instantly got rid of by the imaginative reader, and which, though they may excite a passing smile, do not affect for a moment the sense of verisimilitude. Shakspeare may make a hero of the Trojan War quote Aristotle, or he may arm the Romans of Pharsalia with the Spanish rapier of the sixteenth century; but he never infects the language and sentiments of classical times with the conceits of gallant and courtly compliment that were current in the age of Louis XIV. In the scenes of private and domestic life which, he has freely intermingled with the stirring and heroic episodes of war or policy, his knowledge of human nature enables him to paint with an equally firm and masterly touch the hero and the man. The delicate task of giving glimpses into the private life of great historical personages, which we find generally evaded in all other authors who have treated such subjects, is a proof of the supremacy of Shakspeare's genius. The same thing may be said of the boldness with which he has introduced comic incidents and characters amid the most lofty and solemn events of history, and as frequently and successfully in his Roman as in his English plays. In the two parts of Henry IV. the heroic and familiar are side by side, and the Prince's adventures with the inimitable Falstaff and his other pleasant but disreputable companions, are closely intermingled with the majestic march of the great historical events. This shows that Shakspeare, far from fearing, as an inferior artist would have done, the juxtaposition of the familiar and the sublime, the wildest and most fantastic comedy with the loftiest and gravest tragedy, not only made such apparently discordant elements mutually heighten and complete the general effect which he contemplated, but in so doing teaches us that in human life the sublime and the ridiculous are side by side, and that the source of laughter is placed close by the fountain of tears. HIS CREATIVE POWER. Even a cursory examination of these wonderful plays will supply us with another and not less remarkable evidence of Shakspeare's creative power. In them, though the chief characters may be historical, the action requires the introduction of a multitude of other personages; and these are not always necessarily subordinate ones, which the poet must unavoidably have created out of his own observation. Now, in such cases the most difficult trial of a dramatic talent would be the callida junctura which should make the imaginary harmonize with the historical personages; and this ordeal would be equally arduous whether the subjects upon which it was exercised were persons or events. Walter Scott, with all his power of delineation, has not always been successful in hiding the joining on of the real with the imaginary. In Shakspeare, on the contrary, we never see a deficiency: indeed, whether by his consummate skill in realizing the ideal, or in idealizing the real, both the one and the other stand before us in the same solidity; and it is not too much to say that to us his imaginary persons are as much real entities -nay, often far more so-than the authentic figures of history itself. Thus, to our intimate consciousness, Othello and Shylock are persons as real as Coriolanus and Wolsey. He surpassed all his predecessors in the drawing of his characters, which range over almost every type of humanity furnishing a fit subject for the tragic or comic art. Indeed, he has never been approached by any of his competitors in any branch of the drama illustrated by his genius. In the department of Shakspeare's works which we are now treating, as well as in the other category which we shall examine presently, there are unquestionably some pieces manifestly inferior to others. Thus among the English Histories the three plays upon the subject of Henry VI. bear evident marks. of an inferior hand, and were in all probability older dramas which Shakspeare retouched and revivified. here and there with some of his inimitable strokes of nature and poetic fancy. The last of the English historical plays, at least the latest in the date of its action, is Henry VIII. This piece bears many traces of having been in part composed by a different hand: in the diction, the turn of thought, and in particular in the peculiar mechanism of the versification, there is much to lead to the conclusion that Shakspeare, in its composition, was associated with one other, if not more, poets. This kind of collaboration was an almost universal practice in that age; and the circumstance that the play was written with a particular intention, and contained very pointed and graceful compliments both to Elizabeth and her successor, seem to indicate that it was composed with great rapidity, and that therefore Shakspeare was likely to have worked upon it in partnership with others. HIS TREATMENT OF THE DRAMA FOUNDED UPON FICTION. But a general conception of the dramatic genius of Shakspeare must be founded upon an examination of all his pieces; and while the historical dramas show how he could free his mind from the trammels imposed by the necessity of adhering to real facts and persons, the romantic portion of his pieces, or those founded upon Fiction, will equally prove that the freedom of an ideal subject did not deprive him of the strictest fidelity to general nature. The characters that move through the action of these latter dramas exhibit the same consummate appreciation of the general and the individual in humanity; and though he has occasionally stepped over the boundary of ordinary human nature, and has created a multitude of supernatural beings, fairies, spirits, witches and other creatures of the imagination, even in these the severest consistency and the strictest verisimilitude never for a moment abandon him. They are always constantes sibi; we know that such beings do not and cannot exist; but we irresistibly feel, in reading the scenes in which they appear, that, if they did exist, they could not exist other than as he had painted