Chapter LXIV: Section IX: Characteristics of Shakespeare's Genius

Could such a poet always confine himself to the imitation of nature? Will this poetical world which is going on in his brain never break loose from the laws of the world of reality? Is he not powerful enough to follow his own laws? He is; and the poetry of Shakespeare naturally finds an outlet in the fantastical. This is the highest grade of unreasoning and creative imagination. Despising ordinary logic, it creates another; it unites facts and ideas in a new order, apparently absurd, in reality regular; it lays open the land of dreams, and its dreams seem to us the truth.

When we enter upon Shakespeare's comedies, and even his half-dramas,[723] it is as though we met him on the threshold, like an actor to whom the prologue is committed, to prevent misunderstanding on the part of the public, and to tell them: "Do not take too seriously what you are about to hear: I am amusing myself. My brain, being full of fancies, desired to array them, and here they are. Palaces, distant landscapes, transparent clouds which blot in the morning the horizon with their gray mists, the red and glorious flames into which the evening sun descends, white cloisters in endless vista through the ambient air, grottos, cottages, the fantastic pageant of all human passions, the irregular sport of unlooked-for adventures--this is the medley of forms, colors, sentiments, which I let become entangled and confused in my presence, a many-tinted skein of glistening silks, a slender arabesque, whose sinuous curves, crossing and mingled, bewilder the mind by the whimsical variety of their infinite complications. Don't regard it as a picture. Don't look for a precise composition, a sole and increasing interest, the skilful management of a well-ordered and congruous plot. I have tales and novels before me which I am cutting up into scenes. Never mind the _finis_, I am amusing myself on the road. It is not the end of the journey which pleases me, but the journey itself. Is there any need in going so straight and quick? Do you only care to know whether the poor merchant of Venice will escape Shylock's knife? Here are two happy lovers, seated under the palace walls on a calm night; wouldn't you like to listen to the peaceful reverie which arises like a perfume from the bottom of their hearts?"

"'How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st, But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims; Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. (_Enter musicians._) Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn: With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear. And draw her home with music. _Jessica._ I am never merry when I hear sweet music.'"[724]

"Have I not the right, when I see the big laughing face of a clownish servant, to stop near him, see him gesticulate, frolic, gossip, go through his hundred pranks and his hundred grimaces, and treat myself to the comedy of his spirit and gayety? Two fine gentlemen pass by. I hear the rolling fire of their metaphors, and I follow their skirmish of wit. Here in a corner is the artless arch face of a young wench. Do you forbid me to linger by her, to watch her smiles, her sudden blushes, the childish pout of her rosy lips, the coquetry of her pretty motions? You are in a great hurry if the prattle of this fresh and musical voice can't stop you. Is it no pleasure to view this succession of sentiments and faces? Is your fancy so dull that you must have the mighty mechanism of a geometrical plot to shake it? My sixteenth century playgoers were easier to move. A sunbeam that had lost its way on an old wall, a foolish song thrown into the middle of a drama, occupied their mind as well as the blackest of catastrophes. After the horrible scene in which Shylock brandished his butcher's knife before Antonio's bare breast, they saw just as willingly the petty household wrangle, and the amusing bit of raillery which ends the piece. Like soft moving water, their soul rose and sank in an instant to the level of the poet's emotion, and their sentiments readily flowed in the bed he had prepared for them. They let him stray here and there on his journey, and did not forbid him to make two voyages at once. They allowed several plots in one. If but the slightest thread united them it was sufficient. Lorenzo eloped with Jessica, Shylock was frustrated in his revenge, Portia's suitors failed in the test imposed upon them; Portia, disguised as a doctor of laws, took from her husband the ring which he had promised never to part with; these three or four comedies, disunited, mingled, were shuffled and unfolded together, like an unknotted skein in which threads of a hundred colors are entwined. Together with diversity, my spectators allowed improbability. Comedy is a slight winged creature, which flutters from dream to dream, whose wings you would break if you held it captive in the narrow prison of common-sense. Do not press its fictions too hard; do not probe their contents. Let them float before your eyes like a charming swift dream. Let the fleeting apparition plunge back into the bright misty land from whence it came. For an instant it deluded you; let it suffice. It is sweet to leave the world of realities behind you; the mind rests amidst impossibilities. We are happy when delivered from the rough chains of logic, to wander amongst strange adventures, to live in sheer romance, and know that we are living there. I do not try to deceive you, and make you believe in the world where I take you. A man must disbelieve it in order to enjoy it. We must give ourselves up to illusion, and feel that we are giving ourselves up to it. We must smile as we listen. We smile in "The Winter's Tale" when Hermione descends from her pedestal, and when, Leontes discovers his wife in the statue, having believed her to be dead. We smile in "Cymbeline" when we see the lone cavern in which the young princes have lived like savage hunters. Improbability deprives emotions of their sting. The events interest or touch us without making us suffer. At the very moment when sympathy is too intense, we remind ourselves that it is all a fancy. They become like distant objects, whose distance softens their outline, and wraps them in a luminous veil of blue air. Your true comedy is an opera. We listen to sentiments without thinking too much of plot. We follow the tender or gay melodies without reflecting that they interrupt the action. We dream elsewhere on hearing music; here I bid you dream on hearing verse."

