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tonces farther, but we would exhort any one who is inclined mo. Esgure what we have said to examine carefully the following pasSo Far Betws f Ferns, act scene i; Much Ado About gan i sine hd act v. scene ii; almost all the prose imbo 2 d. F. Lår A but particularly act i. scene ii., the

with the whole of the first scene of the fourth $27 tatt sterei: and it would be easy to extend ve trova la tha particular style of Shakespeare's prose there Jasper ty. In addition to the colloquial ease Lures seldom wanting a sort of literary eloquence, 1 TO LET LA VITA striking a double chord, as though he were creating vas at the real and ideal, at once the speech of the AAS LE 15 Vom we are moving here, and of the beings of that vino vol essay themagination of the poet. And yet the Defect cuson with one another.

tem sety metal Shakspeare has not left us many te has tf case usually expressed himself in blank beer to suet made it necessary for the style to be

cerated The two best illustrations of this

se are perhaps the speech of Brutus over the in Casar, act iL scene ; the fine dialogue ns and the King in the first scene of the The closing description of the shipwreck Ja.. 1 scene It is, indeed, very difficult the pret has on these occasions selected prose in preThe subject is impressive, the treatment is serious,

as born are for the most part in verse. Of this, ose to say something presently.

Do now come to the list of our five divisions. This is the style
Sistem bis 2sed prose to the sublimest pitch of verse,

I confessed the rarest of all his modes of expression. ist ning dress Distration of this is to be found in ati se

valle rume the earth seems to me a sterile promontory. The air, look stunging imune, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, Jean, ke dag to me than a fine and pestilent congregation of 1967 X V.CÀS zu! How nolle in reason! In form how Cross and aimabe' In action how like an angel! In God. The beauty of the world! The paragon of

ANY I This quintessence of dust!

d be hard to call from the whole body of our prose literain z possige må sher & demonstrate more strikingly the splendour The Test of a language when freed from the shackles of

verse.

Of all De Quincey's many inaccurate assertions, he never made one more inaccurate than when he asserted that he-the English opium-eater-had been the first to introduce English literature to what he calls poetical impassioned prose. He might have pretended to forget, possibly he might really have forgotten, Raleigh, who furnished him with the model for one of his finest apostrophes; he might have overlooked Milton, Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, but it is strange indeed that he should have overlooked Shakespeare. Another very eloquent example, but in diction more subdued and less ornate, may be found in the gaoler's speech in Cymbeline, act v. scene iv.; in Lear's speech, "Why, thou wert better in thy grave," &c., Lear, act iii. scene iii.

The above classification, necessarily arbitrary and imperfect, and adopted rather for purposes of convenience than proceeding on any fixed critical principle, leaves of course much of the poet's prose still unspecified. We have still to take into account his grave didactic style, of which we have several examples in Hamlet-his many soliloquies and reflections where the language rises and falls in exquisite unison with the sentiments embodied in it, as in Benedick's speech, Much Ado About Nothing, act ii. scene iii.; Launcelot Gobbo's, Merchant of Venice, act ii. scene ii.; the speeches of Falstaff; the speech of Autolycus, Winter's Tale, act iv. scene iv.; of Thersites, Troilus and Cressida, act ii. scene iv.; the Porter's, Macbeth, act ii. scene iii.; Edmund's, Lear, act i. scene ii.; the serious and set speeches, which might be amply illustrated from Measure for Measure, from Othello, and from Cymbeline; the epilogues, as at the conclusion of As You Like It, and the Second Part of Henry IV.; the various documents and letters cited by the characters.

It is interesting, for it is, we think, quite possible to watch the stages by which Shakespeare's prose arrived at maturity, and to see how it became, by degrees, a favourite instrument of expression with him. At first he used it very sparingly. In some of his earlier works it finds no place at all. There is no prose, for example, in the First Part of Henry VI.; there is none in King John or in Richard II.; there are only about a dozen lines in Titus Andronicus; there is only one short scene in Richard III. In Romeo and Juliet the proportion of prose is very small, and in the conversation between the Nurse and Lady Capulet (act i. scene ii.), where we should have expected to find it, we find blank verse. In the two parts of Henry IV.,

1 Compare the concluding paragraph of the History of the World-"O eloquent, just, and mighty Death," &c.—with the celebrated apostrophe to opium, beginning, “O just, subtle, and mighty Opium,” in the second part of the Opium Eater.

on the other hand, prose and verse are used in almost equal proportions, but the prose portions are, without exception, confined to the comic scenes. In As You Like It the tone of the prose is raised; in Hamlet it begins to encroach on the province of blank verse, that is to say, it is employed in grave and serious passages; and in this way the poet continues to employ it through the whole series of his maturer works, except in the Tempest, where it is confined to the baser characters, and in Henry VIII., where we find it only in one short scene. The stages in the development of Shakespeare's prose are, we think, as clearly discernible as the stages in the development of his verse. It appears for the first time in the Second and Third Part of Henry VI, and here it differs in no respect from the style of Marlowe and Peele-it has all their characteristics, all their stiffness, all their archaism, all their coarseness. In Love's Labour's Lost it is, of course, and is intended to be, merely parody. In All's Well that Ends Well we find it in a state of transition. It is frequently rough, involved, and uncouth, but it is also occasionally compact and musical. Side by side, for instance, with periods like

Now he hath a smack of all neighbouring languages, therefore we must every one be a man of his own fancy; not to know what we speak one to another, so we seem to know, is to know straight our purpose

we find periods like--

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues.

