[515] Salfi, p. 40.

[516] This is only meant as to dialogue and as to the public stage. The talent of a single actor, like the late Charles Mathews, is not an exception; but even the power of strictly extemporaneous comedy, with the agreeable poignancy that the minor theatre requires, is not wanting among some whose station and habits of life restrain its exercise to the most private circles.

[517] Riccoboni, Hist. du Théâtre Italien. Salfi, xii., 518. An elaborate disquisition on the extemporaneous comedy by Mr. Panizzi, in the Foreign Review for 1829 (not the Foreign Quarterly, but one early extinguished), derives it from the mimes and Atellanian comedies of ancient Italy, tracing them through the middle ages. The point seems sufficiently proved. The last company of performers in this old, though plebeian, family existed within about thirty years in Lombardy; a friend of mine at that time witnessed the last of the Harlequins. I need hardly say that this character was not a mere skipper over the stage, as we have seen him, but a very honest and lively young Bergamasque. The plays of Gasparo Gozzi, if plays they are, are mere hints to guide the wit of extemporaneous actors.

Spanish stage. 6. Lope de Vega was at the height of his glory at the beginning of this century. Perhaps the majority of his dramas fall within it; but enough has been said on the subject in the last volume. His contemporaries and immediate successors were exceedingly numerous; the effulgence of dramatic literature in Spain corresponding exactly in time to that of England. Several are named by Bouterwek and Velasquez; but one only, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, must be permitted to arrest us. |Calderon. Number of his pieces.| This celebrated man was born in 1600 and died 1683. From an early age till after the middle of the century when he entered the church, he contributed, with a fertility only eclipsed by that of Lope, a long list of tragic, historic, comic, and tragi-comic dramas to the Spanish stage. In the latter period of his life, he confined himself to the religious pieces, called Autos Sacramentales. Of these, 97 are published in the collective edition of 1726, besides 127 of his regular plays. In one year, 1635, it is said that twelve of his comedies appeared. But the authenticity of so large a number has been questioned; he is said to have given a list of his sacred plays, at the age of eighty, consisting of only 68. No collection was published by himself. Some of his comedies, in the Spanish sense, it may be observed, turn more or less on religious subjects, as their titles show: El Purgatorio de San Patricio—La Devocion de la Cruz—Judas Maccabeus—La Cisma de Inghilterra. He did not dislike contemporary subjects. In El Sitio de Breda, we have Spinola, Nassau, and others then living on the scene. Calderon’s metre is generally trochaic, of eight or seven syllables, not always rhyming; but verses de arte mayor, as they are called, or anapæstic lines of eleven or twelve syllables, and also hendecasyllables frequently occur.

His comedies. 7. The comedies, those properly so called, de capa y espada, which represent manners, are full of incident, but not perhaps crowded so as to produce any confusion; the characters have nothing very salient, but express the sentiments of gentlemen with frankness and spirit. We find in every one a picture of Spain: gallantry, jealousy, quick resentment of insult, sometimes deep revenge. The language of Calderon is not unfrequently poetical, even in these lighter dramas, but hyperbolical figures and insipid conceits deform its beauty. The gracioso, or witty servant, is an unfailing personage; but I do not know (my reading, however, being extremely limited) that Calderon displays much brilliancy or liveliness in his sallies.

11. Sigismund, after some philosophical reflections, prepares to submit to the sad reality which has displaced his vision. But in the third act, an unforeseen event recalls him to the world. The army, become acquainted with his rights, and indignant that the king should transfer them to Astolfo, break into his prison, and place him at their head. Clotaldo expects nothing but death. A new revolution, however, has taken place. Sigismund, corrected by the dismal consequences of giving way to passion in his former dream, and apprehending a similar waking once more, has suddenly overthrown the sway of the sinister constellations that had enslaved him; he becomes generous, mild, and master of himself; and the only pretext for his disinheritance being removed, it is easy that he should be reconciled to his father, that Astolfo, abandoning a kingdom he can no longer claim, should espouse the injured Rosaura, and that the reformed prince should become the husband of Estrella. The incidents which chiefly relate to these latter characters, have been omitted in this slight analysis.

Style of Calderon. 14. It has been objected to Calderon, and the following defence of Bouterwek seems very insufficient, that his servants converse in a poetical style like their masters. “The spirit, on these particular occasions,” says that judicious but lenient critic, “must not be misunderstood. The servants in Calderon’s comedies always imitate the language of their masters. In most cases they express themselves like the latter, in the natural language of real life, and often divested of that colouring of the ideas, without which a dramatic work ceases to be a poem. But whenever romantic gallantry speaks in the language of tenderness, admiration, or flattery, then, according to Spanish custom, every idea becomes a metaphor; and Calderon, who was a thorough Spaniard, seized these opportunities to give the reins to his fancy, and to suffer it to take a bold lyric flight beyond the boundaries of nature. On such occasions the most extravagant metaphoric language, in the style of the Italian Marinists, did not appear unnatural to a Spanish audience; and even Calderon himself had for that style a particular fondness, to the gratification of which he sacrificed a chaster taste. It was his ambition to become a more refined Lope de Vega, or a Spanish Marini. Thus, in his play, Bien vengas mal, si vengas solo, a waiting-maid, addressing her young mistress who has risen in a gay humour, says—“Aurora would not have done wrong had she slumbered that morning in her snowy crystal, for that the sight of her mistress’s charms would suffice to draw aside the curtains from the couch of Sol.” She adds that, using a Spanish idea, “it might then indeed be said that the sun had risen in her lady’s eyes.” Valets, on the like occasion, speak in the same style; and when lovers address compliments to their mistresses, and these reply in the same strain, the play of far-fetched metaphors is aggravated by antitheses to a degree which is intolerable to any but a Spanish-formed taste. But it must not be forgotten that this language of gallantry was in Calderon’s time spoken by the fashionable world, and that it was a vernacular property of the ancient national poetry.”[518] What is this but to confess that Calderon had not genius to raise himself above his age, and that he can be read only as a “Triton of the minnows;” one who is great but in comparison with his neighbours? It will not convert bad writing into good to tell us, as is perpetually done, that we must place ourselves in the author’s position, and make allowances for the taste of his age, or the temper of his nation. All this is true, relatively to the author himself, and may be pleaded against a condemnation of his talents; but the excuse of the man is not that of the work.

