 Introduction of Characters of Shakespeare's Plays This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Nemo Characters of Shakespeare's Plays by William Haslett With an introduction by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch Introduction The book here, included among the world's classics, made its first appearance as an octavo volume of 24 plus 352 pages with the title page Characters of Shakespeare's Plays by William Haslett London, printed by C. H. Raynell, 21 Piccadilly, 1817 William Haslett, 1778 to 1830, came of an Irish Protestant stock and of a branch of it transplanted in the reign of George I from the county of Antrim to Dipperary. His father migrated at 19 to the University of Glasgow where he was contemporary with Adam Smith, graduated in 1761 or thereabouts, the principals of the Unitarians joined their ministry and crossed over to England, being successively pastor at Wisbeck in Cambridgeshire at Marshfield in Gloucestershire and at Maidstone. At Wisbeck he married Grace Loftus, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer. Of the many children granted to them, but three survived infancy. William, the youngest of these, was born in Mitre Lane, Maidstone, on April 10, 1778. From Maidstone the family moved in 1780 to Bandon County Cork and from Bandon in 1783 to America where Mr. Haslett preached before the new Assembly of the State's General of New Jersey lectured at Philadelphia on the evidences of Christianity and founded the first Unitarian Church of Boston and declined a proffered diploma of DD in 1786-87. He returned to England and took up his bode at Wem in Shropshire. His elder son John was now old enough to choose a vocation and chose that of a miniature painter. The second child Peggy had begun to paint also, amateurishly in oils. William, aged eight, a child out of whose recollection all memories of Bandon and of America, save the taste of barberries, soon faded, took his education at home and at a local school. His father designed him for the Unitarian Ministry. The above dry recital contains a number of facts not to be overlooked as predisposing causes in young Haslett's latter career, as that he was Irish by blood, intellectual by geniture, born into descent and a minority of descent, taught at home to value the things of the mind, an early childhood, a nomad, and later childhood, privately educated. A process which, whatever its merits, is apt to develop the freak as against the citizen, the eccentric and lopsided as against what is proportionate and disciplined. Young Haslett's cleverness and his passion for individual liberty were alike precocious. In 1791, at the age of thirteen, he composed and published in the Shrewsbury Chronicle a letter of protest against the culminators of Dr. Priestly. A performance which, for the gravity of its thought as for the balance of its expression, would do credit to ninety-nine grown men in a hundred. At fifteen, his father, designing that he should enter the ministry, he proceeded to the Unitarian College, Hackney, where his master, Mr. Corey, found him rather backward in many of the ordinary points of learning and, in general, of a dry, intractable understanding. The truth being that the lad had set his heart against the ministry, aspiring rather to be a philosopher, in particular a political philosopher. At fourteen he had conceived, in consequence of a dispute one day after coming out of meeting between my father and an old lady of the congregation, respecting the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts and the limits of a religious toleration. The germ of his project for a new theory of civil and criminal legislation published in his mature years, 1828, but drafted and scribbled upon constantly in these days to the neglect of his theological studies, his father, hearing of the project, forbade him to pursue it. Thus four or five years at the Unitarian College were wasted, or at least had been spent without a parent profit. And in 1798, young Haslett, aged close upon twenty, unsettled in his plans as in his prospects, was at home again, and, as the saying is, at a loose end. When, of a sudden, his life found its spiritual apocalypse, it came with the descent of Samuel Taylor Colridge upon Shrewsbury to take over the charge of a Unitarian congregation there. He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to preach, and Mr. Rowe, the abdicating minister, who himself went down to the coach in a state of anxiety and expectation to look for the arrival of his successor, could find no one at all answering the description, but a round-faced man in his short black coat, like a shooting jacket, which hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who seemed to be talking at a great rate to his fellow passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarce return to give an account of his disappointment when the round-faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject by beginning to talk. He did not cease while he stayed, nor has he since. Of his meeting with Colridge and of the soul's awakening that followed, Haslett has left an account, my first acquaintance with poets, that will fascinate so long as English prose is read. Somehow that period, the time was just after the French Revolution, was not a time when nothing was given for nothing. The mind opened and a softness might be perceived coming over the heart of individuals beneath, the scales that fence our self-interest. As Wordsworth wrote, Bliss was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. It was in January 1798 that I was one morning before daylight to walk ten miles in the mud to hear the celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one in the winter of 1798. Il y est de ces pressions qu'il n'y a tant, ni les secondes sens peuvent effacer. Du je vivre des ces clientés, les deux thèmes d'imagines n'est plus renettré pour moi, ni s'effacer jamais dans mes mémoires. When I got there, the organ was playing the hundredth song, and when it was done, Mr Colridge rose and gave out his text, and he went up into the mountain to pray, himself alone. As he gave out this text, his voice rose like a stream of distilled perfumes, and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated and solemn silence through the universe. The preacher then launched into a subject like an eagle dallying with the wind. Colridge visited Wem, walked and talked with young Haslet, and wound up by inviting the disciple to visit him at Nether Stowley in Quantox. Haslet went, made acquaintance with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and was drawn more deeply under the spell. In later years, as the younger man grew cantankerous and the elder declined, through opium into a battered serif, there was an estrangement, but Haslet never forgot his obligation. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied. My heart, shut up in the prison house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to. But that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language that expresses itself. I owe to Colridge. Colridge, sympathizing with the young man's taste for philosophy and abetting it, encouraged him to work upon a treatise which saw the light in 1805. An essay on the principles of human action, being an argument in favor of the natural disinterestedness of the human mind. Meantime, however, the ministry having been renounced, the question of a vocation became more and more urgent, and after long indecision, Haslet packed his portmanteau for London, resolved to learn painting under his brother John, who had begun to do prosperously. John taught him some rudiments and packed him off to Paris, where he studied for some four months in the Louvre, and learned to idolize Bonaparte. This sojourn in Paris, writes his grandson and biographer, was one long bourgeois to him. His illusions to it are constant. He returned to England in 1803, with formed taste and predilections, very few of which he afterwards modified, much less forsook. We find him making a tour as a portrait painter through the north of England, where, as was to be expected, he attempted a portrait of Wordsworth among others. At his desire, says Wordsworth, I sat to him, but as he did not satisfy himself or my friends, the unfinished work was destroyed. He was more successful with Charles Lamb, whom he painted for a whim, in the dress of a Venetian senator. As a friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, he had inevitably made acquaintance with the Lamb's. He first met Lamb at one of the Godwin's strange evening parties, and the two became intimate friends and fellow theatre-goers. Haslitt's touching difficult temper suspended this intimacy in later years, though to the last Lamb regarded him as one of the finest and wisest spirits breathing. But for a while it was unclouded. At the Lamb's, moreover, Haslitt made acquaintance with a doctor Stoddart, owner of some property that went to Slough near Salisbury, and his sister Sarah, a lady wearing past her first youth, but yet addicted to keeping a number of bow to her string. Haslitt attracted to her from the first. He made a gloomy lover, and his subsequent performances in that part were unedifying. For some years played walking gentleman behind the leading suitors, with whom is Stoddart from time to time diversified her comedy. But Mary Lamb was on his side. The rivals on one excuse or another went their ways or were dismissed. And on May 1, 1808, the marriage took place at St. Andrew's Church, Holborn. Lamb attended, foreboding little happiness to the couple from his knowledge of their temperaments. Seven years after, August 9, 1815, he wrote to Southie, I was at Haslitt's marriage, and had liked to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. The marriage was not a happy one. Portrait painting had been abandoned long before this. The essay on the Principles of Human Action, 1805, had fallen, as the saying is, still born from the press. Free Thoughts and Public Affairs, 1806, had earned for the author many enemies but few readers. In a treatise attacking Malthus's theory of population, 1807, had allured the public as little. A piece of hack work, the eloquence of the British Senate, also belonged to 1807. A new and improved grammar of the English tongue for the use of schools, to 1810. The nutriment to be derived from these works again was not of the sort that replenishes the family table. At an 1812, Haslitt left Winterslow, where he had been quarreling with his brother-in-law, settled