Biographical Essays Part 2

But, that we may rid ourselves once and for ever of this outrageous calumny upon Shakspeare's memory, we shall pursue the story to its final stage. Even Malone has been thoughtless enough to accredit this closing chapter, which contains, in fact, such a superfetation of folly as the annals of human dullness do not exceed. Let us recapitulate the points of the story. A baronet, who has no deer and no park, is supposed to persecute a poet for stealing these aerial deer out of this aerial park, both lying in _nephelococcygia_. The poet sleeps upon this wrong for eighteen years; but at length, hearing that his persecutor is dead and buried, he conceives b.l.o.o.d.y thoughts of revenge. And this revenge he purposes to execute by picking a hole in his dead enemy's coat-of-arms. Is this coat-of-arms, then, Sir Thomas Lucy's? Why, no; Malone admits that it is not. For the poet, suddenly recollecting that this ridicule would settle upon the son of his enemy, selects another coat-of-arms, with which his dead enemy never had any connection, and he spends his thunder and lighting upon this irrelevant object; and, after all, the ridicule itself lies in a Welchman's misp.r.o.nouncing one single heraldic term--a Welchman who misp.r.o.nounces all words. The last act of the poet's malice recalls to us a sort of jest-book story of an Irishman, the vulgarity of which the reader will pardon in consideration of its relevancy. The Irishman having lost a pair of silk stockings, mentions to a friend that he has taken steps for recovering them by an advertis.e.m.e.nt, offering a reward to the finder. His friend objects that the costs of advertising, and the reward, would eat out the full value of the silk stockings. But to this the Irishman replies, with a knowing air, that he is not so green as to have overlooked _that_; and that, to keep down the reward, he had advertised the stockings as worsted. Not at all less flagrant is the bull ascribed to Shakspeare, when he is made to punish a dead man by personalities meant for his exclusive ear, through his coat-of-arms, but at the same time, with the express purpose of blunting and defeating the edge of his own scurrility, is made to subst.i.tute for the real arms some others which had no more relation to the dead enemy than they had to the poet himself.

This is the very sublime of folly, beyond which human dotage cannot advance.

It is painful, indeed, and dishonorable to human nature, that whenever men of vulgar habits and of poor education wish to impress us with a feeling of respect for a man's talents, they are sure to cite, by way of evidence, some gross instance of malignity. Power, in their minds, is best ill.u.s.trated by malice or by the infliction of pain. To this unwelcome fact we have some evidence in the wretched tale which we have just dismissed; and there is another of the same description to be found in all lives of Shakspeare, which we will expose to the contempt of the reader whilst we are in this field of discussion, that we may not afterwards have to resume so disgusting a subject.

This poet, who was a model of gracious benignity in his manners, and of whom, amidst our general ignorance, thus much is perfectly established, that the term _gentle_ was almost as generally and by prescriptive right a.s.sociated with his name as the affix of _venerable_ with Bede, or _judicious_ with Hooker, is alleged to have insulted a friend by an imaginary epitaph beginning "_Ten in the Hundred_" and supposing him to be d.a.m.ned, yet without wit enough (which surely the Stratford bellman could have furnished) for devising any, even fanciful, reason for such a supposition; upon which the comment of some foolish critic is," The _sharpness of the satire_ is said to have stung the man so much that he never forgave it. "We have heard of the sting in the tail atoning for the brainless head; but in this doggerel the tail is surely as stingless as the head is brainless. For, 1st, _Ten in the Hundred_ could be no reproach in Shakspeare's time, any more than to call a man _Three-and-a-half-per-cent_. in this present year, 1838; except, indeed, amongst those foolish persons who built their morality upon the Jewish ceremonial law. Shakspeare himself took ten per cent. _2dly_, It happens that John Combe, so far from being the object of the poet's scurrility, or viewing the poet as an object of implacable resentment, was a Stratford friend; that one of his family was affectionately remembered in Shakspeare's will by the bequest of his sword; and that John Combe himself recorded his perfect charity with Shakspeare by leaving him a legacy of 5L sterling. And in this lies the key to the whole story. For, _3dly_, The four lines were written and printed before Shakspeare was born. The name Combe is a common one; and some stupid fellow, who had seen the name in Shakspeare's will, and happened also to have seen the lines in a collection of epigrams, chose to connect the cases by attributing an ident.i.ty to the two John Combes, though at war with chronology.

Finally, there is another specimen of doggerel attributed to Shakspeare, which is not equally unworthy of him, because not equally malignant, but otherwise equally below his intellect, no less than his scholars.h.i.+p; we mean the inscription on his grave-stone. This, as a sort of _siste viator_ appeal to future s.e.xtons, is worthy of the grave-digger or the parish-clerk, who was probably its author. Or it may have been an antique formula, like the vulgar record of owners.h.i.+p in books--

"Anthony Timothy Dolthead's hook, G.o.d give him grace therein to look."

