too much reason to know that the stage had acquired a more licentious tone after Shakspere's time; and although the puritans were over-zealous in their indiscriminating violence against all theatrical performances, there is just cause to believe that the senses of the people were stimulated by excitements of plot and character, mingled with profane and licentious language, much more than in the days when Shakspere rested for his attractions on a large exhibition of natural passion and true wit; and when he produced play after play, history, comedy, tragedy "works truly excellent and capable of enlarging the understanding, warming and purifying the heart, and placing in the centre of the whole being the germs of noble and manlike actions."* The nation was much divided then, as it was long afterwards, between the followers of extreme opinions in morals—the over-strict on one hand, the wholly careless on the other. Prynne tells us that, upon his first arrival in London, he had "heard and seen in four several plays, to which the pressing importunity of some ill acquaintance drew me whiles I was yet a novice, such wickedness, such lewdness, as then made my penitent heart to loathe, my conscience to abhor, all stage-plays ever since." Prynne left Oxford and came to London after 1620. Fletcher was then the living idol of the theatre; and any one who is acquainted with his plays, full of genius as they are, must admit that Prynne had too much cause for his disgust. In the officebook of Sir Henry Herbert, in 1633, we find the following curious entry: "The comedy called 'The Young Admiral,' being free from oaths, profaneness, or obsceneness, hath given me much delight and satisfaction in the reading, and may serve for a pattern to other poets." The play was Shirley's. But six months after there is a still more curious entry in the same book: "This morning, being the 9th of January, 1633 [1634], the king was pleased to call me into his withdrawing chamber to the window, where he went over all that I had crossed in Davenant's play-book, and, allowing of faith and slight to be asseverations only and no oaths, marked

* Coleridge.

them to stand, and some other few things, but in the greater part allowed of my reformations. This was done upon a complaint of Mr. Endymion Porter's, in December. The king is pleased to take faith, death, slight, for asseverations, and no oaths, to which I do humbly submit as my master's judgment; but under favour conceive them to be oaths, and enter them here, to declare my opinion and submission." But it was not the striking out of the asseveration, or even of the oaths, which could purify the plays of that period. Their principal demoralizing power consisted in their false representations of human character and actions. Take for example "the frightful contrasts," as they have justly been called, between the women of Beaumont and Fletcher and those of Shakspere. He kept at all times in the high road of life. He "has no innocent adulteries, no interesting incests, no virtuous vice; he never renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kotzebues of the day." But this very truth and purity of Shakspere must have greatly diminished his attractions, amidst a crowd who wrote upon opposite principles. Nothing but the unequalled strength of his artistical power could have preserved the unbroken continuance of his supremacy.

And this leads us to the consideration of another cause why the popular admiration of him would have been diminished and interrupted within a very few years after his death, and certainly long before the suppression of the theatres, if his excellences had not so completely triumphed over every impediment to his enduring popular fame. His plays were to a certain extent mixed up with the reputation of the actors by whom they were originally represented. In that curious play 'The Return from Parnassus,' which was acted by the students in St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1606, and which was clearly written by an academical person inclined to satirize the popular poets and players of his day, Kempe is thus made to address two scholars who want lessons in the histrionic art: "Be merry, my lads;

* Coleridge's Literary Remains,' vol. ii. p. 79.

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neglect into which Shakspere had fallen as a popular dramatist, may be opposed the most distinct testimony of one, especially, who was a most accurate and minute chronicler of the public taste. COLLEY CIBBER, who himself became an actor, in 1690, in the one privileged company of London, of which Betterton was the head-a company formed out of the united strength of the two companies which had been established at the Restoration-describes the state of the stage at the period of the first revival of dramatic performances: "Besides their being thorough masters of their art, these actors set forward with two critical advantages, which perhaps may never happen again in many ages." One of the advantages he mentions, but a secondary one, was, "that before the Restoration no actresses had ever been seen upon the English stage." But the chief advantage was, "their immediate opening after the so long interdiction of plays during the civil war and the anarchy that followed it." He then goes on to say, What eager appetites from so long a fast must the guests of those times have had to that high and fresh variety of entertainments!" Provided by whom? By the combined variety of Jonson, and Fletcher, and Massinger, and Ford, and Shirley, and a host of other writers, whose attactive fare was to be presented to the eager guests after so long a fast? No. The high entertainment and the fresh variety was to be provided by one man alone,-the man who we are told was neglected in his own age, and forgotten in that which came after him. "What eager appetites from so long a fast must the guests of those times have had to that high and fresh variety of entertainments which Shakespeare had left prepared for them! Never was a stage so provided. A hundred years are wasted, and another silent century well advanced*, and yet what unborn age shall say Shakespeare has his equal! How many shining actors have the warm scenes of his genius given to posterity! Betterton is idolized as an actor, as much as the old man venerates Shakspere: "Betterton was an actor, as Shakespeare was an author, both without * Cibber is writing as late as 1740.

