That it is not the piece itself particularly which impresses the public is evident from the fact, that for several decades the play has been given in different places in different shapes. Every one who has undertaken to alter the piece has picked out such parts as he considered especially effective, and left out other portions. The fact that a piece has admitted of so many alterations shows how very loosely it is constructed. -BENEDIX, RODERICH, 1873, Die Shakespearomanie, p. 289.

In no other piece has Shakespeare employed in such measure all the means of his art. The earlier acts are among the most powerful in all dramatic literature. The epic ductus of the last two must not be considered as a defect. We find the same mode of composition in his other dramas. GRIMM, HERMAN, 1875, Hamlet, Preussische Jahrbücher, April, p. 398.

In "Hamlet" alone, the most marvellously true as it is the most marvellously profound example of Shakspere's power of characterisation, the central character is conceived on a far broader basis than is furnished by the action of the play. In reading this tragedy, or seeing it acted on the stage, the plot is forgotten in the hero. It is as if Hamlet were pausing, not before the deed which he is in reality hesitating to perform and which is neither a great nor a difficult one -- but before action in general. This one necessity proves too heavy for Hamlet to bear; the acorn to use Goethe's simile -bursts the vessel in which it has been planted; and Hamlet succumbs beneath the fardel which is imposed on all humanity. WARD, ADOLPHUS WILLIAM, 1875– 99, A History of English Dramatic Literature, vol. II, p. 294.

Not the faintest streak of Humor appears in this tragedy to reconcile us with the drift of it.-WEISS, JOHN, 1876, Wit, Humor, and Shakespeare, p. 159.

No one of mortal mould (save Him "whose blessed feet were nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross") ever trod this earth, commanding such absorbing interest as this Hamlet, this mere creation of a poet's brain. No syllable that he whispers, no word let fall by any one near him, but is caught and pondered as no words ever have been, except of Holy Writ. Upon no throne built by mortal

hands has ever "beat so fierce a light" as upon that airy fabric reared at Elsinore. FURNESS, HORACE HOWARD, 1877, ed. New Variorum Shakespeare, Hamlet, p. xii.

Every change in the text of "Hamlet" has impaired its fitness for the stage and increased its value for the closet in exact and perfect proportion. Now, this is not a matter of opinion--of Mr. Pope's opinion or Mr. Carlyle's; it is a matter of fact and evidence. Even in Shakespeare's time the actors threw out his additions; they throw out these very same additions in our own. The one especial speech, if any one such especial speech there be, in which the personal genius of Shakespeare soars up to the very highest of its height and strikes down to the very deepest of its depth, is passed over by modern actors; it was cut away by Hemings and Condell. We may almost assume it as certain that no boards have ever echoed - at least, more than once or twice-to the supreme soliloquy of Hamlet. Those words which combine the noblest pleading ever proffered for the rights of human reason with the loftiest vindication ever uttered of those rights, no mortal ear within our knowledge has ever heard spoken on the stage. stage. A convocation even of all priests could not have been more unhesitatingly unanimous in its rejection than seems to have been the hereditary verdict of all actors. It could hardly have been found worthier of theological than it has been found of theatrical condemnation. beyond all question, magnificent as is that monologue on suicide and doubt which has passed from a proverb into a byword, it is actually eclipsed and distanced at once on philosophic and on poetical grounds by the later soliloquy on reason and resolution. SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1880, A Study of Shakespeare, p. 164.

Yet,

Highly educated, possessed of a vivid imagination, his intellect is continually at war with his heart; and while the latter impels him to action, the stronger influence of his mind controls him, and he remains inert. . . With him it is thought that produces doubt, and the idea of Shakspere as represented in "Hamlet" seems to be "the prevalence of thought over the faculty of action."-SALVINI, TOMMASO, 1881, Impressions of Some Shaksperean Characters, Century Magazine, vol. 23, p. 112.

"Hamlet" is the greatest creation in literature that I know of: though there may be elsewhere finer scenes and passages of poetry. Ugolino and Paolo and Francesca in Dante equal anything anywhere. It is said that Shakespeare was such a poor actor that he never got beyond his ghost in this play, but then the ghost is the most real ghost that ever

was.

The Queen did not think that Ophelia committed suicide, neither do I.-TENNYSON, ALFRED, LORD, 1883, Some Criticisms on Poets, Memoir by His Son, vol. II, p. 291.

