a little pin bores through his castle wall, and farewell king. Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood, or solemn reverence, throw away respect, tradition, form, and ceremonious duty, for you have but mistook me all this while. I live on bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends, like you, subjective thus, how can you say to me, I am king? There is as little sincerity afterwards in his affected resignation to his fate, as there is fortitude in this exaggerated picture of his misfortunes before they have happened. When Northumberland comes back with a message from Bollingbroke, he explains, anticipating the result. What must the king do now? Must he submit? The king shall do it. Must he be deposed? The king shall be contented. Must he lose the name of king? Oh, God's name, let it go! I'll give my jewels for a set of beads, my gorgeous palace for a hermitage, my gay apparel for an almsman's gown, my figured goblets for a dish of wood, my scepter for a palmer's walking staff, my subjects for a pair of carved saints, and my large kingdom for a little grave, a little, little grave and an obscure grave. How differently is all this expressed in King Henry's soliloquy during the battle with Edward's party? This battle fares light to the morning's war, when dying clouds contend with growing light. What time the shepherd blowing of his nails can either call it perfect day or night? Here on this mole hill will I sit me down, to whom God will there be victory. There be the victory, for Margaret, my queen, and Clifford, too, have chid me from the battle, swearing both they prosper best of all when I am thence. What I were dead, if God's good will were so, for what is in this world but grief and woe? Oh, God, me thinks that we're a happy life, to be no better than a homely swain, to sit upon the hills I do now, to carve out dials quaintly, point by point, thereby to see the minutes how they run. How many make the hour full complete? How many hours bring about the day? How many days will finish up the year? How many years a mortal man may live? When this is known, then to divide the times, so many hours must I tend my flock, so many hours must I take my rest, so many hours must I contemplate, so many hours must I sport myself. So many days my youths have been with young, so many weeks are the poor fools will yin, so many months are I shall shear the fleece, so many minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years passed over, to the end they were created, would bring white hairs unto a quiet brave. Ah, what a life were this, how sweet, how lovely, gives not the Hawthorne wish a sweeter shade to shepherds looking on their silly sheep, than doth a rich embroidered canopy to kings that fear their subjects treachery? Oh yes, it doth, a thousandfold it doth, and to conclude the shepherd's homely curds, his cold, thin drink out of his little leather bottle, his wanted sleep under a fresh tree shade, all which secure and sweetly he enjoys, as far beyond a prince's delicates, his vian sparkling in a golden cup, his body couched in a curious bed, when care, mistrust, and treasons wait on him. This is a true and beautiful description of a naturally quiet and contented disposition, and, not like the former, the splonetic effusion of disappointed ambition. In the last scene of Richard II, his despair lends him courage, he beats the keeper, slays two of his assassins, and dies with implications in his mouth against Sir Pierce Exton, who has staggered his royal person. Henry, when he is seized by the dear Steelers, only reads the memorial lecture on the duty of allegiance and the sanctity of an oath, and when stabbed by Gloucester in the tower, reproaches him with his crimes, but pardons him his own death. End of Henry VI