in London in 19 York Street, Westminster, once the home of John Milton, and applied himself strenuously to lecturing and journalism. His lectures on the English philosophers were delivered at the Russell Institution, his most notable journalistic work on politics and the drama was done for the Morning Chronicle, then edited by Mr. Perry. From an obituary notice of Haslitt contributed many years later, October 1830, to an old magazine I called the following. He obtained an introduction about 1809, 1810, to the late Mr. Perry of the Morning Chronicle, by whom he was engaged to report parliamentary debates, write original articles, etc. He also furnished a number of theatrical articles on the acting of King. As a political writer he was apt to be too violent, though in general he was not a man of violent temper. He was also apt to conceive strong and rooted prejudices against individuals on very slight grounds. But he was a good-hearted man. Private circumstances, as it is said, contributed to sour his temper, and to produce a peculiar excitement which too frequently held its sway over him. Mr. Haslitt and Mr. Perry did not agree. Upon one occasion, to the great annoyance of some of his colleagues, he preferred his wine with a few friends to taking his share and reporting an important discussion in the House of Commons. Added to this, he either did not understand the art of reporting, or would not take the trouble to master it. His original articles required to be carefully looked after to weed them of strong expression. Haslitt's reputation grew notwithstanding. In 1814, Jeffrey enlisted him to write for the Edinburgh Review, and in 1815 he began to contribute to Lee Hunt's paper, The Examiner. In February 1816 he reviewed Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Literature for the Edinburgh, and this would seem to have started him on his characters of Shakespeare's plays. Throughout 1816 he wrote at it sedulously. The manuscript, when completed, was accepted by Mr. C. H. Rayno of 21 Piccadilly, the head of a printing establishment of old and high standing. And it was agreed that a hundred pounds should be paid to the author for the entire copyright. The volume was published by Mr. Hunter of St. Paul's Churchyard, and the author was gratified by the prompt insertion of a complimentary notice in the Edinburgh Review. The whole edition went off in six weeks, and yet it was a half-guinea book. The reader who comes to it through this introduction will note two points to qualify his appreciation of the book as a specimen of Haslett's critical writing, and a third that helps to account for its fortune in 1817. It was the work of a man in his 38th year, and to that extent has maturity. But it was also his first serious essay, after many false starts, in an art and in a style which, later on, he brilliantly mastered. The subject is most pleasantly handled and with an infectious enthusiasm. The reader feels all the while that his sympathy with Shakespeare is being stimulated and his understanding promoted. But it scarcely yields either the light or the music which Haslett communicates in his latter and more famous essays. For the third point, Haslett had made enemies nor had ever been cautious of making them, and these enemies were now the upper dog. Indeed, they always had been, but the fall of Napoleon, which almost broke his heart, had set them in full cry, and they were not to lament in their triumph. It is not easy, even on the evidence before us, to realize that a number of the finest spirits in this country, nursed in the hopes of the French Revolution, kept their admiration of Napoleon, the hammer of old bad monarchies, down to the end and beyond it. That Napier, for example, historian of the war in the peninsula and his gallant to soldiers ever fought under Wellington, when, late in his life, as he lay on his sofa tortured by an old wound, news was brought him of Napoleon's death, burst into a storm of weeping that would not be controlled. On Haslett, bound up heart and soul in what he regarded as the cause of the French and European liberty and enlightenment, Waterloo, the fall of the Emperor, the restoration of the Bourbons, fell as blows almost stupefying, and his indignant temper charged heaven with them as wrongs not only public but personal to himself. In the writing of the characters he had found a partial drug for despair, but his enemies, as soon as might be, took hold of the anodyne, like the Bourbons, they had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. The quarterly review moved, for a quarterly, with something like agility. A second edition of the book had been prepared and was selling briskly when this review launched one of its diatribes against the work and its author. Taylor and Hesse, the booksellers, told him subsequently that they had sold nearly two editions in about three months, but after the quarterly review of them came out they never sold another copy. My book, he said, sold well. The first edition had gone off in six weeks, till that review came out. I had just prepared a second edition, such was called for, but then the quarterly told the public that I was a fool and a dunce and more that I was an evil disposed person, and the public, supposing Gifford to know best, confessed that it had been a great ass to be pleased where it ought not to be, then the sale completely stopped. The review, when examined, has seemed to be a smart essay into traction, with its arguments ad invidium very deftly inserted. But as a piece of criticism it misses even such points as might fairly have been made against the book, as, for example, that it harps too monotonously upon the tense string of enthusiasm. Hazlett could not have applied to this work the motto, for I am nothing if not critical, which he chose for his view of the English stage in 1818, the characters being anything but critical in the sense they're connoted. Geoffrey noted this in the forefront of a sympathetic article in the Edinburgh. It is in truth, rather, an uncomium on Shakespeare than a commentary or a critique of him, and it is written more to show extraordinary love than extraordinary knowledge of his productions. The author is not merely an admirer of our great dramatist, but an idolter of him, and openly professes his idol-tree. We have ourselves too great a learning to the same superstition to blame him very much for his error, and though we think, of course, that our own admiration is on the whole more discriminating and judicious, there are not many points on which, especially after reading his eloquent exposition of them, we should be much inclined to disagree with him. The book, as we have already intimated, is written less to tell the reader what Mr. H. knows about Shakespeare or his writings than what he feels about them, and why he feels so, and thinks that all who profess to love poetry should feel so likewise. He seems pretty generally, indeed, in a state of happy intoxication, and has borrowed from his great original not indeed the force of brilliancy of his fancy, but something of its playfulness, and a large share of his apparent joyousness and self-indulgence in its exercise. It is evidently a great pleasure to him to be fully possessed with the beauties of his author, and to follow the impulse of his unrestrained eagerness to impress them upon his readers. Upon this, Hazlet, no doubt, would have commented, Well, and why not? I choose to understand drama through my feelings. To surrender to great art was for him, and definitely a part of the critic's function. A genuine criticism should, as I take it, repeat the colors, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work. This contention, for which Hazlet fought all his life and fought brilliantly, is familiar to us by this time as the gauge flung to diadactic criticism, by the Impressionist and in our day in the generation just closed or closing, with a Walter Pater or a Jules Limitère for Challenger. The betting has run on the Impressionists, but in 1817, Hazlet had all the odds against him when he stood up and accused the great Dr. Johnson of having made criticism a kind of Procrusty's bed of genius, where he might cut down imagination to matter fact, regulate the passions according to reason, and translate the whole into logical diagrams and rhetorical declamation. Thus he says as Shakespeare's characters, in contradiction to what Pope had observed and what everyone else feels, that each character is a species instead of being an individual. He, in fact, found the general species or didactic form in Shakespeare's characters, which was all he sought or cared for. He did not find the individual traits or the dramatic distinctions, which Shakespeare has engrafted on this general nature, because he felt no interest in them. Nothing is easier to prove than that in this world nobody ever invented anything. So it may be proved that, Johnson, having written Great Thoughts Are Always General, Blake had countered him by affirming, long before Hazlet, that to generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the great distinction of merit. Even as it may be demonstrable that Charles Lamb in his charming personal chat about the Elizabethan dramatists and his predilections among them was already putting into practice what he did not trouble to theorize. But when it comes to setting out the theory, grasping the worth of the principle, stating it and fighting for it, I think Hazlet may fairly claim first share in the credit. He did not, when he wrote the following pages, know very much even about his subject, as his biographer says. My grandfather came to town with very little book knowledge. He had a fair stock of ideas. One of the volumes, which formed the furniture of a gentleman's library, he was egregiously ignorant. Mr. Hazlet's resources were emphatically internal. From his own mind he drew sufficient for himself. Now while it may be argued with plausibility and even with truth that the first qualification of a critic, at any rate of a critic of poetry is, as Geoffrey puts the antithesis, to feel rather than to know. While to be delicately sensitive and sympathetic counts more than to be well informed. Nevertheless, learning remains respectable. He, who can assimilate it without pedantry, which is another word for intellectual indigestion, actually improves and refines his feelings while enlarging their scope and at the same time enlarging his resources of comparison and in illustration. Hazlet, who is something like a genius for a