them. The data being established, the consequences, to the most remote and trivial details, flow from them in a manner that no analysis can gainsay. In the mode of delineating passion and feeling Shakspeare proceeds differently from all other dramatic authors. They, even the greatest among them, create a personage by accumulating in it all such traits as their reading and observation show to usually accompany the fundamental elements which go to form its constitution: and thus they all, more or less, fall into the error of making their personages embodiments of such and such a moral peculiarity. They give us admirable and complete monographies of ambition, of avarice, of hypocrisy, and the like. Moreover, in the expression of their feelings. whether tragic or comic, such characters almost universally describe the sensations they experience. This men and women in real life never do: nay, when under the influence of strong emotion or other powerful moral impression, we indicate to others what we feel, rather, and far more powerfully, by what we suppress than In this respect the men and by what we utter. women of Shakspeare exactly resemble the men and women of real life, and not the men and women of the stage. Nor has he ever fallen into the error of forgetting the infinite complexity of human character. If we analyze any one of the prominent personages of Shakspeare, though we may often at first sight perceive in it the predominance of some one quality or passion, on a nearer view we shall find that the complexity of its moral being goes on widening and deepening with every new attempt on our part to grasp or sound the whole extent of its individuality. Macaulay has excellently observed that it is easy to say, for example, that the primary characteristic of Shylock is revengefulness; but that a closer insight shows a thousand other qualities in him, the mutual play and varying intensity of which go to compose the complex being that Shakspeare has drawn in the terrible Jew. Thus Othello is no mere impersonation of jealousy, nor Macbeth of ambition, nor Falstaff of selfish gayety, nor Timon of misanthropy, nor Imogene of wifely love in each of these personages the more closely we analyze them the deeper and more multiform will appear the infinite springs of action which make up their personality. Shakspeare has shown, in a manner that no one has either equaled or approached, how a given character will act under the stimulus of some overmastering passion; but he has painted ambitious and revengeful men, not ambition and revenge in human form. Nothing is more childish than the superficial judgment which identifies the great creations of Shakspeare with some prominent moral or intellectual characteristic. His conceptions are as multiform as those of nature herself; and as the physiologist knows that even in the plant or mollusk of apparently the simplest construction there are depths of organization which bid defiance to all attempts to fathom them, so in the characters of the great painter of humanity, there is a variety which grows. more and more bewildering the more earnestly we strive to penetrate its mysteries. This wonderful power of conceiving complex character is at the bottom of another distinguishing peculiarity of our great poet; namely, the total absence in his works of any tendency to self-reproduction. Possessing only the dramas of Shakspeare, it would be totally impossible for us to deduce any notion of what were the sympathies and tendencies of the author. He is absolutely impersonal; or rather he is all persons in turn: for no poet ever pos character as Othello, never recurs to it again. Othello disappears from the stage as completely as a real Othello would have done from the world, and leaves behind him no similar personage. True, Shakspeare has given us a number of other pictures of jealous men; but their jealousy is as different from that of Othello as in real life the jealousy of one man is different from that of another. Leontes, Ford, Posthumus, are all equally jealous; but how differently is the passion manifested in each of these! men-no female having acted on the stage till long after the age which witnessed such creations as Hermione, Lady Macbeth, Rosalind, or Juliet. We may conceive what a chill it must have been to the imagination of a poet to be conscious that a marvel of female delicacy, grandeur, or passion would be personated on the stage by a performer of the other sex, and that the author would feel what Shakspeare has so powerfully expressed in the language of his own Cleopatra: "The quick comedians Extemporary shall stage us: Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Surely the power of ideal creation has never undergone a severer ordeal. Shakspeare's triumph over this great practical difficulty is the more surprising, as there is, perhaps, no class of his personages more varied, more profound, and more exquisitely delicate than his female characters, which possess a far higher tone of sentiment than can be found in the most beautiful conceptions of womanly qualities which even the greatest of his contemporaries—as Beaumont, Massinger, and Ford-have given to the drama. Some critics, indeed, have traced his superior refinement in this respect to the imitation of the pure and lofty feminine ideal which he found in the Arcadia of the illustrious Sidney and the graceful purity of the Faerie Queene. HIS LITERARY STYLE. In the expression of strong emotion, as well as in the delineation of character, Shakspeare is superior to all other dramatists, superior to all other poets. He never finds it necessary, in order to produce the effect he desires, to have recourse in the one case to violent or declamatory rhetoric, or in the other to unusual or abnormal combinations of qualities. In him we meet with no sentimental assassins, no moral monsters "Blessed with one virtue and a thousand crimes. Without overstepping the ordinary limits of human experience, he is always