This is one of the most loose and desultory of our author's plays: it rambles on just as it happens, but it overtakes, together with some indifferent matter, a prodigious number of fine things in its way. Troilus himself is no character: he is merely a common lover; but Cressida and her uncle Pandarus are hit off with proverbial truth. By the speeches given to the leaders of the Grecian host, Nestor, Ulysses, Agamemnon, Achilles, Shakespeare seems to have known them as well as if he had been a spy sent by the Trojans into the enemy's camp—to say nothing of their being very lofty examples of didactic eloquence. The following is a very stately and spirited declamation:
Ulysses. Troy, yet upon her basis, had been down,And the great Hector's sword had lack'd a master,But for these instances.The specialty of rule hath been neglected.
. . . . .
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,Observe degree, priority, and place,Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,Office, and custom, in all line of order:And therefore is the glorious planet, Sol,In noble eminence, enthron'd and spher'dAmidst the other, whose med'cinable eyeCorrects the ill aspects of planets evil,And posts, like the commandment of a king,Sans check, to good and bad. But, when the planets,In evil mixture to disorder wander,What plagues and what portents? what mutinies?What raging of the sea? shaking of earth?Commotion in the winds? frights, changes, horrors,Divert and crack, rend and deracinateThe unity and married calm of statesQuite from their fixture! O, when degree is shaken,(Which is the ladder to all high designs)The enterprise is sick! How could communities,Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,The primogenitive and due of birth,Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,(But by degree) stand in authentic place?Take but degree away, untune that string,And hark what discord follows! each thing meetsIn mere oppugnancy. The bounded watersWould lift their bosoms higher than the shores,And make a sop of all this solid globe:Strength would be lord of imbecility,And the rude son would strike his father dead:Force would be right; or rather, right and wrong(Between whose endless jar Justice resides)Would lose their names, and so would Justice too.Then everything includes itself in power,Power into will, will into appetite;And appetite (an universal wolf,So doubly seconded with will and power)Must make perforce an universal prey,And last, eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,This chaos, when degree is suffocate,Follows the choking:And this neglection of degree it is,That by a pace goes backward, in a purposeIt hath to climb. The general's disdainedBy him one step below; he, by the next;That next, by him beneath: so every step,Exampled by the first pace that is sickOf his superior, grows to an envious feverOf pale and bloodless emulation;And'tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot,Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length,Troy in our weakness lives, not in her strength.
It cannot be said of Shakespeare, as was said of some one, that he was 'without o'erflowing full'. He was full, even to o'erflowing. He gave heaped measure, running over. This was his greatest fault. He was only in danger 'of losing distinction in his thoughts' (to borrow his own expression)
As doth a battle when they charge on heapsThe enemy flying.
There is another passage, the speech of Ulysses to Achilles, showing him the thankless nature of popularity, which has a still greater depth of moral observation and richness of illustration than the former. It is long, but worth the quoting. The sometimes giving an entire extract from the unacted plays of our author may with one class of readers have almost the use of restoring a lost passage; and may serve to convince another class of critics, that the poet's genius was not confined to the production of stage effect by preternatural means.—
Ulysses. Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion;A great-siz'd monster of ingratitudes:Those scraps are good deeds past,Which are devour'd as fast as they are made,Forgot as soon as done: Persev'rance, dear my lord,Keeps Honour bright: to have done, is to hangQuite out of fashion, like a rusty mailIn monumental mockery. Take the instant way;For Honour travels in a strait so narrow,Where one but goes abreast; keep then the path,For Emulation hath a thousand sons,That one by one pursue; if you give way,Or hedge aside from the direct forth-right,Like to an entered tide, they all rush by,And leave you hindmost;—Or, like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,O'er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present,Tho' less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours:For Time is like a fashionable host,That slightly shakes his parting guest by th' hand,And with his arms out-stretch'd, as he would fly,Grasps in the comer: the Welcome ever smiles,And Farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seekRemuneration for the thing it was; for beauty, wit,High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,Love, friendship, charity, are subjects allTo envious and calumniating time:One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,That all, with one consent, praise new-born gauds,Tho' they are made and moulded of things past.The present eye praises the present object.Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax;Since things in motion sooner catch the eye,Than what not stirs. The cry went out on thee,And still it might, and yet it may again,If thou would'st not entomb thyself alive,And case thy reputation in thy tent.—
The throng of images in the above lines is prodigious; and though they sometimes jostle against one another, they everywhere raise and carry on the feeling, which is metaphysically true and profound. The debates beween the Trojan chiefs on the restoring of Helen are full of knowledge of human motives and character. Troilus enters well into the philosophy of war, when he says in answer to something that falls from Hector:
Why there you touch'd the life of our design:Were it not glory that we more affected,Than the performance of our heaving spleens,I would not wish a drop of Trojan bloodSpent more in her defence. But, worthy Hector,She is a theme of honour and renown,A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds.
The character of Hector, in the few slight indications which appear of it, is made very amiable. His death is sublime, and shows in a striking light the mixture of barbarity and heroism of the age. The threats of Achilles are fatal; they carry their own means of execution with them.
Come here about me, you my Myrmidons,Mark what I say.—Attend me where I wheel:Strike not a stroke, but keep yourselves in breath;And when I have the bloody Hector found,Empale him with your weapons round about:In fellest manner execute your arms.Follow me, sirs, and my proceeding eye.
He then finds Hector and slays him, as if he had been hunting down a wild beast. There is something revolting as well as terrific in the ferocious coolness with which he singles out his prey: nor does the splendour of the achievement reconcile us to the cruelty of the means.
