to scorn; undo his illustrious monument to its last Anglo-Saxon stone, and, "by our lady, build-theatres!" If not Juliet only, but her author, and Hamlet's author, too, and Lear's, and Macbeth's can be made without "philosophy," we are for Romeo's verdict, "Hang up philosophy." If such works as these, and Julius Cæsar, and Coriolanus, and Antony, and Henry V., and Henry VIII.-if the Midsummer Night's Dream, and the Merchant of Venice, and the Twelfth Night, if Beatrice, and Benedict, and Rosalind, and Jaques, and Iago, and Othello, and all their immortal company-if these works, and all that we find in them, can be got out of Plutarch's Lives, and Holinshed, and a few old ballads and novels-in the name of all that is honest, give us these, and let us go about our business; and henceforth let him that can be convicted "of traitorously corrrupting the youth of this realm, by erecting a grammar-school," be consigned to his victims for mercy. "Long live Lord Mortimer!" Down with the "papermills!" "Throw learning to the dogs! we'll none of it!" But we are not, as yet, in a position to estimate the graver bearings of this question. For the reverence which the common theory has hitherto claimed from us, as a well-authenticated historical fact, depending apparently, indeed, on the most unimpeachable external evidence for its support, has operated, as it was intended to operate in the first instance, to prevent all that kind of reading and study of the plays which would have made its gross absurdity apparent. In accordance with this original intention, to this hour it has constituted a barrier to the understanding of their true meaning, which no industry or perseverance could surmount; to this hour it has served to prevent, apparently, so much as a suspicion of their true source, and ultimate intention. But let this theory, and the pre-judgment it involves, be set aside, even by an hypothesis, only long enough to permit us once to see, for ourselves, what these works do in fact contain, and no amount of historical evidence which can be produced, no art, no argument, will suffice to restore it to its present position. But it is not as a hypothesis, it is not as a theory, that the truth here indicated will be devel oped hereafter. It will come on other grounds. It will ask no favors. Condemned to refer the origin of these works to the vulgar, illiterate man who kept the theatre where they were first exhibited, a person of the most ordinary character and aims, compelled to regard them as the result merely of an extraordinary talent for pecuniary speculation in this man, how could we, how could any one dare to see what is really in them? With this theory overhanging them, though we threw our most artistic lights upon it, and kept it out of sight when we could, what painful contradictory mental states, what unacknowledged internal misgivings were yet involved in our best judgments of them. How many passages were we compelled to read "trippingly," with the "mind's eye," as the players were first taught to pronounce them on the tongue; and if, in spite of all our slurring, the inner depths would open to us, if anything, which this theory could not account for, would, notwithstanding, obtrude itself upon us, we endeavored to believe that it must be the reflection of our own better learning, and so, half lying to ourselves, making a wretched compromise with our own mental integrity, we still hurried on. Condemned to look for the author of Hamlet himself-the subtle Hamlet of the university, the courtly Hamlet, "the glass of fashion and the mould of form"-in that dirty, doggish group of players, who come into the scene summoned like a pack of hounds to his service, the very tone of his courtesy to them, with its princely condescension, with its arduous familiarity, only serving to make the great, impassable social gulf between them the more evidentcompelled to look in that ignominious group, with its faithful portraiture of the players of that time (taken from the life by one who had had dealings with them), for the princely scholar himself in his author, how could we understand him-the enigmatical Hamlet, with the thought of ages in his foregone conclusions? With such an origin, how could we see the subtlest skill of the university, not in Hamlet and Horatio only, but in the work itself, incorporated in its essence, pervading its execution? With such an origin as this, how was it possible to note, not in this play only, but in all the Shakespeare drama, what, otherwise, we could not have failed to observe, the tone of the highest Elizabethan breeding, the very loftiest tone of that peculiar courtly culture, which was then, and but just then, attaining its height, in the competitions among men of the highest social rank, and among the most brilliant wits and men of genius of the age, for the favor of the learned, accomplished, sagacious, witloving maiden queen;-a culture which required not the best acquisitions of the university merely, but acquaintance. with life, practical knowledge of affairs, foreign travel and accomplishments, and, above all, the last refinements of the highest Parisian breeding. For "your courtier" must be, in fact, "your picked man of countries." He must, indeed, "get his behavior everywhere." He must be, in fact and literally, the man of "the world." But for this prepossession, in that daring treatment of court-life which this single play of Hamlet involves, in the entire freedom with which its conventionalities are handled, how could we have failed to recognize the touch of one habitually