competitors; formed for the mutual assistance and illustration of each other's genius. How Shakespeare wrote, all men who have a taste for nature may read, and know; but with what higher rapture would he still be read, could they conceive how Betterton played him!' Whenever Cibber speaks of Betterton's wondrous excellence, it is always in connection with Shakspere: "Should I tell you that all the Othellos, Hamlets, Hotspurs, Macbeths, and Brutuses whom you may have seen since his time, have fallen far short of him, this still should give you no idea of his particular excellence." For some years after the Restoration it seems to have been difficult to satiate the people with the repetition of Shakspere's great characters and leading plays, in company with some of the plays of Jonson and Fletcher. The two companies had an agreement as to their performances: "All the capital plays of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Ben Jonson were divided between them by the approbation of the court, and their own alternate choice. So that, when Hart was famous for Othello, Betterton had no less a reputation for Hamlet." Still, the test of histrionic excellence was Shakspere. So far from Shakspere being neglected at this period, it is almost evident that the performance of him was overdone; for every one knows that a theatrical audience, even in the largest city, is, in a considerable degree, composed of regular frequenters of the theatre, and that novelty is therefore an indispensable requisite to continued success. The plays of Shakspere were better acted by the company of which Betterton was the head, than by the rival company; and this, according to Cibber, led to the introduction of a new taste:-" These two excellent companies were both prosperous for some few years, till their variety of plays began to be exhausted. Then, of course, the better actors (which the King's seem to have been allowed) could not fail of drawing the greater audiences. Sir William Davenant, therefore, master of the Duke's company, to make head against their success, was forced to add spectacle and music to action, and to introduce a new species of plays, since called dramatic operas, of which kind were 'The

"This sensual supply of sight and sound coming into the assistance of the weaker party, it was no wonder they should grow too hard for sense and simple nature, when it is considered how many more people there are that can see and hear than think and judge. So wanton a change of the public taste, therefore, began to fall as heavy upon the King's company as their greater excellence in action had before fallen upon their competitors. Of which encroachment upon wit several good prologues in those days frequently complained."

There can be no doubt that most of the original performances of Shakspere, immediately after the Restoration, were given from his unsophisticated text. The first improvements that were perpetrated upon this text resulted from the cause which Cibber has so accurately described. Davenant, to make head against the success of the King's company "was forced to add spectacle and music to action." What importance Davenant attached to these novelties, we may learn from the description of the opening scene of 'The Enchanted Island; that alteration of "The Tempest,' by himself and Dryden, to which Cibber refers :—“The front of the stage is opened, and the band of twenty-four violins, with the harpsicals and theorbos which accompany the voices, are placed between the pit and the stage. While the overture is playing, the curtain rises, and discovers a new frontispiece joined to the great pilasters on each side of the stage. This frontispiece is a noble arch, supported by large wreathed columns of the Corinthian order; the wreathings of the columns are beautified with roses wound round them, and several Cupids flying about them. On the cornice, just over the capitals, sits on either side a figure, with a trumpet in one hand and a palm in the other, representing Fame. A little farther on the same cornice, on each side of a compass pediment, lie a lion and a unicorn, the supporters of the royal arms of England. In the middle of the arch are

they were placing them in the midst of that compass-pediment. Behind this is the scene, which represents a thick cloudy sky, a very rocky coast, and a tempestuous sea in perpetual agitation. This tempest (supposed to be raised by magic) has many dreadful objects in it, as several spirits in horrid shapes flying down amongst the sailors, then rising in the air. And, when the ship is sinking, the whole house is darkened, and a shower of fire falls upon 'em. This is accompanied with lightning, and several claps of thunder, to the end of the storm."

In the alterations of this play, which were made in 1669, and which continued to possess the English stage for nearly a century and a half, it is impossible now not to feel how false was the taste upon which they were built. Dryden says of this play, that Davenant, to put the last hand to it, "designed the counterpart to Shakespeare's plot, namely, that of a man who had never seen a woman; that by this means those two characters of innocence and love might the more illustrate and commend each other." Nothing can be weaker and falser in art than this mere duplication of an idea. But still it was not done irreverently. The prologue to this altered Tempest (of his own part of which Dryden says, "I never writ anything with more delight") is of itself an answer to the asinine assertion that Dryden, in common with the public of his day, was indifferent to the memory of Shakspere :

"As, when a tree's cut down, the secret root Lives underground, and thence new branches shoot;

So, from old Shakespear's honour'd dust, this day

Springs up and buds a new reviving play. Shakespear, who (taught by none) did first

impart

To Fletcher wit, to labouring Jonson art. He, monarch like, gave those his subjects law,

And is that nature which they paint and draw.

Fletcher reached that which on his heights

did grow,

Whilst Jonson crept and gather'd all below.