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all;" but who yet think that Proteus ought to have been at least banished, or sent to the galleys for a few years with the outlaws;-that Angelo, in Measure for Measure, should have been hanged;that Leontes, in the Winter's Tale, was not sufficiently punished for his cruel jealousy by sixteen years of sorrow and repentance;--that Iachimo, in Cymbeline, is not treated with poetical justice when Posthumus says,

"Kneel not to me:

The power that I have on you is to spare you;

and that Prospero is a very weak magician not to apply his power to a better purpose than only to give his wicked brother and his followers a little passing punishment;-weak indeed, when he has them in his hands, to exclaim,

"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,

Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury

Do I take part: the rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend

Not a frown further: go release them, Ariel."

Not so thought Shakspere. He, that never represented crime as virtue, had the largest pity for the criminal. "He has never varnished over wild and blood-thirsty passions with a pleasing exterior-never clothed crime and want of principle with a false shew of greatness of soul;" + but, on the other hand, he has never made the criminal a monster, and led us to flatter ourselves that he is not a man. It is as a man, subject to the same infirmities as all are who are born of woman, that he represents Proteus, and Iachimo, and other of the lesser criminals, as receiving pardon upon repentance. It is not so much that they are deserving of pardon, but that it would be inconsistent with the characters of the pardoners that they should exercise their power with severity. Shakspere lived in an age when the vindictive passions were too frequently let loose by men of all sects and opinions, and much too frequently in the name of that religion which came to teach peace and good will. Is it to be objected to him, then, that wherever he could he asserted the supremacy of charity and mercy ;- that he taught men the “quality” of that blessed principle which

"Droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven; "—

that he proclaimed-no doubt to the annoyance of all self-worshippers-that "the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together;"-and that he asked of those who would be hard upon the wretched, "Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?" We may be permitted to believe that this large toleration had its influence in an age of racks and gibbets; and we know not how much of this charitable spirit may have come to the aid of the more authoritative and holier teaching of the same principle,-forgotten even by the teachers, but gradually finding its way into the heart of the multitude,-till human punishments at length were compelled to be subservient to other influences than those of the angry passions, and the laws could only dare to ask for justice, but not for vengeauce.

The generous, confiding, courageous, and forgiving spirit of Valentine, are well appreciated by the Duke-"Thou art a gentleman." In this praise is included all the virtues which Shakspere desired to represent in the character of Valentine; - the absence of which virtues he has also indicated in the selfish Proteus. The Duke adds, "and well derived." "Thou art a gentleman"

in "thy spirit"-a gentleman in "thy unrivalled merit;" and thou hast the honours of ancestrythe further advantage of honourable progenitors. This line, in one of Shakspere's earliest plays, is a key to some of his personal feelings. He was himself a true gentleman, though the child of humble parents. His exquisite delineations of the female character establish the surpassing refinement and purity of his mind in relation to women;--and thus, if there were no other evidence of the son of the wool-stapler of Stratford being a "gentleman," this one prime feature of the character would be his most pre-eminently. Well then might he, looking to himself, assert the principle that rank and ancestry are additions to the character of the gentleman, but not indispensable component parts. "Thou art a gentleman, and well derived."

We have dwelt so long upon the contrasts in the characters of the "two gentlemen," Proteus and Valentine, that we may appear to have forgotten our purpose of also tracing the distinctive peculiarities of the two ladies "beloved." Julia, in the sweetest feminine tenderness, is entirely

* Lardner's Cyclopædia, Literary and Scientific Men, vol. iii. p. 122.

+ A. W. Schlegel, Black, vol. ii. p. 137.

worthy of the poet of Juliet and Imogen. Amidst her deep and sustaining love she has all the playfulness that belongs to the true woman. When she receives the letter of Proteus, the struggle between her affected indifference, and her real disposition to cherish a deep affection, is exceedingly pretty. Then comes, and very quickly, the development of the change which real love works,— the plighting her troth with Proteus,-the sorrow for his absence,-the flight to him,-the grief for his perjury, the forgiveness. How full of heart and gentleness is all her conduct, after she has discovered the inconstancy of Proteus! How beautiful an absence is there of all upbraiding either of her faithless lover, or of his new mistress. Of the one she says,

Because I love him, I must pity him;"

the other she describes, without a touch of envy, as

"A virtuous gentlewoman, mild, and beautiful."

Silvia is a character of much less intensity of feeling. She plays with her accepted lover as with a toy given to her for her amusement; she delights in a contest of words between him and his rival Thurio; she avows she is betrothed to Valentine, when she reproves Proteus for his perfidy, but she allows Proteus to send for her picture, which is, at least, not the act of one who strongly felt and resented his treachery to his friend. When she resolves to escape from her prison, she does not go forth to danger and difficulty with the spirit of Julia," a true devoted pilgrim,”—but she places herself under the protection of Eglamour-(" a very perfect gentle knight," as Chaucer would have called him), "For the ways are dangerous to pass."

She goes to her banished lover, but she flies from her father

"To keep me from a most unholy match."

