fate of Laertes would not have been produced. The death of Ophelia's brother by the poisoned foil, that very instrument by which he had treacherously sought to effect the destruction of Hamlet, is not only a just but most appropriate punishment for his base and unmanly perfidy, and affords more perfect satisfaction to the audience than perhaps any other death that could have been devised. The change of foils was certainly a possible occurrence, and in the present instance it was sufficient for Shakspeare to adopt an expedient within the limits of possibility to bring about an event altogether out of the ordinary course of things. The charge of Shakspeare's violation of the unities cannot be better answered than in the words of Dr. Johnson. “The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible. The critics hold it impossible that an action of months or years can be possibly believed to pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose himself to sit in the theatre, while ambassadors go and return between distant kings, while armies are levied and towns besieged, while an exile wanders and returns. The mind revolts from evident falsehood, and fiction loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality. "From the narrow limits of time necessarily arises the contraction of place. The spectator, who knows that he saw the first act at Alexandria, cannot suppose that he sees the next at Rome. He knows with certainty that he has not changed his place, and he knows that place cannot change itself; that what was a house cannot become a plain, and that what was Thebes can never be Persepolis. "Such is the triumphant language with which a critic exults over the misery of an irregular poet, and exults commonly without resistance or reply. It is time therefore to tell him by the authority of Shakspeare, that he assumes, as an unquestionable principle, a position, which, while his breath is forming it into words, his understanding pronounces to be false. It is false that any representation is mistaken for reality, that any dramatic fable in its materiality was ever credible, or for a single moment was ever credited. “The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria and the next at Rome, supposes that when the play opens, the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine more. He that can take the stage at one time for the palace of the Ptolemies, may take it in half an hour for the promontory of Actium. Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation. If the spectator can be once persuaded that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Cæsar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia or the banks of the Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature, there is no reason why a mind thus wandering in ecstasy should count the clock, or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brain that can make the stage a field. “The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, that the players are only players. They come to hear a certain number of lines recited with just gesture and elegant modulation. The lines relate to some action, and the action must be in some place; but the different actions that complete a story may be in places very remote from each other: and where is the absurdity of allowing that space to represent first Athens and then Sicily, which was always known to be neither Sicily nor Athens, but a modern theatre ? "By supposition, as a place is introduced, time may be extended. The time required by the fable elapses for the most part between the acts; for of so much of the action as is represented, the real and poetical duration is the same. If, in the first act, preparations for war against Mithridates are represented to be made in Rome, the event of the war may, without absurdity, be represented in the catastrophe as happening at Pontus. We know that there is neither war, nor preparations for war; we know that we are neither in Rome nor Pontus,-that neither Mithridates nor Lucullus are before us. The drama exhibits successive imitations of successive actions, and why may not the second imitation represent an action that happened years after the first, if it be so connected with it, that nothing but time can be supposed to intervene. Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination; a lapse of years is as easily conceived as a passage of hours. In contemplation we easily contract the time of real actions, and therefore willingly permit it to be contracted when we only see their imitation. “It will be asked how the drama moves if it is not credited. It is credited with all the credit due to a drama. It is credited whenever it moves, as a just picture of a real original; as representing to the auditor what he would himself feel, if he were to do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The reflection that strikes the heart is not that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed. The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction: if we thought murders and treasons real, they, would please no more. "Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind. When the imagination is recreated by a painted landscape, the trees are not supposed capable to give us shade, or the fountains coolness; but we consider how we should be pleased with such fountains playing beside us, and such woods waving over us. We are agitated in reading the history of Henry the Fifth, yet no man takes his book for the field of Agincourt. A dramatic exhibition is a book recited with concomitants that increase or diminish the effect. "A play read affects the mind like a play acted *. It is therefore evident that the action is not supposed to be real; and it follows, that between the acts a longer or shorter time may be allowed to pass, and that no more account of space or duration is to be taken by the auditor of a drama, than by the reader of a narrative, before whom may pass in an hour the life of a hero or the revolutions of an empire. "Whether Shakspeare knew the unities, and rejected