The characters of Cressida and Pandarus are very amusing and instructive. The disinterested willingness of Pandarus to serve his friend in an affair which lies next his heart is immediately brought forward. 'Go thy way, Troilus, go thy way; had I a sister were a grace, or a daughter were a goddess, he should take his choice. O admirable man! Paris, Paris is dirt to him, and I warrant Helen, to change, would give money to boot.' This is the language he addresses to his niece; nor is she much behindhand in coming into the plot. Her head is as light and fluttering as her heart. It is the prettiest villain, she fetches her breath so short as a new-ta'en sparrow.' Both characters are originals, and quite different from what they are in Chaucer. In Chaucer, Cressida is represented as a grave, sober, considerate personage (a widow—he cannot tell her age, nor whether she has children or no) who has an alternate eye to her character, her interest, and her pleasure: Shakespeare's Cressida is a giddy girl, an unpractised jilt, who falls in love with Troilus, as she afterwards deserts him, from mere levity and thoughtlessness of temper. She may be wooed and won to anything and from anything, at a moment's warning: the other knows very well what she would be at, and sticks to it, and is more governed by substantial reasons than by caprice or vanity. Pandarus again, in Chaucer's story, is a friendly sort of go-between, tolerably busy, officious, and forward in bringing matters to bear: but in Shakespeare he has 'a stamp exclusive and professional': he wears the badge of his trade; he is a regular knight of the game. The difference of the manner in which the subject is treated arises perhaps less from intention, than from the different genius of the two poets. There is no double entendre in the characters of Chaucer: they are either quite serious or quite comic. In Shakespeare the ludicrous and ironical are constantly blended with the stately and the impassioned. We see Chaucer's characters as they saw themselves, not as they appeared to others or might have appeared to the poet. He is as deeply implicated in the affairs of his personages as they could be themselves. He had to go a long journey with each of them, and became a kind of necessary confidant. There is little relief, or light and shade in his pictures. The conscious smile is not seen lurking under the brow of grief or impatience. Everything with him is intense and continuous—a working out of what went before.—Shakespeare never committed himself to his characters. He trifled, laughed, or wept with them as he chose. He has no prejudices for or against them; and it seems a matter of perfect indifference whether he shall be in jest or earnest. According to him, 'the web of our lives is of a mingled yam, good and ill together'. His genius was dramatic, as Chaucer's was historical. He saw both sides of a question, the different views taken of it according to the different interests of the parties concerned, and he was at once an actor and spectator in the scene. If anything, he is too various and flexible; too full of transitions, of glancing lights, of salient points. If Chaucer followed up his subject too doggedly, perhaps Shakespeare was too volatile and heedless. The Muse's wing too often lifted him off his feet. He made infinite excursions to the right and the left.
—He hath doneMad and fantastic execution,Engaging and redeeming of himselfWith such a careless force and forceless care,As if that luck in very spite of cunningBade him win all.
Chaucer attended chiefly to the real and natural, that is, to the involuntary and inevitable impressions on the mind in given circumstances: Shakespeare exhibited also the possible and the fantastical,—not only what things are in themselves, but whatever they might seem to be, their different reflections, their endless combinations. He lent his fancy, wit, invention, to others, and borrowed their feelings in return. Chaucer excelled in the force of habitual sentiment; Shakespeare added to it every variety of passion, every suggestion of thought or accident. Chaucer described external objects with the eye of a painter, or he might be said to have embodied them with the hand of a sculptor, every part is so thoroughly made out, and tangible: Shakespeare's imagination threw over them a lustre
—Prouder than when blue Iris bends.
Everything in Chaucer has a downright reality. A simile or a sentiment is as if it were given in upon evidence. In Shakespeare the commonest matter-of-fact has a romantic grace about it; or seems to float with the breath of imagination in a freer element. No one could have more depth of feeling or observation than Chaucer, but he wanted resources of invention to lay open the stores of nature or the human heart with the same radiant light that Shakespeare has done. However fine or profound the thought, we know what was coming, whereas the effect of reading Shakespeare is 'like the eye of vassalage encountering majesty'. Chaucer's mind was consecutive, rather than discursive. He arrived at truth through a certain process; Shakespeare saw everything by intuition, Chaucer had great variety of power, but he could do only one thing at once. He set himself to work on a particular subject. His ideas were kept separate, labelled, ticketed and parcelled out in a set form, in pews and compartments by themselves. They did not play into one another's hands. They did not re-act upon one another, as the blower's breath moulds the yielding glass. There is something hard and dry in them. What is the most wonderful thing in Shakespeare's faculties is their excessive sociability, and how they gossiped and compared notes together.
We must conclude this criticism; and we will do it with a quotation or two. One of the most beautiful passages in Chaucer's tale is the description of Cresseide's first avowal of her love:
And as the new abashed nightingale,That stinteth first when she beginneth sing,When that she heareth any herde's tale,Or in the hedges any wight stirring,And, after, sicker doth her voice outring;Right so Cresseide, when that her dread stent,Opened her heart, and told him her intent.
See also the two next stanzas, and particularly that divine one beginning
Her armes small, her back both straight and soft, &c.
Compare this with the following speech of Troilus to Cressida in the play.
O, that I thought it could be in a woman;And if it can, I will presume in you,To feed for aye her lamp and flame of love,To keep her constancy in plight and youth,Out-living beauties outward, with a mindThat doth renew swifter than blood decays.Or, that persuasion could but thus convince me,That my integrity and truth to youMight be affronted with the match and weightOf such a winnow'd purity in love;How were I then uplifted! But alas,I am as true as Truth's simplicity,And simpler than the infancy of Truth.
These passages may not seem very characteristic at first sight, though we think they are so. We will give two, that cannot be mistaken. Patroclus says to Achilles;
—Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton CupidShall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane,Be shook to air.
Troilus, addressing the God of Day on the approach of the morning that parts him from Cressida, says with much scorn:
What! proffer'st thou thy light here for to sell?Go, sell it them that smalle seles grave.
If nobody but Shakespeare could have written the former, nobody but Chaucer would have thought of the latter.—Chaucer was the most literal of poets, as Richardson was of prose-writers.
