It agrees with all that is brought together;—the night the storms-the houselessness-Gloster with his eyes put out the Fool-the semblance of a madman, and Lear in his madness,—are all bound together by a strange kind of sympathy, confusion in the elements of nature, of human society and the human soul! Throughout all the play is there not sublimity felt amidst the continual presence of all kinds of disorder and confusion in the natural and moral world; -a continual consciousness of eternal order, law, and good? This it is that so exalts it in our eyes.' two. In every attempt at representing | consecration of Lear's madness. The love-scene between Edgar and Cordelia, in the first scene of the first act of Tate's Lear,' was an assurance, under the hand and seal of Tate, that the play would end happily. He might be constrained, in the impossibility of wholly destroying Shakspere, to exhibit to us some of the most terrific conflicts of human passion, and the most striking displays of human suffering. He could not utterly conceal the terrible workings of the mind of Lear, which had been laid bare by the "explosions of his passion." But he takes care to let it be understood that there is nothing real in this; that all will be right in the end; that, though the flames rage, the house is insured; that a wedding and a dance will terminate the play much better than the "dead march" of Shakspere. "Cordelia," says Dr. Johnson, "from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate, I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor." This was a bold or a lazy avowal in Johnson; for Aristotle describes the popular admiration of the tragedy which ends happily for the good characters, and fatally for the bad, as a result of the "weakness of the spectators; "+ and though Johnson vigorously attacked Aristotle's Unities-or rather the *Black wood s Mag.,' vol. v. + Treatise on Poetry'-Twining's Translation. doctrine of the Unities imputed to Aristotle -the good critic must have been sleeping when he gave his voice to the general suffrage at the risk of being accounted weak. Johnson was too clever a man not to know that he lost something by not reading "the last scenes" of Shakspere's 'Lear;' and we have considerable doubts whether he ever looked into the last scenes of Tate's Lear.' Carrying the principle to the end with which we set out, we venture to print the last scene of each writer; and we ask our readers to apply the scale of Tate, in the manner which we have indicated, to the admeasurement of Shakspere : [TATE.] "Enter ALBANY, KENT, and Knights to LEAR and CORDELIA in Prison. Lear. Who are you? My eyes are none o' th' best, I'll tell you straight: Oh, Albany! Well, sir, we are your captives, And you are come to see death pass upon us. Why this delay? Or, is 't your highness' pleasure To give us first the torture? Say you so? Why here 's old Kent, and I, as tough a pair As e're bore tyrant stroke;-but my Cordelia, My poor Cordelia here, O pity Alb. Thou injured majesty, The wheel of fortune now has made her circle, And blessings yet stand 'twixt thy grave and thee. Lear. Com'st thou, inhuman lord, to sooth us back To a fool's paradise of hope, to make Our doom more wretched? Go to; we are too well Acquainted with misfortune, to be gull'd With lying hope; no, we will hope no more. Alb. Since then my injuries, Lear, fall in with thine, I have resolved the same redress for both. Cord. Speak; for methought I heard Alb. The troops by Edmund raised, I have disbanded: Those that remain are under my command. Re-enter EDGAR with GLOSTER. Glost. Where's my liege? Conduct me to his knees, to hail His second birth of empire: My dear Edgar Has, with himself, reveal'd the king's blest restoration. Lear. My poor dark Gloster! Glost. Oh, let me kiss that once more scepter'd hand? Lear. Hold, thou mistak'st the majesty; kneel here; Cordelia has our pow'r, Cordelia 's queen. Speak, is not that the noble, suff'ring Edgar! Glost. My pious son, more dear than my lost eyes. "Enter LEAR, with CORDELIA dead in his arms; EDGAR, Officer, and others. Lear. Howl, howl, howl! O, you are meu of stones; Had I your tonguês and eyes I'd use them so That heaven's vault should crack:-She 's gone for ever! I know when one is dead, and when one lives; She 's dead as earth:-Lend me a lookingglass; If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, Why, then she lives. Kent. Break, heart; I pr'ythee, break! he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer. [Exeunt with a dead march." And why do we ask any one of our readers to compare what cannot be compared ?-why do we put one of the most divine conceptions of poetry side by side with the meanest interpretation of the most unimaginative feelings-equally remote from the verisimilitude of common life, as from the truth of ideal beauty? It is, as we have said before, because we feel unable to impart to others our own conceptions of the marvellous power of the Lear' of Shakspere, without employing some agency that may give distinctness to ideas which must be otherwise vague. There is only one mode in which such a production as the Lear' of Shakspere can be understood-by study, and by reverential reflection. The age which produced the miserable parody of Lear' that till within a few years has banished the Lear' of Shakspere from the stage, was, as far as regards the knowledge of the highest efforts of intellect, a presumptuous, artificial, and therefore empty age. Tate was tolerated because Shakspere was not read. We have arrived, in some degree, to a better judgment, because we have learnt to judge more humbly. We have learnt to compare the highest works of the highest masters of poetry, not by the pedantic principle of considering a modern great only to the extent in which he is an imitator of an ancient, but by endeavouring to