When she encounters Proteus in the forest, she, indeed, spiritedly avows her love for Valentine, and her hatred for himself; nor is there, in any of the slight distinctions which we have pointed out, any real inferiority in her character to that of Julia. She is only more under the influence of circumstances. Julia, by her decision, subdues the circumstances of her situation to her own will. Turn we now to Speed and Launce, the two "clownish" servants of Valentine and Proteus. In a note introducing the first scene between Speed and Proteus, Pope says, "This whole scene, like many others in these plays (some of which I believe, were written by Shakspere, and others interpolated by the players), is composed of the lowest and most trifling conceits, to be accounted for only by the gross taste of the age he lived in; populo ut placerent. I wish I had authority to leave them out." There are passages in Shakspere which an editor would desire to leave out, if he consulted only the standard of taste in his own age; just as there are passages in Pope which we now consider filthy and corrupting, which the wits and fine ladies of the Court of Anne only regarded as playful and piquant. The scenes, however, in which Speed and Launce are prominent, with the exception of a few obscure allusions, which will not be discovered unless a commentator points them out, and of one piece of plain speaking in Launce, which is refinement itself when compared with the classical works of the Dean of St. Patrick's,-these scenes offer a remarkable instance of the reform which Shakspere was enabled to effect in the conduct of the English stage, and which, without doubt, banished a great deal of what had been offensive to good manners, as well as good taste. "The clown" or "fool" of the earlier English drama was introduced into every piece. He came on between the acts, and sometimes interrupted even the scenes by his buffoonery. Occasionally the author set down a few words for him to speak; but out of these he had to spin a monologue of doggerel verses created by his "extemporal wit." The "Jeasts" of Richard Tarleton, the most celebrated of these clowns, were published in 1511; and fortunate it must have been for the morals of our ancestors that Shakspere constructed dialogue for his "Clowns," and insisted on their adhering to it: "Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them." The "Clown" was the successor of the "Vice" of the old Moralities; and he was the representative of the domestic "Jester" that flourished before and during the age of Shakspere. We shall have frequent occasion to return to this subject. The "clownish" servant was something intermediate between the privileged "fool" of the old drama, and the pert lacquey of the later comedy. But he originally stood in the place of the genuine "Clown;" and his " conceits are to be regarded partly as a reflection of the manners of the most refined, whose wit, in a great degree, consisted in a play upon words, and partly as a law of the established drama, which even Shakspere could not dispense with, if he had desired so to do. But his instinctive knowledge of the value of

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his dramatic materials led him to retain the "Clowns" amongst other inheritances of the old stage; and who that has seen the use he has made of the "allowed fool" in Twelfth Night, and As You Like It, and All's Well that Ends Well, and especially in Lear,-of the country clown in Love's Labour's Lost and The Merchant of Venice,-and of the "clownish" or witty servant in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, will regret that he did not cast away what Pope has called "low" and "trifling," determining to retain a machinery equally adapted to the relief of the tragic and the heightening of the comic, and entirely in keeping with what we now call the romantic drama,—an edifice of which Shakspere found the scaffolding raised and the stone quarried, but which it was reserved for him alone to build up upon a plan in which the most apparently incongruous parts were subjected to the laws of fitness and proportion, and wherein even the grotesque (like the grinning heads in our fine Gothic cathedrals) was in harmony with the beautiful and the sublime. Speed and Launce are both punsters; but Speed is by far the more inveterate one. He begins with a pun - my master "is shipp'd already, and I have play'd the sheep (ship) in losing him." The same play upon words which the ship originates runs through the scene; and we are by no means sure that if Shakspere made Verona a sea-port in ignorance (which we very much doubt),-if, like his own Hotspur, he had "forgot the map," - whether he would, at any time, have converted Valentine into a land traveller, and have lost his pun upon a better knowledge. Of these apparent violations of propriety we have already spoken in the Introductory Notice. In the scene before us, Speed establishes his character for a "quick wit;" Launce, on the contrary, very soon earns the reputation of "a mad-cap" and "an ass." And yet Launce can pun as perseveringly as Speed. But he can do something more. He can throw in the most natural touches of humour amongst his quibbles; and, indeed, he altogether forgets his quibbles when he is indulging his own peculiar vein. That vein is unquestionably drollery,-as Hazlitt has well described it,-the richest farcical drollery. His descriptions of his leave-taking, while "the dog all this while sheds not a tear," and of the dog's. misbehaviour when he thrust "himself into the company of three or four gentleman-like dogs," are perfectly irresistible. We must leave thee, Launce; but we leave thee with less regret, for thou hast worthy successors. Thou wert among the first fruits, we think, of the creations of the greatest comic genius that the world has seen, and thou wilt endure for ever, with Bottom, and Malvolio, and Parolles, and Dogberry. Thou wert conceived, perhaps, under that humble roof at Stratford, to gaze upon which all nations have since sent forth their pilgrims! Or, perhaps, when the young poet was, for the first time, left alone in the solitude of London, he looked back upon that shelter of his boyhood, and shadowed out his own parting in thine, Launce!

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