relations which unquestionably may be considered in an ironical view, without confounding the eternal line of separation between good and evil. This purpose is answered by the comic characters and scenes which are interwoven in the most of Shakspeare's pieces, where romantic fables or historical events are made the subject of a noble and elevating exhibition. A determinate parody of the serious part is frequently not to be mistaken in them; at other times the connexion is more loose and arbitrary; and the more wonderful the invention of the whole, the more easily it becomes merely a light delusion of the fancy. The comic interruptions everywhere serve to prevent the play from being converted into an employment, to preserve the mind in the possession of its hilarity, and to keep off that gloomy and inert seriousness which so easily steals into the sentimental, but not tragical, drama. Most assuredly Shakspeare did not wish in this to comply with the taste of the multitude contrary to his own better judgment; Notwithstanding one or two instances of physical suffering introduced on the stage in the plays of Shakspeare, and which had better, perhaps, have been omitted, there is yet nothing in the impression which his genuine tragic dramas leave behind. them, of gloom and horror, nothing of that wild, painful, and harassing sensation so frequently felt from the perusal of the tragedies of his contemporaries. The lights and shades, indeed, are so skilfully mingled in his pieces, and the moral so broad and pure, that we perpetually recur to them as transcripts of human life and passion, which never cease to instruct and please the mind, never fail to soothe and satisfy the heart, for in various pieces, and in considerable parts of others, especially when the catastrophe approaches, and the minds are consequently more on the stretch, and no longer susceptible of any entertainment serving to divert their attention, he has abstained from all comic intermixtures. It was also an object with him that the clowns or buffoons should not occupy a more important place than that which he had assigned them: he expressly condemns the extemporising with which they loved to enlarge their parts.* Johnson founds the justification of the species of drama in which seriousness and mirth are mixed, on this, that in real life the vulgar is found close to the sublime, that the merry and the sad usually accompany and succeed one another. But it does not follow that because both are found together, they must not therefore be separated in the compositions of art. The observation is in other respects just, and this circumstance invests the poet with a power to proceed in that manner, because every thing in the drama must be regulated by the conditions of theatrical probability; but the mixture of such "In Hamlet's directions to the players. There is every reason to believe that much of what has been objected to as occurring in some passages in the parts of Shakspeare's clowns, has been foisted into these parts during their performance on the stage, by the presumptuous officiousness of the actors, and adopted into the text, as favourites with the lower orders, by the first editors, who were, as is well known, the very fellows and companions of those who had taken these unwarrantable liberties. dissimilar, and apparently contradictory ingredients, in the same works, can only be justifiable on principles reconcileable with the views of art, which I have already described. In the dramas of Shakspeare the comic scenes are the antichamber of the poetry, where the servants remain: these prosaical associates must not give such an extension to their voice as to deafen the speakers in the hall itself; however, in those intervals when the ideal society has retired, they deserve to be listened to the boldness of their raillery, the pretension of their imitations, may afford us many a conclusion respecting the relations of their masters. Shakspeare's comic talent is equally wonderful with that which he has shown in the pathetic and tragic; it stands on an equal elevation, and possesses equal extent and profundity: all that I before wished was, not to admit that the former preponderated. He is highly inventive in comic situations and motives: it will be hardly possible to show whence he has taken any of them; whereas, in the serious part of his dramas, he has generally laid hold of something already known. His comic characterization is equally true, various, and profound, with his serious. So little is he disposed to caricature, that we may rather say many of his traits are almost too nice and delicate for the stage, that they can only be properly seized by a great actor, and fully understood by a very acute audience. Not only has he delinea ted many kinds of folly, he has also contrived to exhibit mere stupidity in a most diverting and entertaining manner. There is also a peculiar species of the farcical to be found in his pieces, which seems to us to be introduced in a more arbitrary manner, but which, however, is founded in imitation of an actual custom. This is the introduction of the buffoon; the fool with his cap and motley dress, called in English, clown, who appears in several comedies, though not in all, but in Lear alone of the tragedies, and who generally exercises his wit merely in conversation with the principal persons, though he is also sometimes incorporated with the action. In those times it. was not only usual for princes to keep court fools; but in many distinguished families they retained, along with other servants, such an exhilarating house-mate as a good antidote against the insipidity and wearisomeness of ordinary life, as a welcome interruption of established formalities. Great men, and even churchmen, did not consider it beneath their dignity to recruit and solace themselves after important concerns with the conversation of their fools. The celebrated Sir Thomas More had his fool painted along with himself by Holbein. Shakspeare appears to have lived immediately before the time when the custom began to be abolished; in the English comic authors who succeeded him, the clown is no longer to be found. The dismissal of the fool has been extolled as a proof of refinement; and our honest fore fathers have been pitied for taking delight in such a coarse and farcical entertainment. I am much rather, however, disposed to believe that the practice was dropped from the difficulty in finding fools able to do full justice to their parts:* on the other hand, reason, with all its conceit of itself, has become too timid to tolerate such bold irony; it is always careful lest the mantle of its gravity should be disturbed in any of its folds; and rather than allow a privileged place to folly beside itself, it has unconsciously assumed the part of the ridiculous; but, alas! a heavy and cheerless ridicule.* It would be easy to make a collection of the excellent sallies and biting sarcasms which have been preserved of celebrated court fools. It is well known that they frequently told such truths to princes as are never now told to them.* Shak * See Hamlet's praise of Yorick. In The Twelfth Night, Viola says: This fellow is wise enough to play the fool; And to do that well, craves a kind of wit; He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of the persons, and the time; That comes before his eye. This is a practice As full of labour as a wise man's art: For folly that he wisely shows is fit, But wise men's folly fall'n quite taints their wit. * "Since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes a greater show."-As You Like It, Act 1. Sc. 2. * Charles the Bold, of Burgundy, is known to have frequently boasted that he wished to rival Hannibal as the greatest general |