This is a very noble play. Though not in the first class of Shakespeare's productions, it stands next to them, and is, we think, the finest of his historical plays, that is, of those in which he made poetry the organ of history, and assumed a certain tone of character and sentiment, in conformity to known facts, instead of trusting to his observations of general nature or to the unlimited indulgence of his own fancy. What he has added to the history, is upon a par with it. His genius was, as it were, a match for history as well as nature, and could grapple at will with either. This play is full of that pervading comprehensive power by which the poet could always make himself master of time and circumstances. It presents a fine picture of Roman pride and Eastern magnificence: and in the struggle between the two, the empire of the world seems suspended, 'like the swan's down-feather:
That stands upon the swell at full of tide,And neither way inclines.'
The characters breathe, move, and live. Shakespeare does not stand reasoning on what his characters would do or say, but at once BECOMES them, and speaks and acts for them. He does not present us with groups of stage-puppets or poetical machines making set speeches on human life, and acting from a calculation of ostensible motives, but he brings living men and women on the scene, who speak and act from real feelings, according to the ebbs and flows of passion, without the least tincture of the pedantry of logic or rhetoric. Nothing is made out by inference and analogy, by climax and antithesis, but everything takes place just as it would have done in reality, according to the occasion.—The character of Cleopatra is a masterpiece. What an extreme contrast it affords to Imogen! One would think it almost impossible for the same person to have drawn both. She is voluptuous, ostentatious, conscious, boastful of her charms, haughty, tyrannical, fickle. The luxurious pomp and gorgeous extravagance of the Egyptian queen are displayed in all their force and lustre, as well as the irregular grandeur of the soul of Mark Antony. Take only the first four lines that they speak as an example of the regal style of love-making.
Cleopatra. If it be love, indeed, tell me how much?
Antony. There's beggary in the love that can be reckon'd.
Cleopatra. I'll set a bourn how far to be belov'd.
Antony. Then must thou needs find out new heav'n, new earth.
The rich and poetical description of her person, beginning:
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,Burnt on the water; the poop was beaten gold,Purple the sails, and so perfumed, thatThe winds were love-sick—
seems to prepare the way for, and almost to justify the subsequent infatuation of Antony when in the sea-fight at Actium, he leaves the battle, and 'like a doting mallard' follows her flying sails.
Few things in Shakespeare (and we know of nothing in any other author like them) have more of that local truth of imagination and character than the passage in which Cleopatra is represented conjecturing what were the employments of Antony in his absence. 'He's speaking now, or murmuring—WHERE'S MY SERPENT OF OLD NILE?' Or again, when she says to Antony, after the defeat at Actium, and his summoning up resolution to risk another fight—'It is my birthday; I had thought to have held it poor; but since my lord is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.' Perhaps the finest burst of all is Antony's rage after his final defeat when he comes in, and surprises the messenger of Caesar kissing her hand:
To let a fellow that will take rewards,And say, God quit you, be familiar withMy play-fellow, your hand; this kingly seal,And plighter of high hearts.
It is no wonder that he orders him to be whipped; but his low condition is not the true reason: there is another feeling which lies deeper, though Antony's pride would not let him show it, except by his rage; he suspects the fellow to be Caesar's proxy.
Cleopatra's whole character is the triumph of the voluptuous, of the love of pleasure and the power of giving it, over every other consideration. Octavia is a dull foil to her, and Fulvia a shrew and shrill-tongued. What a picture do those lines give of her:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom staleHer infinite variety. Other women cloyThe appetites they feed, but she makes hungryWhere most she satisfies.
What a spirit and fire in her conversation with Antony's messenger who brings her the unwelcome news of his marriage with Octavia! How all the pride of beauty and of high rank breaks out in her promised reward to him:
—There's gold, and hereMy bluest veins to kiss!
She had great and unpardonable faults, but the beauty of her death almost redeems them. She learns from the depth of despair the strength of her affections. She keeps her queen-like state in the last disgrace, and her sense of the pleasurable in the last moments of her life. She tastes a luxury in death. After applying the asp, she says with fondness:
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,That sucks the nurse asleep?As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle.Oh Antony!
It is worth while to observe that Shakespeare has contrasted the extreme magnificence of the descriptions in this play with pictures of extreme suffering and physical horror, not less striking—partly perhaps to excuse the effeminacy of Mark Antony to whom they are related as having happened, but more to preserve a certain balance of feeling in the mind. Caesar says, hearing of his conduct at the court of Cleopatra:
—Antony,Leave thy lascivious wassails. When thou onceWert beaten from Mutina, where thou slew'stHirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heelDid famine follow, whom thou fought'st against,Though daintily brought up, with patience moreThan savages could suffer. Thou did'st drinkThe stale of horses, and the gilded puddleWhich beast would cough at. Thy palate then did deignThe roughest berry on the rudest hedge,Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,The barks of trees thou browsed'st. On the Alps,It is reported, thou did'st eat strange flesh,Which some did die to look on: and all this,It wounds thine honour, that I speak it now,Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheekSo much as lank'd not.
The passage after Antony's defeat by Augustus where he is made to say:
Yes, yes; he at Philippi keptHis sword e'en like a dancer; while I struckThe lean and wrinkled Cassius, and 'twas IThat the mad Brutus ended,
is one of those fine retrospections which show us the winding and eventful march of human life. The jealous attention which has been paid to the unities both of time and place has taken away the principle of perspective in the drama, and all the interest which objects derive from distance, from contrast, from privation, from change of fortune, from long-cherished passion; and contracts our view of life from a strange and romantic dream, long, obscure, and infinite, into a smartly contested, three hours' inaugural disputation on its merits by the different candidates for theatrical applause.
The latter scenes of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA are full of the changes of accident and passion. Success and defeat follow one another with startling rapidity. For-tune sits upon her wheel more blind and giddy than usual. This precarious state and the approaching dissolution of his greatness are strikingly displayed in the dialogue between Antony and Eros:
Antony. Eros, thou yet behold'st me?
