DRAMATISTS.

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

is a pleasant and poetical tradition, that he was born on the 23d of the month, the anniversary of St

Birthplace of Shakspeare.

George, the tutelar saint of England; but all we know with certainty is, that he was baptised on the 26th. His father, John Shakspeare, was a woolcomber or glover, who had elevated his social position by marriage with a rustic heiress, Mary Arden, possessed of an estate worth about £70 per annum of our present money. The poet's father rose to be high bailiff and chief alderman of Stratford; but in 1578, he is found mortgaging his wife's inheritance, and, from entries in the town-books, is supposed to havé fallen into comparative poverty. William was the eldest of six surviving children, and after some education at the grammar-school, he is said to have been brought home to assist at his father's business. There is a blank in his history for some years; but doubtless he was engaged, whatever might be his circumstances or employment, in treasuring up materials for his future poetry. The study of man and of nature, facts in natural history, the country, the fields, and the woods, would be gleaned by familiar intercourse and observation among his fellow-townsmen, and in rambling over the beautiful valley of the Avon. It has been conjectured that he was some time in a lawyer's office, as his works abound in technical This has always legal phrases and illustrations. seemed to us highly probable. The London players were also then in the habit of visiting Stratford: Thomas Green, an actor, was a native of the town; and Burbage, the greatest performer of his day (the future Richard, Hamlet, and Othello), was originally from Warwickshire. Who can doubt, then, that the high bailiff's son, from the years of twelve to twenty, was a frequent and welcome visitant behind the scenes?-that he there imbibed the tastes and feelings which coloured all his future life-and that he there felt the first stirrings of his immortal dramatic genius? We are persuaded that he had begun to write long before he left Stratford, and had most probably sketched, if not completed, his Venus

and Adonis, and the Lucrece. The amount of his education at the grammar-school has been made a question of eager scrutiny and controversy. Ben Jonson says, he had little Latin, and less Greek.' This is not denying that he had some. Many Latinised idioms and expressions are to be found in his plays. The choice of two classical subjects for his early poetry, and the numerous felicitous allusions in his dramas to the mythology of the ancients, show that he was imbued with the spirit and taste of classical literature, and was a happy student, if not a critical scholar. His mind was too comprehensive to degenerate into pedantry; but when, at the age of four or five and twenty, he took the field of original dramatic composition, in company with the university-bred authors and wits of his times, he soon distanced them all, in correctness as well as facility, in the intellectual richness of his thoughts and diction, and in the wide range of his acquired knowledge. It may be safely assumed, therefore, that at Stratford he was a hard, though perhaps an irregular, student. The precocious maturity of Shakspeare's passions hurried him into a premature marriage. On the 28th of November 1582, he obtained a license at Worcester, legalising his union with Anne Hathaway, with once asking of the banns. Two of his neighbours became security in the sum of £40, that the poet would fulfil his matrimonial engagement, he being a minor, and unable, legally, to contract for himself. Anne Hathaway was seven years older than her husband. She was the daughter of a 'substantial yeoman' of the village of Shottery, about a mile from Stratford. The hurry and anxiety with respect to the marriage-license, is explained by the register of baptisms in the poet's native town; his daughter Susanna was christened on the 26th May 1583, six months after the marriage. In a year and a half, two other children, twins, were born to Shakspeare, who had no family afterwards. We may readily suppose that the small town of Stratford did not offer scope for the ambition of the poet, now arrived at early manhood, and feeling the ties of a husband and a father. He removed to London in 1586 or 1587. It has been said that his departure was hastened by the effects of a lampoon he had written on a neighbouring squire, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, in revenge for Sir Thomas Part of it must be unprosecuting him for deer-stealing. The story is inconsistent in its details. true; it was never recorded against him in his lifetime; and the whole may have been built upon the opening scene in the Merry Wives of Windsor (not written till after Sir Thomas Lucy's death), in which there is some wanton wit on the armorial bearings of the Lucy family. The tale, however, is now associated so intimately with the name of Shakspeare, that, considering the obscurity which rests and probably will ever rest on his history, there seems little likelihood of its ever ceasing to have a place in the public mind.* Shakspeare soon rose to dis

