SHAKSPEARE. 



211 



mitable superiority; but in the resolutions which 

 he so often embraces, and always leaves unexecuted, 

 the weakness of his volition is evident; he is a 

 hypocrite towards himself; his far-fetched scruples 

 are often mere pretexts to cover his want of deter- 

 mination thoughts, as he says on a different occa- 

 sion, which have 



-but one part wisdom, 



And ever three parts coward. 

 Hamlet has no firm belief either in himself or in 

 any thing else ; from expressions of religious confi- 

 dence, he passes over to sceptical doubts. He even 

 goes so far as to say that " there is nothing either 

 good or bad, but thinking makes it so." The poet 

 loses himself with him in the labyrinths of thought, 

 in which we neither find end nor beginning. Mac- 

 beth (compare Holinshed's and Harrison's Chronicles 

 of Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland, London, 

 1577, continued by Hooker and others, 1587, 3 



vols., fol the chief source of Shakspeare's pieces 



relating to English history ; George Buchanan's 

 Opera Omn., Edinburgh, 1715, vol. i.) This is 

 the greatest and most terrific tragedy that has ap- 

 peared since the Eumenides of ^Eschylus. Shak- 

 speare exhibits an ambitious, but noble hero, who 

 yields to a deep-laid, hellish temptation. The weird 

 sisters surprise Macbeth in the moment of intoxi- 

 cation after victory, when his love of glory has been 

 gratified ; they cheat his eyes by exhibiting to him as 

 the work of fate, what can in fact be accomplished 

 only by his own act, and gain credence for their 

 words by the immediate fulfilment of the first predic- 

 tion. The opportunity for murdering the king imme- 

 diately offers itself; the wife of Macbeth conjures 

 him not to let it slip ; she urges him on with a fiery 

 eloquence, which has all those sophisms at command 

 that serve to throw a false lustre over the crime. 

 Little more than the mere execution falls to the 

 lot of Macbeth ; he is driven to it, as it were, in a 

 state of commotion in which his mind is bewildered. 

 Repentance immediately follows, nay, even precedes 

 the deed, and the stings of his conscience leave 

 him no rest either night or. day. Nothing can 

 equal the power of this picture in the excitation of 

 horror. We need only allude to the circumstances 

 attending the murder of Duncan, the dagger that 

 hovers before the eyes of Macbeth at the feast, and 

 the madness of lady Macbeth In King Lear (com- 

 pare Shakspeare Illustrated, or the Novels and His- 

 tories on which the Plays of Shakspeare are founded, 

 by Miss Lenox, London, 1754, 3 vols. ; Holinshed ; 

 Tyrrel's General History of England, London, 1700, 

 vol. i ; Percy's Reliques, i. ; the Latin Chronicle of 

 Geoffrey of Monmouth; Sidney's Arcadia, Edin- 

 burgh, 1590, quarto; Spenser's Fairy Queen, b. ii, 

 canto x, stanzas 27 33; and the old play The 

 True Chronicle History of King Leir, London, 1605, 

 quarto) compassion is exhausted. The principal 

 characters in this piece are not those who act, but 

 those who suffer. We have not in this, as in most 

 tragedies, the picture of a calamity, in which the 

 sudden blows of fate still seem to honour the head 

 which they strike, in which the loss is always ac- 

 companied by some flattering consolation in the 

 memory of the former possession; but a fall from 

 the highest elevation into the deepest abyss of 

 misery, where humanity is stripped of all external 

 and internal advantages, and given up a prey to 

 naked helplessness. In the three Roman pieces, 

 Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopa- 

 tra, the moderation with which Shakspeare ex- 

 cludes foreign appendages and arbitrary supposi- 



tions, and yet fully satisfies the wants of the stage, 

 is particularly deserving of admiration. Under the 

 apparent artlessness of adhering closely to history 

 as he found it, an uncommon degree of art is con- 

 cealed Timon of Athens (compare Plutarch ; 

 Lucian; Palace of Pleasure'), and Troilus and Cres- 

 sida (compare Dictys Cretensis, and Dares Phry- 

 gius; Guido dalle Colonne of Messina, Historia de 

 Bello Trojano, translated into Italian by Ceffi, 

 Venice, 1481, and into German in 1489, in the parts 

 de sexto et septimo hello; Lydgate. De Bohe of 

 Troye, London, 1515, a prolix poem, modernized 

 in 1614; Raoul de Fevre, Recueil de Troyennes 

 Histoires, Englished by Caxton, 1471 and 1503; 

 Chaucer, The Boke of Troiles and Cresside ; Boc- 

 caccio's Filostrate, 1498, 8vo. ; Alexander Barclay's 

 Ship of Fooles, from the German of Seb. Brandt, 

 1570; Chapman's translation of Homer, 1581 and 

 1596). These pieces are not historical plays, pro 

 perly speaking ; and we cannot call them either 

 tragedy or comedy. Timon, of all the works ( f 

 Shakspeare, has most the character of satire, laugh 

 ing satire, in the picture of flatterers and parasites, 

 and Juvenalian satire, in the bitterness and impre- 

 cations of Timon against the ingratitude of a false 

 world. Troilus and Cressida is the only play 

 which Shakspeare allowed to be printed without 

 having been previously acted. It is, throughout, a 

 parody on the Trojan war, not as described in 

 Homer, but in the romances of chivalry derived 

 from Dares Phrygius. 



The dramas taken from the English history are 

 ten. The poet evidently intended them as parts 

 of a great whole. The principal features of the 

 events are exhibited with such fidelity, their causes, 

 and even their secret springs, are placed in so clear 

 a light, that we may obtain from them a know- 

 ledge of history in all its truth, while the living 

 picture makes an impression on the imagination 

 which can never be effaced. Eight of these plays, 

 from Richard II. to Richard III., are linked to- 

 gether in uninterrupted succession. According to 

 all appearance, the four last were first written. 

 The two other historical plays taken from the Eng- 

 lish history, are chronologically separated from this 

 series. In King John, all the political and national 

 motives, which play so great a part in the follow- 

 ing pieces, are already indicated wars and treaties 

 with France, a usurpation, and the tyrannical actions 

 which it draws after it, the influence of the clergy, 

 and the factions of the nobles. Henry VIII. again 

 shows us the transition to another age ; the policy 

 of modern Europe, a refined court life under a 

 voluptuous monarch, the dangerous situation of 

 favourites, who are themselves precipitated, after 

 having effected the fall of others ; in a word, des- 

 potism under milder forms, but not less unjust and 

 cruel. In Richard II., Shakspeare exhibits to us a 

 noble, kingly nature, at first obscured by levity, 

 and the errors of an unbridled youth, and after- 

 wards purified by misfortune, and rendered more 

 highly and splendidly illustrious. The first part of 

 Henry IV. is particularly brilliant in the serious 

 scenes, from the contrast between two young 

 heroes, prince Henry and Percy with the charac- 

 teristic name of Hotspur. Falstaff (q. v.) is the 

 summit of Shakspeare's comic invention. King 

 Henry V. is visibly the favourite of Shakspeare in 

 the English history. The three parts of Henry 

 VI. were much earlier composed than the preceding 

 pieces. We do not find in this piece the whole 

 maturity of the poet's genius, but we certainly find 