Thus far the matter is of little importance; and it might have been supposed that malignity itself could hardly have imputed such trash to Shakspeare. But when we find, even in this short compa.s.s, scarcely wider than the posy of a ring, room found for traducing the poet's memory, it becomes important to say, that the leading sentiment, the horror expressed at any disturbance offered to his bones, is not one to which Shakspeare could have attached the slightest weight; far less could have outraged the sanct.i.ties of place and subject, by affixing to any sentiment whatever (and, according to the fiction of the case, his farewell sentiment) the sanction of a curse.

Filial veneration and piety towards the memory of this great man, have led us into a digression that might have been unseasonable in any cause less weighty than one, having for its object to deliver his honored name from a load of the most brutal malignity. Never more, we hope and venture to believe, will any thoughtless biographer impute to Shakspeare the asinine doggerel with which the uncritical blundering of his earliest biographer has caused his name to be dishonored. We now resume the thread of our biography.

The stream of history is centuries in working itself clear of any calumny with which it has once been polluted.

Most readers will be aware of an old story, according to which Shakspeare gained his livelihood for some time after coming to London by holding the horses of those who rode to the play. This legend is as idle as any one of those which we have just exposed.

No custom ever existed of riding on horseback to the play.

Gentlemen, who rode valuable horses, would a.s.suredly not expose them systematically to the injury of standing exposed to cold for two or even four hours; and persons of inferior rank would not ride on horseback in the town. Besides, had such a custom ever existed, stables (or sheds at least) would soon have arisen to meet the public wants; and in some of the dramatic sketches of the day, which noticed every fas.h.i.+on as it arose, this would not have been overlooked. The story is traced originally to Sir William Davenant.

Betterton the actor, who professed to have received it from him, pa.s.sed it onwards to Rowe, he to Pope, Pope to Bishop Newton, the editor of Milton, and Newton to Dr. Johnson. This pedigree of the fable, however, adds nothing to its credit, and multiplies the chances of some mistake. Another fable, not much less absurd, represents Shakspeare as having from the very first been borne upon the establishment of the theatre, and so far contradicts the other fable, but originally in the very humble character of _call-boy_ or deputy prompter, whose business it was to summon each performer according to his order of coming upon the stage.

This story, however, quite as much as the other, is irreconcileable with the discovery recently made by Mr. Collier, that in 1589 Shakspeare was a shareholder in the important property of a princ.i.p.al London theatre. It seems destined that all the undoubted facts of Shakspeare's life should come to us through the channel of legal doc.u.ments, which are better evidence even than imperial medals; whilst, on the other hand, all the fabulous anecdotes, not having an attorney's seal to them, seem to have been the fictions of the wonder maker. The plain presumption from the record of Shakspeare's situation in 1589, coupled with the fact that his first arrival in London was possibly not until 1587, but according to the earliest account not before 1586, a s.p.a.ce of time which leaves but little room for any remarkable changes of situation, seems to be, that, either in requital of services done to the players by the poet's family, or in consideration of money advanced by his father-in-law, or on account of Shakspeare's personal accomplishments as an actor, and as an adapter of dramatic works to the stage; for one of these reasons, or for all of them united, William Shakspeare, about the 23d year of his age, was adopted into the partners.h.i.+p of a respectable histrionic company, possessing a first-rate theatre in the metropolis. If 1586 were the year in which he came up to London, it seems probable enough that his immediate motive to that step was the increasing distress of his father; for in that year John Shakspeare resigned the office of alderman. There is, however, a bare possibility that Shakspeare might have gone to London about the time when he completed his twenty-first year, that is, in the spring of 1585, but not earlier.

Nearly two years after the birth of his eldest daughter Susanna, his wife lay in for a second and a _last_ time; but she then brought her husband twins, a son and a daughter. These children were baptized in February of the year 1585; so that Shakspeare's whole family of three children were born and baptized two months before he completed his majority. The twins were baptized by the names of Hamnet and Judith, those being the names of two amongst their sponsors, viz., Mr. Sadler and his wife. Hamnet, which is a remarkable name in itself, becomes still more so from its resemblance to the immortal name of Hamlet [Endnote: 17] the Dane; it was, however, the real baptismal name of Mr. Sadler, a friend of Shakspeare's, about fourteen years older than himself. Shakspeare's son must then have been most interesting to his heart, both as a twin child and as his only boy. He died in 1596, when he was about eleven years old. Both daughters survived their father; both married; both left issue, and thus gave a chance for continuing the succession from the great poet. But all the four grandchildren died without offspring.

Of Shakspeare personally, at least of Shakspeare the man, as distinguished from the author, there remains little more to record.

Already in 1592, Greene, in his posthumous Groat's-worth of Wit, had expressed the earliest vocation of Shakspeare in the following sentence: "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers; in his own conceit the only _Shakscene_ in a country!" This alludes to Shakspeare's office of recasting, and even recomposing, dramatic works, so as to fit them for representation; and Master Greene, it is probable, had suffered in his self-estimation, or in his purse, by the alterations in some piece of his own, which the duty of Shakspeare to the general interests of the theatre had obliged him to make. In 1591 it has been supposed that Shakspeare wrote his first drama, the Two Gentlemen of Verona; the least characteristically marked of all his plays, and, with the exception of Love's Labors Lost, the least interesting.