fallacious, aposite quotation, and steadily bettered it as he grew older, would certainly have said yes to this. At all events, learning impresses, carries weight, and therefore it has always seemed to me that he showed small tack, if some modesty, by heaping whole pages of schlegel into his own preface. For schlegel was not only a learned critic but a great one, and this mass of him, cast with seeming carelessness just here into the scales, does give the reader, as with a jerk, the sensation that Hazlet has of his rashness, invited that which suddenly throws him up in the air to kick the beam, but he is provoked to comparison which exhibits his own performance as clever but flimsy. Nor is this impression removed by his admirer, the late Mr. Ireland, who claims for the characters that, although it professes to be dramatic criticism, it is in reality a discourse on the philosophy of life and human nature, more suggestive than many approved treatises expressly devoted to that subject. Well, for the second half of this pronouncement, you see my friend, writes Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, there is nothing so ridiculous that it has not at some time been said by some philosopher. But for the first part, while a priori Mr. Ireland ought to be right, since Hazlet, as we have seen, came to literary criticism by the road of philosophical writing. I confess to finding very little philosophy in this book. Over and above the gusto of the writing, which is infectious enough in the music of certain passages in which we foretaste the mastery prose of Hazlet's later essays, I find in the book three merits which, as I study it, more and more efface the first impression of flimsiness. One, to begin with, Hazlet had hold of the right end of the stick. He really understood that Shakespeare was a dramatic craftsman, studied him as such, worshiped him for his incomparable skill in doing what he tried, all his life, and all the time to do. In these days, much merit must be allowed to a Shakespearean critic who takes his author steadily as a dramatist, and not as a philosopher, or a propagandist, or a lawyer's clerk, or a disappointed lover, or for his acquaintance with botany, politics, ciphers, Christian science, any of the thousand and one things that with arrival degrees of intrinsic importance agree in being for Shakespeare, Nihil Adrem. Two, secondly, Hazlet always treats Shakespeare as, in my opinion, he deserves to be treated, that is, absolutely, and as patron and not compare, among the Elizabethans. I harbor an ungracious doubt that he may have done so in 1816 and 1817, for the simple and sufficient reason that he had less than a bowing acquaintance with the other Elizabethan dramatist, but he made their acquaintance a due course and discussed them, yet never, so far as I recall, committed the error of ranking them alongside Shakespeare. With all love for the memory of Lamb, and with all respect for the memory of Swinburne, I hold that these two of their generations, both soaked in enjoyment of the Elizabethan style and enjoyment derivative from Shakespeare, did some disservice to criticism by classing them with him in the light they borrow, one as truly he differs from them in kind and beyond any reach of degrees. One can no more estimate Shakespeare's genius in comparison with this, that, or the other mans of the 16th century, then miltons in comparison with any ones of the 17th. Some few men are absolute and can only be judged absolutely. Three, for the third merit, if the characters be considered historically, what seems flimsy in them is often a promise of what has since been substantiated, what seems light and almost juvenile in the composition of this man, aged 39, gives the scent on which nowadays the main pack of students is pursuing. No one not a fool can read Johnson's notes on Shakespeare without respect or fail to turn to them again with an increased trust in his common sense. And no one not a fool can read Haslett without an equal sense that he has the root of the matter, or of the spirit which is the matter. Arthur Quillar Couch. 1916 End of Introduction. Chapter 1 of Characters of Shakespeare's Plays by William Haslett This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Nemo. Preface To Charles Lamb Esquire. This volume is inscribed as a mark of old friendship and lasting esteem by the author. It is observed by Mr. Pope that, if ever any author deserved the name of an original, it was Shakespeare. Homer himself drew not his art so immediately from the fountains of nature. It proceeded through Egyptian strainers and channels and came to him not without some tincture of the learning or some cast of the models of those before him. The poetry of Shakespeare was inspiration indeed, is not so much an imitator as an instrument of nature, and is not so just to say that he speaks from her as that she speaks through him. His characters are so much nature herself that it is a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as copies of her. Those of other poets have a constant resemblance which shows that they receive them from one another and were multipliers of the same image. Each picture, like a mock rainbow, is but the reflection of a reflection. But every single character in Shakespeare is as much an individual as those in life itself. It is as impossible to find any two alike than such as from their relation or affinity, in any respect, appear most to be twins. Will, upon comparison, be found remarkably distinct. To this life and variety of character we must add the wonderful preservation of it, which is such throughout his plays that had all the speeches been printed without the very names of the persons, I believe one might have applied them with certainty to every speaker. The object of the volume here offered to the public is to illustrate these remarks in a more particular manner by a reference to each play. A gentleman of the name of Mason, the author of a treatise on ornamental gardening, not Mason the poet, began a work of a similar kind about 40 years ago, but he only lived to finish a parallel between the characters of Macbeth and Richard III, which is an exceedingly ingenious piece of analytical criticism. Richardson's essays include but a few of Shakespeare's principal characters. The only work which seemed to supersede the necessity of an attempt, like the present, which legals very admirable lectures on the drama, which give by far the best account of the plays of Shakespeare that is hitherto appeared. The only circumstances in which it was thought not impossible to improve on the manner in which the German critic has executed this part of his design were in avoiding an appearance of mysticism in his style, not very attractive to the English reader, and in bringing illustrations from particular passages of the plays themselves, of which Schlegel's work from the extensiveness of his plan did not admit. We will at the same time confess that some little jealousy of the character of the national understanding was not without its share in producing the following undertaking, for we were peaked that it should be reserved for a foreign critic to give reasons for the faith which we English have in Shakespeare. Certainly no writer among ourselves has shown either the same enthusiastic admiration of his genius or the same philosophical acuteness in pointing out his characteristic excellences. As we are pretty well exhausted all we had to say upon this subject in the body of the work, we shall hear transcribe Schlegel's general account of Shakespeare, which is in the following words. Never, perhaps, was there so comprehensive a talent for the delineation of characters Shakespeare's, but not only grasped the diversities of rank, sex, and age down to the dawnings of infancy, not only do the king and the beggar, the hero in the pickpocket, the sage and the idiot, speak and act with equal truth, not only does he transport himself to distant ages and foreign nations in portray in the most accurate manner, with only a few apparent violations of costume the spirit of the ancient Romans, of the French in their wars with the English, of the English themselves during a great part of their history, of the southern Europeans and the serious part of many comedies, the cultivated society of that time and the former rude and barber state of the north. His human characters have not only such depth and precision that they cannot be arranged under classes and are inexhaustible even in conception. Now, this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gate of the magical world of spirits, calls up the midnight ghost, exhibits before us his witches, admits their unhallowed mysteries, peoples the air with sportive theories and selves, and these beings, existing only in imagination, possess such truth and consistency that even when deformed monsters like Caliban he extorts the conviction that if there should be such beings they would so conduct themselves. In a word, as he carries with him the most fruitful and daring fancy into the kingdom of nature, on the other hand he carries nature into the regions of fancy, lying beyond the confines of reality. We are lost in astonishment at seeing the extraordinary, the wonderful and the unheard of in such intimate nearness. If Shakespeare deserves our admiration for his characters he is equally deserving of it for his exhibition of passion, taking this word in its widest signification as including every mental condition, every tone from indifference or familiar mirth to the wildest rage and despair. He gives us the history of minds, he lays open to us in a single word, a whole series of preceding conditions. His passions do not at first stand displayed to us in all their height as is the case with so many tragic poets who, in the language of lessing, are thorough masters of the legal style of love. He paints, in a most inimitable manner, the gradual progress from the first origin. He gives, as lessing says, a living picture of all the most minute and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls, of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains, of all the stratagems by which every other passion is made subservient to it till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions. Of all poets perhaps he alone has portrayed the mental diseases, melancholy, delirium, lunacy with such inexpressible and, in every respect, definite truth that the physician may enrich his observations from them in the same manner as from real cases. And yet