with animation, and the least attractive with dra- | inimitable effect; and in the minor parts of the es matic interest. Of "Richard II." we may say with Mr. Skottowe, that, "though it is an exquisite poem, it is an ind:fferent play." But in the drama which, in its historic order, succeeds to it, we receive an ample compensation for any failure of the dramatist in "Richard II." In every page of "Henry IV.," both the serious and the comic, Shakspeare "is himself again ;" and our fancy is either elevated or amused without the interruption of a single discordant or uncharacteristic sentiment. Worcester, indeed, says,

"And 'tis no little reason bids us speed
To save our heads by raising of a head,"

and is thus guilty of a quibble; an offence of which the Prince, on two occasions, shows himself to be capable; once when he sees Falstaff apparently dead on the field of Shrewsbury; and once when, on his accession to the throne, he appoints his father's Chief Justice to a continuance in his high office: and these, as I believe, are the sole in stances of our Poet's dalliance with his Cleopatra, for whose love he was content to lose the world, throughout the whole of the serious parts of this long and admirable drama.

The succeeding play of " Henry V." bears noble testimony to the poetic and the dramatic supremacy of Shakspeare: to the former, more especially in its three fine choruses, one of them serving as the prologue to the play, one opening the third act, and one describing the night preceeding the battle of Agincourt: to the latter, in every speech of the King's, and in the far greater part of the remaining dialogue, whether it be comic or tragic. "Henry V.," however, is sullied with some weak and silly scenes; and, on the whole, is certainly inferior in dramatic attraction to its illustrious predecessor. But it is a very fine production, and far-far above the reach of any other English writer, who has been devoted to the service of the stage.

Of "Henry VI.," that drum and trumpet thing, as it has happily been called by a man of genius,* who ranged himself with the advocates of Shakspeare, I shall not take any notice on the present occasion, as the three parts of this dramatized history are nothing more than three old plays, corrected by the hand of Shakspeare, and here and there illustrious with the fire-drops which fell from his pen. Though we consider them, therefore, as possessing much attraction, and as disclosing Shakspeare in their outbreaks of fine writing, and in their strong characteristic portriature, we shall now pass them by to proceed without delay to their dramatic successor, "Richard III.” Of "Richard II.," fine as it occasionally is in poetry, and rich in sentiment and pathos, we have remarked that, with reference to the other productions of its great author, it was low in the scale of merit. In "Richard II." he found an insufficient and an unawakening subject for his genius, and it acted drowsily, and as if it were half asleep but in the third Richard there was abundant excitement for all its powers; and the victim of Tudor malignity and calumny rushes from the scene of our mighty dramatist in all the black efficiency of the demoniac tyrant. Besides Sir Thomas More's history of Richard of Gloster, our Poet had the assistance, as it seems, of a play upon the same subject, which had been popular before he began his career upon the stage. Adhering servilely neither to the historian nor to the old dramatist, Shakspeare contented himself with selecting from each of them such parts as were suited to his purpose; and with the materials thus obtained, compounded with others supplied by his own invention, he has produced a drama, which cannot be read in the closet, or seen in its representation on the stage without the strongest agitation of the mind. The character of Richard is drawn with

*The late Mr. Maurice Morgann; who wrote an Vent essay on the dramatic character of Falstaff.

