been altered and adapted to the stage. "Why not act," says he, "the plays of their deity in a perfect form?" Conceding the truth of the assertion, an inference does not follow derogatory to the genius of Shakspeare, or affecting in the least his popularity as a dramatic author. Some of his confessedly most beautiful plays are rarely if ever acted. Of those which are, there is enough for the immortality of a dozen men. That his merits were for a season unperceived and unappreciated, argues only the stupidity of the age. The same temporary neglect happened to Milton: but when once the glories of these luminaries arose to the vision of an admiring country, their splen. dour was duly acknowledged, and they have been worshipped unceasingly since. The universality of Shakspeare's talent, our author thinks, has tended to corrupt dramatic literature, and founded the erroneous notion on which the new school, as he is pleased to term it, is established. He thinks that it is deemed by that school the perfection of the tragic art to "jumble together a succession of incongruous and disconnected scenes-to place the burlesque and the pathetic side by side-to bring the beggar in contact with the king." If it be so, Shakspeare is not to blame for it, but his ignorant imitators. The fact, however, is not so. The school which Shakspeare founded, and himself carried to perfection, is the school of nature in contradistinction to that of studied, formal art-action limited within divisions of time unsuited, according to all the regular course of nature, for the happening of the supposed events, and passion and feeling doled out and checked by rigid weight and measure. When Chateaubriand pronounces Racine more natural than Shakspeare, (whom, by the by, too, he seems disposed to place below Corneille, Molière, and even Voltaire,) we confess we consider him above or below argument, and would therefore leave him undisturbed in the possession of his opinion. "Racine, in all the refinement of his art, is more natural than Shakspeare-just as the Apollo, in all his divinity, is more human in his form than an Egyptian Colossus.". But we eschewed controversy, so let us turn to an agreeable extract. We have here a good picture of the theatre in Shakspeare's time. "In the dramatic performances of Shakspeare's time, the female characters were represented by young men; and the actors were not distinguished from the spectators except by the plumes of feathers which adorned their hats, and the bows of ribbon which they wore in their shoes. There was no music between the acts. The place of performance was frequently the court-yard of an inn, and the windows which looked into this court-yard served for the boxes. On the representation of a tragedy in London, the place in which it was performed was hung with black, like the nave of a church at a funeral. "As to the means of illusion, some idea may be formed of them from the burlesque picture drawn by Shakspeare in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' A man, having his face smeared with plaster, is the wall which intervenes between Pyramus and Thisbe, and he spreads out his fingers to represent the chinks in the wall through which the lovers converse. A lantern, a bush, and a dog, are employed to produce moonlight. In rude dramatic performances of this kind, the scene, without changing, alternately represented a flower-garden, a rock against which a ship was to strike, or a field of battle, where half a dozen miserable-looking soldiers would personate two armies. There is extant a curious inventory of the property of a company of English players; and in this document we find set down a dragon, a wheel employed in the siege of London, a large horse with his legs, sundry limbs of Moors, four Turks' heads, and an iron mouth, which was probably employed in giving utterance to the sweetest and sublimest accents of the immortal poet. False skins were also employed for those characters who were flayed alive on the stage, like the prevaricating judge in Cambyses. Such a spectacle nowa-days would attract all Paris. But, after all, correctness of scenic accessories and costume is far less essential to the illusion than is generally imagined. The genius of Racine gains nothing by the cut and form of a dress. In the masterpieces of Raphael, the back-grounds are neglected and the costumes incorrect. The rage of Orestes, or the prophecy of Joad, recited in a drawing-room by Talma, habited in his own dress, produced not less effect than when delivered by the great actor on the stage, in Grecian or Hebrew drapery. Iphigenia was attired like Madame de Sévigné, when Boileau addressed to his friend the following fine lines: 'Jamais Iphigénie, en Aulide immolée N'a coûté tant de pleurs à la Grèce assemblée, Accuracy in the representation of inanimate objects is the spirit of the literature and the arts of our time. It denotes the decay of the higher class of poetry, and of the genuine drama. We are content with minor beauties, when we cannot attain great aims. Our stage represents to perfection the chair and its velvet coverings, but the actor is not equally successful in portraying the character who is seated in the chair. But, having once descended to these minute representations of material objects, it cannot be dispensed with, for the public taste becomes materialized and demands it. "In Shakspeare's time, the higher class of spectators, or the gentlemen, took their places on the stage seating themselves either on the boards, or on