“Coriolanus.”
This play illustrates the wonderfully philosophic impartiality of Shakespeare's politics. His own country's history furnished him with no matter but what was too recent to be devoted to patriotism. Besides, he knew that the instruction of ancient history would seem more dispassionate. In Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar, you see Shakespeare's good-natured laugh at mobs. Compare this with Sir Thomas Brown's aristocracy of spirit.
Act i. sc. 1. Marcius' speech:—
I suspect that Shakespeare wrote it transposed!
Ib. sc. 10. Speech of Aufidius:—
I have such deep faith in Shakespeare's heart-lore, that I take for granted that this is in nature, [pg 130] and not as a mere anomaly; although I cannot in myself discover any germ of possible feeling, which could wax and unfold itself into such sentiment as this. However, I perceive that in this speech is meant to be contained a prevention of shock at the after-change in Aufidius's character.
Act ii. sc. 1. Speech of Menenius:—
Was it without, or in contempt of, historical information that Shakespeare made the contemporaries of Coriolanus quote Cato and Galen? I cannot decide to my own satisfaction.
Ib. sc. 3. Speech of Coriolanus:—
That the gown of the candidate was of whitened wool, we know. Does “wolvish” or “woolvish” mean “made of wool?” If it means “wolfish,” what is the sense?
Act iv. sc. 7. Speech of Aufidius:—
I have always thought this, in itself so beautiful speech, the least explicable from the mood and full intention of the speaker of any in the whole works of Shakespeare. I cherish the hope that I am mistaken, and that, becoming wiser, I shall discover some profound excellence in that, in which I now appear to detect an imperfection.
“Julius Cæsar.”
Act i. sc. 1.—
The speeches of Flavius and Marullus are in blank verse. Wherever regular metre can be rendered truly imitative of character, passion, or personal rank, Shakespeare seldom, if ever, neglects it. Hence this line should be read:—
I say regular metre: for even the prose has in the highest and lowest dramatic personage, a Cobbler or a Hamlet, a rhythm so felicitous and so severally appropriate, as to be a virtual metre.
Ib. sc. 2.—
If my ear does not deceive me, the metre of this line was meant to express that sort of mild philosophic contempt, characterising Brutus even in his first casual speech. The line is a trimeter,—each dipodia containing two accented and two unaccented syllables, but variously arranged, as thus:—
Ib. Speech of Brutus:—
Warburton would read “death” for “both;” but I prefer the old text. There are here three things, [pg 132] the public good, the individual Brutus' honour, and his death. The latter two so balanced each other, that he could decide for the first by equipoise; nay—the thought growing—that honour had more weight than death. That Cassius understood it as Warburton, is the beauty of Cassius as contrasted with Brutus.
Ib. Cæsar's speech:—
O Theobald! what a commentator wast thou, when thou would'st affect to understand Shakespeare, instead of contenting thyself with collating the text! The meaning here is too deep for a line ten-fold the length of thine to fathom.
Ib. sc. 3. Cæsar's speech:—
I understand it thus: “You have spoken as a conspirator; be so in fact, and I will join you. Act on your principles, and realize them in a fact.”
Act ii. sc. 1. Speech of Brutus:—
This speech is singular;—at least, I do not at [pg 133] present see into Shakespeare's motive, his rationale, or in what point of view he meant Brutus' character to appear. For surely—(this, I mean, is what I say to myself, with my present quantum of insight, only modified by my experience in how many instances I have ripened into a perception of beauties, where I had before descried faults;) surely, nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here attributed to him—to him, the stern Roman republican; namely,—that he would have no objection to a king, or to Cæsar, a monarch in Rome, would Cæsar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be! How, too, could Brutus say that he found no personal cause—none in Cæsar's past conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Had he not entered Rome as a conqueror? Had he not placed his Gauls in the Senate?—Shakespeare, it may be said, has not brought these things forward—True;—and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What character did Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be?
Ib. Speech of Brutus:—
Surely, there need be no scruple in treating this “path” as a mere misprint or mis-script for “put.” In what place does Shakespeare—where does any other writer of the same age—use “path” as a verb for “walk?”
