COMMENDATORY VERSES ON SHAKSPEARE,

BY CONTEMPORARY POETS.

the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him. He knew, that any other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity. Characters thus ample and general were not easily discriminated and preserved, yet perhaps, no poet ever kept his personages more distinct from each other. I will not say with Pope, that every speech may be assigned to the proper speaker, because many speeches there are which have nothing characteristical; but, perhaps, though some may be equally adapted to every person, it will be difficult to find any that can be properly transferred from the present possessor to another claimant. The choice is right, when there is reason for choice.

Nothing can please many, and please long, but | For this, probability is violated, life is misrepresented Just representations of general nature. Particular and language is depraved. But love is only one o manners can be known to few, and therefore few many passions, and as it has no great influence upon only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight awhile, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasares of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose or the stability of truth. Skakspeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world: by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; er by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual: in those of Shakspeare it is commonly a species.

Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a dwarf; and he that should form his expectations of human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakspeare It is from this wide extension of design that so has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by meu, truch instruction is derived. It is this which fills who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should the plays of Shakspeare with practical axioms and himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion: domestic wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that even where the agency is supernatural, the dialogue every verse was a precept; and it may be said of is level with life. Other writers disguise the most Shakspeare, that from his works may be collected a natural passions and most frequent incidents; so system of civil and economical prudence. Yet bis that he who contemplates them in the book will not real power is not shewn in the splendour of parti- know them in the world: Shakspeare approximates calar passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful; the the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to re-event which he represents will not happen, but if it mmend him by select quotations, will succeed Fke the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.

were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned; and it may be said, that he has not only shewn human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials, to which it cannot be exposed.

This therefore is the praise of Shakspeare, that his drama is the mirror of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious ecstasies, by reading human sentiments in human language; by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.

It will not easily be imagined how much Shakspeare excels in accommodating his sentiments to real life, but by comparing him with other authors. It was observed of the ancient schools of declamation, that the more diligently they were frequented, the more was the student disqualified for the world, because he found nothing there which he should ever meet in any other place. The same remark may be applied to every stage but that of Shakspeare. The theatre, when it is under any other direction, is peopled by such characters as were never seen, con- His adherence to general nature has exposed him versing in a language which was never heard, upon to the censure of critics, who form their judgments topics which will never arise in the commerce of upon narrower principles. Dennis and Rymer think Bankind. But the dialogue of this author is often his Romans not sufficiently Roman; and Voltaire Bo evidently determined by the incident which pro- censures his kings as not completely royai. Deunis duces it, and is pursued with so much ease and sim-is offended, that Menenius, a senator of Rome, should licity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of play the buffoon; and Voltaire perhaps thinks defiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selec-cency violated when the Danish usurper is repretion out of common conversation, and common oc

currences.

Upon every other stage the universal agent is Love, by whose power all good and evil is distributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To bring a lover, a lady, and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and harass them with violence of desires inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture, and art in agony; to fil their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered, is the business of a modern dramatist

sented as a drunkard. But Shakspeare always makes nature predominate over accident; and if he preserves the essential character, is not very careful of distinctions superinduced and adventitious. His story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on men. He knew that Rome, like every other city, had men of all dispositions; and wanting a buffoon, he went into the senate-house for that which the senate-house would certainly have afforded him. He was inclined to shew an usurper and a murderer, not only odious but despicable; he therefore added drunkenness to his other qualities, knowing that kings love wine like other meu, and that wine exerts its natural power upon kings. These are the

petty cavils of petty minds; a poet overlooks the casual distinction of country and condition, as a painter, satisfied with the figure, neglects the drapery. The censure which he has incurred by mixing comic and tragic scenes, as it extends to all his works, deserves more consideration. Let the fact be first stated, and then examined.

thor's works into comedies, histories, and tragedies, seem not to have distinguished the three kinds by any very exact or definite ideas.