From this year, 1591 to that of 1611, are just twenty years, within which s.p.a.ce lie the whole dramatic creations of Shakspeare, averaging nearly one for every six months. In 1611 was written the Tempest, which is supposed to have been the last of all Shakspeare's works. Even on that account, as Mr. Campbell feelingly observes, it has "a sort of sacredness;" and it is a most remarkable fact, and one calculated to make a man superst.i.tious, that in this play the great enchanter Prospero, in whom," _as if conscious_, "says Mr. Campbell," _that this would be his last work_, the poet has been _inspired to typify himself as_ a wise, potent, and _benevolent magician_" of whom, indeed, as of Shakspeare himself, it may be said, that "within that circle"

(the circle of his own art)" none durst tread but he, "solemnly and for ever renounces his mysterious functions, symbolically breaks his enchanter's wand, and declares that he will bury his books, his science, and his secrets,

"Deeper than did ever plummet sound."

Nay, it is even ominous, that in this play, and from the voice of Prospero, issues that magnificent prophecy of the total destruction which should one day swallow up

"The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea all which it inherit."

And this prophecy is followed immediately by a most profound e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, gathering into one pathetic abstraction the total philosophy of life:

"We are such stuff As dreams are made of; and our little life Is rounded by a sleep;"

that is, in effect, our life is a little tract of feverish vigils, surrounded and islanded by a sh.o.r.eless ocean of sleep--sleep before birth, sleep after death.

These remarkable pa.s.sages were probably not undesigned; but if we suppose them to have been thrown off without conscious notice of their tendencies, then, according to the superst.i.tion of the ancient Grecians, they would have been regarded as prefiguring words, prompted by the secret genius that accompanies every man, such as insure along with them their own accomplishment. With or without intention, however, it is believed that Shakspeare wrote nothing more after this exquisite romantic drama. With respect to the remainder of his personal history, Dr. Drake and others have supposed, that during the twenty years from 1591 to 1611, he visited Stratford often, and latterly once a year.

In 1589 he had possessed some share in a theatre; in 1596 he had a considerable share. Through Lord Southampton, as a surviving friend of Lord Ess.e.x, who was viewed as the martyr to his Scottish politics, there can be no doubt that Shakspeare had acquired the favor of James I.; and accordingly, on the 29th of May, 1603, about two months after the king's accession to the throne of England, a patent was granted to the company of players who possessed the Globe theatre; in which patent Shakspeare's name stands second.

This patent raised the company to the rank of his majesty's servants, whereas previously they are supposed to have been simply the servants of the Lord Chamberlain. Perhaps it was in grateful acknowledgment of this royal favor that Shakspeare afterwards, in 1606, paid that sublime compliment to the house of Stuart, which is involved in the vision shown to Macbeth. This vision is managed with exquisite skill. It was impossible to display the whole series of princes from Macbeth to James I.; but he beholds the posterity of Banquo, one "gold-bound brow" succeeding to another, until he comes to an eighth apparition of a Scottish king,

"Who bears a gla.s.s Which shows him many more; and some he sees Who twofold b.a.l.l.s and treble sceptres carry;"

thus bringing down without tedium the long succession to the very person of James I., by the symbolic image of the two crowns united on one head.

About the beginning of the century Shakspeare had become rich enough to purchase the best house in Stratford, called _The Great House_, which name he altered to _New Place_; and in 1602 he bought one hundred and seven acres adjacent to this house for a sum (320L) corresponding to about 1500 guineas of modern money.

Malone thinks that he purchased the house as early as 1597; and it is certain that about that time he was able to a.s.sist his father in obtaining a renewed grant of arms from the Herald's College, and therefore, of course, to re-establish his father's fortunes. Ten years of well-directed industry, viz., from 1591 to 1601, and the prosperity of the theatre in which he was a proprietor, had raised him to affluence; and after another ten years, improved with the same success, he was able to retire with an income of 300L, or (according to the customary computations) in modern money of 1500L, per annum. Shakspeare was in fact the first man of letters, Pope the second, and Sir Walter Scott the third, who, in Great Britain, has ever realized a large fortune by literature; or in Christendom, if we except Voltaire, and two dubious cases in Italy. The four or five latter years of his life Shakspeare pa.s.sed in dignified ease, in profound meditation, we may be sure, and in universal respect, at his native town of Stratford; and there he died, on the 23d of April, 1616. [Endnote: 18]

His daughter Susanna had been married on the 5th of June of the year 1607, to Dr. John Hall, [Endnote: 19] a physician in Stratford. The doctor died in November, 1635, aged sixty; his wife, at the age of sixty-six, on July 11, 1640. They had one child, a daughter, named Elizabeth, born in 1608, married April 22, 1626, to Thomas Nashe, Esq., left a widow in 1647, and subsequently remarried to Sir John Barnard; but this Lady Barnard, the sole grand-daughter of the poet, had no children by either marriage. The other daughter, Judith, on February 10, 1616, (about ten weeks before her father's death,) married Mr. Thomas Quincy of Stratford, by whom she had three sons, Shakspeare, Richard, and Thomas. Judith was about thirty-one years old at the time of her marriage; and living just forty-six years afterwards, she died in February, 1662, at the age of seventy-seven. Her three sons died without issue; and thus, in the direct lineal descent, it is certain that no representative has survived of this transcendent poet, the most august amongst created intellects.

