some people have not, in remembrance of the diversion he had formerly afforded them, been forry to see his friend Hal use him so scurvily, when he comes to the crown in the end of The Second Part of Henry the Fourth. Amongst other extravagancies, in The Merry Wives of Windfor he has made him a deer-stealer, that he might at the same time remember his Warwickshire profecutor, under the name of Justice Shallow; he has given him very near the fame coat of arms which Dugdale, in his Antiquities of that county, describes for a family there, and makes the Welsh parson descant very pleasantly upon them. That whole play is admirable; the humours are various and well oppofed; the main design, which is to cure Ford of his unreasonable jealousy, is extremely well conducted. In Twelfth-Night there is something fingularly ridiculous and pleasant in the fantastical steward Malvolio. The parafite and the vain-glorious in Parolles, in All's well that ends well, is as good as any thing of that kind in Plautus or Terence. Petruchio, in The Taming of the Shrew, is an uncommon piece of humour. The conversation of Benedick and Beatrice, in Much Ado about Nothing, and of Rosalind, in As you like it, have much wit and sprightliness all along. His clowns, without which character there was hardly any play writ in that time, are all very entertaining: and, I believe, 7 the same coat of arms which Dugdale, in his Antiquities of that county, defcribes for a family there,] There are two coats, I observe, in Dugdale, where three filver fishes are borne in the name of Lucy; and another coat to the monument of Thomas Iucy, fon of Sir William Lucy, in which are quartered in four several divisions, twelve little fishes, three in each division, probably luces. This very coat, indeed, seems alluded to in Shallow's giving the dozen white luces; and in Slender's faying he may quarter. THROBALD. point out one more, which is, I think, as strong and as uncommon as any thing I ever saw; it is an image of Patience. Speaking of a maid in love, he says, - She never told her love, "But let concealment, like a worm i'th' bud, "And fate like Patience on a monument, Smiling at Grief." What an image is here given! and what a task would it have been for the greatest masters of Greece and Rome to have expressed the passions designed by this sketch of statuary! The style of his comedy is, in general, natural to the characters, and easy in itself; and the wit most commonly sprightly and pleasing, except in those places where he runs into doggrel rhymes, as in The Comedy of Errors, and fome other plays. As for his jingling sometimes, and playing upon words, it was the common vice of the age he lived in: and if we find it in the pulpit, made use of as an ornament to the sermons of some of the gravest divines of those times, perhaps it may not be thought too light for the stage. But certainly the greatness of this author's genius does no where so much appear, as where he gives his imagination an entire loose, and raises his fancy to a flight above mankind, and the limits of the visible world. Such are his attempts in The Tempest, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Of these, The Tempest, however it comes to be placed the first by the publishers of his works, can never have been the first written by him: it seems to me as perfect in its kind, as almost any thing we have of his. One may observe, that the unities are kept here, with an exactness uncommon to the liberties of his writing; though that was what, I suppose, he valued himself least upon, fince his excellencies were all of another kind. I am very sensible that he does, in this play, depart too much from that likeness to truth which ought to be observed in these fort of writings; yet he does it so very finely, that one is easily drawn in to have more faith for his fake, than reason does well allow of. His magick has fomething in it very folemn and very poetical: and that extravagant character of Caliban is mighty well sustained, shows a wonderful invention in the author, who could strike out such a particular wild image, and is certainly one of the finest and most uncommon grotesques that ever was seen. The observation, which, I have been informed, three very great men concurred in making upon this part, was extremely just; that Shakespeare had not only found out a new character in his Caliban, but had also devised and adapted a new manner of language for that character. : It is the fame magick that raises the Fairies in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, the Witches in Mac beth, and the Ghost in Hamlet, with thoughts and language so proper to the parts they fuftain, and fo peculiar to the talent of this writer. But of the two last of these plays I shall have occafion to take which, I have been informed, three very great men concurred in making-) Lord Falkland, Lord and Mr. Selden. ROWE. C. J. Vaughan, Dryden was of the same opinion. "His person (fays he, speaking of Caliban,) is monstrous, as he is the product of unnatural luft, and his language is as hobgoblin as his perfon: in all things he is diftinguished from other mortals." Preface to Troilus and Crefsfida. MALONE. notice, among the tragedies of Mr. Shakspeare. If one undertook to examine the greatest part of these by those rules which are established by Aristotle, and taken from the model of the Grecian stage, it. would be no very hard tafk to find a great many faults; but as Shakspeare lived under a kind of mere light of nature, and had never been made acquainted with the regularity of those written precepts, so it would be hard to judge him by a law he knew nothing of. We are to consider him as a man that lived in a state of almost universal licence and ignorance: there was no established judge, but every one took the liberty to write according to the dictates of his own fancy. When one considers, that there is not one play before him of a reputation good enough to entitle it to an appearance on the present stage, it cannot but be a matter of great wonder that he should advance dramatick poetry so far as he did. The fable is what is generally placed the first, among those that are reckoned the constituent parts of a tragick or heroick poem; not, perhaps, as it is the most difficult or beautiful, but as it is the first properly to be thought of in the contrivance and course of the whole; and with the fable ought to be confidered the fit dispofition, order, and conduct of its several parts. As it is not in this province of the drama that the strength and mastery of Shakspeare lay, so I fshall not undertake the tedious and ill-natured trouble to point out the several faults he was guilty of in it. His tales were seldom invented, but rather taken either from the true history, or novels and romances: and he commonly made use of them in that order, with those incidents, and that extent of time in which he found them in the authors from whence he borrowed them. So The Winter's Tale, : which is taken from an old book, called The Delectable History of Dorastus and Fawnia, contains the space of fixteen or seventeen years, and the scene is fometimes laid in Bohemia, and sometimes in Sicily, according to the original order of the story. Almost all his historical plays comprehend a great length of time, and very different and distinct places: and in his Antony and Cleopatra, the scene travels over the greatest part of the Roman empire. But in recompence for his carelessness in this point, when he comes to another part of the drama, the manners of his characters, in acting or speaking what is proper for them, and fit to be shown by the poet, he may be generally justified, and in very many places greatly commended. For those plays which he has taken from the English or Roman history, let any man compare them, and he will find the character as exact in the poet as the historian. He seems indeed fo far from propofing to himself any one action for a fubject, that the title very often tells you, it is The Life of King John, King Richard, &c. What can be more agreeable to the idea our historians give of Henry the Sixth, than the picture Shakspeare has drawn of him? His manners are every where exactly the fame with the story; one finds him still defcribed with fimplicity, passive sanctity, want of courage, weakness of mind, and easy submiffion to the governance of an imperious wife, or prevailing faction: though at the same time the poet does juftice to his good qualities, and moves the pity of his audience for him, by showing him pious, difinterested, a contemner of the things of this world, and wholly refigned to the severest dispensations of God's providence. There is a short seene in The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, which I cannot think but admirable in its kind. Cardinal Beaufort, |