An action which ended happily to the principal persons, however serious or distressful through its intermediate incidents, in their opinion constituted a comedy. This idea of a comedy continued long Shakspeare's plays are not in the rigorous and among us, and plays were written, which, by changcritical sense, either tragedies or comedies, but com-ing the catastrophe, were tragedies to-day, and copositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state medies to-morrow. of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolic of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.

Tragedy was not in those times a poem of more general dignity or elevation than comedy; it required only a calamitous conclusion, with which the common criticism of that age was satisfied, whatever lighter pleasure it afforded in its progress.

History was a series of actions, with no other than chronological succession, independent on each other, and without any tendency to introduce and regulate the conclusion. It is not always very nicely distinguished from tragedy. There is not much nearer Out of this chaos of mingled purposes and casual-approach to unity of action in the tragedy of Antony ties, the ancient poets, according to the laws which and Cleopatra, than in the history of Richard the custom had prescribed, selected some the crimes of Second. But a history might be continued through men, and some their absurdities: some the momen-many plays; as it had no plan, it had no limits. tous vicissitudes of life, and some the lighter occurrences some the terrors of distress, and some the gaieties of prosperity. Thus rose the two modes of imitation, known by the names of tragedy and comedy, compositions intended to promote different ends by contrary means, and considered as so little allied, that I do not recollect among the Greeks or Romans a single writer who attempted both.

Shakspeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow, not only in one mind, but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and ludicrous characters, and, in the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity and laughter.

Through all these denominations of the drama, Shakspeare's mode of composition is the same; an interchange of seriousness and merriment, by which the mind is softened at one time, and exhilarated at another. But whatever be his purpose, whether to gladden or depress, or to conduct the story, without vehemence or emotion, through tracts of easy and familiar dialogue, he never fails to attain his purpose; as he commands us, we laugh or mourn, or sit silent with quiet expectation, in tranquillity without indifference.

When Shakspeare's plan is understood, most of the criticisms of Rymer and Voltaire vanish away. The play of Hamlet is opened, without impropriety, by two centinels: Iago bellows at Brabantio's That this is a practice contrary to the rules of window, without injury to the scheme of the play, criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always though in terms which a modern audience would an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end not easily endure; the character of Polonius is seaof writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to in-sonable and useful; and the Gravediggers themselves struct by pleasing. That the mingled drama, may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alternations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by shewing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation,

It is objected, that by this change of scenes the passions are interrupted in their progression, and that the principal event, being not advanced by a due gradation of preparatory incidents, wants at last the power to move, which constitutes the perfection of dramatic poetry. This reasoning is so specious, that it is received as true even by those who in daily experience feel it to be false. The interchanges of mingled scenes seldom fail to produce the intended vicissitudes of passion. Fiction cannot move so much, but that the attention may be easily transferred; and though it must be allowed that pleasing melancholy may be sometimes interrupted by unwelcome levity, yet let it be considered likewise, that melancholy often not pleasing, and that the disturbance of one man may be the relief of another; that different auditors have different habitudes; and that, upon the whole, all pleasure consists in variety.

The players, whe in their edition divided our au

may be heard with applause.

Shakspeare engaged in dramatic poetry with the world open before him; the rules of the ancients were yet known to few; the public judgment was unformed; he had no example of such fame as might force him upon imitation, nor critics of such authority as might restrain his extravagance; he therefore indulged his natural disposition, and his disposition, as Rymer has remarked, led him to comedy. In tragedy he often writes with great appearance of toil and study, what is written at last with little felicity; but in his comic scenes, he seems to produce without labour, what no labour can improve. In tragedy he is always struggling after some occa sion to be comic, but in comedy he seems to repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of thinking congenial to his nature. In his tragic scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.

The force of his comic scenes has suffered little diminution from the changes made by a century and a half, in manners or in words. As his personages act upon principles arising from genuine passion, very little modified by particular forms, their plea

sures and vexations are communicable to all times and to all places; they are natural, and therefore