[518] P. 507. It has been ingeniously hinted in the Quarterly Review, vol. xxv., that the high-flown language of servants in Spanish dramas, is a parody on that of their masters, and designed to make it ridiculous. But this is probably too refined an excuse.

His merits sometimes over-rated. 15. The fame of Calderon has been latterly revived in Europe through the praise of some German critics, but especially the unbounded panegyric of one of their greatest men, William Schlegel. The passage is well known for its brilliant eloquence. Every one must differ with reluctance and respect from this accomplished writer; and an Englishman, acknowledging with gratitude and admiration what Schlegel has done for the glory of Shakspeare, ought not to grudge the laurels he showers upon another head. It is, however, rather as a poet than a dramatist that Calderon has received this homage; and in his poetry it seems to be rather bestowed on the mysticism, which finds a responsive chord in so many German hearts, than on what we should consider a more universal excellence, a sympathy with, and a power over all that is true and beautiful in nature and in man. Sismondi (but the distance between Weimar and Geneva in matters of taste is incomparably greater than by the public road), dissenting from this eulogy of Schlegel, which he fairly lays before the reader, stigmatizes Calderon as eminently the poet of the age wherein he lived, the age of Philip IV. Salfi goes so far as to say we can hardly read Calderon without indignation; since he seems to have had no view but to make his genius subservient to the lowest prejudices and superstitions of his country.[519] In the 25th volume of the Quarterly Review an elaborate and able critique on the plays of Calderon seems to have estimated him without prejudice on either side. “His boundless and inexhaustible fertility of invention, his quick power of seizing and prosecuting everything with dramatic effect, the unfailing animal spirits of his dramas, if we may venture on the expression, the general loftiness and purity of his sentiments, the rich facility of his verse, the abundance of his language, and the clearness and precision with which he embodies his thoughts in words and figures, entitle him to a high rank as to the imagination and creative faculty of a poet, but we cannot consent to enrol him among the mighty masters of the human breast.”[520] His total want of truth to nature, even the ideal nature which poetry embodies, justifies, at least, this sentence. “The wildest flights of Biron and Romeo,” it is observed, “are tame to the heroes of Calderon; the Asiatic pomp of expression, the exuberance of metaphor, the perpetual recurrence of the same figures, which the poetry of Spain derived from its intercourse with the Arabian conquerors of the peninsula, are lavished by him in all their fulness. Every address of a lover to a mistress is thickly studded with stars and flowers; her looks are always nets of gold, her lips rubies, and her heart a rock, which the rivers of his tears attempt in vain to melt. In short, the language of the heart is entirely abandoned for that of the fancy; the brilliant but false concetti which have infected the poetical literature of every country, and which have been universally exploded by pure taste, glitter in every page, and intrude into every speech.”[521]

[519] Hist. Litt. de Ginguéné, vol. xii., p. 499.

[520] P. 24.

[521] P. 14.

Sect. II.

ON THE FRENCH DRAMA.

Early French Dramatists of this Period—Corneille—His principal Tragedies—Rotrou.

Plays of Hardy. 16. Among the company who performed at the second theatre of Paris, that established in the Marais, was Hardy, who, like Shakspeare, uniting both arts, was himself the author of 600, or, as some say, 800 dramatic pieces. It is said that forty-one of these are extant in the collection of his works which I have never seen. Several of them were written, learned by heart, and represented within a week. His own inventions are the worst of all; his tragedies and tragi-comedies are borrowed with as close an adherence to the original text as possible, from Homer or Plutarch or Cervantes. They have more incident than those of his predecessors, and are somewhat less absurd; but Hardy is a writer of little talent. The Marianne is the most tolerable of his tragedies. In these he frequently abandoned the chorus, and even where he introduces it, does not regularly close the act with an ode.”[522]

[522] Fontenelle, Hist. du Théâtre Français (in Œuvres de Fontenelle, iii., 72). Suard, Mélanges de Littérature, vol. iv.

