many of which may be found in the miscellany | some of them, indeed, having known what it was called England's Helicon, from which a few of them actually to belong to classes very far removed from have been extracted by Mr. Ellis, in his Specimens. each other at different periods of their lives. But They are, perhaps, on the whole, more creditable we should have gathered, though no other record to his poetical powers than his dramatic perform- or tradition had told us, that they must have been ances. One of his tales, first printed in 1590, under men of this genuine and manifold experience from the title of "Rosalynde: Euphues's Golden Legacie, their drama alone-various, and rich, and glowing found in his cell at Silextra" (for Lodge was one of as that is, even as life itself. Lyly's imitators), is famous at the source from which Shakspeare appears to have taken the story of his As You Like It. "Of this production it may be said," observes Mr. Collier, "that our admiration of many portions of it will not be diminished by a comparison with the work of our great dramatist."

(each being entered the preceding year); Othello, | bursts of poetry there are in many of the pieces of not till 1622, six years after the author's death; our earlier dramatists; but the higher they soar in one and all the other plays, namely, The Two Gentle- scene, the lower they generally seem to think it exmen of Verona, The Winter's Tale, The Comedy pedient to sink in the next. Their great efforts are of Errors, King John, All's Well that Ends Well, made only by fits and starts: for the most part it As You Like It, King Henry VIII., Measure for must be confessed that the best of them are either Measure, Cymbeline, Macbeth, The Taming of merely extravagant and absurd, or do nothing but the Shrew, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra, trifle or doze away over their task with the expendCoriolanus, Timon of Athens, The Tempest, and iture of hardly any kind of faculty at all. This may Twelfth Night, not till they appeared together, and have arisen in part from their own want of judgalong with those formerly printed, in the first folio, ment or want of painstaking, in part from a very in 1623. That collection also contained the First rude condition of the popular taste; but the effect Part of Henry VI., of which it may be confidently is to invest all that they have bequeathed to us with affirmed Shakspeare never wrote a line. an air of barbarism, and to tempt us to take their finest displays of successful daring for mere capricious inspirations, resembling the sudden impulses of fury by which the listless and indolent man of the woods will sometimes be roused on the instant from his habitual laziness and passiveness to an exhibition of superhuman strength and activity. From this savage or savage-looking state, our drama was first redeemed by Shakspeare. Even Milton has spoken of his "wood-notes wild ;" and Thomson, more unceremoniously, has baptized him "wild Shakspeare"-as if a sort of half-insane irregularity of genius were the quality that chiefly distinguished him from other great writers. If he be a "wild"

poets of succeeding times, who, it must be admitted, are sufficiently tame: compared with the dramatists of his own age and of the age immediately preceding

Such is the sum of the treasure that Shakspeare has left us; but the revolution which his genius wrought upon our national drama is placed in the clearest light by comparing his earliest plays with the best which the language possessed before his time. He has made all his predecessors obsolete. While his Merchant of Venice, and his Midsummer Night's Dream, and his Romeo and Juliet, and his King John, and his Richard II., and his Henry IV., and his Richard III., all certainly produced, as we have seen, before the year 1598, are still the most universally familiar compositions in our literature, no other dramatic work that had then been written is now popularly read, or familiar to any body ex-writer, it is in comparison with some dramatists and cept to a few professed investigators of the antiquities of our poetry. Where are now the best productions of even such writers as Greene, and Peele, and Marlow, and Decker, and Marston, and Web--with the general throng of the writers from among ster, and Thomas Heywood, and Middleton? They are to be found among our "Select Collections of Old Plays"-publications intended rather for the mere preservation of the pieces contained in them than for their diffusion among a multitude of readers. Or, if the entire works of a few of these elder dramatists have recently been collected and republished, this has still been done only to meet the demand of a comparatively very small number of curious students, anxious to possess and examine for themselves whatever relics are still recoverable of the old world of our literature. Popularly known and read the works of these writers never again will be; there is no more prospect or probability of this than there is that the plays of Shakspeare will ever lose their popularity among his countrymen. In that sense, everlasting oblivion is their portion, as everlasting life is his. In one form only have they any chance of again attracting some measure of the general attention—namely, in the form of such partial and very limited exhibition as Lamb has given us an example of in his "Specimens." And herein we see the first great difference between the plays of Shakspeare and those of his predecessors, and one of the most immediately conspicuous of the improvements which he introduced into dramatic writing. He did not create our regular drama, but he regenerated and wholly transformed it, as if by breathing into it a new soul. We possess no dramatic production anterior to his appearance that is at once a work of high genius and of any thing like equably-sustained power throughout. Wonderful