Ib. sc. 2. Cæsar's speech:—
No doubt, it should be statua, as in the same age, they more often pronounced “heroes” as a trisyllable [pg 134] than dissyllable. A modern tragic poet would have written,—
But Shakespeare never avails himself of the supposed license of transposition, merely for the metre. There is always some logic either of thought or passion to justify it.
Act iii. sc. 1. Antony's speech:—
I doubt the genuineness of the last two lines;—not because they are vile; but first, on account of the rhythm, which is not Shakespearian, but just the very tune of some old play, from which the actor might have interpolated them;—and secondly, because they interrupt, not only the sense and connection, but likewise the flow both of the passion, and (what is with me still more decisive) of the Shakespearian link of association. As with many another parenthesis or gloss slipt into the text, we have only to read the passage without it, to see that it never was in it. I venture to say there is no instance in Shakespeare fairly like this. Conceits he has; but they not only rise out of some word in the lines before, but also lead to the thought in the lines following. Here the conceit is a mere alien: Antony forgets an image, when he is even touching it, and then recollects it, when the thought last in his mind must have led him away from it.
Act iv. sc. 3. Speech of Brutus:—
This seemingly strange assertion of Brutus is unhappily verified in the present day. What is an immense army, in which the lust of plunder has quenched all the duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or differenced only as fiends are from ordinarily reprobate men? Cæsar supported, and was supported by, such as these;—and even so Buonaparte in our days.
I know no part of Shakespeare that more impresses on me the belief of his genius being superhuman, than this scene between Brutus and Cassius. In the Gnostic heresy it might have been credited with less absurdity than most of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed him to create, previously to his function of representing, characters.
“Antony And Cleopatra.”
Shakespeare can be complimented only by comparison with himself: all other eulogies are either heterogeneous, as when they are in reference to Spenser or Milton; or they are flat truisms, as when he is gravely preferred to Corneille, Racine, or even his own immediate successors, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and the rest. The highest praise, or rather form of praise, of this play, which I can offer in my own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether the Antony and Cleopatra is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. Feliciter audax is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakespeare's other works, even as it is the general motto of all his works compared with those of other poets. Be it remembered, too, that this happy valiancy of style is but the representative and result of all the material excellencies so expressed.
This play should be perused in mental contrast with Romeo and Juliet;—as the love of passion and appetite opposed to the love of affection and instinct. But the art displayed in the character of Cleopatra is profound; in this, especially, that the sense of criminality in her passion is lessened by our insight into its depth and energy, at the very moment that we cannot but perceive that the passion [pg 138] itself springs out of the habitual craving of a licentious nature, and that it is supported and reinforced by voluntary stimulus and sought-for associations, instead of blossoming out of spontaneous emotion.
Of all Shakespeare's historical plays, Antony and Cleopatra is by far the most wonderful. There is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so much;—perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. This is greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force is sustained throughout, and to the numerous momentary flashes of nature counteracting the historic abstraction. As a wonderful specimen of the way in which Shakespeare lives up to the very end of this play, read the last part of the concluding scene. And if you would feel the judgment as well as the genius of Shakespeare in your heart's core, compare this astonishing drama with Dryden's All For Love.
Act i. sc. 1. Philo's speech:—
It should be “reneagues,” or “reniegues,” as “fatigues,” &c.
Ib.—
Warburton's conjecture of “stool” is ingenious, and would be a probable reading, if the scene opening had discovered Antony with Cleopatra on his lap. But, represented as he is walking and jesting with her, “fool” must be the word. Warburton's [pg 139] objection is shallow, and implies that he confounded the dramatic with the epic style. The “pillar” of a state is so common a metaphor as to have lost the image in the thing meant to be imaged.
Ib. sc. 2.—
This is so far true to appearance, that a horse-hair, “laid,” as Hollinshed says, “in a pail of water,” will become the supporter of seemingly one worm, though probably of an immense number of small slimy water-lice. The hair will twirl round a finger, and sensibly compress it. It is a common experiment with school boys in Cumberland and Westmoreland.