After this review of Shakspeare's life, it becomes our duty to take a summary survey of his works, of his intellectual powers, and of his station in literature, a station which is now irrevocably settled, not so much (which happens in other cases) by a vast overbalance of favorable suffrages, as by acclamation; not so much by the _voices_ of those who admire him up to the verge of idolatry, as by the _acts_ of those who everywhere seek for his works among the primal necessities of life, demand them, and crave them as they do their daily bread; not so much by eulogy openly proclaiming itself, as by the silent homage recorded in the endless multiplication of what he has bequeathed us; not so much by his own compatriots, who, with regard to almost every other author, [Endnote: 20] compose the total amount of his _effective_ audience, as by the unanimous "all hail!" of intellectual Christendom; finally, not by the hasty partisans.h.i.+p of his own generation, nor by the bia.s.sed judgment of an age trained in the same modes of feeling and of thinking with himself,--but by the solemn award of generation succeeding to generation, of one age correcting the obliquities or peculiarities of another; by the verdict of two hundred and thirty years, which have now elapsed since the very _latest_ of his creations, or of two hundred and forty-seven years if we date from the earliest; a verdict which has been continually revived and re-opened, probed, searched, vexed, by criticism in every spirit, from the most genial and intelligent, down to the most malignant and scurrilously hostile which feeble heads and great ignorance could suggest when cooperating with impure hearts and narrow sensibilities; a verdict, in short, sustained and countersigned by a longer series of writers, many of them eminent for wit or learning, than were ever before congregated upon any inquest relating to any author, be he who he might, ancient [Endnote: 21] or modern, Pagan or Christian.

It was a most witty saying with respect to a piratical and knavish publisher, who made a trade of insulting the memories of deceased authors by forged writings, that he was "among the new terrors of death." But in the gravest sense it may be affirmed of Shakspeare, that he is among the modern luxuries of life; that life, in fact, is a new thing, and one more to be coveted, since Shakspeare has extended the domains of human consciousness, and pushed its dark frontiers into regions not so much as dimly descried or even suspected before his time, far less illuminated (as now they are) by beauty and tropical luxuriance of life. For instance,--a single instance, indeed one which in itself is a world of new revelation, --the possible beauty of the female character had not been seen as in a dream before Shakspeare called into perfect life the radiant shapes of Desdemona, of Imogene, of Hermione, of Perdita, of Ophelia, of Miranda, and many others. The Una of Spenser, earlier by ten or fifteen years than most of these, was an idealized portrait of female innocence and virgin purity, but too shadowy and unreal for a dramatic reality. And as to the Grecian cla.s.sics, let not the reader imagine for an instant that any prototype in this field of Shakspearian power can be looked for there. The _Antigone_ and the _Electra_ of the tragic poets are the two leading female characters that cla.s.sical antiquity offers to our respect, but a.s.suredly not to our impa.s.sioned love, as disciplined and exalted in the school of Shakspeare. They challenge our admiration, severe, and even stern, as impersonations of filial duty, cleaving to the steps of a desolate and afflicted old man; or of sisterly affection, maintaining the rights of a brother under circ.u.mstances of peril, of desertion, and consequently of perfect self-reliance. Iphigenia, again, though not dramatically coming before us in her own person, but according to the beautiful report of a spectator, presents us with a fine statuesque model of heroic fort.i.tude, and of one whose young heart, even in the very agonies of her cruel immolation, refused to forget, by a single indecorous gesture, or so much as a moment's neglect of her own princely descent, and that she herself was "a lady in the land." These are fine marble groups, but they are not the warm breathing realities of Shakspeare; there is "no speculation" in their cold marble eyes; the breath of life is not in their nostrils; the fine pulses of womanly sensibilities are not throbbing in their bosoms. And besides this immeasurable difference between the cold moony reflexes of life, as exhibited by the power of Grecian art, and the true sunny life of Shakspeare, it must he observed that the Antigones, &c. of the antique put forward but one single trait of character, like the aloe with its single blossom. This solitary feature is presented to us as an abstraction, and as an insulated quality; whereas in Shakspeare all is presented in the _concrete_; that is to say, not brought forward in relief, as by some effort of an anatomical artist; but embodied and imbedded, so to speak, as by the force of a creative nature, in the complex system of a human life; a life in which all the elements move and play simultaneously, and with something more than mere simultaneity or co-existence, acting and re-acting each upon the other, nay, even acting by each other and through each other. In Shakspeare's characters is felt for ever a real _organic_ life, where each is for the whole and in the whole, and where the whole is for each and in each. They only are real incarnations.