Eros. Ay, noble lord.
Antony. Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish,A vapour sometime, like a bear or lion,A towered citadel, a pendant rock,A forked mountain, or blue promontoryWith trees upon't, that nod unto the worldAnd mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs,They are black vesper's pageants.
Eros. Ay, my lord.
Antony. That which is now a horse, even with a thoughtThe rack dislimns, and makes it indistinctAs water is in water.
Eros. It does, my lord.
Antony. My good knave, Eros, now thy captain isEven such a body, &c.
This is, without doubt, one of the finest pieces of poetry in Shakespeare. The splendour of the imagery, the semblance of reality, the lofty range of picturesque objects hanging over the world, their evanescent nature, the total uncertainty of what is left behind, are just like the mouldering schemes of human greatness. It is finer than Cleopatra's passionate lamentation over his fallen grandeur, because it is more dim, unstable, unsubstantial. Antony's headstrong presumption and infatuated determination to yield to Cleopatra's wishes to fight by sea instead of land, meet a merited punishment; and the extravagance of his resolutions, increasing with the desperateness of his circumstances, is well commented upon by Enobarbus:
—I see men's judgements areA parcel of their fortunes, and things outwardDo draw the inward quality after themTo suffer all alike.
The repentance of Enobarbus after his treachery to his master is the most affecting part of the play. He cannot recover from the blow which Antony's generosity gives him, and he dies broken-hearted 'a master-leaver and a fugitive'.
Shakespeare's genius has spread over the whole play a richness like the overflowing of the Nile.
This is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our youth, and whom we seem almost to remember in our after-years; he who made that famous soliloquy on life, who gave the advice to the players, who thought 'this goodly frame, the earth, a sterile promontory, and this brave o'er-hanging firmament, the air, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours'; whom 'man delighted not, nor woman neither'; he who talked with the grave-diggers, and moralized on Yorick's skull; the schoolfellow of Rosencraus and Guildenstern at Wittenberg; the friend of Horatio; the lover of Ophelia; he that was mad and sent to England; the slow avenger of his father's death; who lived at the court of Horwendillus five hundred years before we were born, but all whose thoughts we seem to know as well as we do our own, because we have read them in Shakespeare.
Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is WE who are Hamlet. This play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history. Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself 'too much i' th' sun'; whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever has known "the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes"; he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange things; who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite, and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock-presentation of them—this is the true Hamlet.
We have been so used to this tragedy that we hardly know how to criticize it any more than we should know how to describe our own faces. But we must make such observations as we can. It is the one of Shakespeare's plays that we think of oftenest, because it abounds most in striking reflections on human life, and because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his mind, to the general account of humanity. Whatever happens to him, we apply to ourselves, because he applies it so himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a great moralizer; and what makes him worth attending to is, that he moralizes on his own feelings and experience. He is not a commonplace pedant. If Lear shows the greatest depth of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character. Shakespeare had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shown more of it in this play than in any other. There is no attempt to force an interest: everything is left for time and circumstances to unfold. The attention is excited without effort, the incidents succeed each other as matters of course, the characters think and speak and act just as they might do, if left entirely to themselves. There is no set purpose, no straining at a point. The observations are suggested by the passing scene—the gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind. The whole play is an exact transcript of what might be supposed to have taken place at the court of Denmark, at the remote period of time fixed upon, before the modern refinements in morals and manners were heard of. It would have been interesting enough to have been admitted as a bystander in such a scene, at such a time, to have heard and seen something of what was going on. But here we are more than spectators. We have not only 'the outward pageants and the signs of grief; but 'we have that within which passes show'. We read the thoughts of the heart, we catch the passions living as they rise. Other dramatic writers give us very fine versions and paraphrases of nature: but Shakespeare, together with his own comments, gives us the original text, that we may judge for ourselves. This is a very great advantage.
The character of Hamlet is itself a pure effusion of genius. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be: but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility—the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect, as in the scene where he kills Polonius, and again, where he alters the letters which Rosencraus and Guildenstern are taking with them to England, purporting his death. At other times, when he is most bound to act, he remains puzzled, undecided, and sceptical, dallies with his purposes, till the occasion is lost, and always finds some pretence to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness again. For this reason he refuses to kill the King when he is at his prayers, and by a refinement in malice, which is in truth only an excuse for his own want of resolution, defers his revenge to some more fatal opportunity, when he shall be engaged in some act 'that has no relish of salvation in it':
He kneels and prays,And now I'll do't, and so he goes to heaven,And so am I reveng'd; THAT WOULD BE SCANN'D.He kill'd my father, and for that,I, his sole son, send him to heaven.Why this is reward, not revenge.Up sword and know thou a more horrid time,When he is drunk, asleep, or in a rage.
He is the prince of philosophical speculators, and because he cannot have his revenge perfect, according to the most refined idea his wish can form, he misses it altogether. So he scruples to trust the suggestions of the Ghost, contrives the scene of the play to have surer proof of his uncle's guilt, and then rests satisfied with this confirmation of his suspicions, and the success of his experiment, instead of acting upon it. Yet he is sensible of his own weakness, taxes himself with it, and tries to reason himself out of it:
How all occasions do inform against me,And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,If his chief good and market of his timeBe but to sleep and feed? A beast; no more.Sure he that made us with such large discourse,Looking before and after, gave us notThat capability and god-like reasonTo rust in us unus'd: now whether it beBestial oblivion, or some craven scrupleOf thinking too precisely on th' event,—A thought which quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom,And ever three parts coward;—I do not knowWhy yet I live to say, this thing's to do;Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and meansTo do it. Examples gross as earth excite me:Witness this army of such mass and charge,Led by a delicate and tender prince,Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd,Makes mouths at the invisible event,Exposing what is mortal and unsureTo all that fortune, death, and danger dare,Even for an egg-shell. 'Tis not to be great,Never to stir without great argument;But greatly to find quarrel in a straw,When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,Excitements of my reason and my blood,And let all sleep, while to my shame I seeThe imminent death of twenty thousand men,That for a fantasy and trick of fame,Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plotWhereon the numbers cannot try the cause,Which is not tomb enough and continentTo hide the slain?—O, from this time forth,My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.