ecution of the drama, there is nothing among all the creations of poetry more splendid and terrific than the dream of Clarence. But this noble effort of the tragic power is not altogether faultless. Some of its scenes, as not promoting the action of the drama, are superfluous and even tedious; and the violation of history, for the purpose of introdu cing the deposed queen, Margaret, upon the stage, may reasonably be censured. I am not certain, however, that I should be satisfied to resign her on the requisition of truth. Her curses are thrilling, and their fulfilment is awful. Shakspeare, as it may be remarked, has accumulated uncommitted crimes on the head of the devoted Richard. By the historian, this monarch is cleared of the deaths of Clarence and of Anne, his wife to the latter of whom he is said to have approved himself an affectionate husband; whilst the murder of Clarence is imputed to the intrigues of the relations of his sister-in-law, the queen. His hand certainly did not shed the blood of the pious Henry; and even his assassination of the two illegitimate sons of his brother, Edward, is supported by very questionable evidence, for there is reason to think that the eldest of these young princes walked at his uncle's coronation; and that the youngest escaped to meet his death, under the name of Perkin Warbeck, from the hand of the first Tudor. But the scene of Shakspeare has stamped deeper and more indelible deformity on the memory of the last sovereign of the house of York, than all the sycophants of the Tudors had been able to impress; or than all that the impartiality, and the acute research of the modern historian have ever had the power to erase. We are certain that Richard possessed a lawful title to the throne which he filled: that he was a wise and,patriotic sovereign: that his death was a calamity to his country, which it surrendered to a race of usurpers and tyrants, who trampled on its liberties, and stained its soil with much innocent and rich blood:-to that cold-blooded murderer and extortioner, Henry VII.-to that monster oí cruelty and lust, his ferocious son: to the sangui nary and ruthless bigot, Mary: to the despotic and unamiable Elizabeth; the murderess of a suppliant queen, of kindred blood, who had fled to her for protection. Such was the result of Bosworth's field, preceded, as it was on the stage of Shakspeare, by visions of bliss to Richmond, and by visions of terror to Richard. But Shakspeare wrote with all the prejudices of a partisan of the Tudors: and at a time also when it was still expedient to flatter that detestable family.

His next task was one of yet greater difficulty:to smooth down the rugged features of the eighth Henry, and to plant a wreath on the brutal and blood-stained brow of the odious father of Elizabeth. This task he has admirably executed, and without offering much violation to the truth of history. He has judiciously limited his scene to that period of the tyrant's reign in which the more disgusting deformities of his character had not yet been revealed-to the death of Catharine, the fall of Wolsey, and the birth of Elizabeth: and the crowned savage appears to us only as the generous, the munificent, the magnanimous monarch, striking down the proud, and supporting with a strong arm the humble and the oppressed. But the whole pathos and power of the scene are devoted to Catharine and Wolsey. On these two characters the dramatist has expended all his force; and our pity is inseparably attached to them to the last moment of their lives. They expire, indeed, bedewed with our tears. Of this, the last of Shakspeare's dramatic histories, it may be remarked that it is writ ten in a style different from that of its predeces. sors: that it is less interspersed with comic scenes; that in its serious parts its diction is more stately and formal; more elevated and figurative: that its figures are longer and more consistently sustained. that it is more rich in theatric exhibition, or in the spectacle, as Aristotle calls it, and by whom it is

regarded as a component part of the drama. To any attentive reader these distinguishing characters of the dramatic history of Henry VIII. must be sufficiently obvious; and we can only wonder that the same mind should produce such fine pieces as those of "Henry IV.," "Richard III.," and Henry VIII.," each written with a pen appropriate to itself, and the last with a pen not employed in any other instance.

"facies non omnil us una Nec diversa tamen.”