Then the speaker of the prologue retires, and the actors come on.

"As You Like It" is a caprice.[725] Action there is none; interest barely; likelihood still less. And the whole is charming. Two cousins, princes' daughters, come to a forest with a court clown, Celia disguised as a shepherdess, Rosalind as a boy. They find here the old duke, Rosalind's father, who, driven out of his duchy, lives with his friends like a philosopher and a hunter. They find amorous shepherds, who with songs and prayers pursue intractable shepherdesses. They discover or they meet with lovers who become their husbands. Suddenly it is announced that the wicked Duke Frederick, who had usurped the crown, has just retired to a cloister, and restored the throne to the old exiled duke. Everyone gets married, everyone dances, everything ends with a "rustic revelry." Where is the pleasantness of these puerilities? First, the fact of its being puerile; the absence of the serious is refreshing; There are no events, and there is no plot. We gently follow the easy current of graceful or melancholy emotions, which takes us away and moves us about without wearying. The place adds to the illusion and charm. It is an autumn forest, in which the sultry rays permeate the blushing oak leaves, or the half-stripped, ashes tremble and smile to the feeble breath of evening. The lovers wander by brooks that "brawl" under antique roots. As you listen to them you see the slim birches, whose cloak of lace grows glossy under the slant rays of the sun that gilds them, and the thoughts wander down the mossy vistas in which their footsteps are not heard. What better place could be chosen for the comedy of sentiment and the play of heart-fancies? Is not this a fit spot in which to listen to love-talk? Someone has seen Orlando, Rosalind's lover, in this glade; she hears it and blushes. "Alas the day!... What did he, when thou sawest him? What said he? How looked he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? and when shalt thou see him again?" Then, with a lower voice, somewhat hesitating: "Looks he as freshly as he did the day he wrestled?" She is not yet exhausted: "Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak. Sweet, say on."[726] One question follows another, she closes the mouth of her friend, who is ready to answer. At every word she jests, but agitated, blushing, with a forced gayety; her bosom heaves, and her heart beats. Nevertheless she is calmer when Orlando comes; bandies words with him; sheltered under her disguise, she makes him confess that he loves Rosalind. Then she plagues him, like the frolic, the wag, the coquette she is. "Why, how now, Orlando, where have you been all this while? You a lover?" Orlando repeats that he loves Rosalind, and she pleases herself by making him repeat it more than once. She sparkles with wit, jests, mischievous pranks; pretty fits of anger, feigned sulks, bursts of laughter, deafening babble, engaging caprices. "Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humor, and like enough to consent. What would you say to me now, an I were your very, very Rosalind?" And every now and then she repeats with an arch smile, "And I am your Rosalind; am I not your Rosalind?"[727] Orlando protests that he would die. Die! Who ever thought of dying for love? Leander? He took one bath too many in the Hellespont; so poets have said he died for love. Troilus? A Greek broke his head with a club; so poets have said he died for love. Come, come, Rosalind will be softer. And then she plays at marriage with him, and makes Celia pronounce the solemn words. She irritates and torments her pretended husband; tells him all the whims she means to indulge in, all the pranks she will play, all the teasing he will have to endure. The retorts come one after another like fireworks. At every phrase we follow the looks of these sparkling eyes, the curves of this laughing mouth, the quick movements of this supple figure. It is a bird's petulance and volubility. "O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love." Then she provokes her cousin Celia, sports with her hair, calls her by every woman's name. Antitheses without end, words all a-jumble, quibbles, pretty exaggerations, word-racket; as you listen, you fancy it is the warbling of a nightingale. The trill of repeated metaphors, the melodious roll of the poetical gamut, the summer-warbling rustling under the foliage, change the piece into a veritable opera. The three lovers end by chanting a sort of trio. The first throws out a fancy, the others take it up. Four times this strophe is renewed; and the symmetry of ideas, added to the jingle of the rhymes, makes of a dialogue a concerto of love:

