SHAKSPERE'S NEGLECT OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR EFFECT. 75 and a reconciliation takes place. The only action of 'As You Like As You Like It. It' is pedestrian; if the characters had been placed in the forest in Midsummer Night's Dream has no plot. page 77] In the plots of Shakspere's and character are the main things. He could have made more strik ing effect out Acts IV. & V. 4. of Hamlet, the first scene, the drama would have been then as ripe for its catastrophe as it is in the last. The Midsummer Night's Dream' relates a midnight stroll in a wood; and the unreal na'ture of the incidents is playfully indicated in its name. It is from no stronger materials than those three frail threads of narrative that our poet has spun unrivalled tissues of novel thought and divine fancy. And, as in his lighter works he is careless of variety of adventure, so in his tragic plays he does not seek to heap horrors or griefs one upon another in devising the arrangement of his plots. In this latter class of his works, the skill and force with which the interest is woven out of the details of story and elements of character, make it difficult for us to see how far it is that we are indebted to these for the power which the scene exerts over us. But with a little reflection we are able to discover, that there is scarcely one drama of his, in which, from the same materials, situations could not have been formed, which should have possessed in their mere outline a tenfold amount of interest and tragic effect to those which Shakspeare has presented to us. 'Hamlet' offers, especially in the two last acts, some remarkable proofs of his indifference to the means which he held in his hands for increasing the tragic interest of his situations, and of the boldness with which he threw himself on his own resources for the creation of the most intense effect out of the slenderest outline. But no example can shew more strikingly his independence of tragic situation, and his power of concocting dramatic power out of the most meagre elements of story, than the third act of the Othello. Othello, Act III. It contains no more than the development and triumph of the devilish design which was afterwards to issue in murder and remorse; and other writers would have treated it in no other style than as necessary to prepare the way for the harrowing conclusion. In the Moor's dialogues with Iago, the act of vengeance, ever and anon sternly contemplated, and darkening all with its horror, is yet but one ingredient in the misery of the tale. These scenes are a tragedy in themselves, the story of the most hideous revolution in a noble nature; and their catastrophe of wretchedness is complete when So in the end of ['page 78] all is left clear for the one and his dead child. 76 THE SIMPLICITY OF THE SITUATION AT THE END OF LEAR. the tumult of doubt sinks into resolved and desolate conviction,— when the Moor dashes Desdemona from him, and rushes out in uncontrollable agony.--Read also the conclusion of Lear, and learn the same lesson from the economy of that most touching scene. The horrors which have gathered so thickly throughout the last act, are carefully removed to the background, and free room is left for group, the father the sorrowful groupe on which every eye is turned. The situation is simple in the extreme; but how tragically moving are the internal convulsions for the representation of which the poet has worthily husbanded his force! Lear enters with frantic cries, bearing the body of his dead daughter in his arms; he alternates between agitating doubts and wishing unbelief of her death, and piteously experiments on the lifeless corpse; he bends over her with the dotage of an old man's affection, and calls to mind the soft lowness of her voice, till he fancies he can hear its murmurs. Then succeeds the dreadful torpor of despairing insanity, during which he receives the most cruel tidings with apathy, or replies to them with wild incoherence; and the heart flows forth at the close with its last burst of love, only to break in the vehemence of its emotion,- commencing with the tenderness of regret, swelling into choking grief, and at last, when the eye catches the tokens of mortality in the dead, snapping the chords of life in a paroxysm of agonised horror. Two Noble Oh, thou wilt come no more; Never, never, never, never, never! -Pray you, undo this button: Thank you, Sir.— The application here of the differences thus pointed out is easy enough. Fletcher either would not have chosen so bare a story, or Incidents of The he would have treated it in another guise. The incidents which constitute the story are neither many nor highly wrought: they are only the capture of the two knights, their becoming enamoured of the lady, the combat which was to decide their title to her,—and the death of Arcite after it. And no complexity of minor adventures is inserted to disturb the simplicity so presented. In all this there is nothing which Fletcher could have found sufficient to maintain wouldn't have suited Fletcher, SCENES OF THE TWO N. K. SHOWING SHAKSPERE'S PLAN. 77 that continuity and stretch of interest which he always thought necessary. He would have invented accessory circumstances, he would have produced new characters, or thrust the less important person1ages who now fill the stage, further into the foreground, and more constantly into action: the one simple and inartificial story which we have, possessing none of his mercurial activity of motion, and scarcely exciting a feeling of curiosity, would have been transformed into a complication of intrigues, amidst which the figures who occupy the centre of the piece as it stands, would have been only individuals sharing their importance with others, and scarcely allowed room enough to make their features at all distinguishable. Shakspere's handling seen in certain scenes of The Two Noble Kinsmen. Act I. scene ii. design'd by Shakspere. also. And In the management of particular scenes of this play, likewise, certain circumstances are observable, which, separately, seem to go a certain length in establishing Shakspeare's claim to the arrangement, and have considerable force when taken together. The second scene of the first act would appear to have been sketched by him rather than Fletcher, from its containing no activity of incident, and serving no obvious purpose but