Yět is there not one that delights to roam This bosom, but my Father holds its chain! GOLD PEN. 109. SHAKSPEARE. HAKSPEARE is, above all writers, at least above all SHAKSPE 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, unpracticed by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or 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. 2. It is from this wide extension of design that so much instruction is derived. It is this which fills the plays of Shakspeare with practical axioms and domestic wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of Shakspeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendor of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenor of his dialogue: and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like 'See p. 148.2 EURIPIDES, one of the three great Greek tragedians, was born in Salamis, whither his parents retired during the occupation of Attica by Xerxes, on the day of the glorious victory near that island, B. C. 480. He was highly learned and accomplished, and on terms of intimacy with Socrates. He gained two victories in the Eleusinian and Thesean athletic games when only seventeen years old; received the third prize for his first tragedy, which appeared in his twenty-fifth year, and the first prize on two subsequent occasions. According to some authorities, EURIPIDES wrote 92 tragedies, according to others, 75. Of these 19 are extant. He died B. c. 406, at the age of seventy-five, and was buried at Pella. the pedant in Hier'ocles,' who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen. 3. 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 theater, when it is under any other direction, is peopled by such characters as were never seen, conversing in a language which was never heard, upon topics which will never arise in the commerce of mankind. But the dialogue of this author is often so evidently determined by the incident which produces it, and is pursued with so much. ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of common conversation and common occurrences. 4. 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 part in agony; to fill 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. For this, probability is violated, life is misrepresented, and language is depraved. 5. But love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon 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 'HIER'OCLES, a Platonic philosopher of Alexandria, who wrote, among other things, many facetious stories.-Hy per bål' ic al, exaggerating or diminishing greatly. Nothing (nůth'ing.) cause of happiness or calamity. 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. 6. Shakspeare's plays are not, in the rigorous and critical sense, either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state 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 reveler 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. 7. 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. That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is alway an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingleu drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy can not be denied, because it includes both in its alternations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by showing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low cooperate in the general system by unavoidable concat enation.2 8. The force of his comic scenes has suffered little diminution 'There' fore. Con cat e nå' tion, connection by links; a series of inks united, or of things depending on each other. 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, věry little modified by particular forms, their pleasures and vexations are communicable to all times and to all places; they are natural, and therefore durable. The adventitious peculiarities of personal habits are only superficial dyes, bright and pleasing for a little while, yet soon fading to a dim tinct,' without any remains of former luster; but the discriminations of true passion are the colors of nature; they pervade the whole mass, and can only perish with the body that exhibits The accidental compositions of heterogeneous modes are dissolved by the chance which combined them; but the uniform simplicity of primitive qualitics neither admits increase, nor suffers decay. The sand heaped by one flood is scatteredby another; but the rock alway continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dis'soluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakspeare. DR. JOHNSON." 110. HAMLET'S INSTRUCTION TO THE PLAYERS.3 PEAK the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, SPEAK trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spake my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand thus, but use all gently; for in the věry torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion', you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. Oh! it offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags,-to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable. dumb show and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant it out-herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it. Tinct (tingkt), spot; stain; color - See Biographical Sketch, p. 230. See Rules for the Use of Emphasis, p. 32. Ter' ma gant, a boisterous, brawling woman.- HEROD: there were four persons of this name, all of whom are mentioned in the New Testament. The Herod who sent out and slew all the children in Bethlehem [Matthew, chap. 2. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word; the word to the action; with this special observance-that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature for any thing so over-done is from the purpose of playing; whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature;-to show virtue her own feature; scorn her own image; and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure. Now this, overdone or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, can not but make the judicious grieve; the censure of which one, must, in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theater of others. Oh! there be players, that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, or man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably! SHAKSPEARE. WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE, one of the greatest of all poets, was born at Stratfordon-Avon, Warwick county, England, in April, 1564. His father, JOHN SHAKSPEARE, a woolcomber or glover, rose to be high bailiff and chief alderman of Stratford. William is supposed to have received his early education at the grammar-school in his native town. We have no trace how he was employed between his school-days and manhood. Some hold that he was an attorney's clerk. Doubtless he was a hard, thougn perhaps an irregular student. He married ANNE HATHAWAY in 1582, and soon after became connected with the Blackfriar's Theater, in London, to which city he removed in 1586 or 1587. Two years subsequent he was a joint proprietor of that theater, with four others below him in the list. Though we know nothing of the date of his first play, he had most probably begun to write long before he left Stratford. Of his thirtyseven plays, the existence of thirty-one is defined by contemporary records. He became rich in the theaters, with which he ceased to be connected about 1609. He had previously purchased the principal house in his native town, where he ii. v. 16] was Herod the Great, king of the Jews. Herod that bebeaded John the Baptist [Mark vi. 27] was Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great Herod who persecuted the Christians [Acts xii. 20] was Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great, and nephew of Herod Antipas. The last of the four was Herod Agrippa II. [Acts xxv. xxvi.], before whom Paul pleaded, and "almost persuaded to be a Christian." All of these noted characters were men of cruelty and blood, and par ticularly Herod the Great. To "out-herod Herod'' is to surpass Herod in his enormities, and Shakspeare uses this strong language to express his abhorrence of the style of speaking which he condemns. |