The

from the bosom of sequestered glens and pathless solitudes, has the poet called forth lessons of the most touching and consolatory wisdom. Airs from paradise seem to fan with refreshing gales, with a soothing consonance of sound, the interminable depth of foliage, and to breathe into the hearts of those who have sought its shelter from the world, an oblivion of their sorrows and their cares. banished Duke, the much-injured Orlando, and the melancholy Jaques, lose in meditation on the scenes which surround them, or in sportive freedom, or in grateful occupation, all corrosive sense of past affliction. Love seems the only passion which has penetrated this romantic seclusion, and the sigh of philosophic pity, or of wounded sensibility (the legacy of a deserted world), the only relique of the storm which is passed and gone.

Nothing, in fact, can blend more harmoniously with the romantic glades and magic windings of Arden, than the society which Shakspeare has placed beneath its shades. The effect of such scenery, on the lover of nature, is to take full possession of the soul, to absorb its very faculties, and, through the charmed imagination, to convert the workings of the mind into the sweetest sensations of the heart, into the joy of grief, into a thankful endurance of adversity, into the interchange of the tenderest affections; and find we not here, in the person of the Duke, the noblest philosophy of resignation; in Jaques, the humorous sadness of an amiable misanthropy; in Orlando, the mild dejection of self-accusing humility; in Rosalind and Celia, the purity of sisterly affection, whilst love in all its innocence and gaiety binds in delicious fetters, not only the younger exiles, but the pastoral natives of the forest. A day thus spent, in all the careless freedom of unsophisticated nature, seems worth an eternity of common-place existence!

The nice discrimination of Shakspeare and his profound knowlege of human nature are no where more apparent than in sketching the character of Jaques, whose social and confiding affections, originally warm and enthusiastic, and which had led him into all the excesses and credulities of thoughtless attachment, being blighted by the desertion of those on whom he had fondly relied, have suddenly subsided into a delicately blended compound of melancholy, misanthropy, and morbid sensibility, mingled with a large portion of benevolent though sarcastic humour. The selfishness and ingratitude of mankind are, consequently, the theme of all his meditations, and even tinge his recreations with the same pensive hue of moral invective. We accordingly first recognise him in a situation admirably adapted to the nurture of his peculiar feelings, laid at length

and assimilating the fate of an unfortunate stag, who had been wounded by the hunters, and who

"Stood on the extremest verge of the swift brook,
Augmenting it with tears,"

to the too common lot of humanity :

"

Duke. But what said Jaques ?
Did he not moralize this spectacle?" &c.

Act ii. sc. 1.

As might be imagined, music, the food of melancholy as well as of love, is the chief consolation of Jacques; he tells Amiens, who, on finishing a song, had objected to his request of singing again, that it would make him melancholy. “I thank it. More, I pr'ythee more. I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs: More, I pr'ythee, more;" (act ii. sc. 5) and we can well conceive with what exquisite pleasure he listened to the subsequent song of the same nobleman :

From this interesting and finely shaded character, the result of a false estimate of what is to be expected from human nature and society, much valuable instruction may be derived; but as a similar delineation will soon occur in the person of Timon, we shall defer what may be required upon this subject to a subsequent page.

21. MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR: 1601. It does not appear to us that Mr. Chalmers has succeeded in his endeavours to set aside the general tradition relative to this comedy, as recorded by Mr. Rowe, who says, that Queen Elizabeth "was so well pleased with the admirable character of Falstaff in The Two Parts of Henry the Fourth, that she commanded Shakspeare to continue it for one play more, and to show him in love." Rowe adopted this from Dennis, who mentions it as the tradition of his time; and has also related, that being "eager to see it acted," she ordered it "to be finished in fourteen days," and was highly gratified by the representation.