them by design, or deviated from them by happy ignorance, it is, I think, impossible to decide, and useless to inquire. We may reasonably suppose that, when he rose to notice, he did not want the counsels and admonitions of scholars and critics, and that he at last deliberately persisted in a practice which he might * In a similar manner undoubtedly, but not in an equal degree. have begun by chance. As nothing is essential to the fable but unity of action, and as the unities of time and place arise evidently from false assumptions, and, by circumscribing the extent of the drama, lessen its variety, I cannot think it much to be lamented that they were not known by him, or not observed: nor, if such another poet could arise, should I very vehemently reproach him that his first act passed at Venice, and his next at Cyprus. Such violations of rules merely positive, become the comprehensive genius of Shakspeare, and such censures are suitable to the minute and slender criticisms of Voltaire." In addition to these just observations of Johnson, it may be remarked, that where all the unities are strictly observed the play should not be divided into acts, as this immediately breaks the continuity, and thus consequently destroys the illusion. A drama constructed upon the artificial principles laid down by the ancient Greek dramatists, and rigidly adopted by the modern French, ought in strictness of propriety to have only one act, as any interruption of the action, by the falling of the drop-scene, disturbs its unity, and thus of course weakens the effect where this is made to depend upon the literal observance of such unity. On the contrary, in the dramas of Shakspeare, where the unities of time and place are not observed, the intervals caused by the divisions of the play into acts, are of great advantage in helping the imagination to fill up the lapses of time supposed to intervene between the different periods of the general action. While the drop-scene is down, the attention is utterly diverted from the matter of the drama, and the minds of the audience are engaged by the little details of incident which take place, not on, but off, the stage; so that when the business of the play is renewed, whatever period may be supposed to have elapsed during the suspended interval of the acted drama, will be readily passed over in the imagination, and the subsequent event taken up as a new epoch in which the concurring action goes on. For instance, if, at the end of one act, an invasion was threatened to Carthage by the Romans, we might see the sack of the city in the opening of the next without being in the least conscious of its impossibility, all the intervening events being readily supposed to have taken place during the pause between the acts. It is true that some of the breaks into acts in Shakspeare's plays occur where there is no suspension whatever of the action, but those are evidently capricious sections subsequently adventured upon, with great presumption certainly, by the early editors of his works, and did not originally exist; our author probably not having adhered, in all instances, to the established divisions. They were, no doubt, made in order to separate the subject into five acts, that being established as the number into which all legitimate dramas, whether tragedy or comedy, should be divided; no consistent reason, however, can be given why a tragedy or comedy should be trenched into five acts, rather than into more or less, this being an arbitrary rule of custom, not an imperative law of composition. We have been the more particular in our observations upon the structure of Shakspeare's dramas, because it is upon this point that he has been considered open to the most fatal critical objections; Voltaire especially having attacked him with a caustic asperity peculiar to the splenetic, and often morbid, vivacity of that eloquent but superficial critic. We shall now proceed to consider the characters of Shakspeare's dramas. In general, nay I may say it will almost universally be found that the characters attempted to be delineated in those writings which embody living personages-which represent the actions of social life, or cause to pass before the reader's mind the intrigues of courts, the juggles of state, the artificial modes of society, or the more natural habits of ordinary intercourse between individuals of the same classes, contain for the most part elaborate yet imperfect portraits of originals with which we are tolerably familiar ;-but they are portraits only; they want the living principle. There is not the sustained vigour of life-the spirit that suggests feeling, motion, thought. The husk is seen, with nature's green and freshness upon it, but beneath there is the void which a soul ought to occupy but does not. There is not the constantly varying expression that gives us more than a superficial insight into those spiritual idiosyncrasies peculiar to the person represented, and which constitutes his especial identity. These writings, with a few rare exceptions, always bring before us, in their several characters, one of a species, not an individual who has his own abstract qualities, and whose moral organization works out its own results distinct and tangible, not by association with other minds, but by that mysterious and subtle influence which more or less actuates every individual apart from the restrictions of imposed discipline, or the strong influential bias of education. What the painting of the artist is, compared with the living man, are such delineations of life. They are the mere puppets of a Fantoccini, which move but as they are directed by the artist's hand. The beings which such writers present to the mind's eye lack the unseen pulse, the vascular circulation, that muscular elasticity which imparts expression, embodying thoughts without the aid of words-that mysterious agency which communicates motion to the limbs, lustre to the eyes, and animation to the features. The colours indeed are bright and beautiful, the symmetry and conformation perfect, the general