"_Phebe._ Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to love. _Silvius._ It is to be all made of sighs and tears; And so am I for Phebe. _P._ And I for Ganymede. _Orlando._ And I for Rosalind. _Rosalind._ And I for no woman.... _S._ It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all made of wishes, All adoration, duty, and observance, All humbleness, all patience and impatience, All purity, all trial, all observance; And so I am for Phebe. _P._ And so am I for Ganymede. _O._ And so am I for Rosalind. _R._ And so am I for no woman."[728]

The necessity of singing is so urgent that a minute later songs break out of themselves. The prose and the conversation end in lyric poetry. We pass straight on into these odes. We do not find ourselves in a new country. We feel the emotion and foolish gayety as if it were a holiday. We see the graceful couple whom the song of the two pages brings before us, passing in the misty light "o'er the green corn-field," amid the hum of sportive insects, on the finest day of the flowering spring-time. Unlikelihood grows natural, and we are not astonished when we see Hymen leading the two brides by the hand to give them to their husbands.

Whilst the young folk sing, the old folk talk. Their life also is a novel, but a sad one. Shakespeare's delicate soul, bruised by the shocks of social life, took refuge in contemplations of solitary life. To forget the strife and annoyances of the world, he must bury himself in a wide silent forest, and

"Under the shade of melancholy boughs, Loose and neglect the creeping hours of time."[729]

We look at the bright images which the sun carves on the white beech-boles, the shade of trembling leaves flickering on the thick moss, the long waves of the summit of the trees; then the sharp sting of care is blunted; we suffer no more, simply remembering that we suffered once; we feel nothing but a gentle misanthropy, and being renewed, we are the better for it. The old duke is happy in his exile. Solitude has given him rest, delivered him from flattery, reconciled him to nature. He pities the stags which he is obliged to hunt for food:

"Come, shall we go and kill us venison? And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools, Being native burghers of this desert city, Should in their own confines with forked heads Have their round haunches gored."[730]

Nothing sweeter than this mixture of tender compassion, dreamy philosophy, delicate sadness, poetical complaints, and rustic songs. One of the lords sings:

"Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man's ingratitude; Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen, Although thy breath be rude. Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly: Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: Then, heigh-ho, the holly! This life is most jolly."[731]

Amongst these lords is found a soul that suffers more, Jacques the melancholy, one of Shakespeare's best-loved characters, a transparent mask behind which we perceive the face of the poet. He is sad because he is tender; he feels the contact of things too keenly, and what leaves others indifferent, makes him weep.[732] He does not scold, he is sad; he does not reason, he is moved; he has not the combative spirit of a reforming moralist; his soul is sick and weary of life. Impassioned imagination leads quickly to disgust. Like opium, it excites and shatters. It leads man to the loftiest philosophy, then lets him down to the whims of a child. Jacques leaves other men abruptly, and goes to the quiet nooks to be alone. He loves his sadness, and would not exchange it for joy. Meeting Orlando, he says:

"Rosalind is your love's name? _Orlando._ Yes, just. _Jacques._ I do not like her name."[733]

He has the fancies of a nervous woman. He is scandalized because Orlando writes sonnets on the forest trees. He is eccentric, and finds subjects of grief and gayety where others would see nothing of the sort:

"A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the forest, A motley fool; a miserable world! As I do live by food, I met a fool; Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun, And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms, In good set terms and yet a motley fool...."

