have that honour to dwell in our minds for ever
as an inseparable concomitant with Shakspeare ?
A kindred mind ! O who can read that affecting
sonnet of Shakspeare which alludes to his pro-
fession as a player : —
Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide.
The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public custom breeds —
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ;
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand
Or that other confession : —
Alas ! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motly to thy view,
Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear—
Who can read these instances of jealous self-
watchfulness in our sweet Shakspeare, and dream
of any congeniality between him and one that.
^0 ON shakspeare's tragedies.
by every tradition of him, appears to have been
as mere a player as ever existed j to have had
his mind tainted v^^ith the lowest players' vices, —
envy and jealousy, and miserable cravings after
applause ; one who in the exercise of his profes-
sion was jealous even of the women-performers
that stood in his way } a manager full of man-
agerial tricks and stratagems and finesse: that
any resemblance should be dreamed of between
him and Shakspeare, — Shakspeare who, in the
plenitude and consciousness of his own powers,
could with that noble modesty, which we can
neither imitate nor appreciate, express himself
thus of his own sense of his own defects : —
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possest;
Desiring this mcm's art, and that man's scope.
I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the
merit of being an admirer of Shakspeare. A
true lover of his excellencies he certainly was
not 5 for w^ould any true lover of them have ad-
mitted into his matchless scenes such ribald trash
as Tate and Gibber, and the rest of them, that
With their darkness durst affront his light,
have foisted into the acting plays of Shakspeare ?
ON shakspeare's tragedies. 21
I believe it impossible that he could have had a
proper reverence for Shakspeare, and have con-
descended to go through that interpolated scene
in Richard the Third, in which Richard tries to
break his wife's heart by telling her he loves
another woman, and says, '' if she survives this
she is immortal." Yet I doubt not he delivered
this vulgar stuff with as much anxiety of em-
phasis as any of the genuine parts : and for act-
ing, it is as well calculated as any. But we have
seen the part of Richard lately produce great
fame to an actor by his manner of playing it,
and it lets us into the secret of acting, and of
popular judgments of Shakspeare derived from
acting. Not one of the spectators who have
witnessed Mr. C.'s exertions in that part, but
has come away with a proper conviction that
Richard is a very wicked man, and kills little
children in their beds, with something like the
pleasure which the giants and ogres in childrens'
books are represented to have taken in that
practice 3 moreover, that he is very close and
shrewd and devilish cunning, for you could see
that by his eye.
But is in fact this the impression we have in
reading the Richard of Shakspeare ? Do we feel
22 ON shakspeare's tragedies.
any thing like disgust, as we do at that butcher-
like representation of him that passes for him on
the stage ? A horror at his crimes blends with the
effect which we feel, but how is it qualified, how
is it carried off, by the rich intellect which he
displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spi-
rits, his vast knowledge and insight into charac-
ters, the poetry of his part, — not an atom of all
which is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of
acting it. Nothing but his crimes, his actions,
is visible ; they are prominent and staring ; the
murderer stands out, but where is the lofty ge-
nius, the man of vast capacity, — the profound,
the witty, accomplished Richard ?
The truth is, the Characters of Shakspeare are
so much the objects of meditation rather than of
interest or curiosity as to their actions, that while
we are reading any of his great criminal char-
acters, — Macbeth, Richard, even lago, — we think
not so much of the crimes which they commit,
as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the in-
tellectual activity, which prompts them to over-
leap those moral fences. Barnwell is a wretched
murderer 3 there is a certain fitness between his
neck and the rope ; he is the legitimate heir to
the gallows ; nobody who thinks at all can think
ON shakspeare's tragedies. 23
of any alleviating circumstances in his case to
make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an
instance from the higher tragedy, what else but
a mere assassin is Glenalvon ! Do we think of
any thing but of the crime which he commits,
and the rack which he deserves ? That is all
which we reaUy think about him. Whereas in
corresponding characters in Shakspeare so little
do the actions comparatively affect us, that while
the impulses, the inner mind in all its perverted
greatness, solely seems real and is exclusively
attended to, the crime is comparatively nothing.
But when we see these things represented, the
acts which they do are comparatively every
thing, their impulses nothing. The state of
sublime emotion into which we are elevated by
those images of night and horror which Mac-
beth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with
which he entertains the time tiU the bell shall
strike which is to call him to murder Duncan, —
when we no longer read it in a book, when we
have given up that vantage-ground of abstrac-
tion which reading possesses over seeing, and
come to see a man in his bodily shape before our
eyes actually preparing to commit a murder^ if
the acting be true and impressive^ as I have wit-
^4 ON shakspeare's tragedies.
nessed it in Mr. K.'s performance of that part,
the painful anxiety about the act^, the natural
longing to prevent it while it yet seems unper-
petrated, the too close pressing semblance of
reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which
totally destroy all the delight which the words
in the book convey, where the deed doing never
presses upon us with the painful sense of pre-
sence : it rather seems to belong to history, — to
something past and inevitable, if it has any thing
to do with time at all. The sublime images,
the poetry alone, is that which is present to our
minds in the reading.