To illustrate what I mean, let us contemplate Portia, Desdemona, Imogen, Rosalind, Beatrice, Cordelia, and Ophelia. They are equally amiable and affectionate women; equally faithful and attached as wives, as friends, as daughters: two of them, also, are noted for the poignancy and sparkle of their wit: and yet can it be said that any one of If we were to pause in this stage of our progress, them can be mistaken for the other; or that a single we might confidently affirm that we had suggested speech can with propriety be transferred from the to the minds of our readers such a mass of poetic lips of her to whom it has been assigned by her and dramatic genius as would be sufficient to excite dramatic creator? They are all known to us as the the general interest of an intellectual and literary children of one family, with a general resemblance, Benedict and people. But we are yet only in the vestibule which and an individual discrimination. opens into the magnificence of the palace, where Mercutio are both young men of high birth; of Shakspeare is seated on the throne of his great-known valour; of playful wit, delighting itself in ness. The plays, which we have hitherto been pleasantry and frolic: yet are they not distinguished considering, are constructed, for the most part, beyond the possibility of their being confounded? with materials not his own, supplied either by the So intimately conversant is our great dramatist arcient chronicler, or by some preceding drama- with the varieties of human nature, that he scatters tist; and are wrought up without any reference to character, as a reference to character, as a king on his accession scatters gold, nat essential portion of a drama, a plot or fable. among the populace; and there is not one, perhaps, But when he is disengaged from the incumbrances of his subordinate agents, who has not his peculiai to which he had submitted in his histories, he as- features and a complexion of his own. So mighty sumes the full character of the more perfect dra- is our Poet as a dramatic creator, that characters matist; and discovers that art, for which, equally of the most opposite description are thrown in equal with the powers of his imagination, he was cele- perfection and with equal facility from his hand. brat by Ben Jonson. In some of his plays, in- The executive decision of Richard; the meditative deed, we acknowledge the looseness with which his inefficiency of Hamlet; the melancholy of Jaques, fable is combined, and the careless hurry with which which draws subjects of moral reflection from every he accelerates its close: but in the greater triumphs object around him; and the hilarity of Mercutio, of his genius, we find the fable artificially planned which forsakes him not in the very act of dying; and solidly constructed. In "The Merchant of the great soul of Macbeth, maddened and bursting Venice," in "Romeo and Juliet," in "Lear," in under accumulated guilt; and "the unimitated and 'Othello," and, above all, in that intellectual won- inimitable Falstaff," (as he is called by S. Johnson, der, "The Tempest," we may observe the fable in the single outbreak of enthusiasm extorted from managed with the hand of a master, and contribu- him by the wonders of Shakspeare's page) revellting its effect, with the characters and the dialogue, ing in the tavern at Eastcheap, or jesting on the to amuse, to agitate, or to surprise. In that beau-field of Shrewsbury, are all the creatures of one tiful pastoral drama, "As You Like It," the sudden plastic intellect, and are absolute and entire in their disappearance of old Adam from the scene has kind. Malignity and revenge constitute the founbeen a subject of regret to more than one of the dation on which are constructed the two very dissicommentators and Samuel Johnson wishes thatmilar characters of Shylock and Iago. But there the dialogue between the hermit, as he calls him, and the usurping duke, the result of which was the conversion of the latter, had not been omitted on the stage. But old Adam had fulfilled the purposes of his dramatic existence, and it was, therefore, properly closed. He had discovered his honest attachment to his young master, and had experienced his young master's gratitude. He was brought into a place of safety; and his fortunes were now hended with those of the princely exiles of the forest. There was no further part for him to act; and he passed naturally from the stage, no longer the object of our hopes or our fears. On the subject of S. Johnson's wish respecting the dialogue between the old religious man and the guilty duke, we may shortly remark, that nothing could have been more undramatic than the intervention of such a scene of dry and didactic morality, at such a crisis of the drama, when the minds of the audience were heated, and hurrying to its approaching close. Like Felix in the sacred history, the royal criminal might have trembled at the lecture of the noly man but the audience, probably, would have | been irritated or asleep. No! Shakspeare was not so ignorant of his art as to require to be instructed in it by the author of Irene.

But it was in the portraiture of the human mind: in the specific delineation of intellectual and moral man, that the genius of Shakspeare was pre-eminently conspicuous. The curious inquisition of his eye into the characters, which were passing beneath its glance, cannot be made too much the subject of our admiration and wonder. He saw them not only under their broad distinctions, when they became obvious to the common observer; but he beheld them in their nicer tints and shadings, by which they are diversified, though the tone of their general colouring may be the same.

is something terrific and even awful in the inexora bility of the Jew, whilst there is nothing but meanness in the artifices of the Venetian standardbearer. They are both men of vigorous and acute understandings: we hate them both; but our ha tred of the former is mingled with involuntary respect; of the latter our detestation is made more intensely strong by its association with contempt.

In his representation of madness, Shakspeare must be regarded as inimitably excellent; and the picture of this last degradation of humanity, with nature always for his model, is diversified by him at his pleasure. Even over the wreck of the human mind he throws the variegated robe of character. How different is the genuine insanity of Lear from the assumed insanity of Edgar, with which it is immediately confronted; and how distinct, again, are both of these from the disorder which prevails in the brain of the lost and the tender Ophelia.