whom he emerged, and the coruscations of whose feebler and more desultory genius he has made pale-he is distinguished from them by nothing which is more visible at the first glance than by the superior regularity and elaboration that mark his productions. Marlow, and Green, and Kyd, may be called wild, and wayward, and careless; but the epithets are inapplicable to Shakspeare, by whom, in truth, it was that the rudeness of our early drama was first refined, and a spirit of high art put into it, which gave it order and symmetry as well as elevation. It was the union of the most consummate judgment with the highest creative power that made Shakspeare the miracle that he was-if, indeed, we ought not rather to say that such an endowment as his of "the vision and the faculty divine" necessarily implied the clearest and truest discernment as well as the utmost productive energy-even as the most intense heat must illuminate as well as warm. But, undoubtedly, his dramas are distinguished from those of his predecessors by much more than merely this superiority in the general principles upon which they are constructed. Such rare passages of exquisite poetry, and scenes of sublimity or true passion, as sometimes brighten the dreary waste of their productions, are equaled or exceled in almost every page of his; "the highest heaven of invention," to which they ascend only in far distant flights, and where their strength of pinion never sustains them long, is the familiar home of his genius. Other Is not wild Shakspeare thine and Nature's boast? THOMSON'S Summer

ing or interesting on that account?-do we the less sympathize with them?-nay, do we feel that they are less naturally drawn?-that they have for us less of a truth and life than the most faithful copies from the men and women of the real world? But in these, too, there is no other drama so rich as that of Shakspeare. He has exhausted the old world of our actual experience as well as imagined for us new worlds of his own. What other anatomist of the human heart has ever searched its hidden core, and laid bare all the strength and weakness of our mysterious nature, as he has done in the gushing tenderness of Juliet, and the "fine frenzy" of the discrowned Lear, and the sublime melancholy of Hamlet, and the wrath of the perplexed and tempesttorn Othello, and the eloquent misanthropy of Timon, and the fixed hate of Shylock? What other poetry has given shape to any thing half so terrific as Lady Macbeth, or so winning as Rosalind, or so full of gentlest womanhood as Desdemona? In what other drama do we behold so living a humanity as in his? Who has given us a scene either so crowded with diversities of character, or so stirred with the heat and hurry of actual existence? The men and the manners of all countries and of all ages are there: the lovers and warriors, the priests and prophetesses of the old heroic and kingly times of Greece-the Athenians of the days of Alcibiades and Pericles-the proud patricians and turbulent commonalty of the earliest period of republican Rome-Cæsar, and Brutus, and Cassius, and Antony, and Cleopatra, and the other splendid figures of that later Roman scene-the kings and queens, and princes and courtiers of barbaric Denmark, and Roman Britain, and Britain before the Romansthose of Scotland in the time of the English Heptarchy-those of England and France at the era of Magna Charta-all ranks of the people of almost every reign of our subsequent history from the end of the fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century—not to speak of Venice, and Verona, and Mantua, and Padua, and Illyria, and Navarre, and the Forest of Arden, and all the other towns and lands which he has peopled for us with their most real inhabitants. But Shakspeare is not a mere dramatist. Apart altogether from his dramatic power, he is the greatest poet that ever lived. His sympathy is the most universal, his imagination the most plastic, his diction the most expressive ever given to any writer. His poetry has in itself the power and varied excellences of all other poetry. While in grandeur, and beauty, and passsion, and sweetest music, and all the other higher gifts of song, he may be ranked with the greatest-with Spenser, and Chaucer, and Milton, and Dante, and Homer-he is at the same time more nervous than Dryden, and more sententious than Pope, and almost more sparkling and of more abounding conceit, when he chooses, than Donne, or Cowley, or Butler. In whose handling was language ever such a flame of fire as it is in his? His wonderful potency

