love;-all these traces of what Shakspere only could effect, are utterly destroyed by the stage conception of Lear, such as has been endured amongst us for more than a century. When the "showmen" banished the Fool, they rendered it impossible that the original nature of Lear should be understood. It is the Fool who interprets to us the old man's sensitive tenderness lying at the bottom of his impatience. He cannot bear to hear that "the Fool hath much pined away."-"No more of that, I have noted it well." From the Fool, Lear can bear to hear truth; his jealous pride is not alarmed: he indeed calls him "a pestilent gall," "a bitter fool;' but the

Lear's eager wish to enjoy his daughter's human feelings,-a father's concentrated violent professions, whilst the inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason;—these facts, these passions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found implied, in the first four or five lines of the play." They are implied, certainly, but the character which they make up is not described by Shakspere. When Regan and Goneril speak slightingly of their father, immediately after he has been lavishing his kingdom upon them, it is not the object of the poet to make us understand Lear, but to make us understand Regan and Goneril. This, again, was Shakspere's art:-Tate, the representative of the vulgar notion of art, must have a defined character-something positive, something generic-a bad man, a good mana mild man, a passionate man-a good son, a cruel son. Upon this principle the Lear of Tate is the choleric king. Because Goneril characteristically speaks of "the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them," Gloster, in Tate, is made to say of Lear,—

"Yet has his temper ever been unfix'd, Chol'ric and sudden;"

and, as if this were not enough to disturb an audience in the proper comprehension of the real Lear, we must have Cordelia call him "the choleric king," and, last of all, Lear himself must exclaim, in the trial-scene, "'t is said that I am choleric." And now, then, that we have got a choleric king—a simple, unmixed, ranting, roaring, choleric king, he is in a fit condition to be stirred up by "the showmen of the scene." Charles Lamb would be immortal as a critic if he had only written these words:"Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily." All the wonderful gradations of his character are utterly destroyed;—all the thin partitions which separate passion from wildness, and wildness from insanity, and insanity from a partial restoration to the most intense of

"Poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man," in the depths of his misery, having scarcely anything in the world to love but the Fool, thus clings to him :—

"My wits begin to turnCome on, my boy: How dost, my boy? Art cold?

I am cold myself.-Where is this straw, my fellow?

The art of our necessities is strange,

That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel :

Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart

That's sorry yet for thee."

And all this is gone in the stage Lear. The
"universal, ideal, and sublime" comedy, of
which the Fool is the principal exponent,
would have been incomprehensible to the
Augustan age. We are quite sure that Tate
would have got rid of the assumed madness
of Edgar, if he had not found it convenient
for the purpose of tacking a love-scene to it.
As it is, he has brought the mad Tom and
the mad king into juxtaposition. We do
not suspect Tate of comprehending the
metaphysical principle upon which Shakspere
worked, and which Coleridge has so well
expounded:- 66
Edgar's assumed madness
serves the great purpose of taking off part of
the shock which would otherwise be caused
by the true madness of Lear, and further
displays the profound difference between the

It agrees

with all that is brought together;—the night the storms-the houselessness-Gloster with his eyes put out-the Fool-the semblance of a madman, and Lear in his madness,-are all bound together by a strange kind of sympathy, confusion in the elements of nature, of human society and the human soul! Throughout all the play is there not sublimity felt amidst the continual presence of all kinds of disorder and confusion in the natural and moral world; -a continual consciousness of eternal order, law, and good? This it is that so exalts it in our eyes.'

two. In every attempt at representing | consecration of Lear's madness.
madness throughout the whole range of dra-
matic literature, with the single exception of
Lear, it is mere light-headedness, as especially
in Otway. In Edgar's ravings, Shakspere
all the while lets you see a fixed purpose, a
practical end in view; in Lear's there is
only the brooding of the one anguish, an
eddy without progression." Tate has left us
this contrast; but he has taken away the
Fool, which completes the wonderful power
of the third act of Shakspere's 'Lear.' The
Fool, as well as Edgar, takes off part of the
shock which would otherwise be caused by
the madness of Lear, whilst he yet contributes
to the completeness of that moral chaos
which Shakspere has represented—“ all ex-
ternal nature in a storm, all moral nature
convulsed." A writer of very rare depth
and discrimination has thus described these
scenes of which Edgar and the Fool make
up such important accessories:-"The two
characters, father and king, so high to our
imagination and love, blended in the reverend
image of Lear-both in their destitution, yet
both in their height of greatness-the spirit
blighted, and yet undepressed-the wits gone,
and yet the moral wisdom of a good heart
left unstained, almost unobscured-the wild
raging of the elements, joined with human
outrage and violence to persecute the helpless,
unresisting, almost unoffending sufferer
and he himself, in the midst of all imaginable
misery and desolation, descanting upon
himself, on the whirlwinds that drive around
him, and then turning in tenderness to some
of the wild motley associations of sufferers
among whom he stands—all this is not like
what has been seen on any stage, perhaps in
any reality; but it has made a world to our
imagination about one single imaginary
individual, such as draws the reverence and
sympathy which would seem to belong
properly only to living men. It is like the
remembrance of some wild perturbed scene
of real life. Everything is perfectly woful in
this world of woe. The very assumed madness
of Edgar, which, if the story of Edgar stood
alone, would be insufferable, and would
utterly degrade him to us, seems, associated
as he is with Lear, to come within the