The Greek poets could not exhibit any approximations to _female_ character, without violating the truth of Grecian life, and shocking the feelings of the audience. The drama with the Greeks, as with us, though much less than with us, was a picture of human life; and that which could not occur in life could not wisely be exhibited on the stage. Now, in ancient Greece, women were secluded from the society of men. The conventual sequestration of the hareem, or female apartment [Endnote: 22] of the house, and the Mahommedan consecration of its threshold against the ingress of males, had been transplanted from Asia into Greece thousands of years perhaps before either convents or Mahommed existed. Thus barred from all open social intercourse, women could not develop or express any character by word or action. Even to _have_ a character, violated, to a Grecian mind, the ideal portrait of feminine excellence; whence, perhaps, partly the too generic, too little individualized, style of Grecian beauty. But prominently to _express_ a character was impossible under the common tenor of Grecian life, unless when high tragical catastrophes transcended the decorums of that tenor, or for a brief interval raised the curtain which veiled it. Hence the subordinate part which women play upon the Greek stage in all but some half dozen cases. In the paramount tragedy on that stage, the model tragedy, the (_OEdipus Tyrannus_ of Sophocles), there is virtually no woman at all; for Jocasta is a party to the story merely as the dead Laius or the self-murdered Sphinx was a party, viz., by her contributions to the fatalities of the event, not by anything she does or says spontaneously. In fact, the Greek poet, if a wise poet, could not address himself genially to a task in which he must begin by shocking the sensibilities of his countrymen. And hence followed, not only the dearth of female characters in the Grecian drama, but also a second result still more favorable to the sense of a new power evolved by Shakspeare. Whenever the common law of Grecian life did give way, it was, as we have observed, to the suspending force of some great convulsion or tragical catastrophe. This for a moment (like an earthquake in a nunnery) would set at liberty even the timid, fluttering Grecian women, those doves of the dove-cot, and would call some of them into action. But which? Precisely those of energetic and masculine minds; the timid and feminine would but shrink the more from public gaze and from tumult. Thus it happened, that such female characters as _were_ exhibited in Greece, could not but be the harsh and the severe. If a gentle Ismene appeared for a moment in contest with some energetic sister Antigone, (and chiefly, perhaps, by way of drawing out the fiercer character of that sister,) she was soon dismissed as unfit for scenical effect. So that not only were female characters few, but, moreover, of these few the majority were but repet.i.tions of masculine qualities in female persons. Female agency being seldom summoned on the stage, except when it had received a sort of special dispensation from its s.e.xual character, by some terrific convulsions of the house or the city, naturally it a.s.sumed the style of action suited to these circ.u.mstances. And hence it arose, that not woman as she differed from man, but woman as she resembled man--woman, in short, seen under circ.u.mstances so dreadful as to abolish the effect of s.e.xual distinction, was the woman of the Greek tragedy. [Endnote: 23] And hence generally arose for Shakspeare the wider field, and the more astonis.h.i.+ng by its perfect novelty, when he first introduced female characters, not as mere varieties or echoes of masculine characters, a Medea or Clytemnestra, or a vindictive Hecuba, the mere tigress of the tragic tiger, but female characters that had the appropriate beauty of female nature; woman no longer grand, terrific, and repulsive, but woman "after her kind"--the other hemisphere of the dramatic world; woman, running through the vast gamut of womanly loveliness; woman, as emanc.i.p.ated, exalted, enn.o.bled, under a new law of Christian morality; woman, the sister and coequal of man, no longer his slave, his prisoner, and sometimes his rebel." It is a far cry to Loch Awe; "and from the Athenian stage to the stage of Shakspeare, it may be said, is a prodigious interval. True; but prodigious as it is, there is really nothing between them. The Roman stage, at least the tragic stage, as is well known, was put out, as by an extinguisher, by the cruel amphitheatre, just as a candle is made pale and ridiculous by daylight. Those who were fresh from the real murders of the b.l.o.o.d.y amphitheatre regarded with contempt the mimic murders of the stage. Stimulation too coa.r.s.e and too intense had its usual effect in making the sensibilities callous. Christian emperors arose at length, who abolished the amphitheatre in its bloodier features. But by that time the genius of the tragic muse had long slept the sleep of death. And that muse had no resurrection until the age of Shakspeare. So that, notwithstanding a gulf of nineteen centuries and upwards separates Shakspeare from Euripides, the last of the surviving Greek tragedians, the one is still the nearest successor of the other, just as Connaught and the islands in Clew Bay are next neighbors to America, although three thousand watery columns, each of a cubic mile in dimensions, divide them from each other.

