Rome, should play the buffoon; and Voltaire perhaps thinks decency violated when the Danish usurper is represented 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 senatehouse 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 men, 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 comick and tragick scenes, as it extends to all his works, deserves more consideration. Let the fact be first stated, and then examined.

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 reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.

Out of this chaos of mingled purposes and casualties, the ancient poets, according to the laws which custom had prescribed, selected, some the crimes of men, and some their absurdities; some the momentous vicissitudes of life, and some the lighter occurrences; some the terrors of distress, and some the gayeties of prosperity. Thus rofe 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 fo 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 forrow not only in one mind, but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and ludicrous characers, and, in the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce seriousness and forrow, and sometimes levity and laughter.

That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always 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 mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes

s. From this remark it appears that Dr. Johnson was upacquaiited with the Cyclops of Euripides. STEEVENS.

both in its alternations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by showing how gréat machinations and flender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general fyftem by únavoidable 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 dramatick poetry. This reasoning is so fpecious, 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 pleafing melancholy be sometimes interrupted by unwelcome levity, yet let it be confidered likewise. that melancholy is 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 confills in variety.

The players, who in their edition divided our author's works into comedies, histories, and tragedies, secm not to have distinguished the three kinds, by any very exact or definite ideas.

An acion which ended happily to the principal persons, however serious or distressful through its intermediate incidents, in their opinion constituted à comedy. This idea of a comedy continued long

6

amongst us, and plays were written, which, by changing the catastrophe, were tragedies to-day, and comedies to-morrow.

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 commoni criticifm of that age was fatisfied, 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 or regulate the conclusion.

It is not always very nicely distinguished from tragedy. There is not much nearer approach to unity of a&ion in the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, than in the history of Richard the Second. Buť a historý might be continued through many plays; as it had no plan, it had no limits.

Through all these denominations of the drama, Shakspeare's mode of composition is the same; an interchange of feriousiress and merriment, by which the mind is sostened at one time, and exhiJarated at another. But whatever be his purpose, whether to gladden or depress, or to conduct the ftory, without vehemence or emotion, through tracts of easy and familiar dialogue, he never

6 Thus says Downes the Prompter, p. 22: "The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet was made fome time after (1662] into a tragi-comedy, by Mr. James Howard, he preserving Romeo and Juliet alive ; so that when the iragedy was revived again, 'twas play'd alternately, tragical one day, and tragi-comical another, for ftveral days together." STEEVENS.

fails to attain his purpose; as he commands us, we laugh or mourn, or fit filent 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 ; lago bellows at Brabantio's window, without injury to the scheme of the play, though in terms which a modern audience would not easily endure; the character of Polonius is seasonable and useful; and the Gravediggers themselves may be heard with applause.

Shakspeare engaged in dramatick poetry with the world open before him; the rules of the ancients

; were yet known to few; the publick judgment was unformed; he had no example of such fame as might force him upon imitation, nor criticks 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 appear ance of toil and study, what is written at last with little felicity; but in his comick scenes, he feems to produce without labour, what no labour can improve. In tragedy he is always firuggling after some occasion to be comick, but in comedy he seems to repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mnode of thinking congenial to his nature. In his tragick scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or deiiré. . 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.