A tradition of the seventeenth century thus general in its diffusion, and particular in its circumstances, cannot, and ought not, to be shaken by the mere observations that "she (the Queen) was certainly too feeble in 1601 to think of such toys," and that at this time "she was in no proper mood for such fooleries;" more especially when we recollect, that at this very period she was guilty of fooleries greatly more extravagant and out of character, than that of commanding a play to be written. At a "mask at Blackfriars, on the marriage of Lord Herbert and Mrs. Russel," relates Lord Orford, on the authority of the Bacon Papers, "eight lady maskers chose eight more to dance the measures. Mrs. Fritton, who led them, went to the Queen, and wooed her to dance. Her Majesty asked, what she was? 'Affection,' she said. 'Affection!' said the Queen;-'Affection is false.'-Yet her majesty rose and danced.-She was then SIXTY-EIGHT!" + ІІ, at the age of sixty-eight, she was not too feeble to dance, nor too wise to fancy herself in love, we may easily conceive, that she had both strength and inclination to attend and to enjoy a play!

Another objection of the same critic to the probability of this tradition, turns upon the extraordinary assumption, that it was not within the omnipotence of Elizabeth "to bring Falstaff to real life, after being positively as dead as nail in door;" as if Falstaff had ever possessed a real existence, and the Queen had been expected to have occasioned his bodily resurrection from the dead. In accordance with this supposed impossibility, impossible only in this strange point of view, we are further told, that "whatever a capricious Queen might have wished to have seen, the audience would not have borne to see the dead knight on the living stage;" thus again confounding the dramatic death of an imaginary being, with the physical dissolution incident to material nature! Surely Shakspeare had an unlimited control over the creatures of his own imagination, and had he reproduced the fat knight in half-a-dozen plays, after the death which he had already assigned him in Henry the Fifth, who, provided he had supported the merit and consistency of the character, would have charged him with a violation of probability? When Addison killed Sir Roger de Coverley, in order, as tradition says, to prevent any one interfering with the unity of his sketch, he could only be certain of the non-resumption of his imaginary existence in the very work which had detailed his decease; for if Addison himself, or any of his contemporaries, had reproduced Sir Roger, in a subsequent periodical paper, with the same degree of skill which had accompanied the first delineation, would it have been objected as a sufficient condemnation of such a performance, that the knight had been previously dispatched?

We see no reason, therefore, for distrusting the generally received tradition, and have, accordingly, placed the Merry Wives of Windsor, with Mr. Malone, after the three plays devoted to Henry the Fourth, and Fifth.

In this very entertaining drama, which unfolds a vast display of incident, and a remarkable number of well-supported characters, we are presented with an almost unrivalled instance of pure domestic comedy, and which furnishes a rich draught of English minds and manners, in the middle ranks of society, during one of the most interesting periods of our annals.

Shakspeare has here achieved, perhaps, the most difficult task which can fall to the lot of any writer; that of resuscitating a favourite and highly-wrought child of the imagination, and, with a success equal to that which attended the original production, re-involving him in a series of fresh adventures. Falstaff has not lost, in this comedy, any portion of his former power of pleasing; he returns to us in the fulness of his strength, and we immediately enter, with unabated avidity and relish, into a further development of his inexhaustible stores of humour, wit, and drollery.

The self-delusion of Sir John, who conceives himself to be an object of love, and the incongruities, absurdities, and intrigues, into which this monstrous piece of vanity plunges him, form, together with the secondary plot of Fenton and Anne Page, the richest tissue of incident and stratagem that ever graced a stage. The mode, also, in which the two intrigues are interwoven, the happy termination of the second, arising out of the contrivance which brings about the issue of the first, has a just claim to praise both for its invention and execution.

To the comic characters which had formerly been associated with the exploits of the Knight, and which, as accessories or retainers, accompany him in this play, some very laughable and grotesque additions are to be found in the persons of Slender, Sir Hugh Evans, and Dr. Caius, who are deeply implicated in the fable, and who, by the most ludicrous exhibitions of rustic simplicity, provincial accent, and broken English, contribute in a high degree to the variety and hilarity of the

scene.

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA: 1601. That this play was written and acted before the decease of Queen Elizabeth, is evident from the manner in which it is entered on the Stationers' Books, being registered on February 7, 1602-3, "as acted by my Lord Chamberlen's men," who, in the year of the accession of King James, obtained a license for their theatre, and were denominated "His Majesty's

servants."

It also appears, from some entries in Mr. Henslowes's Manuscript, that a drama on this subject, at first called "Troyelles and Cresseda," but, before its production, altered in its title to "The Tragedy of Agamemnon," was in existence anterior to Skakspeare's play, and was licensed by the Master of the Revels, on the 3rd of June, 1599.