In one illustrious effort of his dramatic power, our Poet has had the confidence to produce two delineations of the same perversion of the human heart, and to present them, once similar and dissimilar, to the examination of our wondering eyes. In Timon and Apemantus is exhibited the same de formity of misanthropy: but in the former it springs from the corruption of a noble mind, stricken and laid prostrate by the ingratitude of his species in the latter, it is a noisome weed, germinating from a bitter root, and cherished by perverse cultivation into branching malignity. In each of them, as the vice has a different parentage, so his it a diversified aspect.

With such an intimacy with all the fine and subtle workings of Nature in her action on the human heart, it is not wonderful that our great dramatist should possess an absolute control over the pas sions; and should be able to unlock the cell of each

But having sported a while with the fairies, "as on the sands with printless feet They chase the ebbing Neptune,"

over.

of them as the impulse of his fancy may direct. | the loftiest aspirations of the human mind in the When we follow Macbeth to the chamber of Dun- ages which are yet to come. can: when we stand with him by the enchanted imagination alone can be placed in competition The great Milton's caldron; or see him, under the infliction of con- with that of Shakspeare; and even Milton's must science, glaring at the spectre of the blood-boltered yield the palm to that which is displayed in "A Banquo in the possession of the royal chair, horror Midsummer Night's Dream," and in the almost is by our side, thrilling in our veins, and bristling in divine "Tempest." our hair. When we attend the Danish prince to his midnight conference with the shade of his murdered father, and hear the ineffable accents of the dead, willing, but prohibited, "to tell the secrets of his prison-house," we are appalled, and our faculties are suspended in terror. When we see the or faithful and the lovely Juliet awaking in the house of darkness and corruption with the corpse of her husband on her bosom: when we behold the innocent Desdemona dying by the hand, to which she was the most fondly attached; and charging on herself, with her latest breath, the guilt of her murderer: when we wil ess the wretchedness of Lear, wiess contending with the midnight storm, and strewing his white locks on the blast; or carrying in his withered arms the body of his Cordelia murdered in his cause, is it possible that the tear of pity should not start from our eyes and trickle down our cheeks? In the forest of Arden, as we ramble with its accidental inmates, our spirits are soothed into cheerfulness, and are, occasionally, elevated into gaiety. In the tavern at Eastcheap, with the witty and debauched knight, we meet with "Laughter holding both his sides;" and we surrender ourselves, willingly and delighted, to the inebriation of his influence. We could dwell for a long summer's day amid the fertility of these charming topics, if we were not called from them to a higher region of poetic enjoyment, possessed by the genius of Shakspeare alone, where he reigns sole lord, and where his subjects are the wondrous progeny of his own creative imagination. From whatever quarter of the world, eastern or northern, England may have originally derived her elves and her fairies, Shakspeare undoubtedly formed these little beings, as they flutter in his scenes, from an idea of his own ; and they came from his hand, beneficent and friendly to man; immortal and invulnerable; of such corporeal minuteness as to lie in the bell of a cowslip; and yet of such power as to disorder the seasons; as