* Mr Washington Irving, in his Sketch-Book,' thus adverts to Charlecote, and the deer-stealing affair :

'I had a desire to see the old family seat of the Lucys at Charlecote, and to ramble through the park where Shakspeare, in company with some of the roysters of Stratford, committed his youthful offence of deer-stealing. In this hair-brained exploit, we are told that he was taken prisoner, and carried to the keeper's lodge, where he remained all night in doleful captivity. When brought into the presence of Sir Thomas Lucy, so wrought upon his spirit, as to produce a rough pasquinade, his treatment must have been galling and humiliating; for it which was affixed to the park-gate at Charlecote.

This flagitious attack upon the dignity of the knight so incensed him, that he applied to a lawyer at Warwick to put the severity of the laws in force against the rhyming deer-stalker.

177

12

DRAMATISTS.

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

magnificent conceptions which were afterwards em-
bodied in the Lear, the Macbeth, Othello, and Tempest
of his tragic muse.

The chronology of Shakspeare's plays has been arbitrarily fixed by Malone and others, without adequate authority. Mr Collier has shown its incorrectness in various particulars. He has proved, for example, that Othello' was on the stage in 1602, though Malone assigns its first appearance to 1604. Macbeth' is put down to 1606, though we only know that it existed in 1610. Henry VIII. is assigned to 1603, yet it is mentioned by Sir Henry Wotton as a new play in 1613, and we know that it was produced with unusual scenic decoration and splendour in that year.

like the work of Greene or Peele. Titus Andronicus resembles the style of Marlow, and if written by Shakspeare, as distinct contemporary testimony affirms, it must have been a very youthful production. The Taming of the Shrew is greatly indebted to an old play on the same subject, and must also It is doubtful be referred to the same period. whether Shakspeare wrote any of the first part of Henry VI. The second and third parts are modelled on two older plays, the 'Contention of York and Lancaster,' and the True Tragedy of the Duke of York.' Whether these old dramas were early sketches of Shakspeare's own, or the labours of some obscure and forgotten playwright, cannot now be ascertained: they contain the death-scene of Cardinal Beaufort, the last speech of the Duke of York, and the germs of that vigorous delineation of character and passion completed in 'Richard III.' We know no other dramatist of that early period, excepting Marlow, who could have written those powerful sketches. From the old plays, Shakspeare borrowed no less than 1771 entire lines, and nearly double that number are merely alterations. Such There seems no good reason for believing that wholesale appropriation of the labours of others is found in none of his other historical plays (as King Shakspeare did not continue writing on to the period John, Richard III., &c., modelled on old dramas), of his death in 1616; and such a supposition is counand we therefore incline to the opinion, that the tenanced by a tradition thus recorded in the diary 'I have Contention and the True Tragedy were early pro- of the Rev. John Ward, A.M., vicar of Stratfordductions of the poet, afterwards enlarged and im-on-Avon, extending from 1648 to 1679. proved by him, as part of his English historical series, and then named Henry VI.

The gradual progress of Shakspeare's genius is supposed to have been not unobserved by Spenser. In 1594, or 1595, the venerable poet wrote his pastoral, entitled 'Colin Clout's Come Home Again,' in which he commemorates his brother poets under feigned names. The gallant Raleigh is the Shepherd of the Ocean, Sir Philip Sidney is Astrophel, and other living authors are characterised by fictitious appellations. He concludes as follows:

And then, though last not least, is Aëtion,
A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found,
full of high thoughts' invention,
Whose muse,
Doth, like himself, heroically sound.