Act ii. sc. 2. Speech of Enobarbus:—
I have the greatest difficulty in believing that Shakespeare wrote the first “mermaids.” He never, I think, would have so weakened by useless anticipation the fine image immediately following. The epithet “seeming” becomes so extremely improper after the whole number had been positively called “so many mermaids.”
“Timon Of Athens.”
Act i. sc. 1.—
Warburton's comment—“If the man be honest, for that reason he will be so in this, and not endeavour at the injustice of gaining my daughter without my consent”—is, like almost all his comments, ingenious in blunder; he can never see any other writer's thoughts for the mist-working swarm of his own. The meaning of the first line the poet himself explains, or rather unfolds, in the second. “The man is honest!”—“True;—and for that very cause, and with no additional or extrinsic motive, he will be so. No man can be justly called honest, who is not so for honesty's sake, itself including its own reward.” Note, that “honesty” in Shakespeare's age retained much of its old dignity, and that contradistinction of the honestum from the utile, in which its very essence and definition consist. If it be honestum, it cannot depend on the utile.
Ib. Speech of Apemantus, printed as prose in Theobald's edition:—
I may remark here the fineness of Shakespeare's sense of musical period, which would almost by itself have suggested (if the hundred positive proofs had not been extant) that the word “aches” was [pg 142] then ad libitum, a dissyllable—aitches. For read it “aches,” in this sentence, and I would challenge you to find any period in Shakespeare's writings with the same musical or, rather dissonant, notation. Try the one, and then the other, by your ear, reading the sentence aloud, first with the word as a dissyllable and then as a monosyllable, and you will feel what I mean.
Ib. sc. 2. Cupid's speech: Warburton's correction of—
into
This is indeed an excellent emendation.
Act ii. sc. 1. Senator's speech:—
Either, methinks, “plays” should be “play'd,” or “and” should be changed to “while.” I can certainly understand it as a parenthesis, an interadditive of scorn; but it does not sound to my ear as in Shakespeare's manner.
Ib. sc. 2. Timon's speech (Theobald):—
Read your;—at least I cannot otherwise understand the line. You made my chance indisposition and occasional inaptness your minister—that is, the ground on which you now excuse yourself. Or, perhaps, no correction is necessary, if we construe “made you” as “did you make;” “and that unaptness did you make help you thus to excuse yourself.” But the former seems more in Shakespeare's [pg 143] manner, and is less liable to be misunderstood.
Act iii. sc. 3. Servant's speech:—
This latter clause I grievously suspect to have been an addition of the players, which had hit, and, being constantly applauded, procured a settled occupation in the prompter's copy. Not that Shakespeare does not elsewhere sneer at the Puritans; but here it is introduced so nolenter volenter (excuse the phrase) by the head and shoulders!—and is besides so much more likely to have been conceived in the age of Charles I.
Act iv. sc. 3. Timon's speech:—
Warburton reads “denude.”
I cannot see the necessity of this alteration. The editors and commentators are, all of them, ready enough to cry out against Shakespeare's laxities and licenses of style, forgetting that he is not merely a poet, but a dramatic poet; that, when the head and the heart are swelling with fulness, a man does not ask himself whether he has grammatically arranged, but only whether (the context taken in) he has conveyed his meaning. “Deny” is here clearly equal to “withhold;” and the “it,” quite in the genius of vehement conversation, which a syntaxist explains by ellipses and subauditurs in a Greek or Latin classic, yet triumphs over as ignorances in a contemporary, refers to accidental and artificial rank or elevation, implied in the verb “raise.” Besides, does the word “denude” occur in any writer before, or of, Shakespeare's age?
“Romeo And Juliet.”