"in the spiced Indian air, They dance their ringlets to the whistling wind," the mighty Poet turns from their bowers, " canopied with luscious woodbine," and plants us on "the blasted heath," trodden by the weird sis ters, the Fates of the north; or leads us to the dreadful cave, where they are preparing their infernal caldron, and singing round it the incantations of hell. What a change, from all that is fascinating, to all that is the most appalling to the fancy; and yet each of these scenes is the product of the same astonishing intellect, delighting at one time to lull us on beds of roses, with the spirit of Or pheus, and at another to curdle our blood by throwing at us the viper lock of Alecto. But to show his supreme command of the super-human world, our royal Poet touches the sepulchre with his magic rod, and the sepulchre opens "its pond'rous and marble jaws," and gives its dead to "revisit the glimpses of the moon." The belief that the dead, on some awful occasions, were permitted to assume the semblance of those bodies, in which they had walked upon earth; or that the world of spirits was sometimes disclosed to the eye of mortality, has prevailed in every age of mankind, in the most enlightened as well as in the most dark. When philosophy had attained its widest extent of power, and had enlarged and refined the intellect, not only of its parent Greece, but of its pupil Rome, a spectre is recorded to have shaken the firmness of Dion, the scholar and the friend of Plato; and another to have assayed the constancy of the philosophic and the virtuous Brutus. In the superstitious age of our Elizabeth and of her Scottish successor, the belief in the existence of ghosts and apparitions was nearly universal; and when Shakspeare produced upon his stage the shade of the Danish sovereign, there was not, perhaps, a heart, amid the crowded audience, which did not To this little ethereal people our Poet has assigned palpitate with fear. But in any age, however little manners and occupations in perfect consistency tainted it might be with superstitious credulity, with their nature; and has sent them forth, in the would the ghost of royal Denmark excite an agită richest array of fancy, to gambol before us, to asto- ting interest, with such awful so emnity is he intro nish and delight us. They resemble nothing upon duced, so sublimely terrible is h's tale of woe, and earth but if they could exist with man, they would such are the effects of his appearance on the peract and speak as they act and speak, with the inspi- sons of the drama, who are its immediate witration of our Poet, in "The Tempest," and "Anesses. We catch, indeed, the terrors of Horatio Midsummer Night's Dream." In contrast with his Ariel, "a spirit too delicate," as the servant of a witch, to act her earthy and abhorred commands:" but ready, under the control of his philosophic master,

"to bedim

The noontide sun; call forth the mutinous winds:
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault,
Set roaring war."

"To answer his best pleasure, be it to fly,
To swim; to dive into the fire; to ride
On the curl'd clouds ;"

in contrast with this aerial being, the imagination
of Shakspeare has formed a monster, the offspring
of a hag and a demon; and has introduced him
into the scene with a mind and a character appro-
priately and strictly his own. As the drama, into
which are introduced these two beings, beyond the
action of Nature, as it is discoverable on this earth,
one of them rising above, and one sinking beneath
the level of humanity, may be received as the
proudest evidence, which has hitherto been pro-
duced, of the extent and vigour of man's imagina-
.ion: so it bids fair to stand unrivalled amid all

and the young prince; and if the illusion be not
so strong as to seize in the first instance on our own
minds, it acts on them in its result from theirs.
The melancholy, which previously preyed on the
spirits of the youthful Hamlet, was certainly height-
ened into insanity by this ghostly conference; and
from this dreadful moment his madness is partly
assumed, and partly unaffected. It is certain that
no spectre, ever brought upon the stage, can be
of Shakspeare.
compared with this phantom, created by the power
"The Lover's Progress," by Fletcher, is too con-
The apparition of the host, in
temptible to be mentioned on this occasion: the
spirit of Almanzor's mother, in "The Conquest of
Granada," by Dryden, is not of a higher class; and
even the ghost of Darius, in "The Persians," of
the mighty and sublime Eschylus, shrinks into insig
nificance before this of the murdered Majesty f
Denmark. For his success, indeed, in this instance,
Shakspeare is greatly indebted to the superior aw-
fulness of his religion; and the use which he has
made of the Romish purgatory must be regarded as

supremely felicitous.

