Page images
PDF
EPUB

the

"By Heaven, Hubert, I am almost ashamed
To say what good respect I have of thee-"
make our flesh creep. The warrior and the
king vanish. If Shakspere had not exercised

-are we to believe that Shakspere intended | showing us, as it were, the sting which that our hearts should sustain this laceration, wounds, and the slaver which pollutes, of the and that the effects should pass away when venomous and loathsome reptile. The Constance quits the stage? Are we to believe "Come hither, Hubert. O my gentle Hubert, that he was satisfied that his "incidents We owe thee much"should be various and affecting," but "independent on each other, and without any tendency to produce and regulate the conclusion?" Was there to be no unity of feeling" to sustain and elevate the action to the end? Was his tragedy to be a mere dance of Fantoccini? No, no. The remembrance of Constance can never be separated from the after-scenes in which Arthur appears; and, at the very last, when the poison has done its work upon the guilty king, we can scarcely help believing that the spirit of Constance hovers over him, and that the echo of the mother's cries is even more insupportable than the "burn'd bosom” and the “parched lips," which neither his "kingdom's rivers" nor the "bleak winds" of the north can "comfort with cold."

Up to the concluding scene of the third act we have not learnt from Shakspere to hate John. We may think him an usurper. Our best sympathies may be with Arthur

and his mother. But he is bold and confident, and some remnant of the indomitable spirit of the Plantagenets gives him a lofty and gallant bearing. We are not even sure, from the first, that he had not something of justice in his quarrel, even though his mother confidentially repudiates "his right.” In the scene with Pandulph we completely go with him. We have yet to know that he would one day crouch at the feet of the power that he now defies; and he has therefore all our voices when he tells the wily and sophistical cardinal

[blocks in formation]

his consummate art in making John move had made the suggestion of Arthur's death thus stealthily to his purpose of blood-if he what John afterwards pretended it was"the winking of authority "—the “humour” "Of dangerous majesty, when, perchance, it frowns,"

we might have seen him hemmed in with revolted subjects and foreign invaders with something like compassion. But this exhibition of low craft and desperate violence we can never forgive.

At the end of the third act, when Pan

dulph instigates the Dauphin to the invasion of England, the poet overleaps the historical succession of events by many years, and makes the expected death of Arthur the motive of policy for the invasion:

"The hearts

Of all his people shall revolt from him, And kiss the lips of unacquainted change; And pick strong matter of revolt, and wrath, Out of the bloody fingers' ends of John." Here is the link which holds together the dramatic action still entire; and it wonderfully binds up all the succeeding events of the play.

In the fourth act the poet has put forth all his power of the pathetic in the same ultimate direction as in the grief of Constance. The theme is not now the affection of a mother driven to frenzy by the circumstances of treacherous friends and victorious foes; but it is the irresistible power of the very helplessness of her orphan boy, triumphing in its truth and artlessness over the evil nature of the man whom John had selected to destroy his victim, as one

[blocks in formation]

"The bloody fingers' ends of John" have not been washed of their taint :"Your uncle must not know but you are dead," tells us, at once, that no relenting of John's purpose had prompted the compassion of Hubert. Pleased, therefore, are we to see the retribution beginning. The murmurs of the peers at the once again crown'd,"—the lectures which Pembroke and Salisbury read to their sovereign,—are but the preludes to the demand for "the enfranchisement of Arthur." Then come the dissembling of John,

66

"We cannot hold mortality's strong hand,"

and the bitter sarcasms of Salisbury and Pembroke:

"Indeed we fear'd his sickness was past cure. Indeed we heard how near his death he was, Before the child himself felt he was sick." "This must be answer'd" is as a knell in John's ears. Throughout this scene the king is prostrate before his nobles; it is the prostration of guilt without the energy which too often accompanies it. Contrast the scene with the unconquerable intellectual activity of Richard III., who never winces at reproach, seeing only the success of his crimes and not the crimes themselves, as, for example, his answer in the scene where

his mother and the widow of Edward up

braid him with his murders,

A flourish, trumpets! strike alarums, drums! Let not the heavens hear these tell-tale women Rail on the Lord's anointed."

The messenger appears from France :-the

[ocr errors]

mother of John is dead;-"Constance in a frenzy died;" the "powers of France" have is brought in to terrify still more the weak arrived "under the Dauphin." Superstition king, who is already terrified with "subject enemies and "adverse foreigners." The "prophet of Pomfret " and the "five moons" affright him as much as the consequences of 'young Arthur's death." He turns upon Hubert in the extremity of his fears, and attempts to put upon his instrument all the guilt of that deed. Never was a more striking display of the equivocations of conscience in a weak and guilty mind. Shakspere is here the true interpreter of the secret excuses of many a criminal, who would shift upon accessories the responsibility of the deviser of a wicked act, and make the attendant circumstances more powerful for evil than the internal suggestions. When the truth is avowed by Hubert, John does not rejoice that he has been spared the perpetration of a crime, but he is prompt enough to avail himself of his altered position:

"O haste thee to the peers."

