on the point. In the harassed state of his mind, he could not have done otherwise than he did. His conduct does not contradict what he says when he sees her funeral, "I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers up my sum."' The We are not satisfied with this laboured vindication. preparation in the first act, the supernatural appearance of the ghost both to Horatio and to Hamlet, was a machine sufficiently strong to overcome any ordinary or probable degree of irresolution; and the hero loses progressively the esteem of the audience, because he abandons his original and proper purpose of revenge, and trifles away his time unfeelingly about other things. The scenes in the second act between Hamlet and Polonius, between Hamlet and Guildenstern, between Hamlet and the players, are too extravagant; and they do not contain sufficient glimpses of the perpetual presence of that master-thought, the murder of his father, to verify and punish which is his plighted office. In the third act, the scene with Ophelia, whether intended to paint a real or an affected madness, has a want of feeling about it that is inconsistent with Hamlet's earlier demonstrations of passion. The players were to be carefully tutored about the allusive drama which Hamlet had devised, but surely there is superfluity as well as improbability in the general stage-directions. The murder of Polonius in the closet is committed with an offensive levity; and the guilt of the queen is left undefined: it is not made sufficiently clear that she was only an adulteress, and not privy to the poisoning. However natural is the banishment of Hamlet by the king, it is not natural that the former should submit to it; and though his return at Ophelia's funeral, with proofs in his pocket of the king's sinister intentions, was precisely a moment for reviving all his vindictive feelings, yet they seem wholly fallen asleep. The catastrophe effected by accident at last is singularly uninteresting and disappointing; and indeed the whole play is written in regular anticlimax, each act falling below the preceding one in probability, in beauty, and in interest. We suspect that Shakspeare began to re-write some old play, and was tempted by the urgent wants of the theatre to bring out his refaccimento before he had completed it; so that we have his new first act, and not the consequent changes which he meditated in the rest. Goethe had once the project of re-making in German the Hamlet of Shakspeare, giving to it the catastrophe of Orestes, subsequently convincing Hamlet of the comparative innocence of bis mother, and thus creating a motive for a concluding suicide suicide of the hero. In this form, Hamlet would be a more tragical and consistent play, and better able to bear comparison with the master-pieces of antiquity. The English idolatry of Shakspeare has this pernicious effect, that it prevents many attempts to alter his imperfect productions, and to accommodate his dramas to the purer taste of a more learned or fastidious age. The Tempest is happily panegyrized, but its faults are studiously concealed. The second scene, in which Prospero relates to Miranda his early history, is a tedious and an improbable dialogue: for it was not likely that he should so long have deferred any communication to his daughter on the cause of their exile. This exposition is in the worst manner of the French drama, where a confidant is introduced to listen to what must have been told twenty times before. We suspect that Shakspeare intended the first scene to go on during the second; that the voyagers should be stranded on the stage, and the magician conversing on the rock, in each other's presence; that Ariel, by fluttering to and fro, should connect the groupes; and that the various pauses of the dialogue, as when Prospero disrobes, or when Miranda sleeps, were designed to make room for the alternate attention of the audience. Still the exposition would better have been made by the penitence of Antonio during the danger. We may also observe that there is an unwelcome mixture of mythologies in the fourth act, where spirits assume the forms of Iris, Juno, and Ceres. The Midsummer Night's Dream has many beauties of detail, but, as a whole, is too heterogeneous for welcome contemplation. In whatever class of characters the main knot of a play is braided, to their level of culture the diction of the whole should tend. It is unwelcome to turn from elegance to vulgarity, or from broad humour to polished poetry. Vivid impressions tend to endure in proportion to their vivacity; and no one can dismiss with instantaneity a groupe of imagery by which he has been much interested. Hence the versatility of manners and of personages in this play forms an incongruous mixture, although each part may be strictly executed. The introduction to Mr. Hazlitt's critique of Romeo and Juliet is so beautiful, that we cannot resist the pleasure of transcribing it: Romeo and Juliet is the only tragedy which Shakespear has written entirely on a love-story. It is supposed to have been his first play, and it deserves to stand in that proud rank. There is the buoyant spirit of youth in every line, in the rapturous intoxication of hope, and in the bitterness of despair. It has been said of of Romeo and Juliet by a great critic, that "whatever is most intoxicating in the odour of a southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous in the first opening of the rose, is to be found in this poem." The description is true; and yet it does not answer to our idea of the play. For if it has the sweetness of the rose, it has its freshness too; if it has the languor of the nightingale's song, it has also its giddy transport; if it has the softness of a southern spring, it is as glowing and as bright. There is nothing of a sickly and sentimental cast. Romeo and Juliet are in love, but they are not love-sick. Every thing speaks the very soul of pleasure, the high and healthy pulse of the passions: the heart beats, the blood circulates and mantles throughout. Their courtship is not an insipid interchange of sentiments lip-deep, learnt at second-hand from poems and plays, -made up of beauties of the most shadowy kind, of" fancies wan that hang the pensive head," of evanescent smiles and sighs that breathe not, of delicacy that shrinks from the touch and feebleness that scarce supports itself, an elaborate vacuity of thought, and an artificial dearth of sense, spirit, truth, and nature! It is the reverse of all this. It is Shakespear all over, and Shakespear when he was young.' Lear is here called the best of all Shakespear's plays, and the one in which he was most in earnest.' If the first part of this remark be open to variety of opinion, some truth must be