17. In the comedies of Hardy, and in the many burlesque farces represented under Henry IV. and Louis XIII., no regard was paid to decency, either in the language or the circumstances. Few persons of rank, especially ladies, attended the theatres.[523] These were first attracted by pastoral representations, of which Racan gave a successful example in his Artenice. It is hardly, however, to be called a drama.[524] But the stage, being no longer abandoned to the populace, and a more critical judgment in French literature gaining ground, encouraged by Richelieu, who built a large room in his palace for the representation of Mirame, an indifferent tragedy, part of which was suspected to be his own,[525] the ancient theatre began to be studied, rules were laid down and partially observed, a perfect decorum replaced the licentiousness and gross language of the old writers. Mairet and Rotrou, though without rising, in their first plays, much above Hardy, just served to prepare the way for the father and founder of the national theatre.[526]

[523] Suard, p. 134. Rotrou boasts that since he wrote for the theatre, it had become so well-regulated that respectable women might go to it with as little scruple as to the Luxembourg garden. Corneille, however, has, in general, the credit of having purified the stage; after his second piece, Clitandre, he admitted nothing licentious in his comedies. The only remain of grossness, Fontenelle observes, was that the lovers se tutoyoient; but, as he gravely goes on to remark, le tutoiement ne choque pas les bonnes mœurs; il ne choque que la politesse et la vraie galanterie, p. 91. But the last instance of this heinous offence is in Le Menteur.

[524] Suard, ubi suprà.

[525] Fontenelle, p. 84, 96.

[526] Id. p. 78. It is difficult in France, as it is with us, to ascertain the date of plays, because they were often represented for years before they came from the press. It is conjectured by Fontenelle, that one or two pieces of Mairet and Rotrou may have preceded any by Corneille.

18. The Melite of Corneille, his first production, was represented in 1629, when he was twenty-three years of age. This is only distinguished, as some say, from those of Hardy by a greater vigour of style; but Fontenelle gives a very different opinion. It had, at least, a success which caused a new troop of actors to be established in the Marais. His next, Clitandre, it is agreed, is not so good. But La Veuve is much better; irregular in action, but with spirit, character, and well-invented situations, it is the first model of the higher comedy.[527] These early comedies must, in fact, have been relatively of considerable merit, since they raised Corneille to high reputation, and connected him with the literary men of his time. The Medea, though much borrowed from Seneca, gave a tone of grandeur and dignity unknown before to French tragedy. This appeared in 1635, and was followed by the Cid next year.

[527] Suard, Fontenelle, La Harpe.

The Cid. 19. Notwithstanding the defence made by La Harpe, I cannot but agree with the French Academy, in their criticism on this play, that the subject is essentially ill-chosen. No circumstances can be imagined, no skill can be employed, that will reconcile the mind to the marriage of a daughter with one that has shed her father’s blood. And the law of unity of time, which crowds every event of the drama within a few hours, renders the promised consent of Chimène (for such it is) to this union still more revolting and improbable.[528] The knowledge of this termination re-acts on the reader during a second perusal, so as to give an irresistible impression of her insincerity in her previous solicitations for his death. She seems, indeed, in several passages, little else than a tragic coquette, and one of the most odious kind.[529] The English stage at that time was not exempt from great violations of nature and decorum; yet, had the subject of the Cid fallen into the hands of Beaumont and Fletcher, and it is one which they would have willingly selected for the sake of the effective situations and contrasts of passion it affords, the part of Chimène would have been managed by them with great warmth and spirit, though probably not less incongruity and extravagance; but I can scarcely believe that the conclusion would have been so much in the style of comedy. Her death, or retirement into a monastery, would have seemed more consonant to her own dignity and to that of a tragic subject. Corneille was, however, borne out by the tradition of Spain, and by the authority of Guillen de Castro, whom he imitated.

[528] La Harpe has said that Chimène does not promise at last to marry Rodrigue, though the spectator perceives that she will do so. He forgets that she has commissioned her lover’s sword in the duel with Don Sancho:—

Sors vainqueur d’un combat dont Chimène est le prix.—Act v., sc. 1.

[529] In these lines, for example, of the third act, scene 4th:—

Malgré les feux si beaux qui rompent ma colère,
Je ferai mon possible à bien venger mon père;,
Mais malgré la rigueur d’un si cruel devoir,
Mon unique souhait est de ne rien pouvoir.

It is true that he found this in his Spanish original, but that does not render the imitation judicious, or the sentiment either moral, or even theatrically specious.

Style of Corneille. 20. The language of Corneille is elevated, his sentiments, if sometimes hyperbolical, generally noble, when he has not to deal with the passion of love; conscious of the nature of his own powers, he has avoided subjects wherein this must entirely predominate; it was to be, as he thought, an accessory but never a principal source of dramatic interest. In this, however, as a general law of tragedy, he was mistaken; love is by no means unfit for the chief source of tragic distress, but comes in generally with a cold and feeble effect as a subordinate emotion. In those Roman stories he most affected, its expression could hardly be otherwise than insipid and incongruous. Corneille probably would have dispensed with it like Shakspeare in Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar; but the taste of his contemporaries, formed in the pedantic school of romance, has imposed fetters on his genius in almost every drama. In the Cid, where the subject left him no choice, he has perhaps succeeded better in the delineation of love than on any other occasion; yet even here we often find the cold exaggerations of complimentary verse, instead of the voice of nature. But other scenes of this play, especially in the first act, which bring forward the proud Castilian characters of the two fathers of Rodrigo and Chimène, are full of the nervous eloquence of Corneille; and the general style, though it may not have borne the fastidious criticism either of the Academy or of Voltaire, is so far above anything which had been heard on the French stage, that it was but a very frigid eulogy in the former to say that it “had acquired a considerable reputation among works of the kind.” It had at that time astonished Paris; but the prejudices of Cardinal Richelieu and the envy of inferior authors, joined perhaps to the proverbial unwillingness of critical bodies to commit themselves by warmth of praise, had some degree of influence on the judgment which the Academy pronounced on the Cid, though I do not think it was altogether so unjust and uncandid as has sometimes been supposed.