In As You Like It the composition of the prose is as perfect as that

of the verse.

How delicately the poet understood and how carefully he studied the rhythm of his prose may be seen, not only in his use of expletives, in the arrangement of his antitheses, and in his introduction of balancing clauses, but in the nice measurement of his subordinate sentences, and in his frequent inversions of the natural order of the words. When he is at his best, Isocrates and Cicero were not more solicitous about the harmony of their periods. Take the following passage from Henry V.:

Now if these men have defeated the law and out-run native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God. War is his beadle. War is his vengeance. So that here men are punished for before breach of the king's laws in the king's quarrel. Where they feared the death they have borne life away, and where they would be safe they perish. Then if they die unprovided no more is the king guilty of their damnation than he was before guilty of those impieties for the which they are now visited. Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul is his own.

Longinus has observed of a celebrated sentence in Demosthenes that so absolutely perfect is the construction, that if a synonym be substituted, if the slightest alteration be made in the order of the words, the whole is ruined, the music is a discord. What is true of the sentence in Demosthenes is true also of the paragraph we have just quoted, and of many other prose paragraphs in Shakespeare. Alter or omit a single word, invert a sentence, strike out a clause, change in the smallest particular a particle, and you would jar the ear of a sensitive critic, as a false note would jar the ear of a musician. Now, we do not believe that, with the exception of the translators of the Bible, any other Elizabethan prose writer had so fine a perception of the native harmony of our tongue, as distinguished from a harmony borrowed from Rome.

And now it remains to say a few words on the question whether we are justified in supposing that Shakespeare was guided by any fixed principle in his employment of verse and prose, or whether he employed them, as fancy suggested, for the sake of variety and relief. On this subject it would be dangerous to dogmatise. It must, of course, be obvious to every one that, as a general rule, he employs prose when he wishes to be emphatically realistic, when he is dealing with commonplace characters, and is embodying commonplace sentiments. There is always an instinct in a true artist prompting him, even at the cost of literary grace, to attain complete harmony between spirit and expression. We find this to be the case even in those schools where a rigid regard to form is the primary canon. We find traces of it in Euripides: we find it still more marked in Aristophanes and in the later schools of the Greek drama. We find it in Terence; we find it pre-eminently in Plautus. As a general rule, Shakespeare's poetical conceptions naturally, and, as it were, spontaneously, clothe themselves in verse, while all that appertains to the familiar side of real life as naturally slides into its appropriate prose. The line of demarcation thus drawn between verse and prose is indeed another proof of Shakespeare's delicate appreciation of style, another proof that he was what the French critics deny-a reflective artist. Many of his disciples have written plays in a mixture of verse and prose, but the employment of the one or the other mode of expression is with them purely arbitrary, and appears to have been introduced simply to vary the dialogue or to save the trouble of yoking thought to metre. This is evident, not only from the fact that conceptions eminently and essentially poetical are often clothed in prose, but that their prose is very commonly nothing but loose blank Webster, in his two great tragedies, constantly selects this

verse.

mode of expression for his grandest and most striking images. The prose of Massinger and Tourneur is so rhythmical that their respective editors have boldly printed it as blank verse. And what applies to these poets will apply, with the exception of Fletcher, to all the other Elizabethan dramatists when writing tragedy. In Shakespeare's prose there is never such ambiguity. His prose is as clearly defined as his verse. However rich, however highly wrought it be, its rhythm is never the rhythm of metre, the style of its rhetoric is not the style of the rhetoric of verse. But it would not be true to say that the poet reserves prose simply for cases where prose is dramatically appropriate. True as a rule, it is a rule which admits of many exceptions. In Hamlet, in Antony and Cleopatra, and in Cymbeline -see particularly the scene between Posthumus and the gaoler, in parts of Henry V., and in parts of Othello, several speeches are in prose where we might, so far as the subject-matter is concerned, have expected verse. In some cases it may possibly have been used to heighten the effect of the verse immediately following. The magnificent soliloquy of Henry V. is preceded by a scene in prose. Antony's splendid rhetoric in Julius Cæsar is ushered in by a prose speech from Brutus. In many cases which will at once suggest themselves to the student it is undoubtedly used for the purpose of relief and variety, and for that purpose only.

It would be idle to draw any parallel between the merits of our great poet in these two branches of composition; but we may observe that in one or two points his prose contrasts very favourably with His verse, in his later style at least, is frequently obscure, perplexed, and abrupt: his prose is uniformly smooth and lucid. His verse abounds in solecisms and anacolutha: his prose is, with a very few exceptions, singularly correct, and is marked by much. greater purity, both of idiom and phrase. His verse is full of mannerisms, and of mannerisms which are not at all times pleasant : his prose is easy and natural. In a word, his most characteristic prose is, regarded merely as composition, decidedly superior to his most characteristic verse.

Margaret Fuller tells us in one of her letters that in a conversation at which she was once present, Mr. Carlyle gave it as his opinion that Shakespeare would have done far better if he had confined himself to prose. Such an opinion may well be put down as one of those paradoxes in which, in his younger days, the author of "Sartor Resartus" loved to indulge. Even a collection of such delightful stories as the "Decamerone," even a romance like "Don Quixote" or "Tom Jones," would have been a poor exchange for

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