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are now present here together; that 's to say, I meant to rectify my conscience,-which I then did feel full sick, and yet not well,-by all the reverend fathers of the land, and doctors learn'd." If the reader will turn to the passage (Act II. Scene 4) he will see that many of the lines end with particles, and that scarcely one of the lines is marked by a pause at the termination. Many other passages could be pointed out with this peculiarity. A theory has been set up that Jonson "tampered " with the versification. We hold this notion to be utterly untenable; for there is no play of Shakspere's which has a more decided character of unity-no one from which any passage could be less easily struck out.

We

The

believe that Shakspere worked in this particular upon a principle of art which he had proposed to himself to adhere to wherever the nature of the scene would allow. elliptical construction, and the licence of versification, brought the dialogue, whenever the speaker was not necessarily rhetorical, closer to the language of common life. Of all his historical plays, the 'Henry VIII.' is the nearest in its story to his own times. It professed to be a "truth." It belongs to his own country. It has no poetical indistinctness about it, either of time or place: all is defined. If the diction and the versification had been more artificial, it would have been less a reality.

CHAPTER VI.

THE ROMAN PLAYS.

THE three plays of 'Coriolanus,' 'Julius Cæsar,' and 'Antony and Cleopatra,' were first printed in the folio collection of 1623. The German critic, Horn, concludes some remarks upon Shakspere's 'King John' with a passage that may startle those who believe that the truth of history, and the truth of our great dramatic teacher of history, are altogether different things :

"The hero of this piece stands not in the list of personages, and could not stand with them; for the idea should be clear without personification. The hero is England.

"What the poet chose to express of his view of the dignity and worth of his native land he has confided to the Bastard to embody in words:

"This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself.' But Shakspere is immeasurably more than Faulconbridge, and he would have the reader and the spectator more also. These lines are not intended to be fixed upon England at the beginning of the fourteenth century alone; they are not even confined to Eng

land generally. They are for the elevation of the views of a state-of a people. Happy for England that she possesses a poet who so many years since has spoken to her people as the highest and most splendid teacher! The full consequences of his teaching have not yet been sufficiently revealed; they may perhaps never wholly be exhibited. We, however, know that in England a praiseworthy zeal for their country's history prevails amongst the people. But who first gave true life to that history ?”

In the three great Roman dramas, the idea, not personified, but full of a life that animates and informs every scene, is ROME. Some one said that Chantrey's bust of a great living poet was more like than the poet himself. Shakspere's Rome, we venture to think, is more like than the Rome of the Romans. It is the idealized Rome, true indeed to her every-day features, but embodying that expression of character which belongs to the universal rather than the accidental. And yet how varied is the idea of Rome which the poet presents to us in these three great mirrors of her history! In the young Rome of Coriolanus we see

the terrible energy of her rising ambition | history, without in any degree changing checked and overpowered by the factious them." But he adopts the literal only when violence of her contending classes. We know that the prayer of Coriolanus is a vain prayer :

"The honour'd gods Keep Rome in safety, and the chairs of justice Supplied with worthy men! plant love among

us !

Throng our large temples with the shows of peace,

And not our streets with war!"

In the matured Rome of Julius Cæsar we see her riches and her glories about to be swallowed up in a domestic conflict of principles:

"Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!

it enters into "the true poetical point of view," and is therefore in harmony with the general poetical truth, which in many subordinate particulars necessarily discards all pretension of "adhering closely to history." Jonson has left us two Roman plays produced essentially upon a different principle. In his 'Sejanus' there is scarcely a speech or an incident that is not derived from the ancient authorities; and Jonson's own edition of the play is crowded with references as minute as would have been Address to the Readers, he says—“ Lest in required from any modern annalist. In his some nice nostril the quotations might savour affected, I do let you know that I abhor nothing more; and I have only done

When went there by an age, since the great it to show my integrity in the story." The

flood,

But it was famed with more than with one
man?

When could they say, till now, that talk'd of
Rome,

That her wide walks encompass'd but one
man?"

In the slightly older Rome of Antony, her power, her magnificence, are ready to perish

in the selfishness of individuals :

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"Let Rome in Tiber melt! and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall !"
Rome was saved from anarchy by the su-
premacy of one. Shakspere did not live to
make the Cæsars more immortal.