the development of the character and situation of the two princes; a mode of preparation not at all practised by Fletcher. Neither does any consequence flow from the beautiful scene immediately following; a circumstance which Act I. scene iii. points out Shakspeare as having arranged the scene, and would strengthen the evidence of his having written the dialogue, if that required any corroboration. The bareness and undiversified iteration of situation in the first three scenes of the last act form one presumption against the devising of those scenes by Fletcher. The economy of the fifth scene of that act, in which Emilia, left alone on the stage, listens to the noise of the combat, is also, to me, strongly indicative of Shakspeare. The contrivance is unusual, but extremely well imagined. I do not recollect an instance in Fletcher bearing the smallest likeness to it, or founded on any principles at all analogous to that which is here called into operation. In Shakspeare, I think we may, in more than one drama, discover something which might have given the germ of it. He has not only in his historical plays again and again regretted the insufficiency of the means possessed by his stage, or any other, for the representation of such Act V. scenes i. ii. iii. [? Emilia with the pictures.] Act V. scene v. also designd by Shakspere. Shakspere's expedients for avoiding spec tacles; in ['page 80] 1 Henry IV., Richard II., Emilia in Two N. K. I. v., like Lady Macbeth in II. ii. of Macbeth. 78 SHAKSPERE'S AVOIDANCE OF SPECTACLES. MOTIVE OF TWO N. K. spectacles; but in several of those plays he has devised expedients for avoiding them. In 'Henry V.' we have the battle of Azincour; but the only encounter of 1the opposite parties is that of Pistol and the luckless Signor Dew. In 'the first part of Henry IV.' he has shewn an unwillingness to risk the effect even of a single combat ; for in the last scene of that play, where prince Henry engages Hotspur, the spectator's attention is distracted from the fight between them, by the entrance of Douglas, and his attack on the prudent Falstaff. In 'Richard II.' the lists are exhibited for the duel of Bolingbroke and Norfolk, which is inartificially broken off at the very last instant by the mandate of the king. But a more deeply marked likeness to the spirit in which the scene in 'The Two Noble Kinsmen' is arranged, meets us in Lady Macbeth watching and listening while her husband perpetrates the murder, like a bad angel which delays its flight only till it be assured that the whispered temptation has done its work. And in this combat scene, even the ancient and artless expedient used, of relating important events by messengers brought in for that sole end, and having no part in the action, may be noticed as belonging to an older form of the drama than Fletcher's, and as being very frequently practised by Shakspeare himself. The motives of Dramatic art defin'd. In The Two This conception ja Shakspere's. In quitting our cursory examination of the qualities which distinguish the mechanical arrangement of the play, we may advert to the mode in which those influences are conceived which give motion to the incidents of the story, and regulate its progress. The dramatic art is a representation of human character in action; and action in human life is prompted by passion, which the other powers of the mind serve only to guide, to modify, or to quell. In the conception of the passions which are chiefly operative in this drama, there seems to be much that is characteristic of a greater poet than Fletcher. In the first place, the passions which primarily originate the action of the piece are simple; they are Love and Jealousy; the purest and most disinterested form of the one, and the noblest and most generous which could be chosen for the other. The conception is Shakspeare's in its loftiness and magnanimity; and it is his UNITY OF SHAKSPERE'S CONCEPTION, AND HIS DEVELOPEMENT OF IT. 79 also as being a direct appeal to common sympathies, modified but slightly by partial or fugitive views of nature. But it also resembles him in the singleness and coherence of design with 'which the idea is seized and followed out. It cannot be necessary that I should specifically exemplify the closeness with which those ruling passions are brought to bear on the leading circumstances of the story from first to last. And it is almost equally superfluous to remind you, how far any such adherence to that unity of impulse, operates as evidence in a question between the two poets whom we have here to compare. Fletcher, in common with other poets of all ranks inferior to the highest, is unable to preserve any one form of passion or of character skilfully in the foreground: he may seem occasionally to have proposed to himself the prosecution of such an end, but he either degenerates into the exhibition of a few over-wrought dramatic contrasts, or loses his way altogether amidst the complicated adventures with which he incumbers his stories. This inability to keep sight of an uniform design, is in truth one striking argument of inferiority; and the clearness with which Shakspeare conceives a definite purpose, and the fixedness with which he pursues it, go very far to unravel the great secret of his power. I have already pointed out to you, perhaps without necessity, wherein it is that his strength of passion consists; that it is not in the incidents of his fable, but in his mode of treating the incidents; that he will not rely on mere vigour or skill of outline in his stage-grouping, for that influence which he is conscious of being always able to acquire more worthily, by the beauty and emotion which he breathes into the organic formation of the living statuary of the scene; that he refuses to sacrifice to the meretricious attraction of strained situations or entangled incidents, the internal and self-supporting strength of his historical pictures of the heart, or the unflinching accuracy of his demonstrations of the intellectual anatomy. In a similar way you will look for his unity of purpose, not in the mechanical economy of his plots, but in the elementary conception of his characters, and in his developement of the principles of passion under whose suggestions those characters act. He chooses as the subject of his delineation some mightily and truly conceived impersonation of human attributes, in |