I have previously had occasion to speak at large on the subject of the three unities of time, place, and action, as applied to the drama in the abstract, and to the particular stage for which Shakespeare wrote, as far as he can be said to have written for any stage but that of the universal mind. I hope I have in some measure succeeded in demonstrating that the former two, instead of being rules, were mere inconveniences attached to the local peculiarities of the Athenian drama; that the last alone deserved the name of a principle, and that in the preservation of this unity Shakespeare stood pre-eminent. Yet, instead of unity of action, I should greatly prefer the more appropriate, though scholastic and uncouth, words homogeneity, proportionateness, and totality of interest,—expressions, which involve the distinction, or rather the essential difference, betwixt the shaping skill of mechanical talent, and the creative, productive, life-power of inspired genius. In the former each part is separately conceived, and then by a succeeding act put together;—not as watches are made for wholesale—(for there each part supposes a pre-conception of the whole in some mind),—but more like pictures on a motley screen. Whence arises the harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks, [pg 146] the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring,—compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations?—From this, that the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified ab intra in each component part. And as this is the particular excellence of the Shakespearian drama generally, so is it especially characteristic of the Romeo and Juliet.
The groundwork of the tale is altogether in family life, and the events of the play have their first origin in family feuds. Filmy as are the eyes of party-spirit, at once dim and truculent, still there is commonly some real or supposed object in view, or principle to be maintained; and though but the twisted wires on the plate of rosin in the preparation for electrical pictures, it is still a guide in some degree, an assimilation to an outline. But in family quarrels, which have proved scarcely less injurious to states, wilfulness, and precipitancy, and passion from mere habit and custom can alone be expected. With his accustomed judgment, Shakespeare has begun by placing before us a lively picture of all the impulses of the play; and, as nature ever presents two sides, one for Heraclitus, and one for Democritus, he has, by way of prelude, shown the laughable absurdity of the evil by the contagion of it reaching the servants who have so little to do with it, but who are under the necessity of letting the superfluity of sensoreal power fly off through the escape-valve of wit-combats, and of quarrelling with weapons of sharper edge, all in [pg 147] humble imitation of their masters. Yet there is a sort of unhired fidelity, an ourishness about all this that makes it rest pleasant on one's feelings. All the first scene, down to the conclusion of the Prince's speech, is a motley dance of all ranks and ages to one tune, as if the horn of Huon had been playing behind the scenes.
Benvolio's speech:—
and, far more strikingly, the following speech of old Montague:—
prove that Shakespeare meant the Romeo and Juliet to approach to a poem, which, and indeed its early date, may be also inferred from the multitude of rhyming couplets throughout. And if we are right, from the internal evidence, in pronouncing this one of Shakespeare's early dramas, it affords a strong instance of the fineness of his insight into the nature of the passions, that Romeo is introduced already love-bewildered. The necessity of loving creates an object for itself in man and woman; and yet there is a difference in this respect between the sexes, though only to be known by a perception of it. It would have displeased us if Juliet had been represented as already in love, or as fancying herself so;—but no one, I believe, ever experiences any shock at Romeo's forgetting his Rosaline, who had been a mere name for the yearning of his youthful imagination, and rushing into his passion for Juliet. Rosaline was a mere creation of his fancy; and we should remark the boastful positiveness [pg 148] of Romeo in a love of his own making, which is never shown where love is really near the heart.
The character of the Nurse is the nearest of any thing in Shakespeare to a direct borrowing from mere observation; and the reason is, that as in infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class,—just as in describing one larch tree, you generalise a grove of them,—so it is nearly as much so in old age. The generalisation is done to the poet's hand. Here you have the garrulity of age strengthened by the feelings of a long-trusted servant, whose sympathy with the mother's affections gives her privileges and rank in the household; and observe the mode of connection by accidents of time and place, and the childlike fondness of repetition in a second childhood, and also that happy humble, ducking under, yet constant resurgence against, the check of her superiors!—
In the fourth scene we have Mercutio introduced to us. O! how shall I describe that exquisite ebullience and overflow of youthful life, wafted on over the laughing waves of pleasure and prosperity, as a wanton beauty that distorts the face on which she knows her lover is gazing enraptured, and wrinkles her forehead in the triumph of its smoothness! Wit ever wakeful, fancy busy and procreative as an insect, courage, an easy mind that, without cares of its own, is at once disposed to [pg 149] laugh away those of others, and yet to be interested in them,—these and all congenial qualities, melting into the common copula of them all, the man of rank and the gentleman, with all its excellencies and all its weaknesses, constitute the character of Mercutio!