When the imagination of instrument. The stream of passion, like a stream Shakspeare sported without control amid these of electricity, rushes from the actor to us, and we creations of its own, it unquestionably lifted him are as unable as we are unwilling to resist it. Now high above any competition. As he plays with the it is this feeling, which constitutes the poetic profairies in their bowers of eglantine and woodbine; bability of what we see and hear, and which may er directs the operations in the magic cave; or calls be violated by an injudicious and lawless shifting of the dead man from the "cold obstruction" of the the scene. If our passions be interested by an tomb, "to make night hideous," he may challenge action passing at a place called Rome, it must the poets of every age, from that of Homer to the shock and chill them to have our attentions hurried present, and be fearless of the event. But either suddenly, without any reason for the discontinuance from his ignorance of them, which is not easily cre- of the action, to a piace called Alexandria, separadible, or from his disregard to them, or rather, per-ted by the intervention of a thousand miles. Let haps, from his desire to escape from their yoke, he us suppose, then, that in the fulness of the scenic violates without remorse the dramatic urities of excitement, a friend at our elbow, with the impastime and place, contenting himself to preserve the sible fibre of a Johnson, were to shake us and to unity of action or design, without which, indeed, | say, "What are you mad? Know you not where nothing worthy of the name of composition can you are? in Drury Lane theatre ? within a few exist. And who steps forward, in this instance of hundred yards of your own chambers in Lincoln's his licentious liberty, as the champion of Shak- Inn, and neither at Rome nor at Alexandria? and speare, but that very critic who brings such charges perceive you not that the old man whom you see against him as a poet and a dramatist, that, if they there on his knee, with his hands clenched, and his were capable of being substantiated, would overturn eyes raised in imprecation to heaven, is our old him from his lofty pedestal; and would prove the friend, Garrick, who is reciting with much propriety object of our homage, during two centuries, to be a some verses made by a man, long since in his little deformed image, which we had with the most grave? Yes! Garrick, with whom you conversed silly idolatry mistaken for a god? But Johnson's not many hours ago; and who, a few hours hence, defence of Shakspeare seems to be as weak as his will be talking with his friends, over a comfortable attack; though in either case the want of power in supper, of the effects of his present mimickry ?" the warrior is concealed under the glare of his If we should be thus addressed, (and a sudden shiftostentatious arms. It is unquestionable that, since ing of the scene may produce an equal dissipation the lays of the patrician of Argos, recorded by of the illusion which delights us,) should we be Horace, who would sit for hours in the vacant thankful to our wise friend for thus informing our theatre, and give his applause to actors who were understanding by the interruption of our feelings? not there, no man, unattended by a keeper, ever Should we not rather exclaim with the Argive noble mistook the wooden and narrow platform of a stage of Horace, when purged by hellebore into his senses, for the fields of Philippi or Agincourt; or the painted canvass, shifting under his eye, for the palace of the Ptolemies or the Cæsars; or the walk, which had brought him from his own house to the theatre, for a voyage across the Mediterranean to Alexandria ; or the men and women, with whom he had probably conversed in the common intercourse of life, for old Romans and Grecians. Such a power of illusion, quite incompatible with any degree of sanity of mind, has never been challenged by any critic, as attached to poetry and the stage; and it is adduced, in his accustomed style of argument, by Johnson, only for the purpose of confounding his adversaries with absurdity, or of baffling them with ridicule. But there is a power of illusion, belonging to genuine poetry, which, without overthrowing the reason, can seize upon the imagination, and make it subservient to its purposes. This is asserted by Horace in that often cited passage:

"Ille per extentum funem mihi posse videtur Ire poeta, meum qui pectus inaniter angit, Irritat, mulcet falsis terroribus implet

Ut magus; et modo me Thebis modo ponit Athenis."

"Pol me occidisti

cui sic extorta voluptas

Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error."

With the illusion of the poetic or dramatic imitation, established as an unquestionable truth in our minds, let us now turn and consider the dramatic unities in their origin and effect. The unity of action, indeed, may be thrown altogether from our notice; for, universally acknowledged to be essen tially necessary to the drama, and constituting what may be called its living principle, it has escaped from violation even by our lawless Poet himself. The drama, as we know, in Greece, derived its origin from the choral odes, which were sung at certain seasons before the altar of Bacchus. To these, in the first instance, was added a dialogue of two persons; and, the number of speakers being subsequently increased, a regular dramatic fable was, at length, constructed, and the dialogue usurped the prime honours of the performance. Eut the chorus, though degraded, could not be expelled from the scene, which was once entirely its own; and, consecrated by the regard of the people, it was forced upon the acceptance of the dramatist, to act with it