Johnson has objected to Shakespeare that his pathos is not always natural and free from affectation. There are, it is, true passages, though comparatively speaking very few, whereas poetry exceeds the bounds of true dialogue, where a too soaring imagination, a too luxuriant wit, rendered the complete dramatic forgetfulness of himself impossible. With this exception, the censure originates only in a fanceless way of thinking, to which everything appears unnatural that does not suit its own tame incipity. Hence an idea has been formed of simple natural pathos which consist in exclamations destitute of imagery, in no wise elevated above everyday life. But energetical passions electrify the whole of the mental powers and will, consequently, in highly favored natures, express themselves in an ingenious and figurative manner. It has been often remarked that indignation gives wit, and, as despair occasionally breaks out into laughter, it may sometimes also give vent to itself in antithetical comparisons. Besides the rites of the political form have not been duly weighed, Shakespeare, who is always sure of his object, to move in a sufficiently powerful manner when he wished to do so, has occasionally, by indulging in a freer play, purposely moderated the impressions when too painful, and immediately introduced a musical alleviation of our sympathy. He had not those rude ideas of his art, which many moderns seem to have, as if the poet, like the clown in the proverb, must strike twice on the same place. An ancient rhetoricician delivered a caution against dwelling too long on the excitation of pity. For nothing, he said, dry so soon as tears. And Shakespeare acted conformably to this ingenious maxim without knowing it. The objection that Shakespeare wounds our feelings by the open display of the most disgusting moral odiousness harrows up the mind unmercifully, and tortures even our senses by the exhibition of the most insupportable and hateful spectacles is one of much greater importance. He has never, in fact, varnished over wild and bloodthirsty passions with a pleasing exterior, never clothed crime and want a principle with a false show of greatness of soul. And in that respect he is every way deserving of praise. Twice he has portrayed downright villains in the masterly way in which he has contrived to elude impressions of too painful a nature may be seen in Iago and Richard III. The constant reference to a petty and puny race must cripple the boldness of the poet. Fortunately for his art, Shakespeare lived in an age extremely susceptible of noble and tender impressions, which had still enough of the firmness inherited from a vigorous olden time not to shrink back with dismay from every strong and violent picture. We have lived to see tragedies of which the catastrophe consists in the swoon of an enamored princess. If Shakespeare falls occasionally into the opposite extreme, it is a noble error originating in the fullness of a gigantic strength, and yet this tragical titan who storms the heavens and threatens to tear the world from off its hinges, who, more terrible than Escalus, makes our hair stand on end and congeals our blood with horror, possessed at the same time the insinuating loveliness of the sweetest poetry. He plays with love like a child, and his songs are breathed out like melting sighs. He unites in his genius the utmost elevation and the utmost depth, and the most foreign, and even apparently irreconcilable properties subsist in him peacefully together. The world of spirits and nature have laid all their treasures at his feet, and strength a demigod and profundity of view a prophet, in all seeing wisdom a protecting spirit of a higher order. He lowers himself to mortals as if unconscious of his superiority, and is as open and unassuming as a child. Shakespeare's comic talent is equally wonderful, with that which he has shown in the pathetic and tragic. It stands on an equal elevation, and possesses equal extent and profundity. All that I before wished was not to admit that the former preponderated. He is highly inventive in comic situations and motives. It will be hardly possible to show whence he has taken any of them, whereas in the serious part of his drama he is generally laid hold of something already known. His comic characters are equally true, various and profound, with his serious. So little is he disposed to caricature that we may rather say many of his traits are almost too nice and delicate for the stage, that they can only be properly seized by a great actor, and fully understood by very acute audience. Not only has he delineated many kinds of folly, he is also contrived to exhibit mere stupidity in a most diverting and entertaining manner. Volume 2, page 145 We have, the rather, availed ourselves of this testimony of a foreign critic in behalf of Shakespeare, because our own countryman, Dr. Johnson, has not been so favorable to him. It may be said of Shakespeare that those who are not for him are against him, for indifference is here the height of injustice. We may sometimes, in order to do a great right, do a little wrong. An overstrained enthusiasm is more partnable with respect to Shakespeare than the want of it, for our admiration cannot easily surpass his genius. We have a high respect for Dr. Johnson's character and understanding, mixed with something like personal attachment. But he was neither a poet nor a judge of poetry. He might in one sense be a judge of poetry, as it falls within the rights and rules of prose, but not as it is poetry. Least of all was he qualified to be a judge of Shakespeare, who, alone, is high fantastical. Let those who have a prejudice against Johnson read Boswell's life of him, as those whom he has prejudiced against Shakespeare should read his Irene. We do not say that a man to be a critic must necessarily be a poet, but to be a good critic he ought not to be a bad poet. Such poetry, as a man deliberately writes, such and such only, will he like. Dr. Johnson's preface to his edition in Shakespeare looks like a laborious attempt to bury the characteristic merits of his author under a load of cumbersome phraseology, and to weigh his excellences and defects in equal scales, stuffed full of swelling figures and sonorous epithets. Nor could it well be otherwise. Dr. Johnson's general powers of reasoning overlaid his critical susceptibility. All his ideas were cast in a given mold, in a set form. They were made out by rule and system, by climax, inference, and antithesis. Shakespeare's were the reverse. Johnson's understanding dealt only in round numbers. The fractions were lost upon him. He reduced everything to the common standard of conventional propriety, and the most exquisite refinement or sublimity produced an effect on his mind only as they could be translated into the language of measured prose. To him an excess of beauty was a fault, for it appeared to him like an excrescence, and his imagination was dazzled by the blaze of light. His writings neither shone with the beams of native genius nor reflected them. The shifting shapes of fancy, the rainbow hues of things, made no impression on him. He seized only on the permanent and tangible. He had no idea of natural objects, but such as he could measure with a two-foot rule, or tell upon ten fingers. He judged of human nature in the same way, by mood and figure. He saw only the definite, the positive, and the practical, the average forms of things, not their striking differences, their classes, not their degrees. He was a man of strong common sense and practical wisdom rather than of genius or feeling. He retained the regular habitual impressions of actual objects, but he could not follow the rapid flights of fancy or the strong movements of passion. That is, he was to the poet what the painter of still life is to the painter of history. Common sense sympathizes with the impressions of things, unordinary minds, and ordinary circumstances. Genius catches the glancing combinations presented to the eye of fancy under the influence of passion. It is the province of the didactic reasoner to take cognizance of those results of human nature which are constantly repeated and always the same, which follow one another in regular succession, which are acted upon by large classes of men, and embodied in received customs, laws, language, and institutions. And it was in arranging, comparing, and arguing on these kinds of general results that Johnson's excellence lay. But he could not quit his hold on the common place and mechanical, and apply the general rule to the particular exception, or show how the nature of man was modified by the workings of passion, or the infinite fluctuations of thought and accident. Hence he could judge neither the heights nor depths of poetry. Nor is this all, for being conscious of great powers in himself and those powers of an adverse tendency to those of his author, he would be for setting up a foreign jurisdiction over poetry, and making criticism a kind of procrusty's bed of genius, where he might cut down imagination to matter of fact, regulate the passions according to reason, and translate the whole ontological diagrams and rhetorical declamation. Thus he says of Shakespeare's characters, in contradiction to what Pope had observed, and to what everyone else feels, that each character is a species instead of being an individual. He in fact found the general species or didactic form in Shakespeare's characters, which was all he sought or cared for. He did not find the individual traits or the dramatic distinctions which Shakespeare has engrafted on this general nature, because he felt no interest in them. Shakespeare's bold and happy flights of imagination were equally thrown away upon our author. He was not only without any particular fineness of organic sensibility, alive to all the mighty world of ear and eye, which is necessary to the painter or musician, but without the intenseness of passion which, seeking to exaggerate whatever excites the feelings of pleasures or power in the mind, and molding the impressions of natural objects, according to the impulses of imagination, produces a genius and a taste for poetry. According to Dr. Johnson, a mountain is sublime, or a rose is beautiful, for that their name and definition imply. But he would no more be able to give the description of Dovercliffe and Lear, or the description of flowers in the winter's tale, than to describe the objects of a sixth sense. Nor do we think he would have any very profound feeling of the beauty of the passages