practiced in its refinements? how could we have failed to -recognize, not in this play only, but in all these plays, the poet whose habits and perceptions have been moulded in the atmosphere of these subtle social influences. He cannot shake off this influence when he will. He carries the court perfume with him, unconsciously, wherever he goes, among mobs of artisans that will not" keep their teeth clean;" into the ranks of "greasy citizens" and "rude mechanicals;" into country feasts and merry-makings; among "pretty low-born lasses," "the queens of curds and cheese," and into the heart of that forest, "where there is no clock." He looks into Arden and into Eastcheap from the court standpoint, not from these into the court, and he is as much a prince with Poins and Bardolph as he is when he enters and throws open to us, without awe, without consciousness, the most delicate mysteries of the royal presence. Compelled to refer the origin of these works to the sordid play-house, who could teach us to distinguish between the ranting, unnatural stuff and bombast which its genuine competitions elicited, in their mercenary appeals to the passions of their audience, ministering to 66 the most vicious tastes, depraving the public conscience, and lowering the common standard of decency, getting up scenes to tear a cat in,"—"outHeroding Herod," and going regularly into professional fits about Hecuba and Priam and other Trojans,-who could teach us to distinguish between the tone of this original, genuine, play-house fustian, and that of the "dozen or sixteen lines" which Hamlet will at first, for some earnest purpose of his own, with the consent and privity of one of the players, cause to be inserted in it? Nay, thus blinded, we shall not, perhaps, be able to distinguish from this foundation that magnificent whole, with which, from such beginnings, this author will, perhaps, ultimately replace his worthless originals, altogether; that whole in which we shall see, one day, not the burning Ilium, not the old Danish court of the tenth century, but the yet living, illustrious Elizabethan age, with all its momentous interests still at stake, with its yet palpitating hopes. and fears, with its new-born energies, bound but unconquerable, already heaving, and muttering through all their undertone; that magnificent whole, where we shall see, one day, "the very abstract and brief chronicle of the time," the "very body of the age, its form and pressure," under any costume of time and country, or under the drapery of any fiction, however absurd or monstrous, which this author shall find already popularized to his hands, and available for his purposes. Hard, indeed, was the time, ill bestead was the spirit of the immemorial English freedom, when the genius of works such as these, was compelled to stoop to such a scene, to find its instruments. How could we understand from such a source, while that wretched player was still crying it for his own worthless ends, this majestic exhibition of our common human life from the highest intellectual and social stand-point of that wondrous age, letting in, on all the fripperies and affectations, the arrogance and pretension of that illustrious centre of social life, the new philosophic beam, and sealing up in it, for all time, "all the uses and customs" of the world that then was? Arrested with that transparent petrefaction, in all the rushing life of the moment, and set, henceforth, on the table of philosophic halls for scientific illustration; its gaudy butterflies impaled upon the wing, in their perpetual gold; its microscopic insects, "spacious in the possession of land and dirt," transfixed in all the swell and flutter of the moment; its fantastic apes, unrobed for inextinguishable mortal laughter and celestial tears, still playing, all unconsciously, their solemn pageants through; how could the showman explain all this to us-how could the player tell us what it meant? How could the player's mercenary motive and the player's range of learning and experiment give us the key to this new application of the human reason to the human life, from the new vantage ground of thought, but just then rescued from the past, and built up painfully from all its wreck? How could we understand, from such a source, this new, and strange, and persevering application of thought to life, not merely to society and to her laws, but to nature, too; pursuing her to her last retreats, and holding everywhere its mirror up to her, reflecting the whole boundary of her limitations; laying bare, in its cold, clear, pure depths, in all their unpolite, undraped scientific reality, the actualities which society, as it is, can only veil, and the evils which society, as it is, can only hide and palliate? In vain the shrieking queen remonstrates, for, it is the impersonated reason whose clutch is on her, and it says, you go not hence till you have seen the inmost part of you. But does all this tell on the thousand pounds? Is the ghost's word good for that? No wonder that Hamlet refused to speak, or to be commanded to any utterance of harmony, let the critics listen, and entreat as they would, while this illiterate performer, who knew no touch of all that divine music of his, from its lowest note to the top of his key, was still sounding him and fretting him. We shall take another key and another interpreter with us when we begin to understand a work which comprehends, in its design, all our human aims and activities, and tracks them to their beginnings and ends; which demands the ultimate, scientific perpetual