stools which they paid for. The pit was a dark and dusty hole, in which the audience stood crowded together. The spectators in the pit, and those on the stage, were like two hostile camps drawn up face to face. The pit saluted the gentlemen with hisses, threw mud at them, and addressed to them insulting outcries. The gentlemen returned these compliments by calling their assailants stinkards and brutes. The stinkards ate apples and drank ale; the gentlemen played at cards and smoked tobacco, which was then recently introduced. It was the fashion for the gentlemen to tear up the cards, as if they had lost some great stake, and then to throw the fragments angrily on the stage-to laugh, speak loud, and turn their backs on the actors. In this manner were the tragedies of the great master received on their first production. John Bull threw apple-parings at the divinity at whose shrine he now offers adoration. Fortune, in her rigour to Shakspeare and Molière, made them actors, and thus gave to the lowest of their countrymen the privilege of at once insulting the great men and their writings." Vol. I. pp. 249-252. Our author places Julius Cæsar and Richard III. on a par with Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello. We believe that he is the first critic of any pretensions who ever did so-as he is assuredly the first who ever charged him with a want of variety in the delineation of female character. Our readers might scarcely credit the assertion: but so says our author. He enters into a parallel (too long to be here extracted) between the chief female characters of French tragedy and those of Shakspeare, and points out, as he supposes, the immense superiority of the former. After a number of extracts and impassioned remarks, he exclaims, "What are all Shakspeare's females in comparison with Esther?" Her speech to Elise (fine, undoubtedly) is then given, and the comparison closed by the following rapturous apostrophe to all barbarians; no doubt, including among such those who are unhappy enough to prefer Shakspeare to Racine: "If there are any Huns, Hottentots, Hurons, Goths, Vandals, or other barbarians, insensible to the feminine modesty, the dignity, and the melody of this exquisite passage, may they be seventy times seven-fold delighted by the charms of their own native productions. 'I thought,' says Racine, in his preface to Esther, 'that I could fill up the whole of my dramatic action with such scenes as God himself has in a manner prepared.' Racine justly thought so, for he alone possessed the harp of David consecrated to the scenes prepared by God." Vol. I. pp. 284, 5. The era of Shakspeare is well described. The author groups together in a very imposing manner all the events of the times, fancying the impressions likely to be made by them upon such a mind as that of the bard of Avon. For ourselves, we believe that Shakspeare's wonderful poetic talent.was one given to him by his Creator, which would have burst forth in splendour in any age; though we should not be disposed to adopt the language which Chateaubriand professes to quote, but which we strongly suspect to be his own" that the poet was as a solitary comet, which, having traversed the constellations of the ancient firmament, returns to the feet of the Deity, and says to him, like the thunder, here I am."" This is precious bombast. Still it was quite fair in Chateaubriand to conjecture the influence of the occurrences of his day upon the imagination of the bard, and it affords the writer an opportunity of showing off in the kind of composition in which he excels. The extract is long, but we wished not to abridge it, as it is well worth the perusal. "At home, Elizabeth presented in her own person an historical character. Shakspeare had attained his twenty-third year when Mary Stuart was beheaded. The child of catholic parents, and probably himself a catholic, he had doubtless heard, among his own community, that Elizabeth had endeavoured to make Rolstone the instrument of seducing her fair captive, in order to disgrace her; and that, taking advantage of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, she had made an attempt to deliver over the Queen of Scots to the vindictive feelings of the Scotish protestants. Who knows but curiosity might have led young William from Stratford to Fotheringay to witness the catastrophe? Who can say but he may have seen the bed, the chamber, the vaults hung with black, the block, the head of Mary, into which the executioner, by his first unskilful stroke of the axe, had driven a portion of the unfortunate victim's coif and gray hair? May not the eyes of Shakspeare have rested with interest and curiosity on the beautiful and mutilated corse? "Some time after, Elizabeth cast another head at the feet of Shakspeare. Mahomet II. had an Icoglan decapitated for the purpose of giving a painter an idea of death. Strange compound of man and woman! Elizabeth seems, during the whole of her mysterious life, to have felt but one passion, and never to have known love. The last malady of this queen, say the memoirs of her time, proceeded from a grief, the cause of which she ever kept a profound secret. She never evinced an inclination to have recourse to remedies-as if she had made up her mind long before to die-being weary of her life from some secret cause, which was said to be the death of the Earl of Essex. "The sixteenth century, the spring-time of modern civilization, flourished in England more prosperously than in other parts of the globe. It