220 Ludgate, because gate is no British word, and, ancient language; and Geffery of Monmouth, 10 SCENE I.-"Mulmutius made our laws," &c. [Coin of Augustus.] 11 SCENE I." Thy Casar knighted me." Shakspere still follows Holinshed literally :"This man was brought up at Rome, and there was made knight by Augustus Cæsar." Douce objects to the word knight as a downright anachronism; as well as to another similar passage, where Cymbeline addresses Belarius and his sons: "Bow your knees, Arise my knights o' the battle." Both Holinshed and Shakspere, in applying a term of the feudal ages to convey the notion of a Roman dignity, did precisely what they were called upon to do. They used a word which conveyed a distinct image much more clearly than any phrase of stricter propriety. They translated ideas as well as words. 12 SCENE II.-"A franklin's housewife." "A Frankelein was in this compagnie; At sessions ther was he lord and sire. Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, 333. But a century and a half later than Chaucer, he was still a dignified member of the landed aristocracy. England is so thick spread and filled with rich and landed men, that there is scarce a small village in which you may not find a knight, an esquire, or some substantial householder, commonly called a frankleyne; all men of considerable estates." This is the description of Sir John Fortescue, in the reign of Henry VI. The franklin in the time of "A shards. 14 SCENE IV.-" And, for I am richer than to be hang'd by the walls, Shakspere had, for the most part, gone upward | like wing. The shard-borne beetle of 'Macinto the squire, or downward into the yeoman; beth' is therefore, the beetle supported on its and the name had probably become synonymous with the small freeholder and cultivator. franklin's housewife" would wear "no costlier suit" than Imogen desired for concealment. Latimer has described the farmer of the early part of the sixteenth century:-"My father was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pound by year, at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for an hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine." "Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her." A shard here is a thing divided; and it is used for something worthless,-fragments. Mr. Tollet says that shard signifies dung; and that "the shard-born beetle" in 'Macbeth' is the beetle born in dung. This is certainly only a secondary meaning of shard. We cannot doubt that Shakspere, in the passage before us, uses the epithet sharded as applied to the flight of the beetle. The sharded beetle, - the beetle whose scaly wing-cases are not formed for a flight far above the earth,-is contrasted with the full-wing'd eagle. The shards support the insect when he rises from the ground; but they do not enable him to cleave the air with a bird I must be ripp'd." Steevens has an interesting note upon this passage: "To hang by the walls' does not mean, to be converted into hangings for a room, but to be hung up, as useless, among the neglected contents of a wardrobe. So in 'Measure for Measure' : "That have, like unscour'd armour, hung by the wall." "When a boy, at an ancient mansion-house in Suffolk I saw one of these repositories, which (thanks to a succession of old maids!) had been preserved with superstitious reverence for almost a century and a half. "Clothes were not formerly, as at present, made of slight materials; were not kept in drawers, or given away as soon as lapse of time or change of fashion had impaired their value. On the contrary, they were hung up on wooden pegs in a room apropriated to the sole purpose of receiving them; and, though such cast-off things as were composed of rich substances were ocasionally ripped for domestic uses (viz., mantles for infants, vests for children, and counterpanes for beds), articles of inferior quality were suffered to hang by the walls till age and moths had destroyed what pride would not permit to be worn by servants or poor relations." ACT IV. 15 SCENE II." But his neat cookery." MRS. LENNOX has the following remark upon this passage:-"This princess, forgetting that she had put on boy's clothes to be a spy upon the actions of her husband, commences cook to two young foresters and their father, who live in a cave; and we are told how nicely she sauced the broths. Certainly this princess had a most economical education." Douce has properly commented upon this impertinence:"Now what is this but to expose her own ignorance of ancient manners? If she had missed the advantage of qualifying herself as a commentator TRAGEDIES-VOL. II. on Shakspeare's plots by a perusal of our old romances, she ought at least to have remembered, what every well-informed woman of the present age is acquainted with, the education of the princesses in Homer's Odyssey.' It is idle to attempt to judge of ancient simplicity by a mere knowledge of modern manners; and such fastidious critics had better close the book of Shakspeare for ever." ("Illustrations,' vol. ii. page 104.) 