Again he crawls before Hubert. But the storm rolls on.

The catastrophe of Arthur's death follows instantly upon the rejoicing of him who exclaimed, "Doth Arthur live?" in the hope to find a safety in his preservation upon the same selfish principle upon which he had formerly sought a security in his destruction. In a few simple lines we have the sad dramatic story of Arthur's end :—

"The wall is high; and yet will I leap down:Good ground, be pitiful, and hurt me not!There's few, or none, do know me; if they did, This ship-boy's semblance hath disguised me quite.

I am afraid; and yet I'll venture it." his characters and situations to the empire How marvellously does Shakspere subject all of common sense! The Arthur of the old

play, after receiving his mortal hurt, makes

a long oration about his mother. The great dramatist carries on the now prevailing feeling of the audience by one pointed line :

[blocks in formation]

If any other recollection were wanting, these | It is this instinctive justice in Faulconbridge, simple words would make us feel that John was as surely the murderer of Arthur, when the terrors of the boy drove him to an inconsiderate attempt to escape from his prison, as if the assassin, as some have represented, rode with him in the dim twilight by the side of a cliff that overhung the sea, and suddenly hurled the victim from his horse into the engulfing wave; or as if the king tempted him to descend from his prison at Rouen at the midnight hour, and, instead of giving him freedom, stifled his prayers for pity in the waters of the Seine. It is thus that we know the anger of "the distemper'd lords" is a just anger, when, finding Arthur's body, they kneel before that "ruin of sweet life," and vow to it the "worship of revenge." The short scene between Salisbury, Pembroke, the Bastard, and Hubert, which immediately succeeds, is as spirited and characteristic as anything in the play. Here we see "the invincible knights of old" in their most elevated characterfiery, implacable, arrogant, but still drawing their swords in the cause of right, when that cause was intelligible and undoubted. The character of Faulconbridge here rises far above what we might have expected from the animal courage and the exuberant spirits of the Faulconbridge of the former acts. The courage is indeed here beyond all doubt:

[blocks in formation]

this readiness to uplift the strong hand in what he thinks a just quarrel,—this abandonment of consequences in the expression of his opinions,—that commands our sympathies for him whenever he appears upon the scene. The motives upon which he acts are entirely the antagonist motives by which John is moved. We have, indeed, in Shakspere none of the essay-writing contrasts of smaller authors. We have no asserters of adverse principles made to play at see-saw, with reverence be it spoken, like the Moloch and Belial of Milton. But, after some reflection upon what we have read, we feel that he who leapt into Coeur-de-lion's throne, and he who hath "a trick of Coeur-de-lion's face," are as opposite as if they were the formal personifications of subtlety and candour, cowardice and courage, cruelty and kindliness. The fox and the lion are not more strongly contrasted than John and Faulconbridge; and the poet did not make the contrast by accident. And yet with what incomparable management are John and the Bastard held together as allies throughout these scenes. In the onset the Bastard receives honour from the hands of John,and he is grateful. In the conclusion he sees his old patron, weak indeed and guilty, but surrounded with enemies,—and he will not be faithless. When John quails before the power of a spiritual tyrant, the Bastard stands by him in the place of a higher and a better nature. He knows the dangers that surround his king :—

"All Kent hath yielded; nothing there holds

out

But Dover castle: London hath received,
Like a kind host, the dauphin and his powers:
Your nobles will not hear you, but are gone
To offer service to your enemy.”
But no dangers can daunt his resolution :-
"Let not the world see fear, and sad distrust,
Govern the motion of a kingly eye:
Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire;
Threaten the threat'ner, and outface the brow
Of bragging horror: so shall inferior eyes,
That borrow their behaviours from the great,
Grow great by your example, and put on
The dauntless spirit of resolution."

The very necessity for these stirring words | annihilated.
would show us that from henceforth John is
but a puppet without a will. The blight of
Arthur's death is upon him; and he moves
on to his own destiny, whilst Faulconbridge
defies or fights with his enemies; and his
revolted lords, even while they swear

"A voluntary zeal, and unurged faith,"

to the invader, bewail their revolt, and

lament

"That, for the health and physic of our right, We cannot deal but with the very hand Of stern injustice and confused wrong." But the great retribution still moves onward. The cause of England is triumphant; "the lords are all come Lack :"-but the king is "poisoned by a monk :"

"Poison'd,-ill fare;-dead, forsook, cast off: And none of you will bid the winter come, To thrust his icy fingers in my maw; Nor let my kingdom's rivers take their course Through my burn'd bosom; nor entreat the north

To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips,

And comfort me with cold:—I do not ask you
much,

I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait,
And so ingrateful, you deny me that."