developed those sturdy generations of men, who already bore within them the seeds of liberty, in the persons of Cromwell and Milton. Elizabeth dined to the sound of drums and trumpets, whilst her parliament was passing atrocious laws against the papists, and whilst the yoke of sanguinary oppression weighed down unhappy Ireland. The executions at Tyburn alternated with the gaieties of the fashionable ball; the austerities of the puritans with the revels of Kenilworth; comedies with sermons; lampoons with hymns; literary disquisitions with philosophical discussions and sectarian controversies. "The spirit of adventure animated the nation, as at the period of the wars in Palestine. Protestant crusaders volunteered to combat the idolaters-that is to say, the catholics. They followed across the seas Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, who, like Peter the Hermit, were friends of Christ, but enemies of the Cross. Engaged in the cause of religious liberty, the English lent their aid to all who sought to shake off the yoke of tyranny; they shed their blood beneath the white plume of Henry IV. and the yellow flag of the Prince of Orange. Shakspeare witnessed all this, and he also was witness to those auspicious tempests which cast the wrecks of the Spanish vessels upon the shores of his delivered country. "Abroad, the picture was not less favourable to poetic inspiration. In Scotland, there were the vices and ambition of Murray-the murder of Rizzio-Darnley strangled, and his body cast to the winds-Bothwell espousing Mary in the fortress of Dunbar, and afterwards becoming a fugitive and a pirate in Norway-Morton delivered up to the executioner. The Low Countries presented all the miseries inseparable from a nation's emancipation: Cardinal de Granvelle, the Duke of Alva-the tragic deaths of the Count d'Egmont and the Count de Horn. "In Spain, besides the death of Don Carlos, we find Philip II. erecting the sombre Escurial, multiplying his auto-da-fés, and saying to his physicians-Are you afraid to take a few drops of blood from a man who has made it flow in rivers?" "In Italy, the history of the Cenci, renewing the ancient adventures of Venice, Verona, Milan, Bologna, and Florence. "In Germany, Wallenstein's career had just commenced. "In France, the nearest country to the native land of Shakspeare, what were the stirring events of the time? "The tocsin of St. Bartholomew sounded when the author of Macbeth had attained his eighteenth year, and England was convulsed by the intelligence of that massacre; exaggerated accounts of it, (if exaggerated they could be,) details calculated to inflame even the imaginations of children, were printed in London and Edinburgh, and sold in every town and village throughout the country. A great deal was said about the reception given by Elizabeth to the ambassador of Charles IX. 'The silence of night reigned through the royal apartments. The ladies and courtiers were ranged in rows on each side, clothed in deep mourning; and when the ambassador passed through the midst of them, none made their obeisance, nor even turned upon him a civil look.' Marlowe brought upon the stage his play entitled 'The Massacre of Paris,' and possibly Shakspeare may have made his debut in one of its characters. "The reign of Charles IX. was succeeded by that of Henry III., so fertile in catastrophes: Catherine-de Medicis, the favourites, the day of the barricades, the assassination of the two Guises at Blois, the death of Henry III. at St. Cloud, the agitations of the League, the murder of Henri IV., must have varied incessantly the emotions of a poet who beheld the long chain of events extendíng before him. The soldiers of Elizabeth, the Earl of Essex himself, took part in our civil wars, and fought at Havre, Ivry, Rouen, and Amiens. Some veterans of the English army might have recounted, at the fireside of William Shakspeare, the calamities they had witnessed in our fields of battle." Shakspeare was born in the interval between the religious revolution, which commenced under Henry VIII., and the political revolution which was preparing to burst forth under Charles I. Both before and after him, there was nothing throughout England but scenes of bloodshed and horror. "In the reign of Edward VI., Somerset, the protector of the kingdom and uncle of the young king, perished on the scaffold. "In the reign of Mary, there were the martyrs of protestantism, the beheading of Lady Jane Grey, and Philip, the exterminator of protestants, landing in England, as if to review and devote to destruction the camp of the enemy. "With the reign of Elizabeth came the martyrs of catholicism. Elizabeth herself, anointed with the sacred oil in conformity with the Roman ritual, became the persecutrix of the faith which had placed the crown upon her head. Elizabeth! the daughter of that Anne Boleyn who caused the schism from the church of Rome, who was sacrificed after Thomas More, and who died half lunatic, praying, laughing, and contrasting the smallness of her neck with the breadth of the executioner's axe. "Shakspeare in his youth must frequently have encountered old monks, chased from their cloisters, who had seen Henry VIII., his reforms, his destructive hand laid upon their monasteries, his court fools, his wives, his mistresses, and his executioners. When the poet died, Charles I. was in his sixteenth year. "Thus Shakspeare might have laid one hand on the hoary heads menaced by the last but one of the Tudors, and the other on the auburn |