A second reason, which lends an emphasis of novelty and effective power to Shakspeare's female world, is a peculiar fact of contrast which exists between that and his corresponding world of men. Let us explain. The purpose and the intention of the Grecian stage was not primarily to develop human _character_, whether in men or in women: human _fates_ were its object; great tragic situations under the mighty control of a vast cloudy destiny, dimly descried at intervals, and brooding over human life by mysterious agencies, and for mysterious ends. Man, no longer the representative of an august _will_, man the pa.s.sion-puppet of fate, could not with any effect display what we call a character, which is a distinction between man and man, emanating originally from the will, and expressing its determinations, moving under the large variety of human impulses. The will is the central pivot of character; and this was obliterated, thwarted, cancelled, by the dark fatalism which brooded over the Grecian stage. That explanation will sufficiently clear up the reason why marked or complex variety of character was slighted by the great principles of the Greek tragedy. And every scholar who has studied that grand drama of Greece with feeling,--that drama, so magnificent, so regal, so stately,--and who has thoughtfully investigated its principles, and its difference from the English drama, will acknowledge that powerful and elaborate character, character, for instance, that could employ the fiftieth part of that profound a.n.a.lysis which has been applied to Hamlet, to Falstaff, to Lear, to Oth.e.l.lo, and applied by Mrs. Jamieson so admirably to the full development of the Shakspearian heroines, would have been as much wasted, nay, would have been defeated, and interrupted the blind agencies of fate, just in the same way as it would injure the shadowy grandeur of a ghost to individualize it too much. Milton's angels are slightly touched, superficially touched, with differences of character; but they are such differences, so simple and general, as are just sufficient to rescue them from the reproach applied to Virgil's "_fortemque Gyan, forlemque Cloanthem;_" just sufficient to make them knowable apart. Pliny speaks of painters who painted in one or two colors; and, as respects the angelic characters, Milton does so; he is _monochromatic_. So, and for reasons resting upon the same ultimate philosophy, were the mighty architects of the Greek tragedy. They also were monochromatic; they also, as to the characters of their persons, painted in one color. And so far there might have been the same novelty in Shakspeare's men as in his women. There _might_ have been; but the reason why there is _not_, must be sought in the fact, that History, the muse of History, had there even been no such muse as Melpomene, would have forced us into an acquaintance with human character. History, as the representative of actual life, of real man, gives us powerful delineations of character in its chief agents, that is, in men; and therefore it is that Shakspeare, the absolute creator of female character, was but the mightiest of all painters with regard to male character. Take a single instance. The Antony of Shakspeare, immortal for its execution, is found, after all, as regards the primary conception, in history. Shakspeare's delineation is but the expansion of the germ already preexisting, by way of scattered fragments, in Cicero's Philippics, in Cicero's Letters, in Appian, &c. But Cleopatra, equally fine, is a pure creation of art. The situation and the scenic circ.u.mstances belong to history, but the character belongs to Shakspeare.

In the great world, therefore, of woman, as the interpreter of the s.h.i.+fting phases and the lunar varieties of that mighty changeable planet, that lovely satellite of man, Shakspeare stands not the first only, not the original only, but is yet the sole authentic oracle of truth. Woman, therefore, the beauty of the female mind, _this_ is one great field of his power. The supernatural world, the world of apparitions, _that_ is another. For reasons which it would be easy to give, reasons emanating from the gross mythology of the ancients, no Grecian, [Endnote: 24] no Roman, could have conceived a ghost. That shadowy conception, the protesting apparition, the awful projection of the human conscience, belongs to the Christian mind. And in all Christendom, who, let us ask, who, who but Shakspeare has found the power for effectually working this mysterious mode of being? In summoning back to earth "the majesty of buried Denmark," how like an awful necromancer does Shakspeare appear! All the pomps and grandeurs which religion, which the grave, which the popular superst.i.tion had gathered about the subject of apparitions, are here converted to his purpose, and bend to one awful effect. The wormy grave brought into antagonism with the scenting of the early dawn; the trumpet of resurrection suggested, and again as an antagonist idea to the crowing of the c.o.c.k, (a bird enn.o.bled in the Christian mythus by the part he is made to play at the Crucifixion;) its starting "as a guilty thing" placed in opposition to its majestic expression of offended dignity when struck at by the partisans of the sentinels; its awful allusions to the secrets of its prison-house; its ubiquity, contrasted with its local presence; its aerial substance, yet clothed in palpable armor; the heart-shaking solemnity of its language, and the appropriate scenery of its haunt, viz., the ramparts of a capital fortress, with no witnesses but a few gentlemen mounting guard at the dead of night,--what a mist, what a _mirage_ of vapor, is here acc.u.mulated, through which the dreadful being in the centre looms upon us in far larger proportions, than could have happened had it been insulated and left naked of this circ.u.mstantial pomp! In the _Tempest_, again, what new modes of life, preternatural, yet far as the poles from the spiritualities of religion! Ariel in ant.i.thesis to Caliban! What is most ethereal to what is most animal! A phantom of air, an abstraction of the dawn and of vesper sun-lights, a bodiless sylph on the one hand; on the other a gross carnal monster, like the Miltonic Asmodai, "the fleshliest incubus" among the fiends, and yet so far enn.o.bled into interest by his intellectual power, and by the grandeur of misanthropy! [Endnote: 25] In the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_, again, we have the old traditional fairy, a lovely mode of preternatural life, remodified by Shakspeare's eternal talisman. Oberon and t.i.tania remind us at first glance of Ariel. They approach, but how far they recede. They are like--"like, but, oh, how different!" And in no other exhibition of this dreamy population of the moonlight forests and forest-lawns, are the circ.u.mstantial proprieties of fairy life so exquisitely imagined, sustained, or expressed. The dialogue between Oberon and t.i.tania is, of itself, and taken separately from its connection, one of the most delightful poetic scenes that literature affords. The witches in Macbeth are another variety of supernatural life, in which Shakspeare's power to enchant and to disenchant are alike portentous. The circ.u.mstances of the blasted heath, the army at a distance, the withered attire of the mysterious hags, and the choral litanies of their fiendish Sabbath, are as finely imagined in their kind as those which herald and which surround the ghost in Hamlet. There we see the _positive_ of Shakspeare's superior power. But now turn and look to the _negative_. At a time when the trials of witches, the royal book on demonology, and popular superst.i.tion (all so far useful, as they prepared a basis of undoubting faith for the poet's serious use of such agencies) had degraded and polluted the ideas of these mysterious beings by many mean a.s.sociations, Shakspeare does not fear to employ them in high tragedy, (a tragedy moreover which, though not the very greatest of his efforts as an intellectual whole, nor as a struggle of pa.s.sion, is _among_ the greatest in any view, and positively _the_ greatest for scenical grandeur, and in that respect makes the nearest approach of all English tragedies to the Grecian model;) he does not fear to introduce, for the same appalling effect as that for which Aeschylus introduced the Eumenides, a triad of old women, concerning whom an English wit has remarked this grotesque peculiarity in the popular creed of that day,--that although potent over winds and storms, in league with powers of darkness, they yet stood in awe of the constable,--yet relying on his own supreme power to disenchant as well as to enchant, to create and to uncreate, he mixes these women and their dark machineries with the power of armies, with the agencies of kings, and the fortunes of martial kingdoms. Such was the sovereignty of this poet, so mighty its compa.s.s!