Still he does nothing; and this very speculation on his own infirmity only affords him another occasion for indulging it. It is not for any want of attachment to his father or abhorrence of his murder that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge his imagination in reflecting upon the enormity of the crime and refining on his schemes of vengeance, than to put them into immediate practice. His ruling passion is to think, not to act: and any vague pretence that flatters this propensity instantly diverts him from his previous purposes.
The moral perfection of this character has been called in question, we think, by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules: amiable, though not faultless. The ethical delineations of 'that noble and liberal casuist' (as Shakespeare has been well called) do not exhibit the drab-coloured quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either from The Whole Duty of Man, or from The Academy of Compliments! We confess, we are a little shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked at the want of refinement in Hamlet. The want of punctilious exactness in his behaviour either partakes of the 'license of the time', or else belongs to the very excess of intellectual refinement in the character, which makes the common rules of life, as well as his own purposes, sit loose upon him. He may be said to be amenable only to the tribunal of his own thoughts, and is too much taken up with the airy world of contemplation to lay as much stress as he ought on the practical consequences of things. His habitual principles of action are unhinged and out of joint with the time. His conduct to Ophelia is quite natural in his circumstances. It is that of assumed severity only. It is the effect of disappointed hope, of bitter regrets, of affection suspended, not obliterated, by the distractions of the scene around him! Amidst the natural and preternatural horrors of his situation, he might be excused in delicacy from carrying on a regular courtship. When 'his father's spirit was in arms', it was not a time for the son to make love in. He could neither marry Ophelia, nor wound her mind by explaining the cause of his alienation, which he durst hardly trust himself to think of. It would have taken him years to have come to a direct explanation on the point. In the harassed state of his mind, he could not have done otherwise than he did. His conduct does not contradict what he says when he sees her funeral:
I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothersCould not with all their quantity of loveMake up my sum.
Nothing can be more affecting or beautiful than the Queen's apostrophe to Ophelia on throwing flowers into the grave:
—Sweets to the sweet, farewell.I hop'd thou should'st have been my Hamlet's wife:I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid,And not have strew'd thy grave.
Shakespeare was thoroughly a master of the mixed motives of human character, and he here shows us the Queen, who was so criminal in some respects, not without sensibility and affection in other relations of life.—Ophelia is a character almost too exquisitely touching to be dwelt upon. Oh rose of May, oh flower too soon faded! Her love, her madness, her death, are described with the truest touches of tenderness and pathos. It is a character which nobody but Shakespeare could have drawn in the way that he has done, and to the conception of which there is not even the smallest approach, except in some of the old romantic ballads. Her brother, Laertes, is a character we do not like so well; he is too hot and choleric, and somewhat rodomontade. Polonius is a perfect character in its kind; nor is there any foundation for the objections which have been made to the consistency of this part. It is said that he acts very foolishly and talks very sensibly. There is no inconsistency in that. Again, that he talks wisely at one time and foolishly at another; that his advice to Laertes is very sensible, and his advice to the King and Queen on the subject of Hamlet's madness very ridiculous. But he gives the one as a father, and is sincere in it; he gives the other as a mere courtier, a busy-body, and is accordingly officious, garrulous, and impertinent. In short, Shakespeare has been accused of inconsistency in this and other characters, only because he has kept up the distinction which there is in nature, between the understandings and the moral habits of men, between the absurdity of their ideas and the absurdity of their motives. Polonius is not a fool, but he makes himself so. His folly, whether in his actions or speeches, comes under the head of impropriety of intention.
We do not like to see our author's plays acted, and least of all, Hamlet. There is no play that suffers so much in being transferred to the stage. Hamlet himself seems hardly capable of being acted. Mr. Kemble unavoidably fails in this character from a want of ease and variety. The character of Hamlet is made up of undulating lines; it has the yielding flexibility of 'a wave o' th' sea'. Mr. Kemble plays it like a man in armour, with a determined inveteracy of purpose, in one undeviating straight line, which is as remote from the natural grace and refined susceptibility of the character as the sharp angles and abrupt starts which Mr. Kean introduces into the part. Mr. Kean's Hamlet is as much too splenetic and rash as Mr. Kemble's is too deliberate and formal. His manner is too strong and pointed. He throws a severity, approaching to virulence into the common observations and answers. There is nothing of this in Hamlet. He is, as it were, wrapped up in his reflections, and only THINKS ALOUD. There should therefore be no attempt to impress what he says upon others by a studied exaggeration of emphasis or manner; no TALKING AT his hearers. There should be as much of the gentleman and scholar as possible infused into the part, and as little of the actor, A pensive air of sadness should sit reluctantly upon his brow, but no appearance of fixed and sullen gloom. He is full of weakness and melancholy, but there is no harshness in his nature. He is the most amiable of misanthropes.
There can be little doubt that Shakespeare was the most universal genius that ever lived. 'Either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited, he is the only man. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light for him.' He has not only the same absolute command over our laughter and our tears, all the resources of passion, of wit, of thought, of observation, but he has the most unbounded range of fanciful invention, whether terrible or playful, the same insight into the world of imagination that he has into the world of reality; and over all there presides the same truth of character and nature, and the same spirit of humanity. His ideal beings are as true and natural as his real characters; that is, as consistent with themselves, or if we suppose such beings to exist at all, they could not act, speak, or feel otherwise than as he makes them. He has invented for them a language, manners, and sentiments of their own, from the tremendous imprecations of the Witches in MACBETH, when they do 'a deed without a name', to the sylph-like expressions 'of Ariel, who 'does his spiriting gently'; the mischievous tricks and gossiping of Robin Goodfellow, or the uncouth gabbling and emphatic gesticulations of Caliban in this play.
