hazard allusions to the awful mysteries of Christianity, which, when brought into contact with our sympathies for mere humanity, cannot but wear an air of irreverence. Thus, when speaking of the "Broken Heart,' by Ford, he says, in reference to the death of Calantha, " the expression of this transcendant scene almost bears me in imagination to Calvary and the cross; and I seem to perceive some analogy between the scenical sufferings which I am here contemplating, and the real agonies of that final com-. pletion to which I dare no more than hint a reference." Mr Lamb has here dared to hint a great deal too muchfar more than Ford himself would have hinted, or Shakspeare. Such a passage must shock every heart; and we implore Mr Lamb, for whom we entertain sincere respect and affection, to obliterate, in a future edition, this most unadvised, irreverent, and impious allusion. He is a Christian : let him therefore beware of offending his fellow Christians-of offending his God. Let him leave open blasphemy, or, what is as bad, affected and hypocritical piety, to such reckless unbelievers as Hazlitt and Hunt.

In his " Essay on the Tragedies of Shakspeare," he adopts a paradox, namely," that they are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist what

ever."

"Their distinguishing excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.

"The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round such "intellectual prize-fighters." Talking is the direct object of the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in Shakspeare above all, how obvious it is, that the form of speaking, whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of that knowledge of

the inner structure and workings of mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at in that form of composition We do here by any gift short of intuition. as we do with novels in the epistolary form. How many improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with in Clarissa and other books, for the sake of the delight which that form upon the whole gives us.

"But the practice of stage representation reduces every thing to a controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous timidity of womanhood, must play the orablasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking

tor.

The love-dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night; the more intimate and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so delightful in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in ParadiseAs beseem'd

Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league, Alone:

By the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these things sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is to judge of her endearments and her returns manifestly aimed at the spectators, who are

of love.

"The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest ambition to distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one of their reasons. But for the character itself, we find it in a play, and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic representation. The play itself abounds in maxims and reflections beyond any other, and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying moral instruction. But Hamlet himself what does he suffer, meanwhile, by being dragged forth as the public schoolmaster, to give lectures to the crowd! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions between himself and his moral sense, they are the effusions of his solitary musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth; or rather, they are the silent meditations with which his bosom is bursting, reduced to words for the sake of the reader, who must else remain ignorant of what is passing there. These profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring ruminations, which the tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticulating actor, who comes and mouths them out before an audience, making four hundred people his

confidants at once. I say not that it is the fault of the actor so to do; he must pronounce them ore rotundo, he must accompany them with his eye, he must insinuate them into his auditory by some trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. He must be thinking all the while of his appearance, because he knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it. And this is the way to represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet."

All this is very ingenious, and it is also, to a certain extent, very true. Many profound and philosophical reflections follow this, on the character of Hamlet; and Mr Lamb considers in succession, and with reference to their unfitness for the stage, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, the Tempest, &c. We can only make room for the following

extracts.

"It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters in Shakspeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering a change and a diminution,-that still stronger the objection must lie against representing another line of characters, which Shakspeare has introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist. When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the Witches in Macbeth, though some of the ingredients of their hellish composition savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the most serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence? We might as well laugh under a consciousness of the principle of Evil himself being truly and really present with us. But attempt to bring these beings on to a stage, and you turn them instantly into so many old women, that men and children are to laugh at. Contrary to the old saying, that "seeing is believing," the sight actually destroys the faith: and the mirth in which we indulge at their expense, when we see these creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification which we make to ourselves for the terror which they put us in when reading made them an object of belief,-when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, as children to their nurses and their elders; and we laugh at our fears, as children who thought they saw something in the dark, triumph when the bringing in of a candle discovers the vanity of their fears. For this exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness. It is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in these ter

rors: a ghost by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no spectators,-a ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human dimensions made out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, and a well-dressed audience, shall arm the most nervous child against any apprehensions: as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his impenetrable armour over it," Bully Dawson would have fought the devil with such advantages."

"Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest: doubtless without some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have sate out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the Tempest of Shakspeare at all a subject for stage representation? It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and to believe the won. drous tale while we are reading it; but to have a conjuror brought before us in his conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself and some hundred of favoured spectators before the curtain are supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted,they can only be believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties, positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A parlour or a drawing-room,-a library opening into a garden,-a garden with an alcove in it,-a street, or the piazza of Co, vent-garden, does well enough in a scene; we are content to give as much credit to it as it demands; or rather, we think little about it, it is little more than reading at the top of a page, "Scene, a Garden;" we do not imagine ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell;* or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was full :-the Orrery Lec

"It will be said these things are done in pictures. But pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a world of itself, but in scene-painting there is the attempt to deceive; and there is the discordancy, never to be got over, between painted scenes and real people.

turer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his apparatus, to make us believe that we do indeed hear the crystal spheres ring out that chime."

Much as we admire such speculation as this, we cannot think that Mr Lamb has at all made good his point. It is true, that in Shakspeare's tragedies there are innumerable beauties, more by far than in any other dramas, -which must be lost or marred in stage-representation. But grant this; and do not more and higher beauties still remain, fit for such stage-representation, than in any other plays? Shakspeare wrote for the stage, and no man ever saw so profoundly as he did into the natural laws and boundaries of the scenic world. His poetical soul lavished in profusion over all his dramas the etherial flowers of poetry, and these, it is possible, may sometimes be too delicate, or too gorgeous, to endure an abiding place in the broad glare of a theatre. Their native air, under which they most beautifully bloom and most fragrantly breathe, may be that of seclusion and peace. Yet, even on the stage, probably where they may seem but little congenial with the character of much that surrounds them, these divine beauties of poetry startle us into sudden delight; and we feel, while they come glistening and shining upon us, as if conscious of a purer and heavenly life. With respect, too, to those nicer and finer shades of character and passion which Mr Lamb thinks cannot be expressed by any actors, we have frequently glimpses even of them; and though there are many of these in Shakspeare that can never be brought over the form or the face, nor into the voice or eye of any human being, yet the soul of every enlightened auditor in a great measure conceives them for himself, and they accompany him silently, and perhaps unconsciously, throughout all the scenes of the acted drama. It would, we humbly think, be a little unreasonable to maintain, that in real life, Grief weeping and wailing before us, was not so affecting as some imagined tale of distress might be,-because that in grief there are thoughts that lie too deep for expression of voice or feature, and that, therefore, real sufferers are in fact but indifferent actors, give us only imperfect symbols -general representations of human

VOL. III.

calamity. Shakspeare gives us in his plays all that is in the power of huhuman passion that can be shewn by man actors to express, every variety of the voices, countenances, or bodies of men. If he gives us a great deal more than this, so much the better; but we are at a loss to conceive why that should make his plays worse fitted for representation. We agree with Mr Lamb, that Shakspeare's plays read better in the closet than those of any other writer, and this is all that his argument seems to us to prove: we cannot see, that merely because they read better in the closet, they should therefore act the worse on the stage.

It is true, and Mr Lamb has very elegantly and philosophically shewn it to be so, that some of Shakspeare's finest plays must afford us greater delight in the closet than they possibly can do on the stage. The Tempest, without doubt, is one of these. But even here, we think Mr Lamb has pushed his argument too far. The imagination is a very kind and accommodating faculty. There is so little for it to work upon in the events of our own daily life, that it springs passionately to grasp at whatever may seem to be illusion. It would fain throw aside the dull drapery of ordinary existence. Give it but some excuse for forgetting this jog-trot world of ours, and it will be well contented to do so. It will overlook many glaring realities for the sake of a few seeming fictions. It makes the food it feeds upon. Imagination is not that fastidious-that solitary power which Mr Lamb seems to believe. It can work in crowds, almost with the same free energy as in solitude,-in the pit of Covent-Garden Theatre as among the ruins of Tadmor. It is idle to say that the stage is not an enchanted island-John Kemble, not ProsperoMiss not Miranda,-nor Miss