Cinna. 22. Cinna, the next in order of time, is probably that tragedy of Corneille which would be placed at the head by a majority of suffrages. His eloquence reached here its highest point; the speeches are longer, more vivid in narration, more philosophical in argument, more abundant in that strain of Roman energy, which he had derived chiefly from Lucan, more emphatic and condensed in their language and versification. But, as a drama, this is deserving of little praise; the characters of Cinna and Maximus are contemptible, that of Emilia is treacherous and ungrateful. She is indeed the type of a numerous class who have followed her in works of fiction, and sometimes, unhappily, in real life; the female patriot, theoretically, at least, an assassin, but commonly compelled, by the iniquity of the times, to console herself in practice with safer transgressions. We have had some specimens; and other nations, to their shame and sorrow, have had more. But even the magnanimity of Augustus, whom we have not seen exposed to instant danger, is uninteresting, nor do we perceive why he should bestow his friendship as well as his forgiveness on the detected traitor that cowers before him. It is one of those subjects, which might, by the invention of a more complex plot than history furnishes, have better excited the spectator’s attention, but not his sympathy.

Polyeucte. 23. A deeper interest belongs to Polyeucte; and this is the only tragedy of Corneille wherein he affects the heart. There is indeed a certain incongruity which we cannot overcome between the sanctity of Christian martyrdom and the language of love, especially when the latter is rather the more prominent of the two in the conduct of the drama.[530] But the beautiful character of Pauline would redeem much greater defects than can be ascribed to this tragedy. It is the noblest, perhaps, on the French stage, and conceived with admirable delicacy and dignity.[531] In the style, however, of Polyeucte, there seems to be some return towards the languid tone of common-place which had been wholly thrown off in Cinna.[532]

[530] The coterie at the Hôtel Rambouillet thought that Polyeucte would not succeed, on account of its religious character. Corneille, it is said, was about to withdraw his tragedy, but was dissuaded by an actor of so little reputation that he did not even bear a part in the performance. Fontenelle, p. 101.

[531] Fontenelle thinks that it shows “un grand attachement à son devoir, et un grand caractère” in Pauline to desire that Severus should save her husband’s life, instead of procuring the latter to be executed that she might marry her lover. Réflexions sur la Poétique, sect. 16. This is rather an odd notion of what is sufficient to constitute an heroic character. It is not the conduct of Pauline, which in every Christian or virtuous woman must naturally be the same, but the fine sentiments and language which accompany it, that render her part so noble.

[532] In the second scene of the second act, between Severus and Pauline, two characters of the most elevated class, the former quits the stage with this line: Adieu trop vertueux objet, et trop charmant. The latter replies: Adieu, trop malheureux, et trop parfait amant.

Rodogune. 24. Rodogune is said to have been a favourite with the author. It can hardly be so with the generality of his readers. The story has all the atrocity of the older school, from which Corneille had emancipated the stage. It borders even on ridicule. Two princes, kept by their mother, one of those furies whom our own Webster or Marston would have delighted to draw, in ignorance which is the elder, and consequently entitled to the throne, are enamoured of Rodogune. Their mothers make it a condition of declaring the succession, that they shall shed the blood of this princess. Struck with horror at such a proposition, they refer their passion to the choice of Rodogune, who, in her turn, demands the death of their mother. The embarrassment of these amiable youths may be conceived. La Harpe extols the fifth act of this tragedy, and it may perhaps be effective in representation.

Pompey. 25. Pompey, sometimes inaccurately called the Death of Pompey, is more defective in construction than even any other tragedy of Corneille. The hero, if Pompey is such, never appears on the stage, and his death being recounted at the beginning of the second act, the real subject of the piece, so far as it can be said to have one, is the punishment of his assassins; a retribution demanded by the moral sense of the spectator, but hardly important enough for dramatic interest. The character of Cæsar is somewhat weakened by his passion for Cleopatra, which assumes more the tone of devoted gallantry than truth or probability warrant; but Cornelia, though with some Lucanic extravagance, is full of a Roman nobleness of spirit, which renders her, after Pauline, but at a long interval, the finest among the female characters of Corneille. The language is not beneath that of his earlier tragedies.

Heraclius. 26. In Heraclius we begin to find an inferiority of style. Few passages, especially after the first act, are written with much vigour; and the plot, instead of the faults we may ascribe to some of the former dramas, a too great simplicity and want of action, offends by the perplexity of its situations, and still more by their nature; since they are wholly among the proper resources of comedy. The true and the false Heraclius, each uncertain of his paternity, each afraid to espouse one who may or may not be his sister, the embarrassment of Phocas, equally irritated by both, but aware that in putting either to death, he may punish his own son, the art of Leontine who produces this confusion, not by silence but by a series of inconsistent falsehoods, all these are in themselves ludicrous, and such as in comedy could produce no other effect than laughter.