From these premises we have a right to infer that our poet's Troilus and Cres-sida was written between June, 1599, and February, 1603, and, accordingly, our two chronologers have thus placed it; Mr. Malone in 1602, and Mr. Chalmers in 1600. But it appears to us, for reasons which we shall immediately assign, that its more probable era is that of 1601.

It has been correctly observed by the Commentators, that an incident in our author's Troilus and Cressida, is ridiculed in an anonymous comedy, entitled Histriomastix, "which, though not printed till 1610, must have been written before the death of Queen Elizabeth, who, in the last act of the piece, is shadowed under the character of Astræa, and is spoken of as then living."

We cannot avoid thinking it somewhat extraordinary that when Mr. Malone recorded this circumstance, it did not occur to him, that, by placing the composition of Shakspeare's play in 1602, he allowed scarcely any time to the author of Histriomastix for the composition of his work. In order that a parody or burlesque may be successful, it is necessary that the production ridiculed should have acquired a certain degree of celebrity, and however well received by the court, before which it was at first chiefly performed, this drama of our author may have been, some time must have elapsed ere it could have acquired a sufficient degree of notoriety for the purpose of successful satire. But if Shakspeare wrote his Troilus and Cressida in 1602, and had even completed it by the middle of the year, scarcely nine months could intervene between this completion and the death of the Queen in March, 1603; and during this short interval, the play of our poet must have been acted, and celebrated so repeatedly and so highly, as to have excited the pen of envy and burlesque, and the comedy of Histriomastix must have been written and performed; a space certainly much too inadequate for these effects and results, more particularly if we are allowed to conclude, what most probably was the case, that the anonymous comedy was finished some months anterior to the decease of Elizabeth.

On the other hand, it would seem that Mr. Chalmers, by approximating the date of Shakspeare's play too closely to that of the elder drama, may be taxed with a similar error. That our poet was in the habit of adopting subjects which had been previously rendered popular on the stage, has been acknowledged by all his commentators, and that his attention was first attracted to the fable under consideration, by the play exhibited on Mr. Henslowe's theatre, there can be little doubt. But this production, we find, was not licensed by the Master of the Revels until June, 1599, and as popularity attached to the performance would be necessary to stimulate Shakspeare to remodel the subject, we can scarcely conceive him, both on this account, and a motive of delicacy to a rival theatre, to have commenced the composition of his Troilus and Cressida before the beginning of 1601.

It was at this period then, that our bard, excited by the success of the prior attempt in 1599, turned his attention to the subject; and, referring to his Chaucer, to Caxton's Translation of the "Recuyles or Destruction of Troy, from Raoul le Fevre," and to the first seven books of Chapman's Homer, for the materials of his story, presented us with the most singular, and, in some respects, the most striking, of his productions.

This play is, indeed, a most perfect unique both in its construction and effect, appearing to be a continued sarcasm on the "Tale of Troy divine," an ironical copy, as it were, of the great Homeric picture. Whether this was in the contemplation of Shakspeare, or whether it might not, in a great measure, flow from the nature of the Gothic narratives to which he had recourse, may admit of some doubt. As Homer, however, was in part before him, in the excellent version of Chapman, it appears to us, that it certainly was his design to expose the follies and absurdities of the Trojan war; the despicable nature of its origin, and the furious discords which protracted its issue. In doing this he has stripped the Homeric characters of all their epic pomp; he has laid them naked to the very heart, but he has, at the same time, individualised them, with a pencil so keen, powerful, and discriminating, that we become more intimately acquainted with them, as mere men, from the perusal of this play, than from all the splendid descriptions of the Greek poet.

This unparalleled strength and distinctness of characterisation, as unfolded in the play before us, has been admirably painted by Mr. Godwin.