So to see Lear acted, — to see an old man tot-
tering about the stage with a walking-stick,
turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy
night, has nothing in it but w^hat is painful and
disgusting. We want to take him into shelter
and relieve him. That is all the feeling which
the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But
the Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. The
contemptible machinery by which they mimic
the storm w^hich he goes out in, is not more
inadequate to represent the horrors of the real
elements, than any actor can be to represent
Lear : they might more easily propose to per-
ON shakspeare's tragedies. 25
sonate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one
of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The great-
ness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but
in intellectual : the explosions of his passion are
terrible as a volcano : they are storms turning
up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his
mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind
which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood
seems too insignificant to be thought on ; even
as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see
nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness,
the impotence of rage • while we read it, we see
not Lear, but we are Lear, — we are in his mind,
we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the
malice of daughters and storms ; in the aberra-
tions of his reason, we discover a mighty irre-
gular power of reasoning, immethodized from
the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its
powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at
will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind.
What have looks, or tones, to do with that sub-
lime identification of his age with that of the
heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to
them for conniving at the injustice of his chil-
dren, he reminds them that " they themselves
are old." What gesture shall we appropriate to
26 ON shakspeare's tragedies.
this ? What has the voice or the eye to do with
such things ? But the play is beyond all art, as
the tamperings with it shew : it is too hard and
stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy
ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a
daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate
has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan,
for Garrick and his followers, the shovonen of
the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more
easily. A happy ending ! — as if the living mar-
tyrdom that Lear had gone through, — the flay-
ing of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dis-
missal from the stage of life the only decorous
thing for him. If he is to live and be happy
after, if he could sustain this world's burden
after, why all this pudder and preparation, —
why torment us with all this unnecessary sym-
pathy ? As if the childish pleasure of getting
his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him
to act over again his misused station, — as if at
his years, and with his experience, any thing
was left but to die.
Lear is essentially impossible to be represented
on a stage. But how many dramatic personages
are there in Shakspeare, which though more
tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than
ON shakspeare's tragedies. 27
Lear, yet from some circmiistance, some adjunct
to their character, are improper to be shewn to
our bodily eye. Othello for instance. Nothing
can be more soothing, more flattering to the
nobler parts of our natures, than to read of
a young Venetian lady of highest extraction,
through the force of love and from a sense of
merit in him whom she loved, laying aside every
consideration of kindred, and country, and colour,
and wedding with a coal-black Moor — (for such
he is represented, in the imperfect state of know-
ledge respecting foreign countries in those days,
compared with our own, or in compliance with
popular notions, though the Moors are now well
enough known to be by many shades less unwor-
thy of a white woman's fancy) — it is the perfect
triumph of virtue over accidents, of the imagina-
tion over the senses. She sees Othello's colour
in his mind. But upon the stage, when the
imagination is no longer the ruhng faculty, but
we are left to our poor unassisted senses, I appeal
to every one that has seen Othello played, whe-
ther he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's
mind in his colour 3 whether he did not find
something extremely revolting in the courtship
28 ON shakspeare's tragedies.
and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona }
and whether the actual sight of the thing did
not over-weigh all that beautiful compromise
which we make in reading , — and the reason it
should do so is obvious, because there is just so
much reality presented to our senses as to give a
perception of disagreement, with not enough of
belief in the internal motives, — all that which is
unseen, — to overpower and reconcile the first
and obvious prejudices.* What we see upon a
stage is body and bodily action 3 what we are
conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the
mind, and its movements : and this I think may
* The error of supposing that because Othello's colour
does not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend
us in the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an
Adam and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do
in the poem. But in the poem we for a while have Para-
disaical senses given us, which vanish when we see a man
and his wife without clothes in the picture. The painters
themselves feel this, as is apparent by the aukward shifts
they have recourse to, to make them look not quite
naked; by a sort of prophetic anachronism, antedating
the invention of fig-leaves. So in the reading of the play,
we see with Desdemona's eyes ; in the seeing of it, we
are forced to look with our own.
ON shakspeare's tragedies. 9.9
sufficiently account for the very different sort of
delight with which the same play so often affects
us in the reading and the seeing.
It requires little reflection to perceive, that if
those characters in Shakspeare which are witliin
the precincts of nature, have yet something in
them which appeals too exclusively to the imagi-
nation, to admit of their being made objects to
the senses without suffering a change and a
diminution, — that still stronger the objection
must lie against representing another line of
characters, which Shakspeare has introduced to
give a wildness and a supernatural elevation
to his scenes, as if to remove them still farther
from that assimilation to common life in which
their excellence is "siilgarly supposed to consist.