Other French tragedies. 30. The only tragedies, after those of Corneille, anterior to 1650, which the French themselves hold worthy of remembrance, are the Sophonisbe of Mairet; in which some characters, and some passages are vigorously conceived, but the style is debased by low and ludicrous thoughts, which later critics never fail to point out with severity;[533] the Scevole of Duryer, the best of several good tragedies, full of lines of great simplicity in expression, but which seem to gain force by their simplicity, by one who, though never sublime, adopted with success the severe reasoning style of Corneille;[534] the Marianne of Tristan, which, at its appearance in 1637, passed for a rival of the Cid, and remained for a century on the stage, but is now ridiculed for a style alternately turgid and ludicrous; and the Wenceslas of Rotrou, which had not ceased thirty years since to be represented, and perhaps is so still.

[533] Suard, ubi supra.

[534] Suard, p. 196.

Wenceslas of Rotrou. 31. This tragedy, the best work of a fertile dramatist, who did himself honour by a ready acknowledgment of the superiority of Corneille, instead of canvassing the suffrages of those who always envy genius, is by no means so much below that great master, as, in the unfortunate efforts of his later years, he was below himself. Wenceslas was represented in 1647. It may be admitted that Rotrou had conceived his plot, which is wholly original, in the spirit of Corneille; the masculine energy of the sentiments, the delineation of bold and fierce passions, of noble and heroic love, the attempt even at political philosophy, are copies of that model. It seems indeed that in several scenes Rotrou must, out of mere generosity to Corneille, have determined to out-do one of his most exceptionable passages, the consent of Chimène to espouse the Cid. His own curtain drops on the vanishing reluctance of his heroine to accept the hand of a monster whom she hated, and who had just murdered her lover in his own brother. It is the Lady Anne of Shakspeare; but Lady Anne is not a heroine. Wenceslas is not unworthy of comparison with the second class of Corneille’s tragedies. But the ridiculous tone of language and sentiment, which the heroic romance had rendered popular, and from which Corneille did not wholly emancipate himself, often appears in this piece of Rotrou; the intrigue is rather too complex, in the Spanish style, for tragedy; the diction seems frequently obnoxious to the most indulgent criticism; but above all, the story is essentially ill contrived, ending in the grossest violation of poetical justice ever witnessed on the stage, the impunity and even the triumph of one of the worst characters that was ever drawn.

Number of theatres. 33. At the beginning of this century, not less than eleven regular play-houses had been erected in London and its suburbs; several of which, it appears, were still in use, an order of the privy council in 1600, restraining the number to two being little regarded. Of these, the most important was that of the Black Friars, with which another, called the Globe, on the opposite side of the river, was connected; the same company performing at the former in winter, at the latter in summer. This was the company of which Burbage, the best actor of the day, was chief, and to which Shakspeare, who was also a proprietor, belonged. Their names appear in letters patent, and other legal instruments.[535]

[535] Shakspeare probably retired from the stage, as a performer, soon after 1603; his name appears among the actors of Sejanus in 1603, but not among those of Volpone in 1605. There is a tradition that James I. wrote a letter thanking Shakspeare for the compliment paid to him in Macbeth. Malone, it seems, believed this: Mr. Collier does not, and probably most people will be equally sceptical. Collier, i. 370.

Encouraged by James. 34. James was fond of these amusements, and had encouraged them in Scotland. The Puritan influence, which had been sometimes felt in the council of Elizabeth, came speedily to an end; though the representation of plays on Sundays, a constant theme of complaint, but never wholly put down, was now abandoned, and is not even tolerated by the declaration of sports. The several companies of players, who, in her reign, had been under the nominal protection of some men of rank, were now denominated the servants of the king, the queen, or other royal personages.[536] They were relieved from some of the vexatious control they had experienced, and subjected only to the gentle sway of the Master of the Revels. It was his duty to revise all dramatic works before they were represented, to exclude profane and unbecoming language, and specially to take care that there should be no interference with matters of state. The former of these functions must have been rather laxly exercised; but there are instances in which a licence was refused on account of very recent history being touched in a play.

[536] Id. p. 347. But the privilege of peers to grant licences to itinerant players, given by statute 14 Eliz., c. 5, and 39 Eliz., c. 4, was taken away by 1 Jac. I., c. 7, so that they became liable to be treated as vagrants. Accordingly there were no established theatres in any provincial city, and strollers, though dear to the lovers of the buskin, were always obnoxious to grave magistrates. The licence, however, granted to Burbage, Shakspeare, Hemmings, and others in 1603 authorizes them to act plays not only at the usual house, but in any other part of the kingdom. Burbage was reckoned the best actor of his time, and excelled as Richard III.