THE TEMPEST is one of the most original and perfect of Shakespeare's productions, and he has shown in it all the variety of his powers. It is full of grace and grandeur. The human and imaginary characters, the dramatic and the grotesque, are blended together with the greatest art, and without any appearance of it. Though he has here given 'to airy nothing a local habitation and a name', yet that part which is only the fantastic creation of his mind, has the same palpable texture, and coheres 'semblably' with the rest. As the preternatural part has the air of reality, and almost haunts the imagination with a sense of truth, the real characters and events partake of the wildness of a dream. The stately magician, Prospero, driven from his dukedom, but around whom (so potent is his art) airy spirits throng numberless to do his bidding; his daughter Miranda ('worthy of that name') to whom all the power of his art points, and who seems the goddess of the isle; the princely Ferdinand, cast by fate upon the haven of his happiness in this idol of his love; the delicate Ariel; the savage Caliban, half brute, half demon; the drunken ship's crew—are all connected parts of the story, and can hardly be spared from the place they fill. Even the local scenery is of a piece and character with the subject. Prospero's enchanted island seems to have risen up out of the sea; the airy music, the tempest-tossed vessel, the turbulent waves, all have the effect of the landscape background of some fine picture. Shakespeare's pencil is (to use an allusion of his own) 'like the dyer's hand, subdued to what it works in'. Everything in him, though it partakes of 'the liberty of wit', is also subjected to 'the law' of the understanding. For instance, even the drunken sailors, who are made reeling-ripe, share, in the disorder of their minds and bodies, in the tumult of the elements, and seem on shore to be as much at the mercy of chance as they were before at the mercy of the winds and waves. These fellows with their sea-wit are the least to our taste of any part of the play: but they are as like drunken sailors as they can be, and are an indirect foil to Caliban, whose figure acquires a classical dignity in the comparison.
The character of Caliban is generally thought (and justly so) to be one of the author's masterpieces. It is not indeed pleasant to see this character on the stage any more than it is to see the God Pan personated there. But in itself it is one of the wildest and most abstracted of all Shakespeare's characters, whose deformity whether of body or mind is redeemed by the power and truth of the imagination displayed in it. It is the essence of grossness, but there is not a particle of vulgarity in it. Shakespeare has described the brutal mind of Caliban in contact with the pure and original forms of nature; the character grows out of the soil where it is rooted uncontrolled, uncouth and wild, uncramped by any of the meannesses of custom. It is 'of the earth, earthy'. It seems almost to have been dug out of the ground, with a soul instinctively superadded to it answering to its wants and origin. Vulgarity is not natural coarseness, but conventional coarseness, learnt from others, contrary to, or without an entire conformity of natural power and disposition; as fashion is the commonplace affectation of what is elegant and refined without any feeling of the essence of it. Schlegel, the admirable German critic on Shakespeare observes that Caliban is a poetical character, and 'always speaks in blank verse'. He first comes in thus:
Caliban. As wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'dWith raven's feather from unwholesome fen,Drop on you both: a south-west blow on ye,And blister you all o'er!
Prospero. For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps,Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchinsShall for that vast of night that they may work,All exercise on thee: thou shalt be pinch'dAs thick as honey-combs, each pinch more stingingThan bees that made 'em.
Caliban. I must eat my dinner.This island's mine by Sycorax my mother,Which thou tak'st from me. When thou camest first,Thou strok'dst me, and mad'st much of me; would'st give meWater with berries in 't; and teach me howTo name the bigger light and how the lessThat burn by day and night; and then I lov'd thee,And show'd thee all the qualities o' th' isle,The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:Curs'd be I that I did so! All the charmsOf Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!For I am all the subjects that you have,Who first was mine own king; and here you sty meIn this hard rock, whiles you do keep from meThe rest o' th' island.
And again, he promises Trinculo his services thus, if he will free him from his drudgery.
I'll show thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee berries,I'll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough.I pr'ythee let me bring thee where crabs grow,And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts:Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee howTo snare the nimble marmozet: I'll bring theeTo clust'ring filberds; and sometimes I'll get theeYoung scamels from the rock.
In conducting Stephano and Trinculo to Prospero's cell, Caliban shows the superiority of natural capacity over greater knowledge and greater folly; and in a former scene, when Ariel frightens them with his music, Caliban to encourage them accounts for it in the eloquent poetry of the senses:
Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises,Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.Sometimes a thousand twanging instrumentsWill hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,That if I then had waked after long sleep,Would make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,The clouds methought would open, and show richesReady to drop upon me: when I wak'dI cried to dream again.
This is not more beautiful than it is true. The poet here shows us the savage with the simplicity of a child, and makes the strange monster amiable. Shakespeare had to paint the human animal rude and without choice in its pleasures, but not without the sense of pleasure or some germ of the affections. Master Barnardine in Measure for Measure, the savage of civilized life, is an admirable philosophical counterpart to Caliban.
Shakespeare has, as it were by design, drawn off from Caliban the elements of whatever is ethereal and refined, to compound them in the unearthly mould of Ariel. Nothing was ever more finely conceived than this contrast between the material and the spiritual, the gross and delicate. Ariel is imaginary power, the swiftness of thought personified. When told to make good speed by Prospero, he says, 'I drink the air before me.' This is something like Puck's boast on a similar occasion, 'I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.' But Ariel differs from Puck in having a fellow-feeling in the interests of those he is employed about. How exquisite is the following dialogue between him and Prospero!
Ariel. Your charm so strongly works 'em,That if you now beheld them, your affectionsWould become tender.
Prospero. Dost thou think so, spirit?
Ariel. Mine would, sir, were I human.
Prospero. And mine shall.Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feelingOf their afflictions, and shall not myself,One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,Passion'd as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?