"The whole catalogue," he observes, "of the dramatis personæ in the play of Troilus and Cressida, so far as they depend upon a rich and original vein of humour in the author, are drawn with a felicity which never was surpassed. The genius of Homer has been a topic of admiration to almost every generation of men since the period in which he wrote. But his characters will not bear the slightest comparison with the delineation of the same characters as they stand in Shakspeare. This is a species of honour which ought by no means to be forgotten when we are making the eulogium of our immortal bard, a sort of illustration of his greatness which cannot fail to place it in a very conspicuous light. The dispositions of men perhaps had not been sufficiently unfolded in the very early period of intellectual refinement when Homer wrote; the rays of humour had not been dissected by the glass, or rendered perdurable by the pencil, of the poet. Homer's characters are drawn with a laudable portion of variety and consistency; but his Achilles, his Ajax, and his Nestor are, each of them, rather a species than a individual, and can boast more of the propriety of abstraction, than of the vivacity of a moving scene of absolute life. The Achilles, the Ajax, and the various Grecian heroes of Shakspeare, on the other hand, are absolute men, deficient in nothing which can tend to individualise them, and already touched with the Promethean fire that might infuse a soul into what, without it, were lifeless form. From the rest perhaps the character of Thersites deserves to be selected (how cold and schoolboy a sketch in Homer), as exhibiting an appropriate vein of sarcastic humour amidst his cowardice, and profoundness and truth in his mode of laying open the foibles of those about him, impossible to be excelled.

"Shakspeare possessed, no man in higher perfection, the true dignity and loftiness of the poetical afflatus, which he has displayed in many of the finest passages of his works with miraculous success. But he knew that no man ever was, or ever can be, always dignified. He knew that those subtler traits of character which identify a man, are familiar and relaxed, pervaded with passion, and not played off with an external eye to decorum. In this respect the peculiarities of Shakspeare's genius are no where more forcibly illustrated than in the play we are here considering. The champions of Greece and Troy, from the hour in which their names were first recorded, had always worn a certain formality of attire, and marched with a slow and measured step. No poet, till this time, had ever ventured to force them out of the manner which their epic creator had given them. Shakspeare first supplied their limbs, took from them the classic stiffness of their gait, and enriched them with an entire set of those attributes, which might render them completely beings of the same species with ourselves." *

The great defect of this play, which, in other respects, is highly entertaining and instructive, and abounding in didactic morality, expressed with the utmost beauty, vigour, and boldness of diction, is a want of attachment to its characters. If we set aside Hector, who seems to have been the favourite hero with Shakspeare, and hisį Gothic authorities, there is not a person in the drama for whom we feel any sympathy or interest; the Grecian chiefs, though varied and coloured in the highest style of relief, are any thing but amiable, and of the persons involved in the love-intrigue, two are proverbially infamous, whilst the forsaken Troilus appears in too tame and inefficient a light to call forth any share of admiration or regret.

23. KING HENRY THE EIGHTH : 1602. Few of the plays of Shakspeare have occasioned more difference of opinion, with regard to the era of their production, than this historical drama. Mr. Malone contends that it was written in 1601 or 1602, and that, after having lain by for some years unacted, on account of the costliness of its exhibition, it was revived in 1613, under the title of " All is True," with new decorations, and a new prologue and epilogue; and that this revival took place on the very day, being St. Peter's, on which the Globe Theatre was burnt down, occasioned, it is said, by the discharge of some small pieces, called chambers, on King Henry's arrival at Cardinal Wolsey's gate at Whitehall, one of which, being injudiciously managed, set fire to the thatched roof of the theatre. He also joins with Dr. Johnson and Dr. Farmer in conceiving, that the prologue, and even some part of the dialogue, were, on this occasion, written by Ben Jonson, to whom also he ascribes the conduct and superintendence of the representation.

Mr. Chalmers, on the contrary, believes that this piece was neither represented nor written before 1613, and that its first appearance on the stage was the night of the conflagration above-mentioned. He reprobates the folly of supposing "that Ben Jonson, "who was in perpetual hostility with Shakspeare, made adycyons to Henry VIII. or even wrote the prologue for our poet."+

And, lastly, Mr. Gifford declares it to be his conviction that the tragedy of our poet was produced in 1601; but that, on the supposed revival of it in 1613, neither the prologue was written by Jonson, nor the play by Shakspeare, the piece then performed being a new play, called "All is Truth," constructed, indeed, on the history of Henry the Eighth, and, like that, full of shows, but not the composition of our author. He has here likewise, as every where else, very successfully combated the prejudice and credulity of the commentators, in their perpetual assumption of the enmity of Jonson to Shakspeare.‡