"Hamlet" has given the name of Denmark a world-wide renown. Of all Danish men, there is only one who can be called famous on the largest scale; only one with whom the thoughts of men are for ever busied in Europe, America, Australia, aye, even in Asia and Africa, wherever European culture has made its way; and this one never existed, at any rate in the form in which he has become known to the world. Denmark has produced several men of note--Tycho Brahe, Thorvaldsen, and Hans Christian Andersen -but none of them has attained a hundredth part of Hamlet's fame. The "Hamlet" literature is comparable in extent to the literature of one of the smaller European peoples-the Slovaks, for instance. BRANDES, GEORGE, 1898, William Shakespeare, A Critical Study, vol. II, p. 2.

"Hamlet" was the only drama by Shakespeare that was acted in his lifetime at the two Universities. It has since attracted more attnetion from actors, playgoers, and readers of all capacities than any other of Shakespeare's plays. Its world-wide popularity from its author's day to our own, when it is as warmly welcomed in the theatres of France and Germany as in those of England and America, is the most striking of the many testimonies to the eminence of Shakespeare's dramatic instinct. At a first glance there seems little in the play to attract the uneducated or the unreflecting. . . . It is the intensity of interest which Shakespeare contrives to excite in the character of the hero that explains the position of the play in popular esteem. The play's unrivalled power of attraction lies in the pathetic fascination exerted on minds of almost every calibre by the central figure

-a high-born youth of chivalric instincts and finely developed intellect, who, when stirred to avenge in action a desperate. private wrong, is foiled by introspective workings of the brain that paralyse the will.-LEE, SIDNEY, 1898, A Life of William Shakespeare, pp. 224, 225.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

1603

The

Of this play, the light or comic part is very natural and pleasing, but the grave scenes, if a few passages be excepted, have more labour than elegance. The plot is rather intricate than artful. time of the action is indefinite; some time, we know not how much, must have elapsed between the recess of the duke and the imprisonment of Claudio; for he must have learned the story of Mariana in his disguise, or he delegated his power to a man already known to be corrupted. The unities of action and place are sufficiently preserved. JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1768, General Observations on Shakspeare's Plays.

The noble virtue, the true greatness, and the feminine honour of Isabella, are every where conveyed through sentiments. of responsive eloquence, and the great and commanding justice of the Duke, who learns the temper of his subjects to govern them, and who chuses for a wife the most amiable of those subjects, are dressed in language no less consonant.DIBDIN, CHARLES, 1795, A Complete History of the Stage, vol. III, p. 314.

Yet, notwithstanding this agitating truthfulness, how tender and mild is the pervading tone of the picture! The piece takes improperly its name from punishment; the true significance of the whole is the triumph of mercy over strict justice, no man being himself so free from errors as to be entitled to deal it out to his equals. The most beautiful embellishment of the composition is the character of Isabella. whose heavenly

purity, amid the general corruption, is not stained with one unholy thought. In the humble robes of the novice she is a very angel of light. SCHLEGEL, AUGUSTUS WILLIAM, 1809, Dramatic Art and Liter

ature.

This play, which is Shakspere's throughout, is to me the most painful-say rather, the only painful the only painful part of his genuine

works. The comic and tragic parts equally border on the Monrov, the one being disgusting, the other horrible; and the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claim of justice (for cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of;) but it is likewise. degrading to the character of woman. Beaumont and Fletcher, who can follow Shakspere in his errors only;have presented a still worse, because more loathsome and contradictory, instance of the same kind. in the "Night-Walker," in the marriage of Alathe to Algripe. Of the counterbalancing beauties of "Measure for Measure," I need say nothing; for I have already remarked that the play is Shakspere's throughout. COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1818, Lectures and Notes on Shakspere, ed. Ashe, p. 299.

Is perhaps, after Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth, the play in which Shakspeare struggles, as it were, most with the over-mastering power of his own mind. the depths and intricacies of being, which he has searched and sounded with intense reflection, perplex and harass him; his personages arrest their course of action to pour forth, in language the most remote from common use, thoughts which few could grasp in the clearest expression; and thus he loses something of dramatic excellence in that of his contemplative philosophy. . I do not value the comic parts highly: Lucio's impudent profligacy, the result rather of sensual debasement than of natural ill disposition, is well represented; but Elbow is a very inferior repetition of Dogberry. In dramatic effect, "Measure for Measure" ranks high: the two scenes between Isabella and Angelo, that between her and Claudio, those where the Duke appears in disguise, and the catastrophe in the fifth act, are admirably written and very interesting; except so far as the spectator's knowledge of the two stratagems which have deceived Angelo may prevent him from participating in the indignation at Isabella's imaginary wrong, which her lamentations would excite. HALLAM, HENRY, 1837-39, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, pt. iii, ch. vi, par. 40 "Measure for Measure" exhibits more clearly than any other piece the profound

skill of Shakspeare, in giving intellectual depth and dramatic life to his traditional materials.-ULRICI, HERMANN, 1839, Shakspeare's Dramatic Art, p. 315.