Schlegel has observed that "these plays are the very thing itself; and, under the apparent artlessness of adhering closely to history as he [Shakspere] found it, an uncommon degree of art is concealed." The poet almost invariably follows Plutarch, as translated by North, sometimes even to the literal adoption of the biographer's words. This is the " apparent artlessness." But Schlegel has also shown us the principles of the uncommon art:"-" Of every historical transaction Shakspere knows how to seize the true poetical point of view, and to give unity and rounding to a series of events detached from the immeasurable extent of

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character of the dramatist's mind, as well as the abundance of his learning, determined this mode of proceeding: but it is evident that he worked upon a false principle of art. His characters are, therefore, puppets carved and stuffed according to the descriptions, and made to speak according to the very words of Tacitus and Suetonius ;-but they are not living men. It is the same in his 'Catiline.' Cicero is the great actor in that play; and he moves as Sallust, corrected by other authorities, made him move; and speaks as he spoke himself in his own orations. Jonson gives the whole of Cicero's first oration against Catiline, in a translation amounting to some three hundred lines. It may be asked, what can we have that may better present Cicero to us than the descriptions of the Roman historians, and Cicero's own words? We answer, six lines of Shakspere, not found in the books :

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ceeded in his principal object, which was to exhibit the characters of the drama to the spectators of his days precisely as they appeared to those of their own.' The plan was scholastic, but it was not judicious. The difference between the dramatis persona and the spectators was too wide; and the very accuracy to which he aspired would seem to take away much of the power of pleasing. Had he drawn men instead of Romans, his success might have been more assured." We presume to think that there is here a slight confusion of terms. If Jonson had succeeded in his principal object, and had exhibited his characters precisely as they appeared in their own days, his representation would have been the truth. But he has drawn, according to this intelligent critic, Romans instead of men, and therefore his success was not perfectly assured. Not drawing men, he did not draw his characters as they appeared in their own days but as he pieced out their supposed appearance from incidental descriptions or formal characterizations-from party historians or prejudiced rhetoricians. If he had drawn Romans as they were, he would have drawn men as they were. They were not the less men because they were Romans. He failed to draw the men, principally on account of the limited range of his imaginative power; he copied instead of created. He repeated, says Gifford, "the ideas, the language, the allusions," which "could only be readily caught by the contemporaries of Augustus and Tiberius." He gave us, partly on this account also, shadows of life, instead of the "living features of an age so distant from our own," as his biographer yet thinks he gave. Shakspere worked upon different principles, and certainly with a different

:

success.

The leading idea of 'Coriolanus'-the pivot upon which all the action turns-the key to the bitterness of factious hatred which runs through the whole drama-is the contest for power between the patricians and plebeians. This is a broad principle, assuming various modifications in various states of society, but very slightly varied in

*Memoirs of Jonson,' p. ccxx.-Works, 9 vols.

its foundations and its results. He that truly works out the exhibition of this principle must paint men, let the scene be the Rome of the first Tribunes, or the Venice of the last Doges. With the very slightest changes of accessaries, the principle stands for the contests between aristocracy and democracy, in any country or in any age— under a republic or a monarchy. The historical truth, and the philosophical principle, which Shakspere has embodied in Coriolanus' are universal. But suppose he had possessed the means of treating the subject with what some would call historical accuracy; had learnt that Plutarch, in the story of Coriolanus,' was probably dealing only with a legend; that, if the story is to be received as true, it belongs to a later period; that in this later period there were very nice shades of difference between the classes composing the population of Rome; that the balance of power was a much more complex thing than he found in the narrative of Plutarch: further suppose that, proud of this learning, he had made the universal principle of the plebeian and patrician hostility subsidiary to an exact display of it, according to the conjectures which modern industry and acuteness have brought to bear on the subject. It is evident, we think, that he would have been betrayed into a false principle of art, and would necessarily have drawn Roman shadows instead of vital and enduring men. As it is. he has drawn men so vividly-under such permanent relations to each other—with such universal manifestations of character, that some persons of strong political feelings have been ready to complain, according to their several creeds, either that his plebeians are too brutal, or his patricians too haughty. A polite democracy, a humane oligarchy, would be better. Jonson somewhat rejoices in the amusing exhibition of "plebeian malignity and tribunitian insolence." Hazlitt, who is more than half angry on the other side of the question, says -"The whole dramatic moral of 'Coriolanus' is that those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left." Let us see.

With his accustomed consummate judgment in his opening scenes, Shakspere throws us at once into the centre of the contending classes of early Rome. We have no description of the nature of the factions; we behold them :

With thousands of these quarter'd slaves, as high

As I could pick my lance."

Till Caius Marcius has become Coriolanus, and we see that the popular violence is under the direction of demagogues-the same

"1 Cit. You are all resolved rather to die never-varying result of the same circumthan to famish.

Cit. Resolved, resolved!

stances we feel no love for him. It is under oppression and ingratitude that his But he has pre

1 Cit. First, you know, Caius Marcius is chief pride becomes sublime. enemy to the people.

Cit. We know 't, we know 't.