allowed to the latter. A bitter dissatisfaction with the world, a mistrust in the eventual success of virtue, and a despair of retribution, run through the plan and the dialogue of the piece; it is, like Candide, a satire on the government of the universe, to which both Lear and Edgar lend hard words; and the inherent spirit of the whole is frustrated by giving to it a happy catastrophe. Piety, not taste, therefore, may be allowed to prefer the modern conclusion now in use at the theatre. Richard II. is justly, we think, preferred by Mr. Hazlitt to Richard the Third. Henry IV. gives occasion to a fine dissection of the character of Falstaff. Henry the Fifth is ably analyzed historically as well as dramatically; and that instinctive truth of nature, which has led Shakspeare, contrary to his wish or intention, to render this monarch unattaching, not to say disagreeable to the audience, is most ingeniously brought out. Henry VI. is well examined; and the parallel or comparison between Richard II. and Henry VI. is worthy of Plutarch. Richard III. gives occasion to much commentary on the more celebrated actors of the part. This play, though full of business and bustle, does not deserve the popularity which it enjoys. The wooing of Lady Anne, notwithstanding the ingenious defence of Richardson, is highly unlikely; and the atrocity atrocity of the hero is neither historically true nor dramatically probable. Henry VIII. is an admirable play, and one of those which Dr. Johnson remarkably undervalued. He says that the genius of Shakspeare comes in and goes out with Queen Katharine; whereas the delineation of Cardinal Wolsey forms a not less masterly portrait. Whether Mr. Hazlitt has not overvalued the sketch of the king himself may be questioned. King John is the last of the English historic plays in the capricious order of the present author's commentary. In our judgment, they are read most agreeably in the chronological order of the reigns which they depict; and we should wish to see the posthumous play intitled Sir John Oldcastle regularly introduced between the parts of Henry IV., and Lord Cromwell regularly prefixed to Henry VIII. Comedy is a more transient sort of art than tragedy: the heroic style of language lasts from age to age: but the style of conversation varies with every change of fashions, manners, and refinements, and soon loses that instantaneous power of stimulating in which the vivacity of talk and the flashiness of repartee consist. Hence the comedies of Shakspeare do not now bestow that high pleasure on perusal which they once excited. Mr. Hazlitt, faithful to his system of panegyric, may talk warmly of his delight: but we have heard many people express their opinion that the humorous scenes of our great dramatist are still read with interest as records of former manners, as instructive delineations of extinct costume in thinking and behaving, and as pictures of the peculiarities and prejudices of our forefathers, rather than as objects of cordial sympathy and natural acquaintance. Twelfth Night is the comedy first analyzed, and it is introduced by the following good remark : This 'There is a certain stage of society in which people become conscious of their peculiarities and absurdities, affect to disguise what they are, and set up pretensions to what they are not. gives rise to a corresponding style of comedy, the object of which is to detect the disguises of self-love, and to make reprisals on these preposterous assumptions of vanity, by marking the contrast between the real and the affected character as severely as possible, and denying to those, who would impose on us for what they are not, even the merit which they have. This is the comedy of artificial life, of wit and satire, such as we see it in Congreve, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, &c. To this succeeds a state of society from which the same sort of affectation and pretence are banished by a greater knowledge of the world or by their successful exposure on the stage; and which by neutralizing the materials of comic character, both natural and artificial, leaves no comedy at all all-but the sentimental. Such is our modern comedy. There is a period in the progress of manners anterior to both these, in which the foibles and follies of individuals are of nature's planting, not the growth of art or study: in which they are therefore unconscious of them themselves, or care not who knows them, if they can but have their whim out; and in which, as there is no attempt at imposition, the spectators rather receive pleasure from humouring the inclinations of the persons they laugh at, than wish to give them pain by exposing their absurdity. This may be called the comedy of nature, and it is the comedy which we generally find in Shakespear.' The Two Gentlemen of Verona furnish an agreeable dramatic novel, the characters of which are less in caricature than in most other comedies of the author. The Merchant of Venice is more freely and ably criticized than the other plays, which are too uniformly praised. By a liberal and candid investigation of their occasional defects, we may best devise a method of fitting them up for the theatre, so as to preserve them in immortal bloom. The Winter's Tale is justly applauded; yet, if this piece had begun in the fourth act, and if the previous incidents had been skilfully narrated, the dead pause, the lacuna of fifteen years, in the action, might have been avoided. All's Well that Ends Well is happily illustrated from Boccaccio, of whom occurs an elegant critical encomium. Love's Labour Lost is with regard to humour, as Mr. H. thinks, the feeblest of Shakspeare's comedies. According to Dr. Drake, it was written in 1591. If one of the earliest, it is, however, one of the most laboured in point of style, abounds with passages in rhyme, and may serve to shew in what manner Shakspeare would have written if he had enjoyed more leisure. Certainly he would have been fastidious and affected if he had not been often hurried, and is indebted for his ease to his compulsory rapidity. Much Ado about Nothing is in the best vein of Shakspeare's comedy. As you Like it contains passages of wonderful beauty. The Taming of the Shrew has a more regular plot and a more definite moral than any other. Measure for Measure is full of genius, yet not of interest. The Merry Wives of Windsor exhibit a less attaching Falstaff than appeared in Henry IV.; and the pageant, in which persons disguised as fairies torment the poor knight, has much of improbability. The credulity which he professes cannot well be either real or assumed. The Comedy of Errors, though borrowed from Plautus, is neither fortunate in its plan nor lively in the dialogue of the incidents. Concern |