reason in all our life-a work which dares to defer the punishment of the crime that society visits with her most dreaded penalties, till all the principles of the human activity have been collected; till all the human conditions have been explored; till the only uni versal rational human principle is found -a work which dares to defer the punishment of the crime that society con demns, till its principle has been tracked through the crime which she tolerates; through the crime which she sanctions; through the crime which she crowns with all her honors. We are, indeed, by no means insensible to the difference between this Shakespeare drama, and that on which it is based, and that which surrounds it. We do, indeed, already pronounce that difference, and not faintly, in our word Shakespeare; for that is what the word now means with us, though we received it with no such significance. Its historical development is but the next step in our progress. Yes, there were men in England then, who had heard somewhat of those masters of the olden time, hight Eschylus and Sophocles-men who had heard of Euripides, too, and next, Aristophanes-men who had heard of Terence, and not of Terence only, but of his patrons-men who had heard of Plato, too, and of his master. There were men in England, in those days, who knew well enough what kind of an instrumentality the drama had been in its original institution, and with what voices it had then spoken; who knew, also, its permanent relations to the popular mind, and its capability for adaptation to new social exigencies; men, quick enough to perceive, and ready enough to appreciate to the utmost, the facilities which this great organ of the wisdom of antiquity offered for effectual communication between the loftiest mind, at the height of its culture, and that mind of the world in which this, impelled by no law of its own ordaining, seeks ever its own self-completion and perpetuity. And where had this mighty instrument of popular sway, this mechanism for moving and moulding the multitude, its first origin, but among men initiated in the profoundest religious and philosophic mysteries of their time, among men exercised in the control and administration of public affairs; men clothed even with imperial sway, the joint administrators of the government of Athens, when Athens sat on the summit of her power, the crowned mistress of the seas, the imperial ruler of "a thousand cities." Yes, Theseus, and Solon, and Cleis thenes and Pythagoras, must be its antecedents there; it could not be produced there, till all Athena had been for ages in Athens, till Athena had been for ages in all; till three centuries of Olympiads had poured the Grecian lifeblood through it, from Byzantium to Sicily; it could not be produced there, till the life of the state was in each true Athenian nerve, till each true Athenian's nerve was in the growing state; it could not begin to be produced there, till new religious inspirations from the east had reached, with their foreign stimulus, the deeper sources of the national life, till the secret philosophic tenet of the inner temple, had overflowed, with new gold, the ancient myth, and kindled, with new fires, the hearts of the nation's leaders. The gay summits of Homer's "ever-young" Olympus, must be reached and overlaid anew from the earth's central mysteries; the Dyonisian procession must enter the temple; the road to it must cross Egaleos; the Pnyx must empty its benches into it; Piræus must crowd its stranger's seat with her many costumes, before Eschylus or Sophocles could find an audience to command all their genius. Nay, Zeno and Anaxagoras must send their pupils thither, and Socrates must come in, and the most illustrious scholars of the Olympian cities, from Abdera to Leontium, must be found there, before all the latent resources of the Grecian drama could be unfolded. And there were men in England, in the age of Elizabeth, who had mastered the Greek and Roman history, and not only that, but the history of their own institutions-men who knew precisely what kind of crisis in human history that was which they were born to occupy. And they had seen the indigenous English drama struggling up, through the earnest, but childish, exhibitions of the cathedral-through "Miracles," and "Mysteries," and "Moralities," to be arrested, in its yet undeve oped vigor, with the unfit and unyielding forms of the finished Grecian art; and when, too, by the combined effect of institutions otherwise at variance, all that had, till then, made its life, was suddenly abstracted from it. The royal ordinances which excluded it, henceforth, from all that vital range of topics which the censorship of a capricious and timorous despotism might include among the inter dicted questions of church and state, found it already expelled from the religious sanctuaries-in which not the drama only, but all that which we call art, par excellence, has its birth and nurture. And that was the crisis in which the pulpit began to open its new drain upon it, having only a vicious play-house, where once the indefinite priestly authority had summoned all the soul to its spectacles, and the longdrawn aisle, and fretted vault, had lent to them their sheltering sanctities; where once, as of old, the Athenian temple had pressed its scene into the heart of the Athenian hill-the holy hill-and opened its subterranean communication with Eleusis, while its centre was the altar on which the gods themselves threw incense. And yet, there was a moment in the history of the national genius, when, roused to