Jacques hearing him moralize in such a manner begins to laugh "sans intermission" that a fool could be so meditative:

"O noble fool; a worthy fool! Motley's the only wear.... O that I were a fool! I am ambitious for a motley coat."[734]

The next minute he returns to his melancholy dissertations, bright pictures whose vivacity explains his character, and betrays Shakespeare, hiding under his name:

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel, And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, In second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."[735]

"As you Like it" is a half dream. "Midsummer Night's Dream" is a complete one.

The scene, buried in the far-off mist of fabulous antiquity, carries us back to Theseus, Duke of Athens, who is preparing his palace for his marriage with the beautiful queen of the Amazons. The style, loaded with contorted images, fills the mind with strange and splendid visions, and the airy elf-world divert the comedy into the fairy-land from whence it sprung.

Love is still the theme: of all sentiments, is it not the greatest fancy-weaver? But love is not heard here in the charming, prattle of Rosalind; it is glaring, like the season of the year. It does not brim over in slight conversations, in supple and skipping prose; it breaks forth into big rhyming odes, dressed in magnificent metaphors, sustained by impassioned accents, such as a warm night, odorous and star-spangled, inspires in a poet and a lover. Lysander and Hermia agree to meet.

"_Lysander._ To-morrow night when Phoebe doth behold Her silver visage in the watery glass, Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass, A time that lovers' flights doth still conceal, Through Athens' gates have we devised to steal. _Hermia._ And in the wood, where often you and I Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie.... There my Lysander and myself shall meet."[736]

They get lost, and fall asleep, wearied, under the trees. Puck squeezes in the youth's eyes the juice of a magic flower, and changes his heart. Presently, when he awakes, he will become enamored of the first woman he sees. Meanwhile Demetrius, Hermia's rejected lover, wanders with Helena, whom he rejects, in the solitary wood. The magic flower changes him in turn, he now loves Helena. The lovers flee and pursue one another, beneath the lofty trees, in the calm night. We smile at their transports, their complaints, their ecstasies, and yet we join in them. This passion is a dream, and yet it moves us: It is like those airy webs which we find at morning on the crest of the hedgerows where the dew has spread them, and whose weft sparkles like a jewel-casket. Nothing can be more fragile, and nothing more graceful. The poet sports with emotions; he mingles, confuses, redoubles, interweaves them; he twines and untwines these loves like the mazes of a dance, and we see the noble and tender figures pass by the verdant bushes, beneath the radiant eyes of the stars, now wet with tears, now bright with rapture. They have the abandonment of true love, not the grossness of sensual love. Nothing causes us to fall from the ideal world in which Shakespeare conducts us. Dazzled by beauty, they adore it, and the spectacle of their happiness, their emotion, and their tenderness, is a kind of enchantment.

Above these two couples flutters and hums the swarm of elves and fairies. They also love. Titania, their queen, has a young boy for her favorite, son of an Indian king, of whom Oberon, her husband, wishes to deprive her. They quarrel, so that the elves creep for fear into the acorn cups, in the golden primroses. Oberon, by way of vengeance, touches Titania's sleeping eyes with the magic flower, and thus on waking the nimblest and most charming of the fairies finds herself enamored of a stupid blockhead with an ass's head. She kneels before him; she sets on his "hairy temples a coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers":

"And that same dew, which sometime on the buds Was wont to swell like round and orient pearls, Stood now within the pretty floweret's eyes, Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail."[737]

She calls round her all her fairy attendants;