A third fund of Shakspeare's peculiar power lies in his teeming fertility of fine thoughts and sentiments. From his works alone might be gathered a golden bead-roll of thoughts the deepest, subtilest, most pathetic, and yet most catholic and universally intelligible; the most characteristic, also, and appropriate to the particular person, the situation, and the case, yet, at the same time, applicable to the circ.u.mstances of every human being, under all the accidents of life, and all vicissitudes of fortune. But this subject offers so vast a field of observation, it being so eminently the prerogative of Shakspeare to have thought more finely and more extensively than all other poets combined, that we cannot wrong the dignity of such a theme by doing more, in our narrow limits, than simply noticing it as one of the emblazonries upon Shakspeare's s.h.i.+eld.

Fourthly, we shall indicate (and, as in the last case, _barely_ indicate, without attempting in so vast a field to offer any inadequate ill.u.s.trations) one mode of Shakspeare's dramatic excellence, which hitherto has not attracted any special or separate notice. We allude to the forms of life, and natural human pa.s.sion, as apparent in the structure of his dialogue. Among the many defects and infirmities of the French and of the Italian drama, indeed, we may say of the Greek, the dialogue proceeds always by independent speeches, replying indeed to each other, but never modified in its several openings by the momentary effect of its several terminal forms immediately preceding. Now, in Shakspeare, who first set an example of that most important innovation, in all his impa.s.sioned dialogues, each reply or rejoinder seems the mere rebound of the previous speech. Every form of natural interruption, breaking through the restraints of ceremony under the impulses of tempestuous pa.s.sion; every form of hasty interrogative, ardent reiteration when a question has been evaded; every form of scornful repet.i.tion of the hostile words; every impatient continuation of the hostile statement; in short, all modes and formulae by which anger, hurry, fretfulness, scorn, impatience, or excitement under any movement whatever, can disturb or modify or dislocate the formal bookish style of commencement, --these are as rife in Shakspeare's dialogue as in life itself; and how much vivacity, how profound a verisimilitude, they add to the scenic effect as an imitation of human pa.s.sion and real life, we need not say. A volume might be written ill.u.s.trating the vast varieties of Shakspeare's art and power in this one field of improvement; another volume might be dedicated to the exposure of the lifeless and unnatural result from the opposite practice in the foreign stages of France and Italy. And we may truly say, that were Shakspeare distinguished from them by this single feature of nature and propriety, he would on that account alone have merited a great immortality.

The dramatic works of Shakspeare generally acknowledged to be genuine consist of thirty-five pieces. The following is the chronological order in which they are supposed to have been written, according to Mr. Malone, as given in his second edition of Shakspeare, and by Mr. George Chalmers in his Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare Papers:

Chalmers. Malone.

