Shakespeare's work. Which makes me almost afraid to trust my own judgment concerning it; yet I always feel it to be in the true spirit of the Poet's method. This strain of droll broad humour, oozing out amid such a congregation of terrors, to my mind deepens their effect, the strange but momentary diversion causing them to return with the greater force. Of the murder-scene, the banquet-scene, the sleep-walking-scene, with their dagger of the mind, and Banquo of the mind, and blood-spots of the mind, it were vain to speak. Yet over these sublimely-terrific passages there everywhere hovers a magic light of poetry, at once disclosing the horrors of the scene and annealing them into matter of delight. Hallam sets the work down as being, in the language of Drake, "the greatest effort of our author's genius, the most sublime and impressive drama which the world has ever beheld"; a judgment from which most readers will perhaps be less inclined to dissent, the older they grow.

KING LEAR.

THE TRAGEDY OF KING LEAR was acted at Court on the 26th of December, 1606; as appears by an entry at the Stationers' dated November 26, 1607: "A book called Mr. William Shakespeare's History of King Lear, as it was played before the King's Majesty at Whitehall, upon St. Stephen's night at Christmas last, by his Majesty's Servants playing usually at the Globe on the Bankside." This is the only contemporary notice of King Lear that has reached us. Most likely the play had become favourably known on the public stage before it was called for at the Court. On the other hand, it contains divers names and allusions evidently borrowed from Harsnet's Declaration of Popish Impostures, which appeared in 1603. This is all the positive information we have as to the date of the writing.

There are, however, several passages in the play itself, referring, apparently, to contemporary events, and thus indicating still more nearly the time of the composition. Of these it seems hardly worth the while to note more than one. In Act i., scene 2, Gloster says, "These late eclipses in the Sun and Moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects.' A great eclipse of the Sun took place in October, 1605, and had been looked forward to with dread as portending evil; the more so, because an eclipse of the Moon occurred within the space of a month previous. And John Harvey had, in 1588, published a book wherein, with the wisdom of nature," he had reasoned against the common belief, that such natural events were ominous of disaster, or had some moral significance in them. Therewithal, in November, 1605, the dreadful secret of the Gunpowder Plot came to light; so that one at all superstitiously inclined might well say that "nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects," and that "machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves." Taking all these particulars together, we have ample ground for inferring the play to have been written near the close of 1605, or somewhat later.

The tragedy was printed at least twice, some editors say three times, in the year 1608, the form being in each case a small quarto. It also reappeared, along with the other plays, in the folio of 1623. Considerable portions of the play, as given in the quartos, are omitted in the folio; in particular one whole scene, the third in Act iv., which, though perhaps of no great account on the stage, is, in the reading, one of the sweetest and loveliest in all Shakespeare. This naturally infers the folio to have been printed from a playhouse copy in which the play had been cut down, to abridge the time of performance. — I must add that the play has several passages which were most certainly not written by Shakespeare. Two of these

have considerable length, one including seventeen lines, the other fourteen; besides several shorter ones. By whom these were written, and why they were inserted, it were probably vain to speculate.

The story of King Lear and his three daughters is one of those old legends with which Mediæval Romance peopled the "dark backward and abysm of time," where fact and fancy appear all of one colour and texture. Milton, discoursing of ante-historical Britain, compares the gradual emerging of authentic history from the shadows of fable and legend, to the course of one who, "having set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth and idle dreams, arrives on the confines where daylight and truth meet him with a clear dawn, representing to his view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes." In Shakespeare's time, the legendary tale which furnished the main plot of this drama was largely interwoven with the popular literature of Europe. It is met with in various.

The oldest extant version

forms and under various names. of it, in connection with British history, is in Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welsh monk of the twelfth century, who translated it from the ancient British tongue into Latin. From thence it was abridged by the Poet's favourite chronicler, Holinshed. I have not room for a sketch of the tale in any of its forms, and must dismiss it by saying that it gives the main incidents of the leading plot very much as we have them in the play. The subordinate plot of Gloster and his sons was probably taken from an episodical chapter in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Here the borrowing was less literal, being rather in the way of ideas than of incidents. This, also, I must leave unsketched.

A good deal of irrelevant criticism has been spent upon the circumstance that in the details and costume of this play the Poet did not hold himself to the date of the forecited legend. That date was some eight hundred years before Christ; yet the play abounds in the manners, senti

ments, and allusions of modern England. Malone is scandalized that Edgar in the play should speak of Nero, while the old chroniclers place Lear's reign upwards of eight hundred years before the birth of that gentleman. The painstaking Mr. Douce, also, is in dire distress at the Poet's blunder in substituting the manners of England under the Tudors for those of the ancient Britons.

Now to make these points, or such as these, any ground of impeachment, is to mistake totally the nature and design of the work. For the drama is not, nor was meant to be, in any sense of the term a history: it is a tragedy, and nothing else; and as such is as free of chronological circumscriptions as human nature itself. The historical or legendary matter, be it more or less, neither shapes nor guides the structure of the piece, but is used in entire subservience to the general ends of tragic representation. The play, therefore, does not fall within the lines of any jurisdiction for settling dates; it is amenable to no laws but those of Art, any more than if it were entirely of the Poet's own creation its true whereabout is in the reader's mind; and the only proper question is, whether it keeps to the laws of this whereabout; in which reference it will probably stand the severest inquisitions that criticism has strength to pros

ecute.

This I take to be an ample vindication of the play not only from the aforesaid criticisms, but from any others of like sort that may be urged. And it seems to me to put the whole matter upon just the right ground; leaving to the Drama all the freedom and variety that belong to the Gothic Architecture, where the only absolute law is, that the parts shall all stand in mutual intelligence: and the more the structure is diversified in form, aspect, purpose, and expression, the grander and more elevating is the harmony resulting from the combination. It is clearly in the scope and spirit of this great principle of Gothic Art that King Lear was conceived and worked out. Herein, to be sure, it is like other of the Poet's dramas, only, it seems to

me, more so than any of the rest. There is almost no end to the riches here drawn together: on attempting to reckon over the parts and particulars severally, one is amazed to find what varied wealth of character, passion, pathos, poetry, and high philosophy is accumulated in the work. Yet there is a place for every thing, and every thing is in its place: we find nothing but what makes good its right to be where and as it is; so that the accumulation is not more vast and varied in form and matter than it is united and harmonious in itself. I have spoken of a main and a subordinate plot in the drama; and I may add that either of these might suffice for a great tragedy by itself: yet the two plots are so woven together as to be hardly distinguishable, and not at all separable; we can scarce perceive when one goes out and the other comes in.

Accordingly, of all Shakespeare's dramas, this, on the whole, is the one which, considering both the qualities of the work and the difficulties of the subject, best illustrates the measure of his genius; - his masterpiece in that style or order of composition which he, I will not say created, but certainly carried so much higher than any one else as to make it peculiarly his own. The work is indeed, to my mind, the highest specimen we have of what is aptly called the Gothic Drama.

T

The style and versification of King Lear do not differ from those of other plays written at or about the same period, save that here they seem attracted, as by imperceptible currents of sympathy, into a freedom and variety of movement answerable to the structure of the piece. There seems, in this case, no possible tone of mind or feeling, but that the Poet has a congenial form of imagery to body it forth, and a congenial pitch of rhythm and harmony to give it voice. Certainly, in none of his plays do we more feel the presence and power of that wonderful diction, not to say language, which he gradually wrought out and built up as the fitting and necessary organ of his thought. English literature has nothing else like it; and whatsoever else