here referred to. A stately commonplace, such as Congress's description of a rune in the morning-bride, would have answered Johnson's purpose just as well, or better than the first, and an indiscriminate profusion of sense and hues would have interfered less with the ordinary routine of his imagination than Perdita's lines which seem enamored of their own sweetness. Daffodils that come before the swallow-dares and take the winds of march with beauty violet stem, but sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, or Scytheria's breath. No one who does not feel the passion which these objects inspire can go along with the imagination which seeks to express that passion and the uneasy sense of delight accompanying it by something still more beautiful, and no one can feel this passionate love of nature without quick natural sensibility. To a mere literal and formal apprehension, the inhibitably characteristic epithet, violet's dim, must seem to imply a defect rather than a beauty, and to anyone not feeling the full force of that epithet which suggests an image like the sleepy eye of love, the illusion to the lids of Juno's eyes must appear extravagant and unmeaning. Shakespeare's fancy lent words and images to the most refined sensibility to nature, struggling for expression. His descriptions are identical with the things themselves seen through the fine medium of passion, strip them of that connection and try them by ordinary conceptions and ordinary rules, and they are as grotesque and barbarous as you please. By thus lowering Shakespeare's genius to the standard of commonplace invention, it was easy to show that his faults were as great as his beauties. For the excellence, which consists merely in a conformity to rule, is counterbalance by the technical violation of them. Another circumstance which led to Dr. Johnson's indiscriminate praise or censure of Shakespeare is the very structure of his style. Johnson wrote a kind of rhyming prose in which he was as much compelled to finish the different clauses of his sentences and to balance one period against another as the writer of heroic verses to keep lines of ten syllables with similar terminations. He no sooner acknowledges the merits of his author in one line than the periodical revolution in his style carries the weight of his opinion completely over to the side of objection, thus keeping up a perpetual alternation of perfections and absurdities. We do not otherwise know how to account for such assertions as the following. Quote, In his tragic scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. His comedy pleases by the thoughts in the language and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct. End quote. Yet after saying that his tragedy was skill, he affirms in the next page, quote, His declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak for his power was the power of nature when he endeavored, like other tragic writers, to catch opportunities of amplification and instead of inquiring what the occasion demanded to show how much his stores of knowledge could supply, he seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of his reader. End quote. Poor Shakespeare, between the charges here brought against him of want of nature in the first instance and of want of skill in the second, he could hardly escape being condemned. End again, quote. But the admirers of this great poet have most reason to complain when he approaches nearest to his highest excellence and seems fully resolved to sink them in dejection or mollify them with tender emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of innocence or the crosses of love. When he does best, he soon ceases to do. He no sooner begins to move than he counteracts himself and terror and pity as they are rising in the mind are checked and blasted by a sudden frigidity. End quote. In all of this, our critic seems more bent on maintaining the equilibrium of his style than the consistency or truth of his opinions. If Dr. Johnson's opinion was right, the following observations on Shakespeare's plays must be greatly exaggerated if not ridiculous. If he was wrong, what has been said may perhaps account for his being so, without detracting from his ability and judgment to other things. It is proper to add that the account of the mid-summer night stream has appeared in another work. April 15, 1817. Chapter 2 Of Characters of Shakespeare's Plays by William Haslett This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Symboline Symboline is one of the most delightful of Shakespeare's historical plays. It may be considered as a dramatic romance in which the most striking parts of the story are thrown into the form of a dialogue, and the intermediate circumstances are explained by the different speakers as occasion renders it necessary. The action is less concentrated in consequence, but the interest becomes more aerial and refined from the principle of perspective introduced into the subject by the imaginary changes of scene as well as by the length of time it occupies. The reading of this play is like going on a journey with some uncertain object at the end of it, and in which the suspense is kept up and heightened by the long intervals between each action. Though the events are scattered over such an extent of surface and relate to such a variety of characters, yet the links which bind the different interests of the story together are never entirely broken. The most straggling and seemingly casual incidents are contrived in such a manner as to lead at last to the most complete development of the catastrophe. The ease and unconscious unconcern with which this is affected only makes the skill more wonderful. The business of the plot evidently thickens in the last act. The story moves forward with increasing rapidity at every step. Its various ramifications are drawn from the most distant points to the same centre. The principal characters are brought together and placed in very critical situations, and the fate of almost every person in the drama is made to depend on the solution of a single circumstance, the answer of Iacomo to the question of Imogen, respecting the obtaining of the ring from posthumous. Dr. Johnson is of opinion that Shakespeare was generally inattentive to the winding up of his plots. We think the contrary is true, and we might cite in proof of this remark not only the present play, but the conclusion of Lear, of Romeo and Juliet, of Macbeth, of Othello, even of Hamlet, and of other plays of Less Moment, in which the last act is crowded with decisive events brought about by natural and striking means. The pathos in Symboline is not violent or tragical, but of the most pleasing and amiable kind. A certain tender gloom overspreads the whole. Posthumous is the ostensible hero of the piece, but its greatest charm is in the character of Imogen. Posthumous is only interesting from the interest she takes in him, and she is only interesting herself from her tenderness and constancy to her husband. It is the peculiar characteristic of Shakespeare's heroines that they seem to exist only in their attachment to others. They are pure abstractions of the affections. We think as little of their persons as they do themselves, because we are led into the secrets of their hearts which are more important. We are too much interested in their affairs to stop and look at their faces, except by stealth and at intervals. No one ever hit the true perfection of the female character, the sense of weakness leaning on the strength of its affections for support, so well as Shakespeare. No one ever so well painted natural tenderness, free from affectation and disguise. No one ever else so well showed how delicacy and timidity, when driven to extremity, grow romantic and extravagant. For the romance of his heroines, in which they abound, is only an excess of the habitual prejudices of their sex, scrupulous of being false to their vows, truant to their affections and taught by the force of feeling when to forego the forms of propriety for the essence of it. His women were in this respect exquisite logicians, for there is nothing so logical as passion. They knew their own minds exactly and only followed up a favorite idea which they had sworn to with their tongues and which was engraven on their hearts into its untoward consequences. They were the prettiest little set of martyrs and confessors on record. Sibur, in speaking of the early English stage, accounts for the want of prominence in theatrical display in Shakespeare's female characters from the circumstance that women in those days were not allowed to play the parts of women, which made it necessary to keep them a good deal in the background. Does not the state of manners itself which prevented their exhibiting themselves in public and confined to them to the relations and charities of domestic life afford a truer explanation of the matter? His women are certainly very unlike stage heroines, the reverse of tragedy queens. We have almost as great an affection for Imogen as she had for posthumous and she deserves it better. Of all Shakespeare's women she is perhaps the most tender and the most artless. Her incredulity in the opening scene with Yacomo as to her husband's infidelity is much the same as Desdemona's backwardness to believe a fellow's jealousy. Her answer to the most distressing part of the picture is only my lord I fear has forgotten Britain. Her readiness to pardon Yacomo's false imputations and his designs against herself is a good lesson to prudes and may show that where there is real attachment to virtue it has no need to bolster itself up with an outrageous or affected antipathy to vice. The scene in which Pozzogno gives Imogen his master's letter accusing her of incontinency on the treacherous suggestions of Yacomo is as touching as it is possible for anything to be. Pozzogno, what cheer madam? Imogen, false to his bed. What is it to be false? To lie and watch there and to think on him? To weep, to ext clock and clock if sleep charge nature, to break it with a fearful dream of him and cry myself awake. That's false to his bed, is it? Pozzogno, alas good lady. Imogen, I false, thy conscience witness Yacomo, thou dist accuse him of incontinency. Thou then looks like a villain, now me thinks thy favour is good enough. Some Jay of Italy whose mother was her painting hath betrayed him. Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion, and for I am richer than to hang by the walls I must be ripped to pieces with me. Oh, men's vows are women's traitors. All good seeming by thy revolt, O husband, shall be thought to put on for villainy. Not borne where it grows, but worn a bait for ladies. Pozzogno, good madam, hear me. Imogen, talk thy tongue weary, speak. I have heard I am a strumpet, and mine ear, therein false struck, can take no greater wound, nor tent to bottom that. When Pozzogno, who had been charged to kill his mistress, puts her in a way to live, she says, why, good fellow, what shall I do the while? Where, Bide, how live? Or in my life, what comfort, when I am dead to my husband? Yet when he advises her to disguise herself in boy's clothes and suggests a course pretty and full in view by which she may happily be near the residence of posthumous, she exclaims, oh, for such a means, though peril to my modesty, not death-aunt, I would adventure. Amon Pozzogno, enlarging on the consequences, tells her she must change, fear and the handmaids of all women, or more truly, woman its pretty self into a waggish courage, ready in jibes, quick answered, saucy, and as quarrelous as the weasel. She interrupts him hastily, nay, be brief, I see unto thy end in them almost a man already. In her journey thus disguised to Milford Haven, she loses her guide and her way, and unbuzzling her complaints beautifully, my dear Lord, thou art one of the false ones now I think on thee. My hunger's gone, but even before I was at point to sink for food. She afterwards finds, as she thinks, the dead body of posthumous, and engages herself as a foot boy to serve a Roman officer when she has done all due obsequies to him whom she calls her former master. And with wild wood leaves and weeds I astrew'd his grave, and on it said a century of prayers, such as I can twice o'er, a weep and sigh, and leaving so his service, follow you, so please you entertain me. Now this is the very religion of love. She all along relies little on her personal charms, which she fears may have been eclipsed by some painted jay of Italy. She relies on her merit, and her merit is in the depth of her love, her truth and constancy. Our admiration of her beauty is excited with as little consciousness as possible on her part. There are two delicious descriptions given of her, one when she is asleep, and one when she is supposed dead. Arvoregas thus addresses her, with fairest flowers, while summer lasts, and I live here for daily, I'll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lack the flower that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor the azured hair-bell like thy veins, no, nor the leaf of Eglentine, which, not to slander, out sweetened not thy breath. The yellow Yacomo gives another thus when he steals into her bed-chamber, Sitharia, how bravely thou becomes'd thy bed. Fresh lily and wider than the sheets, that I might touch, but kiss, one kiss, tis her breathing that perfumes the chamber thus. The flame of the taper bows toward her, and would underpeep her lids to see the enclosed lights now canopied under the windows, white and azure, laced with blue of heaven's own tinct. On her left breast a mole sinks spotted, like the crimson drops in the bottom of a cow slip. There is a moral sense in the proud beauty of this last image, a rich surfeit of the fancy, as that well-known passage beginning, me of my lawful pleasure she restrained and prayed me oft forbearance, sets a keener edge upon it by the inimitable picture of modesty and self-denial. The character of Clotin, the conceited, booby lord and rejected lover of Imogen, though not very agreeable in itself and at present obsolete, is drawn with great humor and knowledge of character. The description which Imogen gives of his unwelcome addresses to her, whose love-suit hath been to me as fearful as a siege, is enough to cure the most ridiculous lover of his folly. It is remarkable that though Clotin makes so poor a figure in love, he is described as assuming an air of consequence as the Queen's son in the Council of State, and with all the absurdity of his person and manners, is not without shrewdness in his observations. So true is it that folly is as often owing to a want of proper sentiments as to a want of understanding. The exclamation of the ancient critic, Oh, Menander and Nature, which of you copied from the other, would not be misapplied to Shakespeare. The other characters in this play are represented with great truth and accuracy. And as it happens in most of the author's works, there's not only the utmost keeping in each separate character, but in the casting of the different parts and their relation to one another, there is an affinity and harmony, like what we may observe in the gradations of color in a picture. The striking and powerful contrasts in which Shakespeare abounds could not escape observation. The use he makes of the principle of analogy to reconcile the greatest diversities of character and to maintain a continuity of feeling throughout has not been sufficiently attended to. In Cymbeline, for instance, the principle interest arises out of the unalterable fidelity of image into her husband under the most trying circumstances. Now the other parts of the picture are filled up with subordinate examples of the same feeling, mostly modified by different situations and applied to the purposes of virtue or vice. The plot is aided by the amorous importunities of clotin, by the tragical determination of Yacomot to conceal the defeat of his project by a daring imposter. The faithful attachment of Pozzogno to his mistress is an affecting accompaniment to the whole. The obstinate adherence to his purpose in Bolarius, who keeps the fate of the young princes so long a secret in resentment for the ungrateful return to his former services, the incorrigible wickedness of the queen, and even the blind, exorious confidence of Cymbeline are all so many lines of the same story tending to the same point. The effect of this coincidence is rather felt than observed, and as the impression exists unconsciously in the mind of the reader, so it probably arose in the same manner in the mind of the author, not from design, but from the force of natural association, a particular train of feelings suggesting different inflections of the same predominant principle, melting into and strengthening one another like chords in music. The characters of Bolarius, Guderius and Averegus, and the romantic scenes in which they appear are a fine relief to the intrigues and artificial refinements of the court from which they are banished. Nothing can surpass the wildness and simplicity of the descriptions of the mountain life they lead. They follow the business of huntsmen, not of shepherds, and this is in keeping with the spirit of adventure and uncertainty in the rest of the story, and with the scenes in which they are afterward called on to act. How admirably the youthful fire and impatience to emerge from their obscurity in the young princes is opposed to the cooler calculations of their prudent resignation of their more experienced counselor. How well the disadvantages of knowledge and of ignorance of solitude and society are placed against each other. Guderius, out of your proof you speak, we poor, unfledged, have never winged from view of the nest, nor know not what heirs from home. Happily this life is best if quiet life is best, sweeter to you that have sharper known, while corresponding with your stiff age. But unto us it is a cell of ignorance, travelling a bed, a prison for a debtor that not dares to stride a limit. Evereggus, what should we speak of when we are as old as you, when we shall hear the rain and wind beat dark December? How, in this art pinching cave, shall we discourse the freezing hours away? We have seen nothing, we are beastly, subtle as the fox for prey, like warlike as the wolf for what we eat. Our valor is to chase what flies, our cage we make a choir as doth the prisoned bird, and sing our bondage freely. The answer of Bolarius to this expostulation is hardly satisfactory, for nothing can be an answer to hope or the passion of the mind for unknown good, but experience. The forest of Arden, and as you like it, can alone compare with the mountain scenes in Cymbeline. Different, the contemplative quiet of the one from the enterprising boldness and the precarious mode of subsistence in the other. Shakespeare not only lets us into the minds of his characters, but gives a tone and colour to the scenes he describes from the feelings of their imaginary inhabitants. He at the same time preserves the utmost propriety of action and passion, and gives all their local accompaniments. If he was equal to the greatest things, he was not above an attention to the smallest. Thus, the gallant sportsmen in Cymbeline have to encounter the abrupt declivities of hill and valley, touchstone and Audrey jog along a level path. The deer in Cymbeline are only regarded as objects of prey, the games of foot, etc. With Jock, they are fine subjects to moralise upon at leisure, under the shade of melancholy boughs. We cannot take leave of this play, which is a favourite with us, without noticing some occasional touches of natural piety and morality. We may allude here to the opening of the scene in which Balerius instructs the young princes to pay their oresons to heaven. Balerius, sea boys, this gate instructs you how to adore the heavens, and bows you to morning's holy office. Guderius, hail heaven! Averagus, hail heaven! Balerius, now for our mountain sport, up to Yon Hill. What a grace and unaffected spirit of piety breathes in this passage. In like manner, one of the brothers says to the other when about to perform the funeral rites to Fidele. Nay, Cadwal, we must lay his head to the east. My father hath a reason for it. Shakespeare's morality is introduced in the same simple and obtrusive manner. Imogen will not let her companion stay away from the chase to attend her when sick, and gives her reason for it. Stick to your journal course. The breach of custom is breach of all. When the queen attempts to disguise her motives for procuring the poison from Cornelius, by saying she means to try its effects on creatures not worth the hanging, his answer conveys at once a tacit reproof of her hypocrisy, and a useful lesson of humanity. Your Highness shall from this practice but make hard your heart. End of Symbolene Chapter 3 Of Characters of Shakespeare's Plays by William Haslett This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Nemo and Eva Davis. Macbeth The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape and gives to