qualities, again, which charm us in his plays, are | humor of Cervantes. But are they the less amusnearly unknown in theirs. He first informed our drama with true wit and humor. Of boisterous, uproarious, blackguard merriment and buffoonery, there is no want in our earlier dramatists, nor of mere jibing and jeering and vulgar personal satire; but of true airy wit there is little or none. In the comedies of Shakspeare the wit plays and dazzles like dancing light. This seems to have been the excellence, indeed, for which he was most admired by his cotemporaries; for quickness and felicity of repartee they placed him above all other playwriters. But his humor was still more his own than his wit. In that rich but delicate and subtil spirit of drollery, moistening and softening whatever it touches like a gentle oil, and penetrating through all infoldings and rigorous incrustments into the kernel of the ludicrous that is in every thing, which mainly created Malvolio, and Shallow; and Slender, and Dogberry, and Verges, and Bottom, and Lancelot, and Launce, and Costard, and Touchstone, and a score of other clowns, fools, and simpletons, and which, gloriously overflowing in Falstaff, makes his wit exhilarate like wine, Shakspeare had almost as few successors as he had predecessors. Sterne is, of modern English authors, the one who has come nearest to him in this quality. It is often said that the drama should be a faithful picture or representation of real life; or, if this doctrine be given up in regard to the tragic or more impassioned drama, because even kings and queens in the actual world never do declaim in the pomp of blank verse, as they do on the stage, still it is insisted that in comedy no character is admissible that is not a transcript-a little embellished perhaps, but still substantially a transcript from some genuine flesh-and-blood original. But Shakspeare has shown that it belongs to such an imagination as his to create in comedy, as well as in tragedy or in poetry of any other kind. Most of the characters that have just been mentioned are as purely the mere creations of the poet's brain as are Ariel, or Caliban, or | the witches in Macbeth. If any modern critic will have it that Shakspeare must have actually seen Malvolio, and Launce, and Touchstone, before he could or at least would have drawn them, we would ask the said critic if he himself has ever seen such characters in real life; and if he acknowledge, as he needs must, that he never has, we would then put it to him to tell us why the cotemporaries of the great dramatist might not have enjoyed them in his plays without ever having seen them elsewhere, just as we do; or, in other words, why such delineations might not have perfectly fulfilled their dramatic purpose then as well as now, when they certainly do not represent any thing that is to be seen upon earth, any more than do Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. There might have been professional clowns and fools in the age of Shakspeare, such as are no longer extant; but at no time did there ever actually exist such fools and clowns as his. These and other similar personages of the Shaksperian drama are as much mere poetical phantasmata as are the creations of the kindred

1 Each change of many-colored life he drew, Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new.-JOHNSON

SHAKSPEARE'S BURIAL PLACE AND MONUMENT, STRATFORD-UPON-AVON CHURCH.
From an Original Drawing.

of a century, or more, over which his career as a
writer for the stage extends, is illustrated also by
the names of a crowd of other dramatists, many of
them of very remarkable genius; but Shakspeare is
distinguished from the greater number of his co-
temporaries nearly as much as he is from his imme-
diate predecessors. With regard to the latter it
has been well observed, by a late critic of eminent
justness and delicacy of taste, that while they "pos-
sessed great power over the passions, had a deep
insight into the darkest depths of human nature,
and were, moreover, in the highest sense of the
word, poets, of that higher power of creation with
which Shakspeare was endowed, and by which he
was enabled to call up into vivid existence all the
various characters of men, and all the events of
human life, Marlow and his cotemporaries had no
great share, so that their best dramas may be said
to represent to us only gleams and shadowings of
mind, confused and hurried actions, from which we
are rather led to guess at the nature of the persons
acting before us, than instantaneously struck with a

perfect knowledge of it; and even amid their highest efforts, with them the fictions of the drama are felt to be but faint semblances of reality. If we seek for a poetical image-a burst of passion-a beautiful sentiment-a trait of nature-we seek not in vain in the works of our very oldest dramatists. But none of the predecessors of Shakspeare must be thought of along with him, when he appears before us like Prometheus, molding the figures of men, and breathing into them the animation and all the passions of life." "The same," proceeds this writer, "may be said of almost all his illustrious cotemporaries. Few of them ever have conceived a consistent character, and given a perfect drawing and coloring of it: they have rarely, indeed, inspired us with such belief in the existence of their personages as we often feel toward those of Shakspeare, and which makes us actually unhappy unless we can fully understand every thing about them, so like are

Magazine (understood to be by the late Henry Mackenzie), vol. ii. p. 1 Analytical Essays on the early English Dramatists, in Blackwood's 657

they to living men. . . . . The plans of their dramas glow, weep, tremble, take any affection which he are irregular and confused, their characters often wildly distorted, and an air of imperfection and incompleteness hangs in general over the whole composition; so that the attention is wearied out-the interest flags and we rather hurry on, than are hurried, to the horrors of the final catastrophe." In other words, the generality of the dramatic writers who were cotemporary with Shakspeare still belong to the semi-barbarous school which subsisted before he began to write.