"Be kind and courteous to this gentleman; Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes; Feed him with apricocks and dewberries, With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries; The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes, To have my love to bed and to arise; And pluck the wings from painted butterflies To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.... Come, wait upon him; lead him to my bower. The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye; And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, Lamenting some enforced chastity. Tie up my love's tongue, bring him silently."[738]

It was necessary, for her love brayed horribly, and to all the offers of Titania, replied with a petition for hay. What can be sadder and sweeter than this irony of Shakespeare? What raillery against love, and what tenderness for love! The sentiment is divine; its object unworthy. The heart is ravished, the eyes blind. It is a golden butterfly, fluttering in the mud; and Shakespeare, whilst painting its misery, preserves all its beauty:

"Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed, While I thy amiable cheeks do coy, And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head, And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.... Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.... So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle Gently entwist; the female ivy so Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. O, how I love thee! how I dote on thee!"[739]

At the return of morning, when

"The eastern gate, all fiery red, Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams, Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams,"[740]

the enchantment ceases, Titania awakes on her couch of wild thyme and drooping violets. She drives the monster away; her recollections of the night are effaced in a vague twilight:

"These things seem small and undistinguishable, Like far-off mountains turned into clouds."[741]

And the fairies

"Go seek some dew drops here And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear."[742]

Such is Shakespeare's fantasy, a slight tissue of bold inventions, of ardent passions, melancholy mockery, dazzling poetry, such as one of Titania's elves would have made. Nothing could be more like the poet's mind than these nimble genii, children of air and flame, whose flights "compass the globe" in a second, who glide over the foam of the waves and skip between the atoms of the winds. Ariel flies, an invisible songster, around shipwrecked men to console them, discovers the thoughts of traitors, pursues the savage beast Caliban, spreads gorgeous visions before lovers, and does all in a lightning-flash:

"Where the bee sucks, there suck I: In a cowslip's bell I lie.... Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.... I drink the air before me, and return Or ere your pulse twice beat."[743]

Shakespeare glides over things on as swift a wing, by leaps as sudden, with a touch as delicate.

What a soul! what extent of action, and what sovereignty of an unique faculty! what diverse creations, and what persistence of the same impress! There they all are united, and all marked by the same sign, void of will and reason, governed by mood, imagination, or pure passion, destitute of the faculties contrary to those of the poet, dominated by the corporeal type which his painter's eyes have conceived, endowed by the habits of mind and by the vehement sensibility which he finds in himself.[744] Go through the groups, and you will only discover in them divers forms and divers states of the same power. Here, a herd of brutes, dotards, and gossips, made up of a mechanical imagination; further on, a company of men of wit, animated by a gay and foolish imagination; then, a charming swarm of women whom their delicate imagination raises so high, and their self-forgetting love carries so far; elsewhere a band of villains, hardened by unbridled passions, inspired by artistic rapture; in the centre a mournful train of grand characters, whose excited brain is filled with sad or criminal visions, and whom an inner destiny urges to murder, madness, or death. Ascend one stage, and contemplate the whole scene: the aggregate bears the same mark as the details. The drama reproduces promiscuously uglinesses, basenesses, horrors, unclean details, profligate and ferocious manners, the whole reality of life just as it is, when it is unrestrained by decorum, common-sense, reason, and duty. Comedy, led through a phantasmagoria of pictures, gets lost in the likely and the unlikely, with no other connection but the caprice of an amused imagination, wantonly disjointed and romantic, an opera without music, a concerto of melancholy and tender sentiments, which bears the mind into the supernatural world, and brings before our eyes on its fairy-wings the genius which has created it. Look now. Do you not see the poet behind the crowd of his creations? They have heralded his approach. They have all shown somewhat of him. Ready, impetuous, impassioned, delicate, his genius is pure imagination, touched more vividly and by slighter things than ours. Hence his style, blooming with exuberant images, loaded with exaggerated metaphors, whose strangeness is like incoherence, whose wealth is superabundant, the work of a mind, which, at the least incitement, produces too much and takes too wide leaps. Hence this involuntary psychology, and this terrible penetration, which instantaneously perceiving all the effects of a situation, and all the details of a character, concentrates them in every response, and gives to a figure a relief and a coloring which create illusion. Hence our emotion and tenderness. We say to him, as Desdemona to Othello: "I love thee for the battles, sieges, fortunes thou hast passed, and for the distressful stroke that thy youth suffered."