When we read the incantations of those terrible
beings the Witches in Macbeth, though some of
the ingredients of their hellish composition savour
of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other
than the most serious and appalling that can be
imagined ? Do we not feel spell-bound as Mac-
beth was } Can any mirth accompany a sense of
their presence ? We might as well laugh under
a consciousness of the principle of Evil himself
being truly and really present with us. But
30 ON shakspeare's tragedies.
attempt to bring these beings on to a stage^ and
you turn them instantly into so many old women,
that men and children are to laugh at. Con-
trary to the old saying, that '' seeing is believ-
ing," the sight actually destroys the faith: and
the mirth in which we indulge at their expense,
when we see these creatures upon a stage, seems
to be a sort of indemnification which we make to
ourselves for the terror which they put us in
when reading made them an object of belief, —
when we surrendered up our reason to the poet,
as children to their nurses and their elders ^ and
we laugh at our fears, as children who thought
they saw something in the dark, triumph when
the bringing in of a candle discovers the vanity
of their fears. For this exposure of supernatural
agents upon a stage is truly bringing in a candle
to expose their own delusiveness. It is the soli-
tary taper and the book that generates a faith in
these terrors : a ghost by chandelier light, and
in good company, deceives no spectators, — a
ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his
human dimensions made out at leisure. The
sight of a well-lighted house, and a well-dressed
audience, shall arm the most nen^ous child
against any apprehensions ; as Tom Brown says
ON shakspeare's tragedies. 31
of the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his
impenetrable armour over it, " Bully Dawson
would have fought the devil with such advan-
tages."
Much has been said, and deservedly, in repro-
bation of the vile mixture which Dryden has
thrown into the Tempest : doubtless without
some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that
age would never have sate out to hear so much
innocence of love as is contained in the sweet
courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is
the Tempest of Shakspeare at all a subject for
stage representation ? It is one thing to read of
an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale
while we are reading it -, but to have a con-
juror brought before us in his conjuring-gown,
with his spirits about him, which none but him-
self and some hundred of favoured spectators
before the curtain are supposed to see, involves
such a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all
our reverence for the author cannot hinder us
from perceiving such gross attempts upon the
senses to be in the highest degree childish and
inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be repre-
sented, they cannot even be painted, — they can
only be believed. But the eleborate and anxious
32 ON shakspeare's tragedies.
provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age
demands, in these cases works a quite contrary
effect to what is intended. That which in
comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much
to the life of the imitation, in plays which ap-
peal to the higher faculties, positively destroys
the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A
parlour or a drawing-room, — a library opening
into a garden, — a garden with an alcove in it, —
a street, or the piazza of Covent-garden, does
well enough in a scene ; we are content to give
as much credit to it as it demands ; or rather,
we think little about it, — it is little more than
reading at the top of a page, " Scene, a Garden;"
we do not imagine ourselves there, but we
readily admit the imitation of familiar objects.
But to think by the help of painted trees and
caverns, which we know to be painted, to tran-
sport our minds to Prospero, and his island
and his lonely cell ;* or by the aid of a fiddle
dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speak-
* It will be said these things are done in pictures.
But pictures and scenes are very different things. Paint-
ing is a world of itself, but in scene-painting there is the
attempt to deceive ; and there is the discordancy, never
to be got over, between painted scenes and real people.
ON shakspeare's tragedies. 33
ing, to make us believe that we hear those su-
pernatural noises of which the isle was full : —
the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as
well hope^ by his musical glasses cleverly sta-
tioned out of sight behind his apparatus, to make
us believe that we do indeed hear the chrystal
spheres ring out that chime, which if it were to
inwrap our fancy long, Milton thinks.
Time would run back and fetch the a^e of gold,
And speckled vanity
Would sicken soon and die.
And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould ;
Yea Hell itself would pass away.
And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.
The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it,
is not more impossible to be shewn on a stage,
than the Enchanted Isle, with its no less interest-
ing and innocent first settlers.
The subject of Scenery is closely connected
with that of the Dresses, which are so anxiously
attended to on our stage. I remember the last
time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I
felt at the changes of garment which he varied, —
the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish
priest at mass. The luxury of stage -improve -
VOL. II. D
34 ON shakspeare's tragedies.
ments, and the importunity of the public eye,
require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish
monarch was fairly a counterpart to that which
our King wears when he goes to the Parliament-
house, — ^just so full and cumbersome, and set out
with ermine and pearls. And if things must be
represented, I see not what to find fault with in
this. But in reading, what robe are we con-
scious of ? Some dim images of royalty — a
crown and sceptre, may float before our eyes,
but who shall describe the fashion of it ? Do
we see in our mind's eye what Webb or any
other robe- maker could pattern ? This is the
inevitable consequence of imitating every thing,
to make all things natural. Whereas the read-
ing of a tragedy is a fine abstraction. It pre-
sents to the fancy just so much of external ap-
pearances as to make us feel that we are among
flesh and blood, while by far the greater and
better part of our imagination is employed upon
the thoughts and internal machinery of the
character. But in acting, scenery, dress, the
most contemptible things, call upon us to judge
of their naturalness.
Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken
ON shakspeare's tragedies. 35
the pleasure which we take in seeing one of these
fine plays acted, compared with that quiet de-
light which we find in the reading of it, to the
different feelings with which a reviewer, and a
man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine poem.
The accursed critical habit, — the being called
upon to judge and pronounce, must make it
quite a different thing to the former. In seeing
these plays acted, we are affected just as judges.
When Hamlet compares the two pictures of
Gertrude's first and second husband, who wants
to see the pictures r But in the acting, a minia-
ture must be lugged out 3 which we know not
to be the picture, but only to shew how finely a
miniature may be represented. This shewing of
every thing, levels all things : it makes tricks,
bows, and curtesies, of importance. Mrs. S.
never got more fame by any thing than by the
manner in which she dismisses the guests in the
banquet-scene in Macbeth : it is as much re-
membered as any of her thrilling tones or im-
pressive looks. But does such a trifle as this
enter into the imaginations of the readers of
that wild and wonderful scene ? Does not the
mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can ?
36 ON SHAKStEARE's TRAGEDIES.
Does it care about the gracefulness of the doing
it^ But by acting, and judging of acting, all
these non-essentials are raised into an impor-
tance, injurious to the main interest of the play.
I have confined my observations to the tragic
parts of Shakspeare. It vi^ould be no very diffi-
cult task to extend the enquiry to his comedies ;
and to shew why FalstafF, Shallow, Sir Hugh
Evans, and the rest, are equally incompatible
with stage representation. The length to which
this Essay has run, will make it, I am afraid,
sufficiently distasteful to the Amateurs of the
Theatre, without going any deeper into the sub-
ject at present.
CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,
CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSTEARE.
When I selected for publication, in 1808, Spe-
cimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived
about the time of Shakspeare, the kind of ex-
tracts which I was anxious to give were, not so
much passages of wit and humour, though the
old plays are rich in such, as scenes of passion,
sometimes of the deepest quality, interesting si-
tuations, serious descriptions, that which is more
nearly allied to poetry than to wit, and to tragic
rather than to comic poetry. The plays which
I made choice of were, with few exceptions, such
as treat of human life and manners, rather than
masques and Arcadian pastorals, with their train
of abstractions, unimpassioned deities, passionate
mortals — Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, and
Amarillis. My leading design was, to illustrate
38 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,
what may be called the moral sense of our an-
cestors. To shew in what manner they felt,
when they placed themselves by the power of
imagination in trying circumstances, in the con-
flicts of duty and passion, or the strife of con-
tending duties ; what sort of loves and enmities
theirs were ; how their griefs were tempered,
and their full-swoln joys abated : how much of
Shakspeare shines in the great men his contem-
poraries, and how far in his divine mind and
manners he surpassed them and all mankind.
I was also desirous to bring together some of
the most admired scenes of Fletcher and Mas-
singer, in the estimation of the world the only
dramatic poets of that age entitled to be consi-
dered after Shakspeare, and, by exhibiting them
in the same volume with the more impressive
scenes of old INIarlowe, Hey wood, Tourneur,
Webster, Ford, and others, to shew what we
had slighted, while beyond all proportion we
had been crying up one or two favourite names.
From the desultory criticisms which accompanied
that publication, I have selected a few which I
thought would best stand by themselves, as re-
quiring least immediate reference to the play or
passage by which they were suggested.
CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 39
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.
LusVs Dominion, or the Lascivious Queen. — This
tragedy is in King Cambyses' vein 3 rape, and
murder, and superlatives ; " huffing braggart
puft lines," such as the play-writers anterior to
Shakspeare are full of, and Pistol but coldly
imitates.
Tamburlaine the Great, or the Scythian Shep-
herd. — The lunes of Tamburlaine are perfect
midsummer madness. Nebuchadnazar's are mere
modest pretensions compared with the thunder-
ing vaunts of this Scythian Shepherd. He comes
in, drawn by conquered kings, and reproaches
these pampered jades of Asia that they can draw
hut twenty miles a day. Till I saw this passage
with my own eyes, I never believed that it was
any thing more than a pleasant burlesque of
mine ancient's. But I can assure my readers
that it is soberly set down in a play, which their
ancestors took to be serious.