pleases-be moved by words, or in spite of them, be disgusted and overcome that disgust." Chapman's Homer is worthy of this fine tribute. Few writers have been more copiously inspired with the genuine frenzy of poetry—with that "fine madness," which, as Drayton has said in his lines on Marlow, "rightly should possess a poet's brain." Indeed, in the character of his genius, out of the province of the drama, Chapman bears a considerable resemblance to Marlow, whose unfinished translation of Museus's Hero and Leander he completed. With more judgment and more care he might have given to his native language, in his version of the Iliad, one of the very greatest of the poetical works it possesses. But what, except the most extreme irregularity and inequality-a rough sketch rather than a finished performance, was to be expected from his boast of having translated half the poem-namely, the last twelve books-in fifteen weeks? Yet, rude and negligent upon the whole as it is, Chapman's is by far the most Homeric Iliad we yet possess. The enthusiasm of the translator for his original is uncompromising to a degree of the ludicrous. "Of all books," he exclaims in his preface," extant in all kinds, Homer is the first and best ;" and in the same spirit, in quoting a passage from Pliny's Natural History in another portion of his preliminary matter, he proceeds first to turn it into verse, “that no prose may come near Homer." In spite, however, of all this eccentricity, and of a hurry and impetu

George Chapman was born six or seven years before Shakspeare, but did not begin to write for the stage till about the year 1595, after which he produced sixteen plays that have survived, besides one in the composition of which he was assisted by Ben Jonson and Marston, and two others in which he joined Shirley. One anonymous play, The Second Maiden's Tragedy (printed for the first time in 1824), and five others that are lost, have also been attributed to him. All these pieces were probably produced before the year 1620; and he died in 1634. Chapman's best-known, and probably also his best plays, are his tragedy of Bussy d'Ambois, printed in the third volume of Dilk's Old Plays (1814), his comedy of Monsieur d'Olive, in the same collection, and his comedies of All Fools, the Widow's Tears, and Eastward Hoe (the last the piece in which he was assisted by Jonson and Marston), in Dodsley's Collection.1 "Of all the English play-writers," says Lamb, "Chapman perhaps approaches nearest to Shakspeare in the descriptive and didactic, in pass-osity which betray him into many mistranslations, ages which are less purely dramatic. Dramatic and, on the whole, have the effect perhaps of giving imitation was not his talent. He could not go out a somewhat too tumultuous and stormy representaof himself, as Shakspeare could shift at pleasure, to tion of the Homeric poetry, the English into which inform and animate other existences, but in himself Chapman transfuses the meaning of the mighty he had an eye to perceive and a soul to embrace all ancient is often singularly and delicately beautiful. forms." Besides his dramas, Chapman is the author He is the author of nearly all the happiest of the of various poetical works, of which his translations compound epithets which Pope has adopted, and of of the Iliad and the Odyssey are by far the greatest. many others equally musical and expressive. "Far"He would have made a great epic poet," continues shooting Phœbus," "the ever-living gods," "the Lamb, if, indeed, he has not abundantly shown many-headed hill," "the ivory-wristed queen," are himself to be one; for his Homer is not so properly a few of the felicitous combinations with which he a translation as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses has enriched his native tongue. Carelessly exerewritten. The earnestness and passion which he cuted, indeed, as the work for the most part is, has put into every part of these poems would be there is scarcely a page of it that is not irradiated incredible to a reader of mere modern translations. by gleams of the truest poetic genius. Often in the His almost Greek zeal for the honor of his heroes is midst of a long paragraph of the most chaotic versionly paralleled by that fierce spirit of Hebrew bigot-fication, the fatigued and distressed ear is surprised ry with which Milton, as if personating one of the by a few lines, or it may be somtimes only a single zealots of the old law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. The great obstacle to Chapman's translations being read is their unconquerable quaintness. He pours out in the same breath the most just and natural and the most violent and forced expressions. He seems to grasp whatever words come first to hand during the impetus of inspiration, as if all other must be inadequate to the divine meaning. But passion (the all in all in poetry) is every where present, raising the low, dignifying the mean, and putting sense into the absurd. He makes his readers

1 The Comedy of All Fools appeared for the first time in the second (Reed's) edition of Dodsley. Specimens, i. 107.

line, "musical as is Apollo's lute," and sweet and graceful enough to compensate for ten times as much ruggedness. Such, for instance, is the fol lowing version of part of the description of the visit paid by Ulysses and his companions to the shrine of Apollo at Chrysa, in the First Book:

The youths crowned cups of wine
Drank off, and filled again to all: that day was held divine,
And spent in peans to the sun; who heard with pleased ear:
All soundly on their cables slept, even till the night was worn;
And when the Lady of the Light, the rosy-fingered morn,
Rose from the hills, all fresh arose, and to the camp retired,
While Phoebus with a fore-right wind their swelling bark inspired.
And here are a few more verses steeped in the

When whose bright chariot stooped to sea, and twilight hid the clear