Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ my dear Smith, to cut it short at once. When the drama's time was come, the whole of civilized Europe saw the glorious birth. In Spain and in England the soil was found most congenial; and the theatre in those countries took at once its place as the best possible instructor – next, of course, to the church – and its lessons were inculcated by the inspired possessors of the art, Lope de Vega and Shakspeare. The Spaniard was born in 1566 – the Englishman two years earlier; so that, allowing both to have reached the maturity of their powers at thirty years of age, and to have retained them twenty years, the appointed hour for the perfection of the drama was the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the next. Now, my dear Smith, cast your luminous eye over the state of society at that period. Lope was a volunteer on board of the Spanish Armada. Shakspeare, perhaps, saw Elizabeth ride forth to review the troops at Tilbury. Middle-aged men, with whom Shakspeare conversed in his youth, had seen the execution of Anne Boleyn. Old fellows, with whom both of them associated, had been present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. And, above all, they had both of them watched, but with very different hopes, the ferocious progress of the Duke of Alva, and heard the echoes of the battle-cry of liberty and Protestantism beside the ditches and mounds of Holland; and the genius of these two men bears impress of the awful period in the world's history which had been reserved for their birth. They were both animated by the struggle in which the whole earth was engaged. Lope did battle for the church – the Pope – and, if need be, would have done so – for the devil, if he had worn a mitre; he wrote plays where the heretics required an immense quantity of rosin and blue lights to do justice to their appalling situation. He preached, and prayed, and excommunicated, and stirred up men's minds to enjoy the splendours of an auto-da-fé; and, for all these, he was honoured by Pope and Cæsar; was created a knight of Alcantara; and, as the acme to his glory, was made a familiar of the Holy Inquisition. Shakspeare no less felt the influence of the time. The old oppressive bonds under which bone and sinew were compressed in order to make jolly old England a footstool for the gouty toes of a wicked old man at Rome, (unless you choose rather to consider him an unfortunate female, clothed in scarlet, and sitting on seven hills,) had been snapt asunder. Henry VIII. (to borrow your own classical expression, my dear Smith, as applied to your stage manager, "the regularest beast as ever was," but the most useful beast mentioned in any natural history I have ever met with) had determined to sit on the seven hills himself; and little Edward had built a nice villa on the sunny slope of one of them; and Mary had tried to tumble it down again; and Elizabeth had planted round it, and laid out the grounds for national recreation and use – like the park at Battersea, whenever that scheme is carried into effect; and all men's minds were in a flurry. Some drank themselves to death; some took to privateering; and many took to having visions and dreaming dreams; and, in the midst of it, Shakspeare rushed in a fury to his pen, and wrote play after play – very noble, very bright, very wonderful – but mad – decidedly mad – the whole time. Every body was mad; Essex galloped through London streets, thinking, by mere dint of hard riding, to rouse the peaceful citizens to take up arms in his behalf, as if the very stones would rise and mutiny – a very mad idea, you will grant; Raleigh set off to seize as much wealth as would have bought the fee-simple of a moderate kingdom, with scarcely a sufficient force to follow the heroic Widdicombe at the battle of Waterloo – not a very wise proceeding, you will allow; and the greatest proof of the universal insanity is, that nobody thought Essex or Raleigh mad for doing as they did. Nor did the calmest observers – if there were any "calm observers" in those days – perceive that Shakspeare was labouring under an access of the most confirmed delirium. They listened to Hamlet, and Lear, and Othello, and did not discover that his inspiration was the effect of over-excitement; that his energy was the preternatural strength bestowed on him by convulsion; and that, in fact, instead of being a swan of Avon, he was neither more nor less than a March hare.