Assisted by the scenery, the dresses of the actors, and their fine adaptation of the voice and counte-in the best manner that he could. It was stationed, nance to the design of the poet, this illusion becomes therefore, permanently or the stage, and made to so strong as intimately to blend us with the fictitious occupy its place with the agents who were to conpersonages whom we see before us. We know, duct the action of the fal 'e. From the circumstance indeed, that we are seated upon benches, and are of its being stationary on the stage, it secured the spectators only of a poetic fiction: but the power, strict observance of the unity of place: for with a which mingles us with the agents upon the stage, is stage, which was never vacant, and consequently of such a nature that we feel, as it were, one inter- with only one scene, the Grecian dramatist could est with them: we resent the injuries which they not remove his agents whithersoever he pleased, in suffer, we rejoice at the good fortune which betides accommodation to his immediate convenience ; but them the pulses of our hearts beat in harmony on the spot, where the scene opened, he was conwith theirs; and as the tear gushes from their eyes, strained to retain them till the action of the drama it swells and overflows in ours. To account for was closed, and what could not consistently be this influence of poetic imitation, for this contagion acted was necessarily onsigned to narration. This of represented passion belongs to the metaphysi- was a heavy servitude to the dramatist; but it had cian, the sole business of the critic is to remark its compensations ir uninterrupted feeling, and in and to reason from the fact. It is unquestionable the greater conservation of probability. To the that our imaginations are, to a certain extent, under unity of time, as time is more pliant to the imagithe control of authentic poetry, and especially of nation than place, the Grecian dramatist seems to that poetry which employs the scenic imitation for its have paid little if any regard. In the Agamemnon of Eschylus, the fire signals have only just an-* Fuit haud ignobilis Argis, &c. Epis. lib. ii. Ep.nounced to Mycena the fall of Troy, when the

ii 1. 128

herald arrives with the tidings of the victorious

If the limits prescribed to me on the present or casion would admit of such a disquisition, I would submit to my readers an analysis of one of our Poet's finest plays, that I might distinctly show how much he has lost by his neglect of the dramatic unities; and how much more effectually he might have wrought for his purpose if he had not disdained or been too idle to solicit their assistance. In two lines of supreme fustian and nonsense, John son says of him,

"Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign, And panting time toil'd after him in vain." If he spurn'd the reign of existence, he must have plunged into some illimitable void, if there be such, in the infinity of space; and what is the idea intended to be conveyed by "Panting time toiling after him in vain," I will confess that I do not precisely comprehend. I conclude, however, that of these lines the first refers to the super-human creatures of the dramatist's invention, to his fairies, his magicians, and his ghosts: and these, indeed, are proud evidences of his imaginative powers; and that the second, in the ludicrous image, which it presents, of old Time, panting and toiling in vain to catch the active and runaway Poet, must allude to less bard for probability and the limitation of time; the contempt occasionally discovered by our lawin truth, the most effective dispraise. But it is more and this, of which any scribbler may be guilty, is,

King approach; who must thus nave passed from { Phrygia to the Peloponnesus, obstructed also as his passage was by a tempest, with the celerity nearly of a ray of light; and in the Trachiniæ of Sophocles, a journey of about one hundred and twenty miles is accomplished during the recitation of a hundred verses. The transgression of the unity of time was not, perhaps, much the subject of the auditor's calculation, or in any degree of his concern. With his mind intent on the still occupied stage and the unchanging scene, he was ready to welcome the occurrence of any new event, or to isten with pleasure to any new narration of facts beyond the stage, without pausing to investigate the poet's due apportionment of time. If the scene had been shifted, the feelings of the spectator would have been outraged by such an infringement of the unity of place. When the arbitrary separation of the drama into acts was accomplished by the Roman dramatists, the observance of the unity of place became more easy, though still it was not to be abandoned. An act constitutes a portion of the action of a drama, at the close of which the stage is vacated and the curtain drops. If, during the act, the scene be shifted, the unity of place is broken; the probability of the dramatic imitation is diminished, and our feelings are certainly offended: but in the interval between act and act, the scene may be removed to any place where it may suit the convenience of the poet to plant it, to Venice or to Cyprus; and any lapse of time may, readily and without absurdity, be imagined to intervene. The wonderful that Shakspeare, who may be regarded action of the drama must necessarily be maintained as the father of the English drama, accomplished one and entire, and then, with the scene stationary so much for its perfection, than that he failed to during the act, all t..e dramatic unities will be suf- accomplish more. ficiently, if not rigidly, preserved. As we know nothing of the tragic writers of Rome, all their works having perished, with the exception of those of heca, from which not any thing of value can be learned, we cannot decide whether or not they availed themselves of the liberty which they had obtained by this division of their plays into acts; and that their plays were divided into acts, like those of the Roman comic writers, we are assured by