[Footnote 587: Halliwell's "Life of Shakespeare."]

[Footnote 588: Born 1564, died 1616. He adapted plays as early as 1591. The first play entirely from his pen appeared in 1593.--Payne Collier.]

[Footnote 589: Mr. Halliwell and other commentators try to prove that at this time the preliminary trothplight was regarded as the real marriage; that this trothplight had taken place, and that there was therefore no irregularity in Shakespeare's conduct.]

[Footnote 590: Halliwell, 123.]

[Footnote 591: All these anecdotes are traditions, and consequently more or less doubtful; but the other facts are authentic.]

[Footnote 592: Terms of an extant document. He is named along with Burbage and Greene.]

[Footnote 593: Sonnet 110.]

[Footnote 594: See Sonnets 91 and 111; also "Hamlet," III. 2. Many of Hamlet's words would come better from the mouth of an actor than a prince. See also the 66th Sonnet, "Tired with all these."]

[Footnote 595: Sonnet 29.]

[Footnote 596: "Hamlet," III. 1.]

[Footnote 597: Sonnet 111.]

[Footnote 598: Anecdote written in 1602 on the authority of Tooley the actor.]

[Footnote 599: The Earl of Southampton was nineteen years old when Shakespeare dedicated his "Adonis" to him.]

[Footnote 600: See Titian's picture. Loves of the Gods, at Blenheim.]

[Footnote 601: "Venus and Adonis," lines 548-553.]

[Footnote 602: Ibid. lines 55-60.]

[Footnote 603: Ibid, lines 853-858.]

[Footnote 604: Compare the first pieces of Alfred de Musset, "Contes d'Italie et d'Espagne."]

[Footnote 605: Crawley, quoted by Ph. Chasles, "Études sur Shakspeare."]

[Footnote 606: A famed French courtesan (1613-1650), the heroine of a drama of that name, by Victor Hugo, having for its subject-matter: "Love purifies everything."--Tr.]

[Footnote 607: Sonnet 138.]

[Footnote 608: Two characters in Molière's "Misanthrope." The scene referred to is Act V. Scene 7.--Tr.]

[Footnote 609: Sonnet 142.]

[Footnote 610: Sonnet 95.]

[Footnote 611: Sonnet 98.]

[Footnote 612: Ibid.]

[Footnote 613: Sonnet 99.]

[Footnote 614: Sonnet 151.]

[Footnote 615: Sonnet 151.]

[Footnote 616: Sonnet 144; also the "Passionate Pilgrim," 2.]

[Footnote 617: This new interpretation of the Sonnets is due to the ingenious and learned conjectures of M. Ph. Chasles.--For a short history of these Sonnets, see Dyce's "Shakspeare," I. pp. 96-102. This learned editor says: "I contend that allusions scattered through the whole series are not to be hastily referred to the personal circumstances of Shakspeare."--Tr.]

[Footnote 618: Miranda, Desdemona, Viola. The following are the first words of the Duke in "Twelfth Night": "If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odor! Enough; no more: 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou, That, notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there. Of what validity and pitch soever, But falls into abatement and low price. Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy That it alone is high-fantastical."]

[Footnote 619: H. Chettle, in repudiating Greene's sarcasm, attributed it to him.]

[Footnote 620: Dyce, "Shakespeare," I. 27: "Of French and Italian, I apprehend, he knew but little."--Tr.]

[Footnote 621: Sonnet 29.]

[Footnote 622: Sonnet 73.]

[Footnote 623: Sonnet 71.]

[Footnote 624: The part in which he excelled was that of the ghost in "Hamlet."]

[Footnote 625: Greene's "A Groatsworth of Wit," etc.]

[Footnote 626: "He was a respectable man. A good word; what does it mean? He kept a gig."--From Thurtell's trial for the murder of Weare.]