      Pardon me, my dear Smith, in the escapade in the last page or two – it is a figurative mode of speech, and you will at once dissect the alligator through all its scales, and see every thing it is intended to convey. It was a mad world, my masters; and, as you generally find an inferior dauber magnify the peculiarities of a great man's style, so as to give a better idea of his manner than you gather from his own performances, let us see the prodigious insanity developed in the imitators of Shakspeare. Never, till I saw the brass knocker on the door of the Vizier's palace in Timor the Tartar, painted, you told me, by Wilkins of the Yorkshire Stingo, did I know how you produced your marvellous effects on the door of Billy Button, the tailor of Brentford. The Vizier's knocker was a caricature; but it showed your style. So, read the love-scenes of any dramatist during Shakspeare's period – or the heroic passages of any poetaster copying his manner; – isn't that Bedlam, my dear Smith? isn't that Hanwell? Read the rhapsodies of Nat Lee – (by a stretch of truth-speaking which it would be wise to make more common) – called mad Nat Lee. What do you see in him more indicative of insanity than in any play of Shakspeare you like to name? Not, understand me, that Shakspeare was mad according to the standard of sanity in his own day. Far from it; he was infinitely wise compared to any man in his century, except, perhaps, Bacon and Burleigh, and retired to Stratford-on-Avon with a realized fortune equal to twelve or fifteen hundred a-year. But all mankind run the risk of having a different standard applied to them from that according to which they were measured during life. Diocletian was thought an excellent emperor for persecuting the Christians – we think him a considerable beast for doing so, now. Cortez was thought the perfect image of a hero for slaughtering the Mexicans, and the noblest of Christian missionaries for putting the heretical Montezuma to death – we think Cortez not quite so respectable a character as Greenacre or Burke. And it is most just that each century should pass its predecessors in review, and apply its own lights to bring every feature forward. What progress would there be open to the human mind if we were for ever to go on viewing incidents exactly as they were viewed when they occurred? Are we to go on believing Galileo an infidel, because his discoveries were condemned by his contemporaries? Are we to think all the butchers, conquerors, and destroyers of mankind, great men, because their own age was terrified at their power, and proclaimed them heroes? The time may come when the great Bunn's efforts to make Drury-Lane into a squeaking, dancing, and dirty imitation of the Italian Opera, will not be considered conducive to the triumph of the legitimate English drama. Many things of this sort, my dear friend, may take place, and most justly; for each present generation is as the highest court of legislation – it can repeal all old acts, but it cannot bind its successors. Now, do me the favour to finish the pot of porter which, in my mind's eye, I see you dandling on your crossed knee, while your left hand, with easy elegance, is supporting the bowl of your pipe – and see how these observations apply to Shakspeare. He has ruined the stage; he has fixed its taste for ever, by establishing one unvarying standard for plot, language, and character – and that is his own. There can be no progress – not merely meaning, by progress, improvement, but, positively, no change. He blocks up every access to the dramatic Parnassus – he has acquired an entire monopoly of the heroines in Collins' Ode – and woe to the intruder into the sacred precincts of his zenana. Well, he was a tremendous Turk, that old swan of Avon – there is no denying the fact; but what I complain of is, that no other Leda should be looked at for a moment but only his. No man can look at the Swan for an instant, and doubt that the king of gods and men has disguised himself in that avatar of web-feet and feathers. Jupiter is only enveloped, not concealed; but, at the same time, is it possible to be blind to the fact, that he has degraded himself to the habits of the flat-billed bird – that he waddles most unmercifully when by chance he leaves the lake? – that he hisses and croaks most unmusical, most melancholy? – and that he gathers all unclean garbage for his food – newts, and frogs, and crawling worms? In short, that though, in his pride, and grandeur, and passionate energy, he is the Tyrant of Olympus, he is, in many other respects, an animal not greatly to be admired – by no means comparable as a dish at Christmas to a well-fed goose, or even a couple of ducks. For reading aloud to ladies after tea, I prefer Ion to Othello. And now, my excellent friend, I will tell you the reason – not why I prefer Ion, which, though I have introduced it in this flippant manner, I consider a very beautiful and poetical drama – but why no play of Shakspeare is fit to be read to a party of ladies after tea. It is this – that ladies, in one sense of the word, were as unknown in Shakspeare's days as tea. There were certain human beings that wore petticoats, and, in due course of time, fulfilled the original command, and СКАЧАТЬ