Ariel. We surrender ourselves up as eagerly and engrossingly to the feeling that they are so, as we do to the representation of historical facts, and the personification of historical characters. Indeed, we can safely say of ourselves, that the consciousness of sitting on a bench of the pit, with a free ticket in our pockets, and looking at a number of men and women all paid so much per week, never does so utterly forsake us, as during the exhibition of some spectacle connected

4 H

with preternatural or supernatural agents. Such a play, therefore, as the Tempest, may impart the most exquisite delight. The vision of the Poet cannot be realized-but something may be given-something we have seen given-like the shadow of its enchant ment. Wild airs and sounds, though Mr Lamb seems to think otherwise, have a wonderful effect on the senses and the imagination in a theatre. Music never so touches us as when it steals up like a faint and far-off echo from behind the scenes. It gives us thoughts and feelings of another world. If there be any truth in these remarks, Mr Lamb's objections to MACBETH as an acting play, have still less weight. For, first of all, the Witches, whose appearance on the stage he asserts must necessarily be poor and contemptible, though, doubtlessly, they are essential to the wild character of the drama, appear but for glimpses; and, although, during their appear ance, they may create no strong and lasting preternatural emotions, yet is the belief in unearthly agency so much a part of the creed of nature, that in spite of the inadequate apparent personality of these creatures to our conceptions of their ideal nature, that ideal nature haunts us throughout the play, -and we look on Macbeth as a man doomed to misery and crime, beneath their malignant influence. This would therefore be a terrible drama, even although Shakspeare had not brought the Witches into action before our eyes at all, but had merely described the Thane as having had an unwitnessed and unrepresented interview with them on the blasted heath.

It is most true, that every thing about the Witches, as they are painted in this drama, is terrible as poetry can render superstition. But even in reading Macbeth, it is by no means the case, that the influence of the written scenes, wherein the Witches exist, is essential to the passion with which we watch the progress of the drama. All that is necessary is to feel that Macbeth is under their power, and the victim of a wild national superstition. Shakspeare takes care to preserve this feeling in us, because he preserves it in Macbeth himself; and there can be no doubt, that a person who had never seen or heard of Macbeth, and came to witness the representation of that first of all tragedies after the

witch-scene was over,-and who did not even know distinctly that such a scene was in the drama, would nevertheless be speedily carried away by the deep interest of the tragedy,interest founded on the general belief of preternatural agency, and the subjection of the fate of kings and kingdoms to its empiry.

-an

But farther, though the witch-scenes in Macbeth have at all times, when we witnessed them, been vulgarly ludicrous, there can be no reason why that should be so; nay, on the contrary, it seems to us that these wild anomalies, and all the accompanying terrors of the superstition in which they have their existence, are admirably well adapted for shadowy representation on a wide and darkened stage, and might be arrayed, even to the eye, in something of that formless terror in which the phantoms glide before the imagination, in the deepest darkness of midnight solitude.

We have no intention of searching this subject to the bottom. But we may add, that the acted tragedy of Macbeth curdles our blood, whether the Witches be ludicrous or fearful, -and that it is more terrible on the stage than any other creation of genius, dallying with crime, death, and judgment. The idea of murder cannot be more fearful in the soul, during its most hideous dreams, than is its reality when the murderer comes staggering before us, with his “hangman's hands," or when sleep, getting into the grasp of its noiseless clutches, that woman, whom, when awake, nothing could appal, carries her with quaking bosom, and eyes held open by horror, to and fro before our sight, in vain striving to wring from her quivering joints the ineffaceable stain of blood. But we have carried this discussion too far, and have no doubt that Mr Lamb himself was aware that he was embodying truth in the attractive form of a paradox, when he threw out so many admirable reflections to support a position which never can be supported, and which is overthrown by the universal consent of mankind,namely, that Shakspeare's plays are not well adapted for representation. For our own parts, we think that no man can know how awful human life is, that has never seen its pageants of fear, terror, and despair, gliding before him in the imaginary, but, at the same time,

intensely real, world of Shakspeare. No man has so powerful an imagination as not to require and feel the advantage of the visible personifications, on the stage, of the poet's ideal creations,-while, on the other hand, persons, in whom that faculty is but weak, see in those personifications a far more vivid and impressive existence, than they could ever see in the silent words of an unacted tragedy.

