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The Traviata mania.

SHAKSPEARE'S PORTRAIT.

FROM the bust over his tomb in Stratford church, and the portrait attached to the first (1623) edition of his works, we gain doubtless the best idea of the face and head of Shakspeare. The head is extraordinarily high, its great dome gradually declining from the back to the forehead, which indicates a lofty and subtile distinctive power, in union with broad imaginative force;-creative energy, and presiding principle-passionate susceptibility controlled by intellectual potency. The eyes are large-capacity for language; the nose penetrative and emotional; while the mouth indicates a power of what we may call sensationability-all which lineaments represent the outward and visible form of a nature, an imagination, and distinctive reason and judgment, constituted to give vitality and natural truth to the mental conceptions of personality. No other writer had so great a capacity for loving the themes which his imagi

nation grasped. A great but tranquil pride constantly impelled him to attain perfection in his delineations; and symmetrical and incomparable as were his gifts, we believe that, instead of crediting the statements of Hemmige and Condél, "that he never blotted a line"-he frequently rewrote his scenes and reshaped his dramas, to satisfy the perfection he ambitioned. His business as an actor, too, advantaged him in the composition of his dramas, as it gave his mind the habit of entering into individualities. His excellence lies in his truth, not to real but imaginative nature. As an instance, take Macbeth's soliloquy before committing the murder, “When pity like a naked new-born babe," &c. The rude Scottish chieftain would never have had such ideas, it is Shakspeare himself, who has thrown himself into his position, and who, abandoning his nature to his imagination, speaks. Shakspeare's diction is as different from that of all other writers as his works are superior. Where in any literature do we find such a shaping

power of imagination displayed in the natural language of passion and poetry? Much as has been written on Shakspeare, his genius has not as yet received an adequate comment; Warburton, Stephens, Malone, are merely verbal; Pope, Guizot, Ulrici, didactic critics. Schlegel led the way for Coleridge, Hazlit, and Lamb, and the latter three have, at least, entered sympathetically into the spirit of his genius; but, though they have irradiated it here and there in flashes, an æsthetical commentary, worthy of the greatest of poets, remains to be written. We are, indeed, only now getting into an atmosphere of true poetical criticism, illumined by the minds of Germany, who first thought it necessary to feel as well as see in adjudicating upon a creative work. Vast has been the progress made between Johnson and Hegel. The remarks of the former on Shakspeare's dramas are like the criticisms of an old crabtree on a forest of cedars and oaks.

HAMLET.

THE best way to comprehend the transcendent dramatic and poetic creative power of Shakspeare is to contrast his dramas with the sources from which, as a basis, they were constructed. In all cases the materials—short narrative Italian novels, sparsely scattered with incident, and having no pretensions to the delineation of character-dry pages of chronicle, plain old ballads, Roman history, and such like, resembled the insignificant seed or acorn from which his genius, pregnant with the exhaustless powers of nature, developed some luxuriant and beautiful shrub or majestic tree. From each of such arid fragments a world of life has sprung into being, each of which may be truly said to be a miracle of mental power. Taken altogether, Shakspeare is the greatest of poets, uniting and surpassing the gifts of all his forerunners and succeedents. But powerful as is the interest which he has given to his dramas, as a dramatic artist exquisite the poetry, and exhaustless the ideas which are lavished among them—it is the uniform truth to nature which they display, in the drawing and evolution of character, in scene and painting, which renders them unparalleled.

The characteristic equality of excellence and truth which his dramas exhibit has always appeared marvellous to the critics of Europe, contrasting them with the creations of other poets, ancient and modern, and will, perhaps, ever continue so. Though Shakspeare, however, undoubtedly possessed an understanding and imagination of wider reach and more perfect symmetry than any other mind which has appeared in literature, was gifted with, the surpassing greatness to which we allude, seems to have arisen from the predominance of an abnormal sensitive system acting in unison with an intelligence so potent, harmonious, and even in its action, and which by enabling him to sympathise with calm undisturbed intensity with all his ideas and conceptions, thus resulted in his giving unequalled natural truth to each. No other compositions of the human mind manifest so complete a balance between nature and spirit. Vain also is it to hope that any other poet, though equally gifted, could dare in the present state of civilization, to throw his imagination so thoroughly and nakedly into the depths of nature as Shakspeare has done.