Act i. sc. 5.—
How admirable is the old man's impetuosity at once contrasting, yet harmonised, with young Tybalt's quarrelsome violence! But it would be endless to repeat observations of this sort. Every leaf is different on an oak tree; but still we can only say—our tongues defrauding our eyes— “This is another oak-leaf!”
Act ii. sc. 2. The garden scene.
Take notice in this enchanting scene of the contrast of Romeo's love with his former fancy; and weigh the skill shown in justifying him from his inconstancy by making us feel the difference of his passion. Yet this, too, is a love in, although not merely of, the imagination.
Ib.—
With love, pure love, there is always an anxiety for the safety of the object, a disinterestedness, by [pg 150] which it is distinguished from the counterfeits of its name. Compare this scene with Act iii. sc. 1 of the Tempest. I do not know a more wonderful instance of Shakespeare's mastery in playing a distinctly rememberable variety on the same remembered air, than in the transporting love confessions of Romeo and Juliet and Ferdinand and Miranda. There seems more passion in the one, and more dignity in the other; yet you feel that the sweet girlish lingering and busy movement of Juliet, and the calmer and more maidenly fondness of Miranda, might easily pass into each other.
Ib. sc. 3. The Friar's speech.
The reverend character of the Friar, like all Shakespeare's representations of the great professions, is very delightful and tranquillising, yet it is no digression, but immediately necessary to the carrying on of the plot.
Ib. sc. 4.—
Compare again Romeo's half-exerted, and half real, ease of mind with his first manner when in love with Rosaline! His will had come to the clenching point.
Ib. sc. 6.—
The precipitancy, which is the character of the play, is well marked in this short scene of waiting for Juliet's arrival.
Act iii. sc. 1.—
How fine an effect the wit and raillery habitual to Mercutio, even struggling with his pain, give to Romeo's following speech, and at the same time so completely justifying his passionate revenge on Tybalt!
Ib. Benvolio's speech:—
This small portion of untruth in Benvolio's narrative is finely conceived.
Ib. sc. 2. Juliet's speech:—
Indeed the whole of this speech is imagination strained to the highest; and observe the blessed effect on the purity of the mind. What would Dryden have made of it?
Ib.—
Note the Nurse's mistake of the mind's audible struggles with itself for its decision in toto.
Ib. sc. 3. Romeo's speech:—
All deep passions are a sort of atheists, that believe no future.
Ib. sc. 5.—
A noble scene! Don't I see it with my own eyes?—Yes! but not with Juliet's. And observe in Capulet's last speech in this scene his mistake, [pg 152] as if love's causes were capable of being generalised.
Act iv. sc. 3. Juliet's speech.:—
Shakespeare provides for the finest decencies. It would have been too bold a thing for a girl of fifteen;—but she swallows the draught in a fit of fright.
Ib. sc. 5.—
As the audience know that Juliet is not dead, this scene is, perhaps, excusable. But it is a strong warning to minor dramatists not to introduce at one time many separate characters agitated by one and the same circumstance. It is difficult to understand what effect, whether that of pity or of laughter, Shakespeare meant to produce;—the occasion and the characteristic speeches are so little in harmony! For example, what the Nurse says is excellently suited to the Nurse's character, but grotesquely unsuited to the occasion.
Act v. sc. 1. Romeo's speech:—
This famous passage is so beautiful as to be self-justified; yet, in addition, what a fine preparation it is for the tomb scene!
Ib. sc. 3. Romeo's speech:—
The gentleness of Romeo was shown before, as softened by love; and now it is doubled by love and sorrow and awe of the place where he is.
[pg 153]Ib. Romeo's speech:—--
Here, here, is the master example how beauty can at once increase and modify passion!
Ib. Last scene.
How beautiful is the close! The spring and the winter meet;—winter assumes the character of spring, and spring the sadness of winter.