Horace when he tells the Pisos→→→

"Neve minor, neu sit quinto productior actu Fabula, &c."*

We have now considered this extraordinary man as the giver of a poetic soul to historic narration, as the framer of a dramatic fable, and excelling equally in the sublime, the pathetic, and the ludicrous; as luxuriating by himself, in a sort of inac cessible glory, in a world of his own imagination; as neglecting the dramatic unities, either from ignorance of their effect, or from an indolent dislike of their restraint. We have made, in short, a cursory survey of his excellencies and his defects. His diction only now remains to be the subject of our attention; and in this subordinate portion of the drama, we shall find him to be as superior to competition as he is in the characteristic and the imaBut if they did not assert the liberty, which they ginative. His diction is an instrument, which is had gained by thus breaking the continued repre- admirably adapted to all his purposes. In his trasentation of the Grecian theatre, they had them-gic strains, it sounds every note of the gamut; and selves only to blame; for they certainly possessed is either sublime or tender, vehement or pathetic, the means of effectively preserving all the power of with the passion of which it is the organ: in dethe unities at a very small expense of difficulty and scription it is picturesque, animated, and glowing; labour. It is for his inattention to the integrity of and every where its numbers are so harmonious, so the scene during the continuance of each single act varied, almost to infinity, in their cadence and their that I conceive Shakspeare to be principally cen-pauscs, that they give to the ear a perpetual feast, surable; and the variety, to which we are instruct-in which there is no satiety. As the dictior. of ed to look as the consequence of his lawlessness in Shakspeare rises in his higher scenes, without efthis instance, to be an insufficient compensation for the outrage of probability, for the frequent violation of our feelings, and for the vicious example with which he has corrupted the good taste, and has diminished the efficiency of the English stage. A recent commentator, however, has discovered, and he seems to applaud himself on the felicitous discovery, that our great bard has been faithful to one unity of the drama, though he has treated the others with disregard that he has been faithful to the unity of feeling-to the unity of feeling! What! when he transports us from the revels and the wit of Falstaff to the council chamber of the politic Bolingbroke, to the military array of the young Percy, to the field of Shrewsbury, to the castle of the plaintiff Northumberland. The tragedies of Rowe, and the comedies of Congreve may vaunt of their unity of feeling: but that mixed species of drama, in which Shakspeare delights, will admit the any other unity in preference to that of

praise of feeling.

* De Arte Poetica. 1. 189.

fort or tumour, to the sublime of poetry, so does it fall, in his comic, with facility and grace, into the humility of prose. It has been charged with being harsh and ungrammatical. I believe it to be harsh and unrhythmical (I confine the remark, of course, to the verse portion of it) only when it has been deformed by the perverse industry of tasteless commentators, referring us to incorrect transcriptions for authorities; and to the same cause may be ascribed, as I am satisfied, many, if not all, of its grosser grammatical errors. It will not, indeed, in every instance, as we are willing to allow, abide the rigid analysis of grammar; for it sometimes impresses the idea forcibly and distinctly on the mind without the aid of regular grammar, and with out discovering the means by which the exploit has been achieved. As one example of this power of Shakspeare's diction, among many of a similar nature which might be adduced, we will transcribe the often-cited answer of Claudio to his sister, in "Measure for Measure," respecting the unknown terrors of deatn. The expressions in Italics convey their meaning with great accuracy to the hear