[Footnote 627: The model of an optimist, the hero of one of Voltaire's tales.--Tr.]

[Footnote 628: See his portraits, and in particular his bust.]

[Footnote 629: Especially in his later plays: "Tempest, Twelfth Night."]

[Footnote 630: "Hamlet," III. 3.]

[Footnote 631: Act III. Scene 4.]

[Footnote 632: Act III. Scene 4.]

[Footnote 633: This is why, in the eyes of a writer of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare's style is the most obscure, pretentious, painful, barbarous, and absurd, that could be imagined.]

[Footnote 634: Shakespeare's vocabulary is the most copious of all. It comprises about 15,000 words; Milton's only 8,000.]

[Footnote 635: See the conversation of Laertes and his sister, and of Laertes and Polonius, in "Hamlet." The style is foreign to the situation; and we see here plainly the natural and necessary process of Shakespeare's thought.]

[Footnote 636: "Winter's Tale," I. 2.]

[Footnote 637: One of Molière's characters in "Tartuffe."--Tr.]

[Footnote 638: "Romeo and Juliet," III. 5.]

[Footnote 639: "Henry VIII," II. 3, and many other scenes.]

[Footnote 640: "Much Ado about Nothing." See also the manner in which Henry V in Shakespeare's "King Henry V" pays court to Katharine of France (V. 2).]

[Footnote 641: Ibid. II. 1.]

[Footnote 642: Act IV. 2.]

[Footnote 643: Second part of "Henry VI," IV. 6.]

[Footnote 644: "Henry VI," 2d part, IV. 2, 6, 7.]

[Footnote 645: "King Lear," III. 7.]

[Footnote 646: "The Tempest," IV. 1.]

[Footnote 647: See "Troilus and Cressida," II. 3, the jesting manner in which the generals drive on this fierce brute.]

[Footnote 648: "Cymbeline," II. 3.]

[Footnote 649: Ibid. III. 5.]

[Footnote 650: "Romeo and Juliet," I. 3.]

[Footnote 651: "Romeo and Juliet," II. 5.]

[Footnote 652: Ibid. III. 5.]

[Footnote 653: "Romeo and Juliet," II. 4.]

[Footnote 654: "Much Ado about Nothing," II. 1.]

[Footnote 655: "Romeo and Juliet," II. 1.]

[Footnote 656: Ibid. I. 4.]

[Footnote 657: "Romeo and Juliet," I. 4.]

[Footnote 658: First part of "King Henry IV," III. 3.]

[Footnote 659: First Part of "King Henry IV," IV. 2.]

[Footnote 660: Ibid. II. 4.]

[Footnote 661: "Othello," III. 3.]

[Footnote 662: Ibid.]

[Footnote 663: Ibid.]

[Footnote 664: "Othello," III. 3.]

[Footnote 665: "Cymbeline," III. 5.]

[Footnote 666: "Coriolanus," I. 3.]

[Footnote 667: Ibid.]

[Footnote 668: "Romeo and Juliet," I. 5.]

[Footnote 669: "The Tempest," III. 1.]

[Footnote 670: "King Lear," IV. 7.]

[Footnote 671: "O ye're well met: the hoarded plague o' the gods Requite your love! If that I could for weeping, you should hear-- Nay, and you shall hear some.... I'll tell thee what; yet go: Nay but thou shalt stay too: I would my son Were in Arabia, and thy tribe before him, His good sword in his hand."--Coriolanus, IV. 2.

See again, "Coriolanus," I. 3, the frank and abandoned triumph of a woman of the people, "I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man."]

[Footnote 672: Ibid. I. 3.]

[Footnote 673: "Othello," II. 3.]

[Footnote 674: Ibid. II. 1.]

[Footnote 675: "Othello," II. 1.]

[Footnote 676: Ibid. IV. 1.]

[Footnote 677: See the like cynicism and scepticism in Richard III. Both begin by slandering human nature, and both are misanthropical of malice prepense.]

[Footnote 678: "Othello," II. 3.]

[Footnote 679: See his conversation with Brabantio, then with Roderigo,