146

THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE.

the Argo, in which he sought the Golden Fleece. So carefully did a grateful and reverent nation patch up the decaying timbers of the old craft, as she lay high and dry on the Greek shore, that in process of time it became a serious question among learned men whether much of the old ship was left together after all. The books written about Shakspere and his works would of themselves fill a respectable library.

The thirty-seven plays are classed as Tragedies, Comedies, and Histories. The great Tragedies are five-Macbeth, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello. The Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and the Merchant of Venice, are perhaps the finest Comedies; while Richard III., Coriolanus, and Julius Caesar, stand prominently out among the noble series of Histories. The student who knows these eleven plays, knows Shakspere in his finest vein. Yet fat and vinous old Jack Falstaff, whose portraiture is the happiest hit in all the varied range of English comedy, must be sought for in other scenes. Indeed, to know Shakspere as he ought to be known, we must read him right through from first to last; and in days when our most brilliant essayists draw gems of illustration from this exhaustless mine, when every newspaper and magazine studs its leaders with witty allusions to Shallow or Dogberry, Malvolio or Mercutio, and every orator borrows the lightning of some Shaksperian line to gild his meaner language with its flash,-not to have studied the prince of poets thoroughly, proves not merely the absence of a fine literary taste, but the total lack of that common sense which leads men to aim at knowing well and clearly every subject that may help them in their daily life.

The grand, surpassing quality of Shakspere's genius, was its creative power. Coleridge, who saw, perhaps, deeper into the unfathomed depths of the poet's spirit than any man has done, calls him the thousand-souled Shakspere, and speaks of his oceanic mind. And well the dramatist deserves such magnificent epithets, for no writer has ever created a host of characters, so numerous, so varied, and yet so completely distinct from one another. The door of his fancy opened, as if of its own accord,

SHAKSPERE VERSUS HISTORY.

147

and out trooped such a procession as the world had never seen The bloodiest crimes and the broadest fun were represented there; the fresh silvery laughter of girls and the maniac shriekings of a wretched old man, the stern music of war and the roar of tavern rioters, mingled with a thousand other various sounds, yet no discordant note was heard in the manifold chorus. So true and subtile an interpreter of the human soul, in its myriad moods, has never written novel, play, or poem; yet he drew but little from the life around him. The revels with Raleigh and Jonson at the Mermaid and the Falcon, may have suggested some hints for the pictures of life in the Boar's Head Tavern, Eastcheap. The court of Elizabeth, and the greenwood that embowered Stratford, doubtless supplied material for many brilliant and lovely scenes. But those characters which were not drawn from the page of history, are chiefly the creations of his own inexhaustible imagination; and often, when he does adopt a historic portraiture, the colouring is nearly all his own. Many of us read Shakspere before we read history, and take our ideas of historical heroes rather from his masterly idealizations than from the soberer painting of the historian's pencil. So deeply rooted, for example, are our early-caught notions of Macbeth's villany, and Richard Crookback's appalling guilt, that it is with somewhat of a startle and recoil we come in our later reading upon other and milder views of these Shaksperian criminals. And, read as we may, we can never get wholly rid of the magic spell with which the poet's genius has enchained us.

The language of Shakspere has been justly censured for its obscurity. "It is full of new words in new senses. There are lines and passages, upon whose impenetrable granite the brains of critics and commentators have been well-nigh dashed out; and yet their meaning is still uncertain. Another fault is the frequent use of puns and verbal quibbles, where, quite out of place and keeping, they jar harshly upon the feelings of the reader. Yet these are spots upon the sun, forgotten while we rejoice in his cheerful beams and drink his light into our souls-discoverable only by the cold eyes of those critics who read for business, not delight.

148

SPECIMENS OF SHAKSPERE'S STYLE.

Besides his plays, Shakspere gave to the world various poems: Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, A Lover's Complaint, and one hundred and fifty-four Sonnets. The "Venus and Adonis," which formed the first fruits of his ripening powers, was published in 1593, with a dedication to Lord Southampton.

Dr. Johnson says, in his Preface to Shakspere's Works, "He that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen." The comparison is witty and just; yet, in pursuance of our plan, we must select specimens of Shakspere's style. The first extract illustrates the poet's tragic power; the second shows him in a light and playful mood:

:

MACBETH.- ACT II.. SCENE 1.

Macbeth.-Is this a dagger, which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee :

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling, as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind; a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.

Thou marshal'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.

Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest: I see thee still;
And on thy blade and dudgeon, gouts of blood,
Which was not so before.-There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business, which informs
Thus to mine eyes.-Now o'er the one half world
Nature seems dead; and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; now witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings; and withered murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, toward his design
Moves like a ghost.-Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,

Which now suits with it.-Whiles I threat, he lives:

SPECIMENS OF SHAKSPERE'S STYLE.

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven, or to hell.

ROMEO AND JULIET.-ACT I., SCENE 4.

149

[A bell rings.

Mercutio.-Oh, then, I see, Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife; and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman.
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep :

Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
The traces, of the smallest spider's web;

The collars, of the moonshine's wat'ry beams :

Her whip, of cricket's bone; the lash, of film:
Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid:
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut,
Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub,
Time out of mind the fairies' coach-makers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love:
On courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight:
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees:
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose.
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit:
And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig's tail,
Tickling a parson's nose, as 'a lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice:
Sometimes she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon

Drums in his ear; at which he starts, and wakes:
And, being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two,
And sleeps again.

No English writer has lived a more romantic life than Raleigh. Born in 1552, at Hayes Farm in Devonshire, and educated at Oriel College, Oxford, he entered at the age of seventeen upon his brilliant and adventurous career as a volunteer in the cause of the French Protestants. For more than five years he fought in Continental wars; but in 1576 a new field of action was opened to his daring spirit. It was the time when Britain began to take her first steps towards winning that ocean-crown which she now so proudly wears. And among the dauntless sailors, who braved the blistering calms of the tropics and the icy breath of the frigid seas in search of new dominions, Raleigh was one of the foremost. With his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who perished at sea in a later voyage, he sailed to North America; but after two years of toil he returned home, richer in nothing but hard-won experience. We then find young Captain Raleigh engaged in Ireland on active service against the rebel Desmonds, winning high honours by his bravery and military talent, and rewarded by being chosen to bear despatches from the Lord Lieutenant to the Queen.

His court life now began. Hitherto, we picture him keeping watch upon the icy deck in the starry light of a frosty night at sea, or, in dusty and blood-stained doublet, sleeping off the exhaustion of a hard battle-day. A scene of courtly splendour now opens to our view; and, prominent among the plumed and jewelled circle gathered round the throne, stands Sir Walter Raleigh, high