Far as this article has exceeded the bounds we had first assigned to it, we cannot dismiss these volumes without more particularly directing the attention of our readers to the admirable essay on the genius of Hogarth. Mr Lamb considers that great man, with good reason, as in many things a kind of Shakspeare; and the following parallel displays, we think, truth and originality.

"I have sometimes entertained myself with comparing the Timon of Athens of Shakspeare, (which I have just mentioned) and Hogarth's Rake's Progress together. The story, the moral, in both is nearly the same. The wild course of riot and extravagance, ending in the one with driving the Prodigal from the society of men into the solitude of deserts, and on the other with conducting the Rake through his several stages of dissipation, into the still more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the play and in the picture are described with almost equal force and nature. The levee of the Rake, which forms the subject of the second plate in the series, is almost a transcript of Timon's levee in the opening scene of that play. We find a dedicating poet, and other similar characters in both.

"The concluding scene in the Rake's Progress is perhaps superior to the last scenes of Timon. If we seek for something of kindred excellence in poetry, it must be in the scenes of Lear's beginning madness, where the King and the Fool and the Tomo'-Bedlam conspire to produce such a medley of mirth checked by misery, and misery rebuked by mirth; where the society of those "strange bed-fellows" which misfortunes have brought Lear acquainted with, so finely sets forth the destitute state of the monarch, while the lunatic bans of the one, and the disjointed sayings and wild but pregnant allusions of the other, so wonderfully sympathize with that confusion, which they seem to assist in the production of, in the senses of that "child-changed father."

"In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the Rake's Progress, we find the same assortment of the ludicrous with the terrible.

Here is desperate madness, the overturning of originally strong thinking faculties, at which we shudder, as we contemplate the duration and pressure of affliction which it

3

must have asked to destroy such a building; and here is the gradual hurtless lapse into idiocy, of faculties, which at their best of times never having been strong, we look upon the consummation of their decay with no The mad taylor, the poor driveller that has more of pity than is consistent with a smile.. gone out of his wits (and truly he appears to have had no great journey to go to get past their confines) for the love of Charming Betty Careless, these half-laughable, scarce-pitiable objects take off from the horror which the principal figure would of itself raise, at the same time that they assist the general notion of its subject." the feeling of the scene by contributing to

"Is it carrying the spirit of comparison to excess to remark, that in the poor kneeling weeping female, who accompanies her seducer in his sad decay, there is something analogous to Kent, or Caius, as he delights rather to be called, in Lear,-the noblest pattern of virtue which even Shakspeare has conceived,-who follows his royal master in banishment, that had pronounced his banishment, and forgetful at once of his wrongs and dignities, taking on himself the disguise of a menial, retains his fidelity to the figure, his loyalty to the carcass, the shadow, the shell and empty husk of Lear?"

He then goes over all the principal pictures of Hogarth, and brings out into clear and steady light the vast treasures of profound passion and moral truth, that strew the surface, and lie hidden, as it were, in the heart of those astonishing creations.

with those who cry up the great Histori"It is," says Mr Lamb," the fashion cal School in this country, at the head of which Sir Joshua Reynolds is placed, to exclude Hogarth from that school, as an artist of an inferior and vulgar class. Those persons seem to me to confound the painting of subjects in common or vulgar life with the being a vulgar artist. quantity of thought which Hogarth crowds into every picture, would alone unvulgarize every subject which he might choose.

The

"We are for ever deceiving ourselves with names and theories. We call one man a great historical painter, because he has taken for his subjects kings or great men, or transactions over which time has thrown a grandeur. We term another the painter of common life, and set him down in our minds for an artist of an inferior class, without reflecting whether the quantity of thought shewn by the latter may not much more than level the distinction which their mere choice of subjects may seem to place between them; or whether, in fact, from that very common life a great artist may not extract as deep an interest as another man from that which we are pleased to call history."

With all this we perfectly agree; but we wish that Mr Lamb had stop-ped here, and not allowed his passion