impression just and true; but the changing hues of life are wanting, the perpetually shifting modes and aspects by which the living principle moves in its brief cycle of unceasing rotations and change, being never for an instant fixed, are not seized by those who commonly represent human nature in the pages of fiction. They merely give pictures of animated objects, not the objects themselves. To this Shakspeare is a glorious and immortal exception. His characters live and move, and have their being, as if fresh from the hand of their Creator. They are not shown through a medium-through the reflex mirror of the author's conception, which seems to be placed between us and them, but we see the object direct, acting before us with the energy of vital consciousness, and exhibiting the finely susceptible faculties of identical nature, free from the glowing hues and transparent gloss of art. The characters of Avon's immortal bard are not copies, but living principles; not representations of nature, but her actual progeny; not transcripts, but prototypes; and I know of no other man of whom this, without any reservation, can be said. They are not specimens of a certain classification of character, but are individualised with a fidelity amounting almost to the marvellous, and by a creative process peculiar to his original mind and inexhaustible powers of production. No two are alike. Wherever there is a superficial resemblance the shades of difference will be perceived to be marked with a skill and exquisite facility of delineation that, part the second, act the fourth, scene the fourth, where the king reproaches the prince of Wales with having taken the crown from his pillow to place it upon his own head. PRINCE HENRY. I never thought to hear you speak again. Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought; when examined by the delicate test of That thou wilt needs invest thee with mine honours Which thou hast whetted on thy stony heart What! could'st thou not forbear me half an hour? waters upon the ear, or cramped by me- And bid the merry bells ring to thine ear, Now, neighbour confines, purge you of your scum: England shall give him office, honour, might; PRINCE HENRY. O, pardon me, my liege! but for my tears (kneeling) In the particular adaptation of his language to the character, our immortal bard has shown a judgment peculiar to himself, (Which my most true and inward duteous spirit and it is this which imparts the charm of never ceasing variety to the inimitable productions of his pen. I cannot exhibit a more beautiful specimen of the just adaptation of thought and expression to the persons by whom they are uttered, than in the play of Henry the Fourth, Teacheth) this prostrate and exterior bending! And never live to show the incredulous world And thus upbraided it. The care on thee depending Therefore, thou best of gold art worst of gold. But thou most fine, most honor'd, most renown'd, To try with it—as with an enemy That had before my face murder'd my father- But if it did infect my blood with joy, Or swell my thoughts to any strain of pride:- Did, with the least affection of a welcome O my son ! KING HENRY. Heaven put it in thy mind to take it hence That ever I shall breathe. Heaven knows, my son, I met this crown; and I myself know well Yet, tho' thou stand'st more sure than I could do, My gracious liege, PRINCE HENRY. You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me, Nothing can exceed the perfect consistency of the language in this extract. It is unrivalled for just force of reproof on the one hand, and for delicate, but manly expression of humility on the other. There is no noisy declamation-no turgid vituperation-no trim, canting verbosity. The king's speech is full of earnest warmth, he employs strong and numerous figures, but they seem to rise out of the thoughts like bright and beautiful inspirations: they are fitted to the sentiment, not the sentiment to them. They are spontaneous and akin to the thought, which they strengthen and embellish. Here is nothing above the language of polished and eloquent conversation, in which there is often more poetry than in the most elaborate and rhetorical effusions. The pathos is of the highest kind, intense without being lachrymose, and natural without being common-place. The reply of the prince nobly conforms the character of that generous and valiant youth, which until now had not reached the climax of its moral development; it had only been seen through transient glimpses, when the occasional efforts of a nobler nature emancipated it for a moment from the thraldom of tyrannical habit. His earnest but manly humility is conveyed in language so affectingly suited to what he intends to express, that it would be difficult to shew where a word could be supplied or omitted for the better, and yet all the graces of poetry are brought in to aid and adorn the sentiment, without abating for an instant the natural tone of the dialogue. Their presence, however, is rather felt than perceived, and it is in this mysterious blending of the artificial with the natural, giving grace as well as force to the one, without causing the other to become apparent, that Shakspeare immeasurably surpasses all who have preceded or followed him in that patlı which he so pre-eminently pursued. He, indeed, has a language of his own, or at least idioms peculiar to himself in which his characters speak, but with so just a propriety, that those idioms seem to be identical with the very structure of their minds. Here is one of the greatest charms of our author's plays. They are in every particular original, and in nothing more so than in the language, which, moreover, is the language of all ages-the vernacular idiom of all countries of all people-of all tongues; for while that of Chaucer and the earlier poets is now scarcely understood, being seldom, if ever read without the aid of a glossary, that of Shakspeare is, with the exception of a few isolated expressions, intelligible to all; it is a language that can never become obsolete—a language that can never die. |