The Roman plays were undoubtedly among his latest works. The Tempest' has been usually considered the last, but on no decisive authority. Adopting this popular belief, Mr Campbell has remarked, that the Tempest' has a sort of sacredness' as the last drama of the great poet, who, as if conscious that this was to be the case, has been inspired to typify himself as a wise, potent, and benevolent magician.'

tion, that he attained to the highest pitch of dramatic art, and the most accurate philosophy of the human mind, and that he was, as Schlegel has happily remarked, a profound artist, and not a blind and wildly-luxuriant genius.”*

heard,' says the careless and incurious vicar, who might have added largely to our stock of Shakspearian facts, had he possessed taste, acuteness, or He frequented industry-I have heard that Mr Shakspeare was a natural wit, without any art at all. the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for it had an allowance so large, that he spent at the rate of £1000 a-year, as I have heard. Shakspeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson, had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakspeare died of a fever there contracted.' We place no great reliance on this testimony, either as to facts literary or personal. Those who have studied the works of the great dramatist, and marked his successive approaches to perfection, must see that The sonorous and chivalrous-like name of Shak-he united the closest study to the keenest observaspeare seems here designated. The poet had then published his two classical poems, and probably most of his English historical plays had been acted. The supposition that Shakspeare was meant, is at least a pleasing one. We love to figure Spenser and Raleigh sitting under the shady alders' on the banks of Mulla, reading the manuscript of the 'Faery Queen; but it is not less interesting to consider the great poet watching the dawn of that mighty mind which was to eclipse all its contemporaries. A few years afterwards, in 1598, we meet with an impor- usual fine poetical appreciation and feeling, that that law of unity which has its foundations, not in the factitious necessity tant notice of Shakspeare by Francis Meres, a conAs Plautus and Seneca,' he of custom, but in nature itself, the unity of feeling, is everywhere, temporary author. says, are accounted the best for comedy and tra- and at all times, observed by Shakspeare in his plays. Read gedy among the Latins, so Shakspeare, among the Romeo and Juliet-all is youth and spring; youth with its folEnglish, is the most excellent in both kinds for the lies, its virtues, its precipitancies; spring with its odours, its stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, flowers, and its transiency; it is one and the same feeling that commences, goes through, and ends the play.' This unity of his Errors, his Love's Labour Lost, his Love's Labour Won (or All's Well that Ends Well), his Mid-action, or of character and interest, conspicuous in Shakspeare, summer Night's Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.' This was indeed a brilliant contribution to the English drama, throwing Greene, Peele, and Marlow immeasurably into shade, and far transcending all the previous productions of the English stage. The harvest, however, was not yet half reaped the glorious intellect of Shakspeare was still forming, and his imagination nursing those

*Coleridge boasted of being the first in time who publicly demonstrated, to the full extent of the position, that the supmere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it posed irregularity and extravagances of Shakspeare were the had not the dimensions of the swan.' He maintains, with his

Whence arises the harmony Coleridge illustrates by an illustration drawn, with the taste of a poet, from external nature. tive shapes of rocks-the harmony of colours in the heaths, that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes-in the rela

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 springcompared 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 în each component part. In working out his conceptions, elther

179

Eleven of the dramas were printed during Shakspeare's life, probably from copies piratically obtained. It was the interest of the managers that new and popular pieces should not be published; but we entertain the most perfect conviction, that the poet intended all his original works, as he had revised some, for publication. The Merry Wives of Windsor' is said to have been written in fourteen days, by command of Queen Elizabeth, who wished to see Falstaff in love. Shakspeare, however, was anxious for his fame, as well as eager to gratify the queen; when the temporary occasion was served, he returned to his play, filled up his first imperfect outline, and heightened the humour of the dialogue and character. Let not the example of this greatest name in English literature be ever quoted to support the false opinion, that excellence can be attained without study and labour!

In 1623 appeared the first collected edition of Shakspeare's dramatic works-seven years after his own death, and six months after that of his widow, who, we suspect, had a life-interest in the plays. The whole were contained in one folio volume, and a preface and dedication were supplied by the poet's fellow comedians, Hemming and Condell.

guage (like light from heaven')—his imagery and versification.