General taste for the stage. 35. The reigns of James and Charles were the glory of our theatre. Public applause, and the favour of princes, were well bestowed on those bright stars of our literature who then appeared. In 1623, when Sir Henry Herbert became Master of the Revels, there were five companies of actors in London. This indeed is something less than at the accession of James, and the latest historian of the drama suggests the increase of puritanical sentiments as a likely cause of this apparent decline. But we find little reason to believe that there was any decline in the public taste for the theatre; and it may be as probable an hypothesis, that the excess of competition, at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, had rendered some undertakings unprofitable; the greater fishes, as usual in such cases, swallowing up the less. We learn from Howes, the continuator of Stow, that within sixty years before 1631 seventeen play-houses had been built in the metropolis. These were now larger and more convenient than before. They were divided into public and private; not that the former epithet was inapplicable to both; but those styled public were not completely roofed, nor well provided with seats, nor were the performances by candlelight; they resembled more the rude booths we still see at fairs, or the constructions in which interludes are represented by day in Italy; while private theatres, such as that of the Black Friars, were built in nearly the present form. It seems to be the more probable opinion that moveable scenery was unknown on these theatres. “It is a fortunate circumstance,” Mr. Collier has observed, “for the poetry of our old plays that it was so; the imagination of the auditor only was appealed to: and we owe to the absence of painted canvas many of the finest descriptive passages in Shakspeare, his contemporaries, and immediate followers. The introduction of scenery gives the date to the commencement of the decline of our dramatic poetry.” In this remark, which seems as original as just, I entirely concur. Even in this age the prodigality of our theatre in its peculiar boast, scene-painting, can hardly keep pace with the creative powers of Shakspeare; it is well that he did not live when a manager was to estimate his descriptions by the cost of realizing them on canvas, or we might never have stood with Lear on the cliffs of Dover, or amidst the palaces of Venice with Shylock and Antonio. The scene is perpetually changed in our old drama, precisely because it was not changed at all. A powerful argument might otherwise have been discovered in favour of the unity of place, that it is very cheap.

Theatres closed by the parliament. 36. Charles, as we might expect, was not less inclined to this liberal pleasure than his predecessors. It was to his own cost that Prynne assaulted the stage in his immense volume, the Histrio-mastix. Even Milton, before the foul spirit had wholly entered into him, extolled the learned sock of Jonson, and the wild wood-notes of Shakspeare. But these days were soon to pass away; the ears of Prynne were avenged; by an order of the two houses of parliament, Sept. 2, 1642, the theatres were closed, as a becoming measure, during the season of public calamity and impending civil war; but, after some unsuccessful attempts to evade this prohibition, it was thought expedient, in the complete success of the party who had always abhorred the drama, to put a stop to it altogether; and another ordinance of Jan. 22, 1648, reciting the usual objections to all such entertainments, directed the theatres to be rendered unserviceable. We must refer the reader to the valuable work which has supplied the sketch of these pages for further knowledge;[537] it is more our province to follow the track of those who most distinguished a period so fertile in dramatic genius; and first, that of the greatest of them all.

[537] I have made no particular references to Mr. Collier’s double work, The History of English Dramatic Poetry, and Annals of the Stage; it will be necessary for the reader to make use of his index; but few books lately published contain so much valuable and original information, though not entirely arranged in the most convenient manner. He seems, nevertheless, to have obligations to Dodsley’s preface to his Collection of Old Plays, or rather, perhaps, to Reed’s edition of it.

Shakspeare’s Twelfth Night. 37. Those who originally undertook to marshal the plays of Shakspeare according to chronological order, always attending less to internal evidence than to the very fallible proofs of publication they could obtain, placed Twelfth Night last of all, in 1612 or 1613. It afterwards rose a little higher in the list; but Mr. Collier has finally proved that it was on the stage early in 1602, and was at that time chosen, probably as rather a new piece, for representation at one of the Inns of Court.[538] The general style resembles, in my judgment, that of Much Ado about Nothing, which is referred with probability to the year 1600. Twelfth Night, notwithstanding some very beautiful passages, and the humorous absurdity of Malvolio, has not the coruscations of wit and spirit of character that distinguish the excellent comedy it seems to have immediately followed; nor is the plot nearly so well constructed. Viola would be more interesting, if she had not indelicately, as well as unfairly towards Olivia, determined to win the Duke’s heart before she had seen him. The part of Sebastian has all that improbability which belongs to mistaken identity, without the comic effect for the sake of which that is forgiven in Plautus and in the Comedy of Errors.

[538] Vol. i., p. 327.

Merry Wives of Windsor. 38. The Merry Wives of Windsor is that work of Shakspeare in which he has best displayed English manners; for though there is something of this in the historical plays, yet we rarely see in them such a picture of actual life as comedy ought to represent. It may be difficult to say for what cause he has abstained from a source of gaiety whence his prolific invention and keen eye for the diversities of character might have drawn so much. The Masters Knowell and Well-born, the young gentlemen who spend their money freely, and make love to rich widows, an insipid race of personages, it must be owned, recur for ever in the old plays of James’s reign; but Shakspeare threw an ideality over this class of characters, the Bassanios, the Valentines, the Gratianos, and placed them in scenes which neither by dress nor manners recalled the prose of ordinary life.[539] In this play, however, the English gentleman, in age and youth, is brought upon the stage, slightly caricatured in Shallow, and far more so in Slender. The latter, indeed, is a perfect satire, and I think was so intended, on the brilliant youth of the provinces, such as we may believe it to have been before the introduction of newspapers and turnpike roads, awkward and boobyish among civil people, but at home in rude sports, and proud of exploits at which the town would laugh, yet perhaps with more courage and good nature than the laughers. No doubt can be raised that the family of Lucy is ridiculed in Shallow; but those who have had recourse to the old fable of the deer stealing, forget that Shakspeare never lost sight of his native county, and went, perhaps every summer, to Stratford. It is not impossible that some arrogance of the provincial squires towards a player, whom, though a gentleman by birth and the recent grant of arms, they might not reckon such, excited his malicious wit to those admirable delineations.

