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AS YOU LIKE IT.

For the delicacy of its wit, the pregnant quaintness of its humor, the keenness of its satire, and, above all, the profound and subtle knowledge of human nature shown in the moulding of its characters, this sylvan comedy is remarkable even among the plays of Shakespeare. To these traits it adds a healthy, rural, inartificial air, which is grateful to pure sympathies. Its events pass amid trees and rocks and running brooks; and its characters show the influence of their surroundings. They do not talk like sentimental citizens on an excursion, determined to be becomingly romantic; but they drink in wholesome exhilaration from the open air, and yet do not lack that sober thoughtfulness proper to those who dwell beneath "the shade of melancholy boughs." We find in no other language so fresh and true a picture of sylvan life. The English boasts one glorious gallery of views equal to it :-the forest scenes in Ivanhoe. The very songs scattered through the play seem to be the spontaneous utterance of frank yet thoughtful natures, under the spell of forest influences.

ACT I. SCENE 1.

"Oliver. And what wilt thou do, beg, when that is spent?"

This is pointed thus in all the editions:

"And what wilt thou do? beg, when that is spent."

a punctuation which does not bring out the sense of the question. Oliver obviously does not need to ask Orlando what he will do when he gets the thousand crowns, but what he will do when they are spent. The question is double; and in their natural order the queries would stand thus:

"And what wilt thou do when that is spent? beg!"

But the two are united by making the last parenthetical in the first; and there should therefore be no interrogation point except at the close of the whole sentence.

On the very threshhold of the drama we have a remarkable instance of the nice and intuitive discrimination of Shakespeare in the delineation of a secondary character. Oliver, the elder brother of Orlando, would be drawn by any but a great master of the human heart, as an unmitigated villain; and so, indeed, he is invariably misrepresented on the stage.

first Scene, says :

Oliver, speaking of Orlando in the

"I hope I shall see an end of him; for my soul, yet I know not why, hates nothing more than he."

Here the speech closes, on the stage: but Shakespeare makes Oliver go on, and say of his of his young brother :

"Yet he's gentle; never schooled, and yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly beloved; and, indeed so much in the heart of the world, and especially of my own people, who best know him, that I

am altogether misprised. But it shall not be so, long; this wrestler shall clear all: nothing remains, but that I kindle the boy thither, which now I'll go about."

With what wonderful knowledge is here depicted the effect of moral excellence upon a man envious in temper and domineering in spirit, yet capable of appreciating that which is good in others, and even of desiring it for himself! He is not a mere brutal, grasping elder brother: but being somewhat morose and moody in his disposition, he first envied and then disliked the youth who, although his inferior in position, is so much in the heart of the world, and especially of his own people, that he himself is altogether misprised. The very moody disposition which makes him less popular than his younger brother, led him to nourish this envious dislike, till it became at length the bitter hate which he shows in the first Scene of the play. Had Oliver been less appreciative of the good in others, and less capable of it himself, he would not have turned so bitterly against Orlando. It is quite true to nature that such a man should be overcome entirely, and at once, by the subsequent generosity of his brother, and instantly subdued by simple, earnest Celia. But his sudden yielding to sweet and noble influences is not consistent with the character of the coarse, unmitigated villain whom we see upon the stage, and who is the monstrous product, not of Shakespeare, but of those who garble Shakespeare's text.

I notice this, because it is an example of the wrong done to Shakespeare as a dramatist by the preparers of the acting copies of his plays; a wrong from which this comedy especially has suffered. Shakespeare was not only the greatest of poets, but an actor, and the successful manager of a theatre; and it is more than probable that he knew, not only what was necessary to the development of his conceptions of character, but what was suited to the tastes

of a promiscuous audience. This appears to have been forgotten for about two centuries past.

SCENE 2.

"Le Beau. Fair princess, you have lost much good sport. Celia. Sport? Of what colour?"

It seemed to me at first quite probable, as Mr. Collier's folio suggests, that Le Beau told the princesses, in his affected way, that they had "lost much good spo't" (sport), and that this prompted Cecilia to ask, "Spot? of what color?" But upon reflection, the emendation appears to be one of those made points, called in theatrical cant, 'gags,' upon which actors venture successfully sometimes, but so rarely, that it is to be desired that they should always fail. We would gladly forego the few happy hits, if the sacrifice could secure us from the multitudinous misses.

SCENE 3.

"Cel. But is all this for thy father!

Ros. No, some of it is for my child's father."

This, the reading of the original, has been changed by Rowe and Mr. Knight to "for my father's child." The meaning of the original is obviously, as Theobald says, "for him whom I hope to marry, and who will be the father of my children." Of this, Coleridge says, "Who can doubt that it is a mistake for my father's child,' meaning herself? According to Theobald's note, a most indelicate anticipation is put into the mouth of Rosalind without

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reason." This opinion Mr. Knight indorses, with the addition that the thought is "most forced and unnatural."

It certainly is pleasant to agree with Coleridge and Mr. Knight, and it may be presuming to differ from them; but I cannot sympathize with the tone of their criticism on this passage, or agree with their conclusions in regard to it. Rosalind, as the whole context shows, is evidently thinking of Orlando, whom she already loves fixedly. Rosalind is no prude in spirit,-none of Shakespeare's fine women are, -and she speaks with the freedom with which women spoke in the days of Elizabeth. When this Scene opens, she has evidently been long brooding over her love and her thoughts have travelled far into the future. She has fancied herself Orlando's loving wife and the mother of his children; —what man, what truly pure woman, with a woman's instincts and affections undistorted and unperverted, will not honor her and love her for it! Rosalind was no missy girl, ignorant of the relations of her sex to the other, or affecting an ignorance to hide prurient knowledge. She was an honest-hearted, sensible woman, with all the instincts and impulses of her sex active within her; and she, speaking in the tone of those trained in Shakespeare's time, is not ashamed to say to her cousin, who seems but her other self, that to be the mother of Orlando's child is the longed-for sum of her earthly happiness.

But let us see if Rosalind, in subsequent unquestioned passages of the play, do not indulge in thoughts far more indelicate, and speeches more gross, than this utterance of a woman's longing which so shocks Coleridge and Mr. Knight. A moment afterward, when Celia tells her to "hem away" the burrs in her heart, she replies:

"I would try: if I could cry hem, and have him.”

In Act IV. Sc. 1. Orlando asks,

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