1. The Comedy of Errors, 1591 1592 2. Love's Labors Lost, 1592 1594 3. Romeo and Juliet, 1592 1596 4. Henry VI., the First Part, 1593 1589 5. Henry VI., the Second Part, 1595 1591 6. Henry VL, the Third Part, 1595 1591 7. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1595 1591 8. Richard III., 1596 1593 9. Richard II, 1596 1593 10. The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1596 1601 11. Henry IV., the First Part, 1597 1597 12. Henry IV., the Second Part, 1597 1599 13. Henry V., 1597 1599 14. The Merchant of Venice, 1597 1594 15. Hamlet, 1598 1600 16. King John, 1598 1596 17. A Midsummer-Night's Dream, 1598 1594 18. The Taming of the Shrew, 1599 1596 19. All's Well that Ends Well, 1599 1606 20. Much Ado about Nothing, 1599 1600 21. As you Like It, 1602 1599 22. Troilus and Cressida, 1610 1602 23. Timon of Athens, 1611 1610 24. The Winter's Tale, 1601 1611 25. Measure for Measure, 1604 1603 26. King Lear, 1605 1605 27. Cymbeline, 1606 1609 28. Macbeth, 1606 1606 29. Julius Caesar, 1607 1607 30. Antony and Cleopatra, 1608 1608 31. Coriola.n.u.s, 1619 1610 32. The Tempest, 1613 1611 33. The Twelfth Night, 1613 1607 34. Henry VIII., 1613 1603 35. Oth.e.l.lo, 1614 1604

Pericles and t.i.tus Andronicus, although inserted in all the late editions of Shakspeare's Plays, are omitted in the above list, both by Malone and Chalmers, as not being Shakspeare's.

The first edition of the Works was published in 1623, in a folio volume, ent.i.tled Mr. William Shakspeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. The second edition was published in 1632, the third in 1664, and the fourth in 1685, all in folio; but the edition of 1623 is considered the most authentic. Rowe published an edition in seven vols. 8vo, in 1709. Editions were published by Pope, in six vols. 4to, in 1725; by Warburton, in eight vols. 8vo, in 1747; by Dr. Johnson, in eight vols. 8vo, in 1765; by Stevens, in four vols.

8vo, in 1766; by Malone, in ten vols. 8vo, in 1789; by Alexander Chalmers, in nine vols. 8vo, in 1811; by Johnson and Stevens, revised by Isaac Reed, in twenty-one vols. 8vo, in 1813; and the Plays and Poems, with notes by Malone, were edited by James Boswell, and published in twenty-one vols. 8vo, in 1821. Besides these, numerous editions have been published from time to time.

NOTES.

NOTE 1.

Mr. Campbell, the latest editor of Shakspeare's dramatic works, observes that "the poet's name has been variously written Shax-peare, Shackspeare, Shakspeare, and Shakspere;" to which varieties might be added s.h.a.gspere, from the Worcester Marriage License, published in 1836. But the fact is, that by combining with all the differences in spelling the first syllable, all those in spelling the second, more than twenty-five distinct varieties of the name may be expanded, (like an algebraic series,) for the choice of the curious in mis-spelling. Above all things, those varieties which arise from the intercalation of the middle _e, _(that is, the _e_ immediately before the final syllable _spear,_) can never be overlooked by those who remember, at the opening of the Dunciad, the note upon this very question about the orthography of Shakspeare's name, as also upon the other great question about the t.i.tle of the immortal Satire, Whether it ought not to have been the Dunceiade, seeing that Dunce, its great author and progenitor, cannot possibly dispense with the letter _e._ Meantime we must remark, that the first three of Mr. Campbell's variations are mere caprices of the press; as is s.h.a.gspere; or, more probably, this last euphonious variety arose out of the gross clownish p.r.o.nunciation of the two hiccuping _"marksmen"_ who rode over to Worcester for the license; and one cannot forbear laughing at the bishop's secretary for having been so misled by two varlets, professedly incapable of signing their own names. The same drunken villains had cut down the bride's name _Hathaway_ into _Hathwey._ Finally, to treat the matter with seriousness,

Sir Frederick Madden has shown, in his recent letter to the Society of Antiquaries, that the poet himself in all probability _wrote_ the name uniformly _Shakspere._ Orthography, both of proper names, of appellatives, and of words universally, was very unsettled up to a period long subsequent to that of Shakspeare. Still it must usually have happened that names written variously and laxly by others, would be written uniformly by the owners; especially by those owners who had occasion to sign their names frequently, and by literary people, whose attention was often, as well as consciously, directed to the proprieties of spelling. _Shakspeare_ is now too familiar to the eye for any alteration to be attempted; but it is pretty certain that Sir Frederick Madden is right in stating the poet's own signature to have been uniformly _Shakspere._ It is so written twice in the course of his will, and it is so written on a blank leaf of Florio's English translation of Montaigne's Essays; a book recently discovered, and sold, on account of its autograph, for a hundred guineas.

NOTE 2.

But, as a proof that, even in the case of royal christenings, it was not thought pious to "tempt G.o.d," as it were, by delay, Edward VI., the only son of Henry VIII., was born on the 12th day of October in the year 1537. And there was a delay on account of the sponsors, since the birth was not in London. Yet how little that delay was made, may be seen by this fact: The birth took place in the dead of the night, the day was Friday; and yet, in spite of all delay, the christening was most pompously celebrated on the succeeding Monday. And Prince Arthur, the elder brother of Henry VIII., was christened on the very next Sunday succeeding to his birth, notwithstanding an inevitable delay, occasioned by the distance of Lord Oxford, his G.o.dfather, and the excessive rains, which prevented the earl being reached by couriers, or himself reaching Winchester, without extraordinary exertions.

NOTE 3.