[539] “No doubt,” says Coleridge, “they (Beaumont and Fletcher) imitated the ease of gentlemanly conversation better than Shakspeare, who was unable not to be too much associated to succeed in this.” Table Talk, ii., 396. I am not quite sure that I understand this expression; but probably the meaning is not very different from what I have said.

39. The Merry Wives of Windsor was first printed in 1602, but very materially altered in a subsequent edition. It is wholly comic; so that Dodd, who published the Beauties of Shakspeare, confining himself to poetry, says it is the only play which afforded him nothing to extract. This play does not excite a great deal of interest; for Anne Page is but a sample of a character not very uncommon, which, under a garb of placid and decorous mediocrity, is still capable of pursuing its own will. But in wit and humorous delineation no other goes beyond it. If Falstaff seems, as Johnson has intimated, to have lost some of his powers of merriment, it is because he is humiliated to a point where even his invention and impudence cannot bear him off victorious. In the first acts he is still the same Jack Falstaff of the Boar’s Head. Jonson’s earliest comedy, Every Man in his Humour, had appeared a few years before the Merry Wives of Windsor; they both turn on English life in the middle classes, and on the same passion of jealousy. If, then, we compare these two productions of our greatest comic dramatists, the vast superiority of Shakspeare will appear undeniable. Kitely, indeed, has more energy, more relief, more perhaps of what might appear to his temper matter for jealousy, than the wretched, narrow-minded Ford; he is more of a gentleman, and commands a certain degree of respect; but dramatic justice is better dealt upon Ford by rendering him ridiculous, and he suits better the festive style of Shakspeare’s most amusing play. His light-hearted wife, on the other hand, is drawn with more spirit than Dame Kitely; and the most ardent admirer of Jonson would not oppose Master Stephen to Slender, or Bobadil to Falstaff. The other characters are not parallel enough to admit of comparison; but in their diversity (nor is Shakspeare, perhaps, in any one play more fertile), and their amusing peculiarity, as well as in the construction and arrangement of the story, the brilliancy of the wit, the perpetual gaiety of the dialogue, we perceive at once to whom the laurel must be given. Nor is this comparison instituted to disparage Jonson, whom we have praised, and shall have again to praise so highly, but to show how much easier it was to vanquish the rest of Europe than to contend with Shakspeare.

Measure for Measure. 40. Measure for Measure, commonly referred to the end of 1603, is perhaps, after Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth, the play in which Shakspeare struggles, as it were, most with the over-mastering power of his own mind; the depths and intricacies of being which he has searched and sounded with intense reflection, perplex and harass him; his personages arrest their course of action to pour forth, in language the most remote from common use, thoughts which few could grasp in the clearest expression; and thus he loses something of dramatic excellence in that of his contemplative philosophy. The Duke is designed as the representative of this philosophical character. He is stern and melancholy by temperament, averse to the exterior shows of power, and secretly conscious of some unfitness for its practical duties. The subject is not very happily chosen, but artfully improved by Shakspeare. In most of the numerous stories of a similar nature, which before or since his time have been related, the sacrifice of chastity is really made, and made in vain. There is, however, something too coarse and disgusting in such a story; and it would have deprived him of a splendid exhibition of character. The virtue of Isabella, inflexible and independent of circumstance, has something very grand and elevated; yet one is disposed to ask, whether, if Claudio had been really executed, the spectator would not have gone away with no great affection for her; and at least we now feel that her reproaches against her miserable brother when he clings to life like a frail and guilty being, are too harsh. There is great skill in the invention of Mariana, and without this the story could not have had anything like a satisfactory termination; yet it is never explained how the Duke had become acquainted with this secret, and being acquainted with it, how he had preserved his esteem and confidence in Angelo. His intention, as hinted towards the end, to marry Isabella, is a little too common-place, it is one of Shakspeare’s hasty half-thoughts. The language of this comedy is very obscure, and the text seems to have been printed with great inaccuracy. I do not value the comic parts highly; Lucio’s impudent profligacy, the result rather of sensual debasement than of natural ill disposition, is well represented; but Elbow is a very inferior repetition of Dogberry. In dramatic effect, Measure for Measure ranks high; the two scenes between Isabella and Angelo, that between her and Claudio, those where the Duke appears in disguise, and the catastrophe in the fifth act are admirably written and very interesting; except so far as the spectator’s knowledge of the two stratagems which have deceived Angelo may prevent him from participating in the indignation at Isabella’s imaginary wrong which her lamentations would excite. Several of the circumstances and characters are borrowed from the old play of Whetstone, Promos and Cassandra; but very little of the sentiments or language. What is good in Measure for Measure is Shakspeare’s own.