1 Cit. Let us kill him, and we'll have corn at our own price.

Cit. No more talking on 't: let it be done." The foundation of the violence is misery; its great stimulant is ignorance. The people are famishing for want of corn ;-they will kill one man, and that will give them corn at their own price: the murder will turn scarcity into plenty. Hazlitt says that Shakspere "spared no occasion of baiting the rabble." If to show that misery acting upon ignorance produces the same effects in all ages be "baiting the rabble," he has baited them. But he has not painted the “mutinous citizens" with an undiscriminating contempt. One that displays a higher power than his fellows of reasoning or remonstrance, and yet is zealous enough to resist what he thinks injustice, says of Caius Marcius,

"Consider you what services he has done for his country."

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The people are sometimes ungrateful; but Shakspere chose to show that some amongst them could be just. The people have their favourites. Worthy Menenius Agrippa" has the good word of the mutinous citizens. Shakspere gave them no unworthy favourite. His rough humour, his true kindliness, his noble constancy, form a character that the people have always loved, even whilst they are rebuked and chastened. But, if the poet has exhibited the democratic ignorance in pretty strong colours, has he shrunk from presenting us a full-length portrait of patrician haughtiness? Caius Marcius in the first scene claims no sympathies:"Would the nobility lay aside their ruth,

And let me use my sword, I'd make a quarry

viously deserved our homage, and in some sort our affection. The poet gradually wins us to an admiration of the hero, by the most skilful management. First, through his mother. What a glorious picture of an antique matron, from whom her son equally derived his pride and his heroism, is presented in the exquisite scene where Volumnia and Valeria talk of him they loved, according to their several natures! Who but Shakspere could have seized upon the spirit of a Roman woman of the highest courage and mental power bursting out in words such as these ?— "Vol. His bloody brow

With his mail'd hand then wiping, forth he

goes;

Like to a harvest-man, that's task'd to mow Or all, or lose his hire.

Vir. His bloody brow! Oh, Jupiter, no blood!

Vol. Away, you fool! it more becomes a

man

Than gilt his trophy: The breasts of Hecuba, When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier

Than Hector's forehead, when it spit forth blood

At Grecian swords' contending. This is a noble preparation for the scenic exhibition of the deeds of Caius Marcius. Amidst the physical strength, and the mental energy, that make the triumphant warrior, the poet, by a few of his magical touches, has shown us the ever-present loftiness of mind that denotes qualities far beyond those which belong to mere animal courage. contempt of the Romans who are "beaten back," and the "Romans with spoils," is equally withering. It is not sufficient for him to win one battle. The force of character through which he thinks that nothing

His

"Where is the enemy? Are you lords o' the field?

If not, why cease you till you are so?"—

is done whilst anything remains to do, shows | It puts the individual for the species, the that Shakspere understood the stuff of which one above the infinite many, might before a great general is made. His remonstrance right." Now we apprehend that Shakspere to Cominiushas not treated the subject of Coriolanus after this right royal fashion of poetry. He has dealt fairly with the vices as well as the virtues of his hero. The scene in the second act, in which Coriolanus stands for thei consulship, is amongst the most remarkable examples of Shakspere's insight into character. In Plutarch he found a simple fact related without any comment:“Now, Marcius, following this custom, showed many wounds and cuts upon his body, which he had received in seventeen years' service at the wars, and in many sundry battles, being

is not in Plutarch. It is supplied to us by a
higher authority,—by the instinct by which
Shakspere knew the great secret of success
in every enterprise-the determination to be
successful. One example more of the skill
with which Shakspere makes Caius Marcius
gradually obtain the uncontrolled homage
of our hearts. The proud conqueror who
rejects all gifts and honours, who has said,
"I have some wounds upon me, and they smart
To hear themselves remember'd,"

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ever the foremost man that did set out feet to fight; so that there was not a man among the people but was ashamed of himself to refuse so valiant a man; and one of them said to another, We must needs choose him consul, there is no remedy." But in his representation of this fact Shakspere had to create a character, and to make that character act and re-act upon the character of the people. Coriolanus was essentially and necessarily proud. His education, his social position, his individual supremacy made him

So.

He lives in a city of factions, and he dislikes, of course, the faction opposed to his

order.

The people represent the opinions that he dislikes, and he therefore dislikes the people. That he has pity and love for humanity, however humble, we have already seen. Coming into contact with the Roman populace for their suffrages, his uppermost thought is "bid them wash their faces and keep their teeth clean." He outwardly despises that vanity of the people which will not reward desert unless it go hand in hand with solicitation. He betrays his contempt for the canvassed, even whilst he is canvassing :

people, to earn a dearer estimation of them;
"I will, sir, flatter my sworn brother the
't is a condition they account gentle: and, since
the wisdom of their choice is rather to have my
hat than my heart, I will practise the insinuating
nod, and be off to them most counterfeitly:
that is, sir, I will counterfeit the bewitchment
of some popular man, and give it bountifully |

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