It has been observed that there is a peculiar charm in the songs introduced in Shakespeare, which, without conveying any distinct images, seem to recall all the feelings connected with them, like snatches of half-forgotten music heard indistinctly and at intervals. There is this effect produced by Ariel's songs, which (as we are told) seem to sound in the air, and as if the person playing them were invisible. We shall give one instance out of many of this general power.
Enter Ferdinend; and Ariel invisible, playing and singing.
Ariel's Song
Come unto these yellow sands,And then take hands;Curt'sied when you have, and kiss'd,(The wild waves whist;)Foot it featly here and there;And sweet sprites the burden bear.[Burden dispersedly.]Hark, hark! bowgh-wowgh: the watch-dogs bark,Bowgh-wowgh.
Ariel. Hark, hark! I hearThe strain of strutting chanticleerCry cock-a-doodle-doo.
Ferdinand. Where should this music be? in air or earth?It sounds no more: and sure it waits uponSome god o' th' island. Sitting on a bankWeeping against the king my father's wreck,This music crept by me upon the waters,Allaying both their fury and my passionWith its sweet air; thence I have follow'd it,Or it hath drawn me rather:—but 'tis gone.—No, it begins again.
Ariel's Song
Full fathom Eve thy father lies,Of his bones are coral made:Those are pearls that were his eyes,Nothing of him that doth fade,But doth suffer a sea change,Into something rich and strange.Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell—Hark! I now I hear them, ding-dong bell.[Burden ding-dong.]
Ferdinand. The ditty does remember my drown'd father.This is no mortal business, nor no soundThat the earth owns: I hear it now above me.
The courtship between Ferdinand and Miranda is one of the chief beauties of this play. It is the very purity of love. The pretended interference of Prospero with it heightens its interest, and is in character with the magician, whose sense of preternatural power makes him arbitrary, tetchy, and impatient of opposition.
The Tempest is a finer play than the Midsummer Night's Dream, which has sometimes been compared with it; but it is not so fine a poem. There are a greater number of beautiful passages in the latter. Two of the most striking in The Tempest are spoken by Prospero. The one is that admirable one when the vision which he has conjured up disappears, beginning, 'The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,' &c., which has so often been quoted that every schoolboy knows it by heart; the other is that which Prospero makes in abjuring his art:
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves,And ye that on the sands with printless footDo chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly himWhen he comes back; you demi-puppets, thatBy moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastimeIs to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoiceTo hear the solemn curfew, by whose aid(Weak masters tho' ye be) I have be-dimm'dThe noon-tide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vaultSet roaring war; to the dread rattling thunderHave I giv'n fire, and rifted Jove's stout oakWith his own bolt; the strong-bas'd promontoryHave I made shake, and by the spurs pluck'd upThe pine and cedar: graves at my commandHave wak'd their sleepers; op'd, and let 'em forthBy my so potent art. But this rough magicI here abjure; and when I have requir'dSome heav'nly music, which ev'n now I do,(To work mine end upon their senses thatThis airy charm is for) I'll break my staff,Bury it certain fadoms in the earth,And deeper than did ever plummet sound,I'll drown my book.
We must not forget to mention among other things in this play, that Shakespeare has anticipated nearly all the arguments on the Utopian schemes of modern philosophy:
Gonzalo. Had I the plantation of this isle, my lord—
Antonio. He'd sow't with nettle-seed.
Sebastian. Or docks or mallows.
Gonzalo. And ere the king on't, what would I do?
Sebastian. 'Scape being drunk, or want of wine.
Gonzalo. I' th' commonwealth I would by contrariesExecute all things: for no kind of trafficWould I admit; no name of agistrate;Letters should not be known; wealth, poverty,And use of ervice, none; contract, succession,Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;No occupation, all men idle, all,And women too; but innocent and pure:No sov'reignty.
Sebastian. And yet he would be king on't.
Antonio. The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning.
Gonzalo. All things in common nature should produceWithout sweat or endeavour. Treason, felony,Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engineWould I not have; but nature should bring forth,Of its own kind, all foison, all abundanceTo feed my innocent people!
Sebastian. No marrying 'mong his subjects?
Antonio. None, man; all idle; whores and knaves.
Gonzalo. I would with such perfection govern, sir,T' excel the golden age.
Sebastian. Save his majesty!
Bottom the Weaver is a character that has not had justice done him. He is the most romantic of mechanics. And what a list of companions he has—Quince the Carpenter, Snug the Joiner, Flute the Bellows-mender, Snout the Tinker, Starveling the Tailor; and then again, what a group of fairy attendants, Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed! It has been observed that Shakespeare's characters are constructed upon deep physiological principles; and there is something in this play which looks very like it. Bottom the Weaver, who takes the lead of
This crew of patches, rude mechanicals,That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,
follows a sedentary trade, and he is accordingly represented as conceited, serious, and fantastical. He is ready to undertake anything and everything, as if it was as much a matter of course as the motion of his loom and shuttle. He is for playing the tyrant, the lover, the lady, the lion. 'He will roar that it shall do any man's heart good to hear him'; and this being objected to as improper, he still has a resource in his good opinion of himself, and 'will roar you an 'twere any nightingale'. Snug the Joiner is the moral man of the piece, who proceeds by measurement and discretion in all things. You see him with his rule and compasses in his hand. 'Have you the lion's part written? Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study.'—'You may do it extempore,' says Quince, 'for it is nothing but roaring.' Starveling the Tailor keeps the peace, and objects to the lion and the drawn sword. 'I believe we must leave the killing out when all's done.' Starveling, however, does not start the objections himself, but seconds them when made by others, as if he had not spirit to express his fears without encouragement. It is too much to suppose all this intentional; but it very luckily falls out so. Nature includes all that is implied in the most subtle analytical distinctions; and the same distinctions will be found in Shakespeare. Bottom, who is not only chief actor, but stage-manager for the occasion, has a device to obviate the danger of frightening the ladies: 'Write me a prologue, and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed; and for better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the Weaver; this will put them out of fear.' Bottom seems to have understood the subject of dramatic illusion at least as well as any modern essayist. If our holiday mechanic rules the roast among his fellows, he is no less at home in his new character of an ass, 'with amiable cheeks, and fair large ears'. He instinctively acquires a most learned taste, and grows fastidious in the choice of dried peas and bottled hay. He is quite familiar with his new attendants, and assigns them their parts with all due gravity. 'Monsieur Cobweb, good Monsieur, get your weapon in your hand, and kill me a red-hipt humble-bee on the top of a thistle, and, good Monsieur, bring me the honey-bag.' What an exact knowledge is here shown of natural history!
Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is the leader of the fairy band. He is the Ariel of the MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM; and yet as unlike as can be to the Ariel in THE TEMPEST. No other poet could have made two such different characters out of the same fanciful materials and situations. Ariel is a minister of retribution, who is touched with a sense of pity at the woes he inflicts. Puck is a mad-cap sprite, full of wantonness and mischief, who laughs at those whom he misleads—'Lord, what fools these mortals be!' Ariel cleaves the air, and executes his mission with the zeal of a winged messenger; Puck is borne along on his fairy errand like the light and glittering gossamer before the breeze. He is, indeed, a most Epicurean little gentleman, dealing in quaint devices and faring in dainty delights. Prospero and his world of spirits are a set of moralists; but with Oberon and his fairies we are launched at once into the empire of the butterflies. How beautifully is this race of beings contrasted with the men and women actors in the scene, by a single epithet which Titania gives to the latter, 'the human mortals'! It is astonishing that Shakespeare should be considered, not only by foreigners, but by many of our own critics, as a gloomy and heavy writer, who painted nothing but 'gorgons and hydras, and chimeras dire'. His subtlety exceeds that of all other dramatic writers, insomuch that a celebrated person of the present day said that he regarded him rather as a metaphysician than a poet. His delicacy and sportive gaiety are infinite. In the MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM alone, we should imagine, there is more sweetness and beauty of description than in the whole range of French poetry put together. What we mean is this, that we will produce out of that single play ten passages, to which we do not think any ten passages in the works of the French poets can be opposed, displaying equal fancy and imagery. Shall we mention the remonstrance of Helena to Hermia, or Titania's description of her fairy train, or her disputes with Oberon about the Indian boy, or Puck's account of himself and his employments, or the Fairy Queen's exhortation to the elves to pay due attendance upon her favourite, Bottom; or Hippolita's description of a chace, or Theseus's answer? The two last are as heroical and spirited as the others are full of luscious tenderness. The reading of this play is like wandering in a grove by moonlight: the descriptions breathe a sweetness like odours thrown from beds of flowers.
Titania's exhortation to the fairies to wait upon Bottom, which is remarkable for a certain cloying sweetness in the repetition of the rhymes, is as follows:
Be kind and courteous to this gentleman.Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes,Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries;The honey-bags steal from the humble bees,And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs,And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,To have my love to bed, and to arise:And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,To fan the moon-beams from his sleeping eyes;Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.
The sounds of the lute and of the trumpet are not more distinct than the poetry of the foregoing passage, and of the conversation between Theseus and Hippolita:
Theseus. Go, one of you, find out the forester,For now our observation is perform'd;And since we have the vaward of the day,My love shall hear the music of my hounds.Uncouple in the western valley, go,Dispatch, I say, and find the forester.We will, fair Queen, up to the mountain's top,And mark the musical confusionOf hounds and echo in conjunction.
Hippolita. I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bearWith hounds of Sparta; never did I hearSuch gallant chiding. For besides the groves,The skies, the fountains, every region nearSeena'd all one mutual cry. I never heardSo musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
Theseus. My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,So flew'd, so sanded, and their heads are hungWith ears that sweep away the morning dew;Crook-knee'd and dew-lap'd, like Thessalian bulls,Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells,Each under each. A cry more tuneableWas never halloo'd to, nor cheer'd with hom,In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly: Judge when you hear.
Even Titian never made a hunting-piece of a gusto so fresh and lusty, and so near the first ages of the world as this.
It had been suggested to us, that the MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM would do admirably to get up as a Christmas after-piece; and our prompter proposed that Mr. Kean should play the part of Bottom, as worthy of his great talents. He might, in the discharge of his duty, offer to play the lady like any of our actresses that he pleased, the lover or the tyrant like any of our actors that he pleased, and the lion like 'the most fearful wild-fowl living'. The carpenter, the tailor, and joiner, it was thought, would hit the galleries. The young ladies in love would interest the side-boxes; and Robin Goodfellow and his companions excite a lively fellow-feeling in the children from school. There would be two courts, an empire within an empire, the Athenian and the Fairy King and Queen, with their attendants, and with all their finery. What an opportunity for processions, for the sound of trumpets and glittering of spears! What a fluttering of urchins' painted wings; what a delightful profusion of gauze clouds and airy spirits floating on them!
Alas, the experiment has been tried, and has failed; not through the fault of Mr. Kean, who did not play the part of Bottom, nor of Mr. Liston, who did, and who played it well, but from the nature of things. The Midsummer Night's Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled.—Poetry and the stage do not agree well together. The attempt to reconcile them in this instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum. The IDEAL can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective; everything there is in the foreground. That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality. Where all is left to the imagination (as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells according to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested. But the imagination cannot sufficiently qualify the actual impressions of the senses. Any offence given to the eye is not to be got rid of by explanation. Thus Bottom's head in the play is a fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells: on the stage, it is an ass's head, and nothing more; certainly a very strange costume for a gentleman to appear in. Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine. Fairies are not incredible, but fairies six feet high are so. Monsters are not shocking, if they are seen at a proper distance. When ghosts appear at midday, when apparitions stalk along Cheapside, then may the MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM be represented without injury at Covent Garden or at Drury Lane. The boards of a theatre and the regions of fancy are not the same thing.