That Shakspeare deviated from the dramatic unities of time, place, and action, laid down by the ancients, and adopted by the French theatre, is wellknown, and needs no defence. In his tragedies, he amply fulfils what Aristotle admits to be the end and object of tragedy, to beget admiration, terror, or sympathy. His mixture of comic with tragic scenes is sometimes a blemish, but it was the fault of his age; and if he had lived to edit his works, some of these incongruities would doubtless have been expunged. But, on the whole, such blending of opposite qualities and characters is accordant with the actual experience and vicissitudes of life. No course of events, however tragic in its results, moves on in measured, unvaried solemnity, nor would the English taste tolerate this stately French style. The great preceptress of Shakspeare was Nature: he spoke from her inspired dictates, warm from the heart and faithful to its fires;' and in his disregard of classic rules, pursued at will his winged way through all the labyrinths of fancy and of the human heart. These celestial flights, however, were regulated, as we have said, by knowledge and taste. Mere poetiThe plots of Shakspeare's dramas were nearly all cal imagination might have created a Caliban, or borrowed, some from novels and romances, others evoked the airy spirits of the enchanted island and from legendary tales, and some from older plays. the Midsummer Dream; but to delineate a DesdeIn his Roman subjects, he followed North's transla- mona or Imogen, a Miranda or Viola, the influence tion of Plutarch's Lives; his English historical plays of a pure and refined spirit, cultivated and disciare chiefly taken from Holinshed's Chronicle. From plined by 'gentle arts,' and familiar by habit, thought, the latter source he also derived the plot of Mac- and example, with the better parts of wisdom and beth,' perhaps the most transcendent of all his works. | humanity, were indispensably requisite. Peele or A very cursory perusal will display the gradual pro- Marlow might have drawn the forest of Arden, with gress and elevation of his art. In the Two Gentle- its woodland glades, but who but Shakspeare could men of Verona,' and the earlier comedies, we see the have supplied the moral beauty of the scene?-the timidity and immaturity of youthful genius; a half- refined simplicity and gaiety of Rosalind, the philoformed style, bearing frequent traces of that of his sophic meditations of Jaques, the true wisdom, tenpredecessors; fantastic quibbles and conceits (which derness, and grace, diffused over the whole of that he never wholly abandoned); only a partial develop- antique half-courtly and half-pastoral drama. These ment of character; a romantic and playful fancy; and similar personations, such as Benedict and Beabut no great strength of imagination, energy, or pas- trice, Mercutio, &c., seem to us even more wondersion. In Richard II and III., the creative and masterful than the loftier characters of Shakspeare. No mind are visible in the delineation of character. In types of them could have existed but in his own the Midsummer Night's Dream,' the Merchant of mind. The old drama and the chroniclers furnished Venice,' 'Romeo and Juliet,' &c., we find the ripened the outlines of his historical personages, though poetical imagination, prodigality of invention, and a destitute of the heroic ardour and elevation which searching, meditative spirit. These qualities, with he breathed into them. Plutarch and the poets a finer vein of morality and contemplative philo-kindled his classic enthusiasm and taste; old Chapsophy, pervade' As You Like It,' and the Twelfth man's Homer perhaps rolled its majestic cadences Night.' In 'Henry IV.,' the Merry Wives,' and 'Mea- over his ear and imagination; but characters in sure for Measure,' we see his inimitable powers of which polished manners and easy grace are as precomedy, full formed, revelling in an atmosphere of dominant as wit, reflection, or fancy, were then unjoyous life, and fresh as if from the hand of nature. known to the stage, as to actual life. They are He took a loftier flight in his classical dramas, con- among the most perfect creations of his genius, and, ceived and finished with consummate taste and free-in reference to his taste and habits, they are valuable dom. In his later tragedies, Lear,' Hamlet' (in its improved form), Othello,' Macbeth,' and the Tem- In judgment, Shakspeare excels his contemporary pest,' all his wonderful faculties and acquirements are dramatists as much as in genius, but at the same found combined-his wit, pathos, passion, and sub- time it must be confessed that he also partakes of limity-his profound knowledge and observation of their errors. To be unwilling to acknowledge any mankind, mellowed by a refined humanity and bene- faults in his plays, is, as Hallam remarks, an exvolence his imagination richer from skilful culture travagance rather derogatory to the critic than and added stores of information-his unrivalled lan-honourable to the poet.' Fresh from the perusal of

of character or passion, we conceive Shakspeare to have laboured for ultimate and lasting fame, not immediate theatrical effect. His audiences must often have been unable to follow his philosophy, his subtle distinctions, and his imagery. The actors must have been equally unable to give effect to many of his personations. He was apparently indifferent to both-at least in his great works-and wrote for the mind of the universe. There was, however, always enough of ordinary nature, of pomp, or variety of action, for the multitude; and the English historical plays, connected with national pride and glory, must have rendered their author popular.