Timon of Athens. 42. Timon of Athens is cast as it were in the same mould as Lear; it is the same essential character, the same generosity more from wanton ostentation than love of others, the same fierce rage under the smart of ingratitude, the same rousing up, in that tempest, of powers that had slumbered unsuspected in some deep recess of the soul; for had Timon or Lear known that philosophy of human nature in their calmer moments which fury brought forth, they would never have had such terrible occasion to display it. The thoughtless confidence of Lear in his children has something in it far more touching than the self-beggary of Timon; though both one and the other have prototypes enough in real life. And as we give the old king more of our pity, so a more intense abhorrence accompanies his daughters and the worse characters of that drama, than we spare for the miserable sycophants of the Athenian. Their thanklessness is anticipated, and springs from the very nature of their calling; it verges on the beaten road of comedy. In this play there is neither a female personage, except two courtezans, who hardly speak, nor any prominent character (the honest steward is not such) redeemed by virtue enough to be estimable; for the cynic Apemantus is but a cynic, and ill replaces the noble Kent of the other drama. The fable, if fable it can be called, is so extraordinarily deficient in action, a fault of which Shakspeare is not guilty in any other instance, that we may wonder a little how he should have seen in the single delineation of Timon a counterbalance for the manifold objections to this subject. But there seems to have been a period of Shakspeare’s life when his heart was ill at ease, and ill content with the world or his own conscience; the memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the experience of man’s worser nature, which intercourse with ill-chosen associates, by choice or circumstance, peculiarly teaches;—these, as they sank down into the depths of his great mind, seem not only to have inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary character, the censurer of mankind. This type is first seen in the philosophic melancholy of Jaques, gazing with an undiminished serenity, and with a gaiety of fancy, though not of manners, on the follies of the world. It assumes a graver cast in the exiled Duke of the same play, and next one rather more severe in the Duke of Measure for Measure. In all these, however, it is merely contemplative philosophy. In Hamlet, this is mingled with the impulses of a perturbed heart under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances; it shines no longer, as in the former characters, with a steady light, but plays in fitful coruscations amidst feigned gaiety and extravagance. In Lear it is the flash of sudden inspiration across the incongruous imagery of madness; in Timon it is obscured by the exaggerations of misanthropy. These plays all belong to nearly the same period: As you Like It, being usually referred to 1600; Hamlet, in its altered form, to about 1602; Timon to the same year; Measure for Measure to 1603, and Lear to 1604. In the later plays of Shakspeare, especially in Macbeth and the Tempest, much of moral speculation will be found, but he has never returned to this type of character in the personages. Timon is less read and less pleasing than the great majority of Shakspeare’s plays; but it abounds with signs of his genius. Schlegel observes that of all his works it is that which has most satire; comic in representation of the parasites, indignant and Juvenalian in the bursts of Timon himself.

44. The majority of readers, I believe, assign to Macbeth, which seems to have been written about 1606, the pre-eminence among the works of Shakspeare; many, however, would rather name Othello, one of his latest, which is referred to 1611; and a few might prefer Lear to either. The great epic drama, as the first may be called, deserves, in my own judgment, the post it has attained, as being, in the language of Drake, “the greatest effort of our author’s genius, the most sublime and impressive drama which the world has ever beheld.” It will be observed that Shakspeare had now turned his mind towards the tragic drama. No tragedy but Romeo and Juliet belongs to the sixteenth century; ten, without counting Pericles, appeared in the first eleven years of the present. It is not my design to distinguish each of his plays separately; and it will be evident that I pass over some of the greatest. No writer, in fact, is so well known as Shakspeare, or has been so abundantly, and, on the whole, so ably criticised; I might have been warranted in saying even less than I have done.

Coriolanus. 47. This fault is by no means discerned in the third Roman tragedy of Shakspeare, Coriolanus. He luckily found an intrinsic historical unity which he could not have destroyed, and which his magnificent delineation of the chief personage has thoroughly maintained. Coriolanus himself has the grandeur of sculpture; his proportions are colossal, nor would less than this transcendent superiority by which he towers over his fellow-citizens, warrant, or seem for the moment to warrant, his haughtiness and their pusillanimity. The surprising judgment of Shakspeare is visible in this. A dramatist of the second class, a Corneille, a Schiller, or an Alfieri, would not have lost the occasion of representing the plebeian form of courage and patriotism. A tribune would have been made to utter noble speeches, and some critics would have extolled the balance and contrast of the antagonist principles. And this might have degenerated into the general saws of ethics and politics, which philosophical tragedians love to pour forth. But Shakspeare instinctively perceived that to render the arrogance of Coriolanus endurable to the spectator, or dramatically probable, he must abase the plebeians to a contemptible populace. The sacrifice of historic truth is often necessary for the truth of poetry. The citizens of early Rome, “rusticorum mascula militum proles,” are indeed calumniated in his scenes, and might almost pass for burgesses of Stratford; but the unity of emotion is not dissipated by contradictory energies. Coriolanus is less rich in poetical style than the other two, but the comic parts are full of humour. In these three tragedies it is manifest that Roman character, and still more Roman manners, are not exhibited with the precision of a scholar; yet there is something that distinguishes them from the rest, something of a grandiosity in the sentiments and language, which shows us that Shakspeare had not read that history without entering into its spirit.