able to interest or to in, struct us with the exhibition of general passions and feelings, manifesting themselves in the way we generally see them in the world. He is like the great painter of antiquity, who produced his evervarying effects by the aid of four simple colors. In the expression, too, he uniformly draws, at least in his finest passages, his illustrations from the most simple and familiar objects, from the most ordinary scenes of life. When a great occasion presents itself, he ever shows himself equal to that occasion. There are, indeed, in his works many passages where he has allowed his taste for intellectual subtleties to get the better of his judgment, and where his passion for playing upon words-a passion which was the literary vice of his day, and the effects of which are traceable in the writings of Bacon as well as in his-is permitted to cool the enthusiasm excited by the situation or the feelings of the speaker. But this indulgence in conceits generally disappears in the great culminating moments of intense passion; and we should not overlook the fact that the most violent emotion sometimes finds a vent in the intellectual contortion of a conceit. His diction may be compared to some elaborate monument of the finest Gothic architecture, in which the superficial glance loses itself in an inextricable maze of sculptural detail and fantastically fretted ornamentation, but where a close examination shows that every pinnacle, every buttress, every molding, is an essential member of the construction. This intimate union of the reason and the imagination is a peculiarity common to Shakspeare and Bacon, in whose writings the severest logic is expressed in the boldest metaphor, and the very titles of whose books and the very definitions of whose philosophical terms are frequently images of the most figurative character. There is assuredly no poet, ancient or modern, from whose writings may be extracted such a number of profound and yet practical observations applicable to the common affairs and interests of life; observations expressed with the simplicity of a casual remark, yet pregnant with the condensed wisdom of philosophy; exhibiting more than the acuteness of De Rochefoucauld, without his cynical contempt for humanity, and more than the practical good sense of Molière, with a far wider and more universal applicability. In the picturing of abnormal and supernatural states of existence, as in the delineation of every phase of mental derangement, or the sentiments and actions of fantastic and supernatural beings, Shakspeare exhibits the same coherency and consistency in the midst of what at first sight appears altogether to transcend ordinary experience. Every grade of folly, from the verge of idiocy to the most fantastic eccentricity, every shade of moral perturbation, from the jealous fury of Othello to the frenzy of Lear, or the not less touching madness of Ophelia, is represented in his plays with a fidelity so complete that the most experienced physiologists have affirmed that such intellectual disturbances may be studied in his pages with as much profit as in the actual patients of a madhouse. HE age of Elizabeth and James I. produced a galaxy of great dramatic poets, the like of whom, whether we regard the nature or the degree of excellence exhibited in their works, the world has never seen. In the general style of their writings, they bear a strong family resemblance to Shakspeare; and indeed many of the peculiar merits of their great prototype may be found scattered among his various contemporaries, and in some instances carried to a height little inferior to that found in his writings. Thus intensity of pathos hardly less touching than that of Shakspeare may be found in the dramas of Ford; gallant animation and dignity in the dialogues of Beaumont and Fletcher; deep tragic emotion in the somber scenes of Webster; noble moral elevation in the graceful plays of Massinger; but in Shakspeare alone do we see the consummate union of all the most opposite qualities of the poet, the observer, and the philosopher. BEN JONSON. The name which stands next to that of Shakspeare in the list of these illustrious dramatists is that of Ben Jonson (1573-1637), a vigorous and solid genius, built high with learning and knowledge of life, and whose numerous works, dramatic as well as other, possess an imposing and somewhat monumental weight. He was born in 1573, and was consequently nine years younger than Shakspeare. His career was full of strange vicissitudes. Though compelled by a step-father to follow the humble trade of a bricklayer, he succeeded in gratifying an intense thirst for learning. He passed some short time, probably with the assistance of a patron, at the University of Cambridge, and there, as well as after leaving college, continued to study with a diligence that certainly rendered him one of the most learned men of his age-an age fertile with learned men. He is known to have served some time as a soldier in the Low Countries, and to have distinguished himself by his courage in the field; but his theatrical career seems to have begun when he was about twenty years of age, when we find him attached as an actor to one of the minor theaters, called "The Curtain." His success as a performer is said to have been very small, arising most probably from want of grace and beauty of person; and there is no reason to suppose that his theatrical career differed from the almost universal type of the actor-dramatists of that age. While still a very young man he fought a duel with one of his fellow-actors, whom he had the misfortune to kill, receiving at the same time a severe wound; and for this infringement of the law, which at that particular period was punished with extreme severity, the poet was condemned to death, though afterward pardoned. Among other vicissitudes of life, Jonson is related to have twice changed his religion, having been converted by a Jesuit to the Roman Catholic faith, and |