Ari Nothing a local habitation and a name. Macbeth and Lear, Othello and Hamlet, are usually reckoned Shakespeare's four principal tragedies. Lear stands first for the profound intensity of the passion. Macbeth, for the wildness of the imagination and the rapidity of the action. Othello, for the progressive interest and powerful alternations of feeling. Hamlet, for the refined development of thought and sentiment. If the force of genius shown in each of these works is astonishing, their variety is not less so. They are like different creations of the same mind, not one of which has the slightest reference to the rest. This distinctness and originality is indeed the necessary consequence of truth and nature. Shakespeare's genius alone appeared to possess the resource of nature. He is your only tragedy maker. His plays have the force of things upon the mind. What he represents is brought home to the bosom as a part of our experience implanted in the memory as if we had known the places and persons and things of which he treats. Macbeth is like a record of a preternatural and tragical event. It has the rugged severity of an old chronicle with all that the imagination of the poet can engraft upon traditional belief. The castle of Macbeth, round which the air smells wooingly and where the temple-haunting marthlet builds has a real subsistence in the mind. The weird sisters meet us in person on the blasted heath. The air-drawn dagger moves slowly before our eyes. The gracious Duncan, the blood-boltered Banquo, stand before us. All that pass through the mind of Macbeth passes without the loss of a tittle through ours. All that could actually take place in all that is only possible to be conceived. What was said and what was done, the workings of passion, the spells of magic, are brought before us with the same absolute truth and vividness. Shakespeare excelled in the openings of his plays. That of Macbeth is the most striking of any. The wildness of the scenery, the sudden shifting of the situations and characters, the bustle, the expectations excited, are equally extraordinary. From the first entrance of the witches and the description of them when they meet Macbeth what are these so withered and so wild in their attire that look not like the inhabitants of the earth and yet aren't? The mind is prepared for all that follows. This tragedy is alike distinguished for the lofty imagination it displays and for the tumultuous vehemence of the action and the one is made the moving principle of the other. The overwhelming pressure of preternatural agency urges on the tide of human passion with redoubled force. Macbeth himself appears driven along by the violence of his fate like a vessel drifting before a storm. He reels to and fro like a drunken man. He staggers under the weight of his own purposes and the suggestions of others. He stands at bay with his situation and from the superstitious awe and the breathless suspense into which the communications of the weird sisters throw him is hurried on with daring impatience to verify their predictions and with impious and bloody hand to tear aside the veil which hides the uncertainty of the future. He is not equal to the struggle with fate and conscience. He now bends up each corporal instrument to the terrible feat. At other times his heart misgives him and he is cowed and abashed by his success. The deed no less than the attempt confounds him. His mind is assailed by the stings of remorse and full of preternatural solicitings. His speeches and soliloquies are dark riddles on human life, baffling solution and entangling him in their labyrinths. In thought he is absent and perplexed, sudden and desperate in act from a distrust of his own resolution. His energy springs from the anxiety and agitation of his mind, his blindly rushing forward on the objects of his ambition and revenge or his recoiling from them. Equally betrays the harassed state of his feelings. This part of his character is admirably set off by being brought in connection with that of Lady Macbeth, whose obdurate strength of will and masculine firmness give her the ascendancy over her husband's faltering virtue. She at once seizes on the opportunity that offers for the accomplishment of all their wished-for greatness and never flinches from her object till all is over. The magnitude of her resolution almost covers the magnitude of her guilt. She is a great bad woman whom we hate but whom we fear more than we hate. She does not excite our loathing in abhorrence like Regan and Gonnaral. She is only wicked to gain a great end and is perhaps more distinguished by her commanding presence of mind in inexorable self-will, which do not suffer her to be diverted from a bad purpose when once formed by weak and womanly regrets than by the hardness of her heart or want of natural affections. The impression which her lofty determination of character makes on the mind of Macbeth is well described where he exclaims, Bring forth men children only, for thy undaunted metal should compose nothing but males. Nor do the pains she is at to screw his courage to the sticking-place, their approach to him not to be lost so poorly in himself. The assurance that a little water clears them of this deed show anything but her greater consistency and depravity. Her strong-nerved ambition furnishes ribs of steel to the sides of his intent, and she is herself wound up to the execution of her baneful project with the same unshrinking fortitude and crime that in other circumstances she would probably have shown patience in suffering. The deliberate sacrifice of all other considerations to the gaining for their future days and nights sole sovereign sway and mastodom by the murder of Duncan gorgeously expressed in her invocation and hearing of his fatal entrance under her battlements. Come, all you spirits, attend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top full of direst cruelty, make thick my blood, stop up the access and passage of remorse that no compunctuous visitings of nature shake my foul purpose, break peace between the effect and it. Come to my woman's breast and take my milk for gal, you murdering ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick knight, and poll thee in the dunnest smoke of hell that my keen knife see not the wound it makes nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark to cry, hold, hold. When she first hears that, Duncan comes there to sleep. She is so overcome by the news which is beyond her utmost expectations that she answers the messenger, thou art mad to say it, and on receiving her husband's account of the predictions of the witches, conscious of his instability of purpose and that her presence is necessary to goat him onto the consummation of his promised greatness she exclaims, Hy thee hither, that I may pour my spirits in thine ear and chastise with the valor of my tongue all that impedes thee from the golden round which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem to have thee crowned with all. This swelling of exultation and keen spirit of triumph, this uncontrollable eagerness of anticipation which seems to dilate her form and take possession of all her faculties, solid, substantial, flesh and blood display of passion exhibit a striking contrast to the cold, abstracted, gratuitous, servile malignity of the witches who are equally instrumental in urging Macbeth to his fate for the mere love of mischief and from a disinterested delight in deformity and cruelty they are hags of mischief, obscene panders to iniquity, malicious from their impotence of enjoyment enamored of destruction because they are themselves unreal, abortive, half-existences and who become sublime from their exemption from all human sympathies and contempt for all human affairs as Lady Macbeth does by the force of passion. Her fault seems to have been in excess of that strong principle of self-interest and family, a grandizement, not amenable to the common feelings of compassion and justice which is so marked a feature in barbarous nations and times. A passing reflection of this kind on the resemblance of the sleeping king to her father alone prevents her from slaying Duncan with her own hand. In speaking of the character of Lady Macbeth we ought not to pass over Mrs. Sidden's manner of acting that part we can conceive of nothing grander. It was something above nature. It seemed almost as if a being of superior order had dropped from a higher sphere to awe the world with a majesty of her appearance. Power was seated on her brow. Passion emanated from her breast is from a shrine. She was tragedy personified. In coming on in the sleeping scene her eyes were open but their sense was shut. She was like a person bewildered and unconscious of what she did. Her lips moved involuntarily. All her gestures were involuntary and mechanical. She glided on and off the stage like an apparition. To have seen her in that character was an event in everyone's life not to be forgotten. The dramatic beauty of the character of Duncan which excites the respect and pity even of his murderers has been often pointed out that forms a picture of itself in instance of the author's power of giving a striking effect to a common reflection by the manner of introducing it occurs in a speech of Duncan complaining of his having been deceived in his opinion of the thane of Cawdor at the very moment that he's expressing the most unbounded confidence in the loyalty and services of Macbeth. There is no art to find the mind's construction in the face. He was a gentleman on whom I built an absolute trust O'worthiest cousin addressing himself to Macbeth. The sin of my ingratitude even now was great upon me et cetera, et cetera. Another passage to show that Shakespeare lost sight of nothing that could in any way give relief or heightening to a subject is the conversation which takes place between Banco and Fleance immediately before the murder scene of Duncan. Banco. How goes the night, boy? Fleance. The moon is down. I've not heard the clock. Banco. And she goes down at twelve. Fleance. I take it tis later, sir. Banco. Hold, take my sword. There's husbandry in heaven. Their candles are all out. A heavy summons lies like lead upon me. And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature gives way to and repose. In like manner a fine idea is given of the gloomy coming on of evening just as Banco is going to be assassinated. Light thickens and the crow makes wing to the rookie wood now spurs the lateed traveller apace to gain the timely in. Macbeth, generally speaking, is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other Shakespeare's plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures, which of them shall destroy the other. There is nothing but what has a violent end or violent beginnings. The lights and shades are laid on with a determined hand. The transitions from triumph to despair, from the height of terror to the repose of death, are sudden and startling. Every passion brings in its fellow contrary and the thoughts pitch and jostle against each other as in the dark. The whole play is an unruly chaos and the action forbidden things where the ground rocks under our feet. Shakespeare's genius here took its full swing and trod upon the furthest bounds of nature and passion. This circumstance will account for the abruptness and violent antithesis of this style, the throes and labour which run through the expression and from defects will turn them into beauties. So far and foul a day I have not seen, etc., such welcome and unwelcome news together. Men's lives are like the flowers in their caps, dying or ere they sicken. Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it. The scene before the castle gate follows the appearance of the witches on the heath and is followed by a midnight murder. Duncan is cut off by times by treason-league with witchcraft and Macduff is ripped untimely from his mother's womb to avenge his death. Macbeth, after the death of Banquo, wishes for his presence in extravagant terms. To him in all we thirst and when his ghost appears, cries out avante and quit my sight and being gone he is himself again. Macbeth resolves to get rid of Macduff that he may sleep in spite of thunder and cheers his wife on the doubtful intelligence of Banquo's ticking off with the encouragement. Then be thou jockened, ere the bat has flown his cloistered flight, ere to black hecatees summons the shard-born beetle has wrung night's yawning peel. There shall be done a deed of dreadful note. In Lady Macbeth's speech, had he not resembled my father as he slept, but I had done it. There is murder and filial piety together. And in urging him to fulfill his vengeance against the defenseless king, her thoughts spare the blood neither of infants nor old age. The description of the witches is full of the same contradictory principle. They rejoice when good kings bleed. They are neither of the earth nor the air but both. They should be women, but their beards forbid it. They take all the pains possible to lead Macbeth on to the heights of his ambition, only to betray him in deeper consequence. And after showing him all the pomp of their art, discover their malignant delight in his disappointed hopes by that bitter taunt. Why stands Macbeth thus amazingly? We might multiply such instances everywhere. The leading features in the character of Macbeth are striking enough, and they form what may be thought at first only a bold, rude, gothic outline. By comparing it with other characters of the same author, we shall perceive the absolute truth and identity which is observed in the midst of the giddy whirl and rapid career of events. Macbeth in Shakespeare no more loses his identity of character in the fluctuations of fortune or the storm of passion than Macbeth in himself would have lost the identity of his person. Thus he is as distinct a being from Richard III as it is possible to imagine, though these two characters in common hands and indeed in the hands of any other poet would have been a repetition of the same general idea, more or less exaggerated. For both are tyrants, azerpers, murderers, both aspiring and ambitious, both courageous, cruel, treacherous. But Richard is cruel from nature and constitution. Macbeth becomes so from accidental circumstances. Richard is from his birth deformed in body and mind and naturally incapable of good. Macbeth is full of the milk of human kindness, as frank, sociable, generous. He is tempted to the commission of guilt by golden opportunities by the instigations of his wife and by prophetic warnings. Fate and metaphysical aid conspire against his virtue and his loyalty. Richard, on the contrary, needs no prompter but wades through his series of crimes to the height of his ambition from the ungovernable violence of his temper and a reckless love of mischief. He is never gay but in the prospect or in the success of his villainies. Macbeth is full of horror at the thoughts of the murder of Duncan, which he is with difficulty prevailed on to commit and of remorse after its perpetration. Richard has no mixture of common humanity in his composition, no regard to kindred or posterity. He owns no fellowship with others. He is himself alone. Macbeth is not destitute of feelings of sympathy, is accessible to pity, is even made in some measure the dupe of his luxuriousness, ranks the loss of friends of the cordial love of his followers and of his good name among the causes which have made him weary of life and regrets that he has ever seized the crown by unjust means as he cannot transmit it to his own posterity. For Banquo's issue have I filled my mind for them the gracious Duncan have I murdered to make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings. In the agitation of his thoughts he envies those whom he has sent to peace. Duncan is in his grave. After life's fitful fever he sleeps well. It is true he becomes more callous as he plunges deeper in guilt. Dieriness is thus rendered familiar to his slaughterous thoughts and he in the end anticipates his wife in the boldness and bloodiness of his enterprises while she, for want of the same stimulus of action, is troubled with thick coming fancies that rob her of her rest, goes mad and dies. Macbeth endeavors to escape from reflections on his crimes by repelling their consequences and banishes remorse for the past by the meditation of future mischief. This is not the principle of Richard's cruelty which resembles the wanton malice of a fiend as much as the frailty of human passion. Macbeth is goaded on to acts of violence and retaliation by necessity. To Richard, blood is a pastime. There are other decisive differences inherent in the two characters. Richard may be regarded as a man of the world, a plotting hardened nave, wholly regardless of everything but his own ends, from a means to secure them. Not so, Macbeth. The superstitions of the age, the rude state of society, the local scenery and customs all give a wildness and imaginary grandeur to his character. From the strangeness of the events that surround him, he is a symbol of amazement and fear and stands in doubt between the world of reality and the world of fancy. He sees sights not shown to mortal eyes and hears unearthly music. All is tumult and disorder, within and without his mind. His purposes recoil upon himself are broken and disjointed. He is the double-thrall of his passions and his evil destiny. Either of imagination or pathos, but of pure self-will. There is no conflict of opposite feelings in his breast. The apparitions which he sees only haunt him in his sleep. Nor does he live like Macbeth in a waking dream. Macbeth has considerable energy and manliness of character, but then he is subject to all the sky-y influences. He is sure of nothing but the present moment. Richard, in the busy turbulence of his projects, never loses his self-possession and makes use of every circumstance that happens as an instrument of his long-reaching designs. In his last extremity we can only regard him as a wild beast taken in the toils. We never entirely lose our concern for Macbeth and he calls back all our sympathy by that fine close of Thoughtful Melancholy. My way of life has fallen into the seer. The yellow leaf and that which should accompany old age as honour troops of friends I must not look to have, but in their stead curses not loud but deep mouth, honour, breath which the poor heart would feign deny and dare not. We can conceive a common actor to play Richard tolerably well. We can conceive no one to play Macbeth properly or to look like a man that had encountered the weird sisters. All the actors we have ever seen appear as if they had encountered them on the boards of Covent Garden or Jury Lane but not on the heath at Forrest and as if they did not believe what they had seen. The witches of Macbeth indeed are ridiculous on the modern stage and we doubt if the furies of Nicholas would be more respected. The progress of manners and knowledge has an influence on the stage and will in time perhaps destroy both tragedy and comedy. Filches picking pockets in the beggars opera is not so good a jest as it used to be. By the force of the police and of philosophy Lilo's murderers and the ghosts in Shakespeare will become obsolete. At last there will be nothing left bad to be desired or dreaded on the theatre or in real life. A question has been started with respect to the originality of Shakespeare's witches which had been well answered by Mr. Lamb in his notes to the specimens of early dramatic poetry. Though some resemblance may be traced between the charms in Macbeth and the incantations in this play The Witch of Middleton which is supposed to have preceded it This coincidence will not detract much from the originality of Shakespeare His witches are distinguished from the witches of Middleton by essential differences These are creatures to whom man or women plotting some dire mischief might resort for occasional consultation Those originate deeds of blood and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth he is spellbound. That meeting sways his destiny He can ever break the fascination These witches can hurt the body Those have power over the soul Hecatee in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon The hags of Shakespeare have neither child of their own nor seem to be descended from any parent They are foul anomalies of whom we know not once they are sprung nor whether they have beginning or ending As they are without human passions so they seem to be without human relations They come with thunder and lightning and vanish to airy music This is all we know of them Except Hecatee they have no names, which heightens their mysteriousness The names and some of the properties which Middleton has given to his hags excite smiles The weird sisters are serious things Their presence cannot coexist with mirth But in a lesser degree witches of Middleton are fine creations Their power too is, in some measure, over the mind They raise jars jealousies, stripes like a thick scurf or life End of McBeth