The love-scene between Edgar and Cordelia, in the first scene of the first act of Tate's

Lear,' was an assurance, under the hand and seal of Tate, that the play would end happily. He might be constrained, in the impossibility of wholly destroying Shakspere, to exhibit to us some of the most terrific conflicts of human passion, and the most striking displays of human suffering. He could not utterly conceal the terrible workings of the mind of Lear, which had been laid bare by the "explosions of his passion." But he takes care to let it be understood that there is nothing real in this; that all will be right in the end; that, though the flames rage, the house is insured; that a wedding and a dance will terminate the play much better than the "dead march" of Shakspere. "Cordelia," says Dr. Johnson, "from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate, I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor."

This was a bold or a lazy avowal in Johnson; for Aristotle describes the popular admiration of the tragedy which ends happily for the good characters, and fatally for the bad, as a result of the "weakness of the spectators; "+ and though Johnson vigorously attacked Aristotle's Unities-or rather the *Blackwoods Mag., vol. v.

+ Treatise on Poetry '-Twining's Translation.

[Exeunt with a dead march."

And why do we ask any one of our readers to compare what cannot be compared?-why do we put one of the most divine conceptions of poetry side by side with the meanest interpretation of the most unimaginative feelings-equally remote from the verisimilitude of common life, as from the truth of ideal beauty? It is, as we have said before, because we feel unable to impart to others our own conceptions of the marvellous power of the Lear' of Shakspere, without employing some agency that may give distinctness to ideas which must be otherwise vague. There is only one mode in which such a production as the ' Lear' of Shakspere can be understood-by study, and by reverential reflection. The age which produced the miserable parody of Lear' that till within a few years has banished the 'Lear'

of Shakspere from the stage, was, as far as regards the knowledge of the highest efforts of intellect, a presumptuous, artificial, and therefore empty age. Tate was tolerated because Shakspere was not read. We have arrived, in some degree, to a better judgment, because we have learnt to judge more humbly. We have learnt to compare the highest works of the highest masters of poetry, not by the pedantic principle of considering a modern great only to the extent in which he is an imitator of an ancient, but by endeavouring to comprehend the idea in which the modern and the ancient each worked. The Cordelia of Shakspere and the Antigone of Sophocles have many points of similarity; but they each belong to a different system of art. It is for the highest minds only to carry their several systems to an approach to the perfection to which Shakspere and Sophocles have carried them. It was for the feeblest of imitators, in a feeble age, to produce such parodies as we have exhibited, under the pretence of substituting order for irregularity, but in utter ignorance of the principle of order which was too skilfully framed to be visible to the grossness of their taste.

CHAPTER VII.

MACBETH.

'THE Tragedie of Macbeth' was first pub- | is true, or has been related as true: it belished in the folio collection of 1623. Its longs to the realms of poetry altogether. place in that edition is between Julius We might as well call 'Lear' or 'Hamlet' Cæsar' and 'Hamlet.' In the entry on the historical plays, because the outlines of the Stationers' register, immediately previous to story of each are to be found in old records the publication of the edition of 1623, it is of the past. also classed amongst the Tragedies. And yet, in modern reprints of the text of Shakspere, 'Macbeth' is placed the first amongst the Histories. This is to convey a wrong notion of the character of this great drama. Shakspere's Chronicle-histories are essentially conducted upon a different principle. The interest of Macbeth' is not an historical interest. It matters not whether the action

Malone and Chalmers agree in assigning this tragedy to the year 1606. Their proofs, as we apprehend, are entirely frivolous and unsatisfactory. The Porter says, “Here's a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty:" the year 1606 was a year of plenty, and therefore 'Macbeth' was written in 1606. Again, the same character says, "Here's an equivocator, that could swear