16 SCENE II. "The ruddock would," &c. Percy asks, "Is this an allusion to the babes of the wood? or was the notion of the redbreast covering dead bodies general before the writing of that ballad?" It has been shown that the notion has been found in an earlier book of natural history; and there can be no doubt that it was an old popular belief. The redbreast has always been a favourite with the poets, and "Robin the mean, that best of all loves men," as Browne sings, was naturally employed in the last offices of love. Drayton says, directly imitating Shakspere : "Covering with moss the dead's unclosed eye The little red breast teacheth charity." In the beautiful stanza which Gray has omitted from his Elegy' the idea is put with his usual exquisite refinement : "There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen, are showers of violets found; The redbreast loves to build and warble there, And little footsteps lightly print the ground." 17 SCENE II.-"We have done our obsequies." In the 'Studies of Shakspere' (p. 372,) we have given an opinion as to the dramatic value of the dirge of Collins as compared with that of Shakspere. Taken apart from the scene, it will always be read with pleasure. A SONG. Sung by Guiderius and Arviragus over Fidele, supposed to be dead. To fair Fidele's grassy tomb, Soft maids and village hinds shall bring No wailing ghost shall dare appear And melting virgins own their love. No goblins lead their nightly crew: And dress thy grave with pearly dew. The redbreast oft at evening hours To deck the ground where thou art laid. 18 SCENE II. "I saw Jove's bird, the Roman eagle." The annexed beautiful coin of Domitian is the best illustration of this passage. something more than humorous. It is as profound, under a gay aspect, as some of the highest speculations of Hamlet. 21 SCENE V. "Postures beyond brief nature," &c. Warburton remarks, "It appears from a number of such passages as these that our author was not ignorant of the fine arts;" to which Steevens replies," "The pantheons of his own age (several of which I have seen) afford a most minute and particular account of the different degrees of beauty imputed to the different deities; and, as Shakspere had at least an opportunity of reading Chapman's translation of Homer, the first part of which was published in 1596, with additions in 1598, and entire in 1611, he might have taken these ideas from thence, without being at all indebted to his own particular ohservation, or acquaintance with statuary and painting." Steevens has here missed the point, as it was likely he would do. That Shakspere was familiar with works of art we have abundant proof. Take, for example, his vivid description in the "Tarquin and Lucrece' of "A piece Of skilful painting, made for Priam's Troy." But the passage before us indicates something more. In " postures beyond brief nature" is shadowed the highest principle of high art— that it is not essentially imitative-that it works in and through its own power, not in contradiction to nature, but heightening and refining reality. We have the same indication of the poet's profound knowledge of these subjects in Antony and Cleopatra : ' "O'erpicturing that Venus where we see FOR the dress of our ancient British ancestors of the time of Cymbeline or Cunobelin we have no pictorial authority, and the notices of ancient British costume which we find scattered amongst the classical historians are exceedingly scanty and indefinite. That the chiefs and the superior classes amongst them, however, were clothed completely and with barbaric splendour, there exists at present little doubt; and the naked savages with painted skins whose imaginary effigies adorned the 'Pictorial Histories' of our childhood, are now considered to convey a better idea of the more remote and barbarous tribes of the Maæatæ than of the inhabitants of Cantium or Kent ("the most civilised of all the Britons" as early as the time of Cæsar), and even to represent those only when, in accordance with a Celtic custom, they had thrown off their garments of skin or dyed cloths to rush upon an invading enemy. That all the Britons stained themselves with woad, which gave a blueish cast to the skin and made them look dreadful in battle, is distinctly stated by Cæsar: but he also assures us expressly that the inhabitants of the southern coasts differed but little in their manners from the Gauls, an assertion which is confirmed by the testimony of Strabo, Tacitus, and Pomponius Mela, the latter of whom says "the Britons fought armed after the Gaulish manner." The following description therefore of the Gauls by Diodorus Siculus becomes an authority for the arms and dress of the Britons, particularly as in many parts it corresponds with such evidence as exists in other cotemporaneous writers respecting the dress of the Britons themselves. "The Gauls wear bracelets about their wrists and arms, and massy chains of pure and beaten gold about their necks, and weighty rings upon their fingers", and corslets of gold upon their breasts". For stature they are tall, of a pale complexion, and red-haired, not only naturally, but they endeavour all they can to make it Pliny says the Britons and Gauls wore a ring on the middle finger. b A British corslet of gold, found at Mold, in Flintshire, is now in the British Museum. |