materials for his biography.

any of his works, and under the immediate effects of his inspirations-walking, as it were, in a world of his creating, with beings familiar to us almost from infancy-it seems like sacrilege to breathe one word of censure. Yet truth must admit that some of his plays are hastily and ill-constructed as to plot; that his proneness to quibble and play with words is brought forward in scenes where this peculiarity constitutes a positive defect; that he is sometimes indelicate where indelicacy is least pardonable, and where it jars most painfully with the associations of

the scene; and that his style is occasionally stiff, turgid, and obscure, chiefly because it is at once highly figurative and condensed in expression. Ben Jonson has touched freely, but with manliness and fairness, on these defects.

excluded by that inquiring temper, which is as characteristic of literature in our times, as is its appearance of comparative animation."

The difficulty of making selections from Shakspeare must be obvious. If of character, his characters are as numerous and diversified as those in human life; if of style, he has exhausted all styles, and has one for each description of poetry and action; if of wit, humour, satire, or pathos, where shall our choice fall, where all are so abundant? We have felt our task to be something like being deputed to search in some magnificent forest for a handful of the finest leaves or plants, and as if we were diligently exploring the world of woodland beauty to accomplish faithfully this hopeless adventure. Happily, Shakspeare is in all hands, and a single leaf will recall the fertile and majestic scenes of his inspiration.

I remember,' he says, 'the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakspeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand! which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted, and to justify mine own candour; for I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped, sufflimandus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power would the rule of it had been so too! Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter, as when he said, in the person of seize the crown.] Cæsar, one speaking to him, "Cæsar, thou dost me wrong," he replied, "Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause," and such like, which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.'

[Murder of King Duncan.]

[Macbeth, prompted by ambition, and pushed on by his savage wife, resolves to murder the king, then his guest, and

MACBETH and a Servant.

Macb. Go bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready, She strike upon the bell. Get thee to bed.

[Exit Servant.

Is this a dagger which I see before me, The first edition of Shakspeare was published, as The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. already stated, in 1623. A second edition was pub-I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. lished in 1632, the same as the first, excepting that Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible it was more disfigured with errors of the press. A To feeling as to sight or art thou but third edition was published in 1644, and a fourth in A dagger of the mind, a false creation 1685. The public admiration of this great English Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain! I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw.

classic now demanded that he should receive the honours of a commentary; and Rowe, the poet, gave an improved edition in 1709. Pope, Warburton, Johnson. Chalmers, Steevens, and others, successively published editions of the poet, with copious notes. The best of the whole is the voluminous edition by Malone and Boswell, published in twentyone volumes, in 1821. The critics of the great poet are innumerable, and they bid fair, like Banquo's progeny, to stretch to the crack of doom.' The scholars of Germany have distinguished themselves by their philosophical and critical dissertations on the genius of Shakspeare. There never was an author, ancient or modern, whose works have been so carefully analysed and illustrated, so eloquently expounded, or so universally admired.

He so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie, That kings for such a tomb would wish to die. Milton on Shakspeare, 1630. 'Since the beginning of the present century,' says a writer in the Edinburgh Review (1840), Shakspeare's influence on our literature has been very great; and the recognition of his supremacy not only more unqualified, but more intelligent than ever. In many instances, indeed, and particularly by reason of the exaggerated emphasis which is so apt to infect periodical writing, the veneration for the greatest of all poets has risen to a height which amounts literally to idolatry. But the error is the safest which can be committed in judging the works of genius; and the risk of any evil consequences is

* Jonson's allusion is to the following line in the third act of

Julius Casar

Know Cæsar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied.

The passage was probably altered by Ben's suggestion, or still
more likely it was corrupted by the blunder of the player.

Thou marshal'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine

Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still;
eyes are made the fools o' th' other senses,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing.
It is the bloody business, which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now, o'er one half the world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep: now witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings; and wither'd Murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, tow'rds his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sound and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whilst I threat, he lives-
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me:
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

Enter Lady MACBETH.

[A bell rings.

[Eart.