comprehend the idea in which the modern and the ancient each worked. The Cordelia of Shakspere and the Antigone of Sophocles have many points of similarity; but they each belong to a different system of art. It is for the highest minds only to carry their several systems to an approach to the perfection to which Shakspere and Sophocles have carried them. It was for the feeblest of imitators, in a feeble age, to produce such parodies as we have exhibited, under the pretence of substituting order for irregularity, but in utter ignorance of the principle of order which was too skilfully framed to be visible to the grossness of their taste. CHAPTER VII. MACBETH. Its longs to the realms of poetry altogether. We might as well call Lear' or 'Hamlet' historical plays, because the outlines of the story of each are to be found in old records of the past. "THE Tragedie of Macbeth' was first pub- | is true, or has been related as true: it be lished in the folio collection of 1623. place in that edition is between Julius Cæsar' and 'Hamlet.' In the entry on the Stationers' register, immediately previous to the publication of the edition of 1623, it is also classed amongst the Tragedies. And yet, in modern reprints of the text of Shakspere, 'Macbeth' is placed the first amongst the Histories. This is to convey a wrong notion of the character of this great drama. Shakspere's Chronicle-histories are essentially conducted upon a different principle. The interest of Macbeth' is not an historical interest. It matters not whether the action Malone and Chalmers agree in assigning this tragedy to the year 1606. Their proofs, as we apprehend, are entirely frivolous and ' unsatisfactory. The Porter says, "Here's a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty:" the year 1606 was a year of plenty, and therefore 'Macbeth' was written in 1606. Again, the same character says. "Here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales, against either scale." This passage Malone most solemnly tells us, "without doubt, had a direct reference to the doctrine of equivocation avowed and maintained by Henry Garnet, superior of the order of the Jesuits in England, on his trial for the Gunpowder Treason, on the 28th of March, 1606, and to his detestable perjury." There is more of this sort of reasoning, in the examination of which it appears to us quite unnecessary to occupy the time of our readers. We have two facts as to the chronology of this play which are indisputable: the first is, that it must have been written after the crowns of England and Scotland were united in one monarch, who was a descendant of Banquo:— "Some I see That two-fold balls and treble sceptres carry." The second is, that Dr. Forman has most minutely described the representation of this tragedy in the year 1610. The following extract from his 'Book of Plays, and Notes thereof, for common Policy,' is copied by Mr. Collier from the manuscript in the Bodleian Library: "In 'Macbeth,' at the Globe, 1610, the 20th of April, Saturday, there was to be observed, first, how Macbeth and Banquo, two noblemen of Scotland, riding through a wood, there stood before them three women, fairies, or nymphs, and saluted Macbeth, saying three times unto him, Hail, Macbeth, King of Coudor, for thou❘ shalt be a king, but shalt beget no kings, &c. Then said Banquo, What, all to Macbeth and none to me? Yes, said the nymphs, Hail to thee, Banquo? thou shalt beget kings, yet be no king. And so they departed, and came to the court of Scotland, to Duncan, King of Scots, and it was in the days of Edward the Con fessor. And Duncan bade them both kindly welcome, and made Macbeth forthwith Prince of Northumberland; and sent him home to his "Then was Macbeth crowned king, and then he, for fear of Banquo, his old companion, that he should beget kings but be no king himself, he contrived the death of Banquo, and caused him to be murdered on the way that he rode. The night, being at supper with his noblemen, whom he had bid to a feast (to the which also Banquo should have come), he began to speak of noble Banquo, and to wish that he were there. And as he thus did, standing up to drink a carouse to him, the ghost of Banquo came and sat down in his chair behind him. And he, turning about to sit down again, saw the ghost of Banquo, which fronted him, so that he fell in a great passion of fear and fury, uttered many words about his murder, by which, when they heard that Banquo was murdered, they suspected Macbeth. "Then Macduff fled to England to the king's son, and so they raised an army and came into Scotland, and at Dunston Anyse overthrew Macbeth. In the mean time, while Macduff was in England, Macbeth slew Macduff's wife and children, and after, in the battle, Macduff slew Macbeth. 'Observe, also, how Macbeth's queen did rise in the night in her sleep and walk, and talked and confessed all, and the doctor noted her words." Here, then, the date of this tragedy must be fixed after the accession of James I. in 1603, and before the representation at which Forman was present in 1610. Mr. Collier is inclined to believe that the play was a new one when Forman saw it acted. Be that as own castle, and appointed Macbeth to provide it may, we can have no doubt that it be for him, for he would sup with him the next day at night, and did so. "And Macbeth contrived to kill Duncan, and through the persuasion of his wife did that night murder the king in his own castle, being his guest. And there were many prodigies seen that night and the day before. And when Macbeth had murdered the king, the blood longed to the last ten years of the poet's life. That Shakspere found sufficient materials for this great drama in Holinshed's 'History of Scotland' is a fact that renders it quite unnecessary for us to enter into any discussion as to the truth of this portion of A A |