Shakspeare found the story on which he shaped the tragedy of "Hamlet" in "Saxo-Grammaticus,' and while confining himself to such details as were consistent with the unity and directness of the action, has adhered closer to chronicle in this than other plays derived from similar sources. "Macbeth" and "Hamlet" belong to the same order of drama. The introduction of a supernatural element-in the one of witches, in the other the ghost-while connected with, advance the plot, just as in the spiritual machinery the "Midsummer Night's Dream" and the "Tempest" resemble each other. In

Hamlet," which abounds with incident more than any of Shakspeare's higher tragedies, the chief interest centres round the Prince, and arises from the peculiarity of his character, the influences which act upon him, and the position in which he is placed. In this being, who is altogether peculiar and unlike any other delineations in dramatic literature, the imaginative and reflective tendencies so predominate, that, though surrounded by circumstances

of the most complicated horror, and stimulated by supernatural influence, each

progressive incident merely brings forth his reflective power and plunges him into a soliloquy on the problems of existence-until the last scene. Such retardations of the action as are thus dependent on the nature of "Hamlet" conform to the admission of that variety of scene which constitutes one of the great charms of the drama, next to the interest arising from the character of the hero. In one sense," Hamlet" which was one of his earliest works, is Shakspeare; the poet having filled his mind with the peculiar position in which the ideal "Hamlet" was placed and acted on, let his nature and imagination flow together, and unconsciously conceived what he himself would have thought and done in such a situation. Hence the originality of the type of being which we find in the contemplative imaginative Dane. Other dramatists made their characters speak merely what illustrates the story and tends to its dramatic consummation; Shakspeare, on the contrary, in all his plays, but this especially, makes them natural creatures, consistent with the ideal of their nature as it arose in his conception. But though intervalling their discourse with those soliloquies in which he introduces the profoundest reflection and wisdom, he never loses sight of the perspective result of the incidents and action.

From the first scene to the last, an air of death hangs over this dramacold, spectral-gloomy as a black Norwegian sky coldly illuminated by its icy crescent-moon. How dark, warlike, feudal and awful are the opening scenes on the midnight bastions of Elsinore when the sentinels are expecting the ghost, of whose appearance Horatio speaks :

"When yon same star that nightward from Had run its course to fill that point of

the pole

heaven

Where now it burns-Marcellus and myself

The bell then beating one”

What fine accessory touches are interspersed in the discourse of the speakers: such as the remark of Horatio, which at once carries the imagination to the frozen Norland :

"Such was the very armour he had on When he th' ambitious Norway combated;

So frowned he once, when, in an angry parle,

He smote the sledded Pollack on the ice."

But in ghostly painting the address of Hamlet to the spectre is unrivalled in poetry :—

"What may this mean,

That thou, dead corse, again in complete
steel,
Revisitest thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous."

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The assumed madness of Hamlet (an incident which Shakspeare found in Grammaticus), is admirably managed, to give variety of scene, alternately painful and humorous, to the play. The latter chiefly in bringing out the absurd side of Polonius, a figure who unites the maxim-wisdom of age with the buffoonery of the courtier, who is tolerated for his length of office. Congreve, who was a diligent student of Shakspeare, has introduced this dramatic resumé into his Love for Love," and through its means has given a chief interest to this-the best of his dry, brilliant comedies. The character of Ophelia represents one of the purest and simplest types of woman-nature in Shakspeare. Hamlet loves her, but the horror of the scene in which he finds himself placed, the supernatural commands he has received involving imperatively a destiny to revenge his father's murder, acting upon his imagination, have made him careless of life; hence his coarseness to Ophelia in the scene where he is watching the effect of the play upon the King. The madness of Ophelia, consequent upon Hamlet's having killed her father, her songs, the Queen's account of her drowning, her burial, are wonderfully natural, woful, and beautiful. The famous scene in the church-yard, between the clowns who are digging her grave and Hamlet, in its powerful contrasts of vulgar badinage and elevated reflection, is the most perfect instance in Shakspeare, or any other poet, of the union of the grotesque and sublime. Never were death and life, dust and spirit, brought into such awful juxtaposition as in the soliloquy of Hamlet over the skull of the jester, Yorick"Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now ?" In the scene

with Osric, the court fop, we have a character of manners, his style of speaking the neplus ultra offrivolity and affectation-is, doubtless, exaggerated for effect; but there is sometimes a sort of stiffness and stilted euphuism about the conversation of Shakspeare's gentlemen, as in the chat of Posthumus Iachino, &c., at Rome in Cymbeline. The other sketchfigures, introduced to assist the plot and action of the drama, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are more developed, and are representations of scholarly gentlemanhood so beautifully represented by the amiable and faithful Horatio, the fidus Achates of the hero, who in his last moments resolves to die with him; "I am more of an antique Roman than a Dane," &c. The last scene is overwhelmingly tragic, a wrathful destiny dealing retributive death on the guilty, involves the noble and innocent in the like catastrophe, and the pall falls on all the principal personages of the drama-leaving but Horatio and a few side figures alive

at the consummation.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.

"ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA" is a drama much less frequently acted, and more seldom read than many of Shakspeare's other tragic masterpieces, founded on Roman annal. But though it is without the powerful interest which attaches to several of the characters in "Julius Cæsar," and the scenes in which they appear, and lacks the noble symmetry and fine contrasts of "Coriolanus," it nevertheless contains several superb scenes of imaginative nature. No poet has ever read history with so penetrating a power of creative vision as Shakspeare-no one ever so thoroughly diagnosed the real nature of its figures under the drapery thrown around them; and thus, vitalized by his genius, we obtain a more complete conception of Julius and Antony, Brutus, Cassius, Octavius, &c., than we could derive from any amount of study of Dion or Plutarch. The latter, for instance, details the events in which Antony acted, and retails several of his sayings, but in Shakspeare only have we placed before us the character of the Triumvir, in its martial gloriousness, its weakness, its bursts and transitions of grandeur

and inconstancy; and in this drama alone do we find portrayed the real Octavius, with his cowardly nature and cold political intellect, who throughout offers so striking a contrast in his action and language to Antony-who in one of those accessory touches of reminiscence by which Shakspeare gives such completeness to his conceptions drawn from history, says—

"He at Phillipi kept

His sword even as a dancer, while I struck
The lean and wrinkled Cassius, and 'twas I
That the mad Brutus ended."

The chief interest of this drama

centres in the delineation of Cleopatra-a most original and true imagination-in which Shakspeare has painted the majesty of an eastern queen, in union with the voluptuousness of a crowned courtesan, with her politike, her ungovernable rages, and her fluctuations of passionate inconstancy, over which finally the love and majesty of her nature triumphs. The first lines which Antony and she utter, as is customary with Shakspeare, strike the key note of the drama :

Cleo. If this be love indeed, tell me how much?

Ant.-There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned.

Cleo-I'll set a bourne how far to be be

loved.

Ant.-Then must thou needs find out new heavens, new earth.

The scene between the Soothsayer and Charmian and Iras, while finely introduced as an accessory indication of the drift and destiny of the drama, is admirably true to nature, and is just such as might have occurred in the listless life of an Egyptian palace. One of the finest and most characteristic connected with Cleopatra, however, is that in which, during his absence in Rome, her mind reverts to Antony :

-

"He's speaking now Or murmuring, 'Where's my serpent of old Nile,'

For so he calls me. Now I feed myself With most delicious poison. Think of me That am with Phoebus, amorous pinches black,

And wrinkled deep in time. Broadfronted Cæsar,

When thou was't here above the earth, I

was

A morsel for a monarch, and great Pompey

Would stand and make his eyes grow in
my brow.

There would he anchor his aspect, and die,
With looking, on his life."

Shakspeare here, indeed, is wrong as regards fact, it being the son of Pompey the Great who was enamoured of Cleopatra.

And after the messenger who has arrived from Antony fills her with joy, how womanish is her answer to Charmian, when she praises Cæsar

Char.-Ah, the brave Cæsar.

Cleo.-Be choked with such another emphasis

Say the brave Antony.

Char. The valiant Cæsar.
Cleo.-By Isis, I will give thee bloody teeth
If thou with Cæsar paragon again
My man of men.

In another scene, what imaginative reality there is in the latter lines of the passage in which she is recalling the revel life they have led together

next morn,

Ere the ninth hour, I drank him to his bed,

Char.-

Cleo.

Then put my tires and mantles on him, while

I wore his sword Philippan.

And how appropriately illustrative of
the queenly beauty her address to
the messenger, whom she will hardly
let speak, through impatience-
Cleo.-Antony dead?

If thou say so, villain, thou killest
thy mistress;
But well and free,

If thou so yield him, there is gold,
and here

My bluest veins to kiss.

I have

Immortal longings in me. Now no

more

The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.

Oh, eastern star!

Peace, peace,

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,

That sucks the nurse asleep.

The air of voluptuousness which pervades the drama, like an air of music, reaches its sweetest close in

her death.

In the scene in which Octavius, Macænas, Antony, &c., are revelling on board the galley at Messina, we see illustrated the character of Lepidusthe cypher in the triumvirate--whom Antony fools to the top of his drunken bent in his reply to his queries about the Ptolemies, pyramids, and crocodiles of the Nile

Lep.--What manner of thing is your crocodile ?

Ant.--It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth, &c., &c.

Lep.--What colour is it?
Ant.--Of its own colour too.
Lep.--'Tis a strange serpent.
Ant.--'Tis so; and the tears of it are wet.

The little song which is sung at this revel is a perfect bacchanalian catch. It seems appropriately to end in a reel.