No one of the high female characters of tragedy has been found more effective in representation than Isabella; while there is perhaps no composition of the same length in the language which has left more of its expressive phrases, its moral aphorisms, its brief sentences crowded with meaning, fixed in the general memory, and embodied by daily use. in every form of popular eloquence, argument, and literature.-VERPLANCK, GULIAN CROMMELIN, 1844-47, ed. The Illustrated Shakespeare.

In "Measure for Measure,” in contrast with the flawless execution of "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare has spent his art in just enough modification of the scheme of the older play to make it exponent of this purpose, adapting its terrible essential incidents, so that Coleridge found it the only painful work among Shakespeare's dramas, and leaving for the reader of to-day more than the usual number of difficult expressions; but infusing a lavish colour and a profound significance into it, so that under his touch certain select portions of it rise far above the level of all but his own best poetry, and working out of it a morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for the central expression of his moral judgments. It remains a comedy, as indeed is congruous with the bland, halfhumorous equity which informs the whole composition, sinking from the heights of sorrow and terror into the rough scheme of the earlier piece; yet it is hardly less full of what is really tragic in man's existence istence than if Claudio had indeed "stooped to death." Even the humorous concluding scenes have traits of special grace, retaining in less emphatic passages a stray line or word of power, as it seems, so that we watch to the end for the traces where the nobler hand has glanced along, leaving its vestiges, as if accidentally or wastefully, in the rising of the style.PATER, WALTER, 1874, Appreciations, p. 176.

Almost all that is here worthy of Shakespeare at any time is worthy of Shakespeare at his highest: and of this every touch, every line, every incident, every

syllable belongs to pure and simple tragedy. The evasion of a tragic end by the invention and intromission of Mariana has deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity but ingenius evasion of a natural and proper end is usually the distinctive quality which denotes a workman of a very much lower school than the school of Shakespeare. In short and in fact, the whole elaborate machinery by which the complete and completely unsatisfactory result of the whole plot is attained is so thoroughly worthy of such a contriver as "the old fantastical duke of dark corners" as to be in a moral sense, if I dare say what I think, very far from thoroughly worthy of the wisest and mightiest mind that ever was informed with the spirit or genius of creative poetry.-SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1880, A Study of Shakespeare, p. 203.

He treated the subject as he did, because the interests of the theatre demanded that the woof of comedy should be interwoven with the severe and sombre warp of tragedy. But what a comedy! Dark, tragic, heavy as the poet's mood--a tragi-comedy, in which the unusually broad and realistic comic scenes, with their pictures of the dregs of society, cannot relieve the painfulness of the theme, or disguise the positively criminal nature of the action. One feels throughout, even in the comic episodes, that Shakespeare's burning wrath at the moral hypocrisy of self-righteousness underlies the whole structure like a volcano, which every moment shoots up its flames through the superficial form of comedy and the interludes of obligatory merriment. BRANDES, GEORGE, 1898, William Shakespeare, A Critical Study, vol. II, p. 71.

Even in that unequal melody, "Measure for Measure," the great scene between Isabel and Claudio so far transcends anything that English, anything that European, drama had had to show for nearly two thousand years, that in this special point of view it remains perhaps the most wonderful in Shakespeare. Marlowe has nothing like it; his greatest passages, psychologically speaking, are always monologues; he cannot even attempt the clash and play of soul with soul that is so miraculously given here.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, p. 323.

JULIUS CÆSAR

1601-3

The many-headed multitude were drawne By Brutus speech, that Cæsar was ambitious, When eloquent Mark Antonie had showne His vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious? Mans memorie, with new, forgets the old, One tale is good, untill another's told. -WEEVER, JOHN, 1601, The Mirror of Martyrs, s. 4.

So I have seene, when Cesar would appeare, And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were, Brutus and Cassius: oh how the Audience Were ravish'd, with what new wonder they went thence,

When some new day they would not brooke a line

Of tedious (though well laboured) Catiline. -DIGGES, LEONARD, 1640, Upon Master William Shakespeare.

This may shew with what indignity our poet treats the noblest Romans. But there is no other cloth in his wardrobe. Every one must wear a fool's coat that comes to be dressed by him; nor is he more civil to the ladies-Portia, in good manners, might have challenged more respect; she that shines a glory of the first magnitude in the gallery of heroic dames, is with our poet scarce one remove from a natural; she is the own cousin-german of one piece, the very same impertinent silly flesh and blood with Desdemona. Shakespear's genius lay for comedy and humour. In tragedy he appears quite out of his element; his brains are turned -he raves and rambles without any coherence, any spark of reason, or any rule to controul him, to set bounds to his phrenzy.-RYMER, THOMAS, 1693, A Short View of the Tragedy of the Last Age.