its utmost-stimulated to its best capability of ingenuity and invention-it found itself constrained to stoop at its height, even to the threshold of this same degraded play-house. There were men in England, who knew what latent capacities that debased instrument of genius yet contained within it-who knew that in the master's hand it might yet be made to yield, even then, and under those conditions, better music than any which those old Greek sons of song had known how to wake in it. These men knew well enough the proper relation between the essence of the drama and its form. "Considering poetry in respect to the verse, and not to the argument," says one, "though men in learned languages may tie themselves to ancient measures; yet, in modern languages, it seems to me as free to make new measures as to make new dances; and, in these things, the sense is a better judge than the art." Surely, a Schlegel himself could not give us a truer Shakespearean rule than that. Indeed, if we can but catch them when the wind is south-south-west-these grave and oracular Elizabethan witswe shall find them putting two and two together, now and then, and drawing inferences, and making distinctions which would have much surprised their "uncle-fathers" and "aunt-mothers" at the time, if they had but noted them. But, as they themselves tell us, "in regard to the rawness and unskillfulness of the hands through which they pass, the greatest matters are sometimes car once find the spa ni be For, although they had in leed the happiness to paste der sales wier the direct personal supervision of those two matchless scholars, Eliza and one James." whose infance in the world of letters was then so signally felt, they, nevertheless, evidently ventured to dip into antiquity a little on their own account, and that, apparently, with out feeling called upon to render in a perfectly unambiguous report in full of all that they found there, for the benefit of their illustrious patrons, to whom, of course, their literary labors are dedicated. There seemed, indeed, to be no occasion for unpegging the basket on the house's top, and trying conclusions in any so summary man ner. These men distinctly postpone, not their personal reputation only, but the interpretation of their avowed works, to freer ages. There were sparrows abroad then. The tempest was already "singing in the wind," for an ear fine enough to catch it; but only invisible Ariels could dare "to play" then "on pipe and tabor," [stage direction]. Thought is free," but only base Trinculos and low-born Stephanos could dare to whisper to it. "That is the tune of our catch, played by the picture of-Nobody." . Yes, there was one moment in that nation's history, wherein the costume, the fable, the scenic effect, and all the attractive and diverting appliances and concomitants of the stage, even the degradation into which it had fallen, its known subserviency to the passions of the audience, its habit of creating a spectacle merely, all combined to furnish to men, in whom the genius of the nation had attained its highest form, freer instrumentalities than the book, the pamphlet, the public document, the parliament, or the pulpit, when all alike were subject to an oppressive and despotic censorship, when all alike were forbidden to meddle with their own proper questions, when cruel mainings and tortures old and new, life-long im prisonment, and death itself, awaited, VOL. VII.-2 mix of these restrictions ket i sastiron of an intention, må via ten-penalties ch England's nödlöst men suffered. ore moment in that the ancient drama new feas its oid power; vira, samped and biszomed on its surface everyrhre, with the badges of servitude it Lad yet leaping within the indomalle heart of its ancient freedim, the spirit of the immemorial Eropean Iberties, which Magna Charta had only recognized, and more than that, the freedom of the new ages that were then beginning, "the freedom of the chainless mind." There was one moment in which all the elements of the national genius, that are now separated and incorporated in institutions as wide apart, at least, as earth and heaven, were held together, and that in their first vigor, pressed from without into their old Greek conjunction. That moment there was; it is chronicled; we have one word for it; we call itShakespeare! Has the time come at last, or has it not yet come, in which this message of the new time can be laid open to us? This message from the lips of one endowed so wondrously, with skill to utter it; endowed, not with the speaker's melodious tones and subduing harmonies only, but with the teacher's divinely glowing heart, with the ambition that seeks its own in all, with the love that is sweeter than the tongues of men and angels. Are we, or are we not, his legatees? Surely this new summing up of all the real questions of our common life, from such an elovation in it, this new philosophy of all men's business and desires, cannot be without its perpetual vital uses. For, in all the points on which the demonstration rests, these diagrams from the dissolving views of the past are still included in the problems of the present. And if, in this new and more earnest research into the true ends and meanings of this greatest of our teachers, the poor player who was willing enough to assume the responsibility of these works, while they were still plays-theatrical exhibitions only, and quite in his line for the time; who might, indeed, be glad enough to do it for the sake of the princely patronage that henceforth encompassed his fortunes, even to the |