The interval of fourteen years between the death of Arthur and the death of John is

Causes and consequences, separated in the proper history by long digressions and tedious episodes, are brought together. The attributed murder of Arthur lost John all the inheritances of the house of Anjou, and allowed the house of Capet to triumph in his overthrow. Out of this grew a larger ambition, and England was invaded. The death of Arthur and the events which

marked the last days of John were separated in their cause and effect by time only, over which the poet leaps. It is said that a man who was on the point of drowning saw, in an instant, all the events of his life in connection with his approaching end. So sees the poet. It is his to bring the beginnings and the ends of events into that real union and dependence which even the philosophical historian may overlook in tracing their course. It is the poet's office to preserve a unity of action; it is the historian's to show a consistency of progress. In the chroniclers we have manifold changes of fortune in the life of John after Arthur of Brittany has fallen. In Shakspere Arthur of Brittany is at once revenged. The heartbroken mother double courses. and her boy are not the only sufferers from The spirit of Constance is appeased by the fall of John. The Niobe of a Gothic age, who vainly sought to shield her child from as stern a destiny as that with which Apollo and Artemis pursued the daughter of Tantalus, may rest in peace.

CHAPTER II.

A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

'A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM' was first | Fisher. It is difficult to say whether both of printed in 1600. In that year there appeared two editions of the play: the one published by Thomas Fisher, a bookseller; the other by James Roberts, a printer. The differences between these two editions are very slight. Steevens, in his collection of twenty plays, has reprinted that by Roberts, giving the variations of the edition by

these were printed with the consent of the author, or whether one was genuine and the other pirated. If the entries at Stationers' Hall may be taken as evidence of a proprietary right, the edition by Fisher is the genuine one, 'A booke called A Mydsomer Nyghte Dreame' having been entered by him Oct. 8, 1600. One thing is perfectly

clear to us that the original of these editions, whichever it might be, was printed from a genuine copy, and carefully superintended through the press. The text appears to us as perfect as it is possible to be, considering the state of typography in that day. There is one remarkable evidence of this. The prologue to the interlude of the Clowns, in the fifth act, is purposely made inaccurate in its punctuation throughout. The speaker" does not stand upon points." It was impossible to have effected the object better than by the punctuation of Roberts's edition; and this is precisely one of those matters of nicety in which a printer would have failed, unless he had followed an extremely clear copy, or his proofs had been corrected by an author or an editor. The play was not reprinted after 1600, till it was collected into the folio of 1623; and the text in that edition differs in few instances, and those very slight ones, from that of the preceding quartos.

Malone has assigned the composition of 'A Midsummer-Night's Dream' to the year 1594. We are not disposed to object to this, -indeed we are inclined to believe that he has pretty exactly indicated the precise year, as far as it can be proved by one or two allusions which the play contains. But we entirely object to the reasons upon which Malone attempts to show that it was one of our author's "earliest attempts in comedy." He derives the proof of this from " the poetry of this piece, glowing with all the warmth of a youthful and lively imagination, the many scenes which it contains of almost continual rhyme, the poverty of the fable, and want of discrimination among the higher personages." Malone would place A Midsummer-Night's Dream' in the same rank as 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' 'Love's Labour's Lost,' and The Comedy of Errors;' and he supposes all of them written within a year or two of each other. We have no objection to believe that our poet wrote A MidsummerNight's Dream' when he was thirty years of age, that is in 1594. But it so far exceeds the three other comedies in all the higher attributes of poetry, that we cannot avoid repeating here the opinion which we have

before expressed, that he had written these for the stage before his twenty-fifth year, when he was a considerable shareholder in the Blackfriars company, some of them, perhaps, as early as 1585, at which period the vulgar tradition assigns to Shakspere—a husband, a father, and a man conscious of the possession of the very highest order of talent-the dignified office of holding horses at the theatre door. The year 1594 is, as nearly as possible, the period where we would place 'A Midsummer-Night's Dream,' with reference to our strong belief that Shakspere's earliest plays must be assigned to the commencement of his dramatic career; and that two or three even of his great works had then been given to the world in an unformed shape, subsequently worked up to completeness and perfection. But it appears to us a misapplication of the received meaning of words to talk of "the warmth of a youthful and lively imagination" with reference to 'A Midsummer-Night's Dream,' and the¦ Shakspere of thirty. We can understand these terms to apply to the unpruned luxu- | riance of the 'Venus and Adonis;' but the poetry of this piece, the almost continual rhyme, and even the poverty of the fable, are to us evidences of the very highest art having obtained a perfect mastery of its materials after years of patient study. Of all the dramas of Shakspere there is none more entirely harmonious than A Midsummer-Night's Dream.' All the incidents, all the characters, are in perfect subordinaation to the will of the poet. Throughout the whole piece," says Malone, "the more exalted characters are subservient to the interests of those beneath them." Precisely

SO.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

An unpractised author-one who had not "a youthful and lively imagination" under perfect control,—when he had got hold of the Theseus and Hippolyta of the heroic ages, would have made them ultraheroical. They would have commanded events, instead of moving with the supernatural influence around them in harmony and proportion. "Theseus, the associate of Hercules, is not engaged in any adventure worthy of his rank or reputation, nor is he in reality an agent throughout the play."

« PreviousContinue »