Of this tragedy many particular passages deserve regard, and the contention and reconcilement of Brutus and Cassius is universally celebrated; but I have never been strongly agitated in perusing it, and think it somewhat cold and unaffecting, compared with some other of Shakspeare's plays; his adherence to the real story, and to Roman manners, seems to have impeded the natural vigour of his genius.-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1768, General Observations on Shakspeare's Plays.

I know no part of Shakspere that more impresses on me the belief of his genius being superhuman, than this scene between Brutus and Cassius. In the Gnostic heresy, it might have been credited with less

absurdity than most of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed him to create, previously to his function of representing, characters. COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1818, Lectures and Notes on Shakspere, ed. Ashe, p. 315.

Neither has he characters of insignificance, unless the phantom that stalks over the stage as Julius Cæsar, in the play of that name, may be accounted one. -LAMB, CHARLES, 1834, Table-Talk.

In "Julius Cæsar" Shakspere makes a complete imaginative study of the case of a man predestined to failure. . . . Brutus is an idealist. . . . Moral ideas and priuciples are more to him than concrete realities; he is studious of self-perfection.

.. Cassius, on the contrary, is by no means studious of moral perfection. He is frankly envious, and hates Cæsar. . Julius Cæsar appears in only three scenes of the play. In the first scene of the third act he dies. Where he does appear, the poet seems anxious to insist upon the weakness rather than the strength of Cæsar. . In the characters of the "Julius Cæsar" there is a severity of outline; they impose themselves with strict authority upon the imagination; subordinated to the great spirit of Cæsar, the conspirators appear as figures of lifesize, but they impress us as no larger than life. DoWDEN, EDWARD, 1875-80, Shakspere, A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, pp. 249, 251, 253, 272.

The style of "Julius Cæsar" is characterized by simplicity and breadth of touch, and each sentence is clear, easy, and flowing, with the thought clothed in perfect and adequate expression: the lines are as limpid as those of "Romeo and Juliet," but without their remains of rhyme and Italian conceits. Of all Shakespeare's works, none has greater purity of verse or transparent fluency. . . . Nothing perhaps in the whole roll of dramatic poetry equals the tenderness given by Shakespeare to Brutus, that tenderness of a strong nature which the force of contrast renders so touching and so beautiful. STAPFER, PAUL, 1880, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, tr. Carey, pp. 317, 342.

It is afternoon, a little before three o'clock. Whole fleets of wherries are crossing the Thames, picking their way among the swans and the other boats, to land their passengers on the south bank

of the river. Skiff after skiff puts forth from the Blackfriars stair, full of theatregoers who have delayed a little too long over their dinner and are afraid of being too late; for the flag waving over the Globe Theatre announces that there is a play to-day. The bills upon the streetposts have informed the public that Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar" is to be presented, and the play draws a full house. People pay their sixpences and enter; the balconies and the pit are filled. Distinguished and specially favoured spectators take their seats on the stage behind the curtain. Then sound the first, the second, and the third trumpet-blasts, the curtain parts in the middle, and reveals a stage entirely hung with black. Enter the tribunes Flavius and Marullus; they scold the rabble and drive them home because they are loafing about on a week-day without their working-clothes and tools -in contravention of a London police regulation which the public finds so natural that they (and the poet) can conceive it as in force in ancient Rome. At first the audience is somewhat restless. The groundlings talk in undertones as they light their pipes. But the Second Citizen speaks the name Cæsar. There are cries of "Hush! hush!" and the progress of the play is followed with eager attention. It was received with applause, and soon became very popular.-BRANDES, GEORGE, 1898, William Shakespeare, A Critical Study, vol. I, p 357.

Brutus is one of the noblest and most consistent of Shakespearian creations; a man far above all self-seeking and capable of the loftiest patriotism; in whose whole bearing, as in his deepest nature, virtue wears her noblest aspect. But Brutus is an idealist, with a touch of the doctrinaire; his purposes are of the highest, but the means he employs to give those purposes effect are utterly inadequate; in a lofty spirit he embarks on an enterprise doomed to failure by the very temper and pressure of the age. "Julius Cæsar" is the tragedy of the conflict between a great nature, denied the sense of reality, and the world-spirit. Brutus is not only crushed, but recognizes that there was no other issue of his untimely endeavour.MABIE, HAMILTON WRIGHT, 1900, William Shakespeare, Poet, Dramatist, and Man, p. 298.