parallel extract; but the passages furnish a key to the principle upon which a dull character is made brilliant. Our poet has let in the sunlight of prodigious animal spirits, without any great intellectual refinement, (how different from Mercutio!) upon the heavy clod that he found ready to his hand: THE KING JOHN' OF 1591. "Lym. Methinks that Richard's pride and Richard's fall Should be a precedent t' affright you all. Bast. What words are these? how do my My father's foc clad in my father's spoil! What mak'st thou with the trophy of a king?" An 'a may catch your hide and you alone. You are the hare of whom the proverb gces, Whose valour plucks dead lions by the beard. I'll smoke your skin-coat, an I catch you right; Sirrah, look to 't; i' faith, I will, i' faith. Blanch. Oh, well did he become that lion's robe, That did disrobe the lion of that robe! Bast. It lies as sightly on the back of him As great Alcides' shoes upon an ass :— But, ass, I'll take that burthen from your back, Or lay on that shall make your shoulders crack." The second extract we shall make is for the purpose of exhibiting the modes in which the same passion is dealt with under the same circumstances. The situation in each play is where Arthur exhorts his mother to be content, after the marriage between Lewis and Blanch, and the consequent peace between John and Philip: THE KING JOHN' OF 1591. "Art. Madam, good cheer, these drooping Add no redress to salve our awkward haps: green To look into the bottom of these cares: What joy, what ease, what rest can lodge in me, With whom all hope and hap do disagree? Art. Yet ladies' tears, and cares, and solemn shows, Rather than helps, heap up more work for woes. Const. If any power will hear a widow's plaint, That from a wounded soul implores revenge, But now, black-spotted perjure as he is, own, And triumph in a widow's tearful cares, So Heavens cross them with a thriftless course! SHAKSPERE'S KING JOHN.' "Art. I do beseech you, madam, be content. Const. If thou, that bidd'st me be content, wert grim, Ugly, and sland'rous to thy mother's womb, Full of unpleasing blots and sightless stains, I would not care, I then would be content; But thou art fair; and at thy birth, dear boy, To tread down fair respect of sovereignty, Sal. Pardon me, madam, I will instruct my sorrows to be proud : characters consistent, natural, and distinct. No other unity is intended, and, therefore, none is to be sought. In his other works he has well enough preserved the unity of action." Taking these observations together, as a general definition of the character of Shakspere's histories, we are constrained to say that no opinion can be farther removed from the truth. So far from the "unity of action" not being regarded in Shakspere's histories, and being subservient to the "chronological succession," it rides over that succession whenever the demands of the scene require The great connecting link of the chain that binds together all the series of actions in the King John' of Shakspere, is the fate of Arthur. In this series of actions we find no events that arise out of other causes. From the first to the last scene, the hard Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it." struggles and the cruel end of the young Dr. Johnson, in his preface to Shakspere, speaking of the division, by the players, of our author's works into comedies, histories, and tragedies, thus defines what, he says, was the notion of a dramatic history in those times: "History was a series of actions, with no other than chronological succession, independent on each other, and without any tendency to introduce and regulate the conclusion." Again, speaking of the unities of the critics, he says of Shakspere-" His histories, being neither tragedies nor comedies, are not subject to any of their laws; nothing more is necessary to all the praise which they expect than that the changes of action be so prepared as to be understood, that the incidents be various and affecting, and the John; and immediately afterwards we come to the formal assertion by France of the "most lawful claim" of "Arthur Plantagenet”— "To this fair island, and the territories; To Ireland, Poictiers, Anjou, Touraine, Maine." As rapid as the lightning of which John speaks is a defiance given and returned. The ambassador is commanded to "depart in peace;" the king's mother makes an important reference to the "ambitious Constance;" and John takes up the position for which he struggles to the end,— "Our strong possession, and our right, for us.” The scene of the Bastard is not an episode entirely cut off from the main action of the piece; his loss of "lands," and his "new-made honour," were necessary to attach him to the cause of John. The Bastard is the one partisan who never deserts him. The second act brings us into the very heart of the conflict on the claim of Arthur. What a Gothic grandeur runs through the whole of these scenes! We see the men of six centuries ago, as they played the game of their personal ambition-now swearing hollow friendships, now breathing stern denunciations; now affecting compassion for the weak and the suffering, now breaking faith with the orphan and the mother;-now "Gone to be married, gone to swear a peace;" now keeping the feast "with slaughtered men;"-now trembling at, and now braving, the denunciations of spiritual power; and agreeing in nothing but to bend "their sharpest deeds of malice" on unoffending and peaceful citizens, unless the citizens have some "commodity" to offer which shall draw them "To a most base and vile-concluded peace." With what skill has Shakspere, whilst he thus painted the spirit of the chivalrous times,-lofty in words, but sordid in acts, given us a running commentary which interprets the whole in the sarcasms of the Bastard! But amidst all the clatter of conventional dignity which we find in the speeches of John, and Philip, and Lewis, and Austria, the real dignity of strong natural I would that I were low laid in my grave; This is the key-note to the great scene of Arthur and Hubert in the fourth act. But in the mean time the maternal terror and anguish of Constance become the prominent objects; and the rival kings, the haughty prelate, the fierce knights, the yielding citizens, appear but as puppets moved by destiny to force on the most bitter sorrows of that broken-hearted mother. We have here the true characteristic of the drama as described by the philosophical critic,-"fate and will in opposition to each other." Mrs. Jameson, in her very delightful work, 'The Characteristics of Women,' has formed a most just and beautiful conception of the character of Constance : "That which strikes us as the principal attribute of Constance is power-power of imagination, of will, of passion, of affection, of pride: the moral energy, that faculty which is principally exercised in self-control, and gives consistency to the rest, is deficient; or rather, to speak more correctly, the extraordinary development of sensibility and imagination, which lends to the character its rich poetical colouring, leaves the other qualities comparatively subordinate. Hence it is that the whole complexion of the character, notwithstanding its amazing grandeur, is so exquisitely feminine. The weakness of the woman, who by the very consciousness of that weakness is worked up to desperation and defiance, the fluctuations of temper and the bursts of sublime passion, the terrors, the impatience, and the tears, are all most true to feminine nature. The energy of Constance, not being based upon strength of character, rises and falls with the tide of passion. Her haughty spirit swells against resistance, and is excited into frenzy by sorrow and disappointment; while neither from her towering pride nor her strength of intellect can she borrow patience to submit, or fortitude to endure." How exquisitely is this feminine nature exhibited when Constance affects to disbelieve the tale of Salisbury that the kings are "gone to swear a peace;" or rather makes her words struggle with her half-belief, in very weakness and desperation! through the medium of her own personal wrongs: "Good father cardinal, cry thou, amen, To my keen curses: for, without my wrong, There is no tongue hath power to curse him right." Reckless of what may follow, she, who formerly exhorted Philip, "Stay for an answer to your embassy, Lest unadvised you stain your swords with blood," is now ready to encounter all the perilous chances of another war, and to exhort France to fall off from England, even upon her knee "made hard with kneeling." This would "Thou shalt be punish'd for thus frighting me, appear like the intensity of selfishness, did For I am sick, and capable of fears; we not see the passion of the mother in every Oppress'd with wrongs, and therefore full of act and word. It is thus that the very weakfears; A widow, husbandless, subject to fears; A woman, naturally born to fears; ness of Constance the impotent rage, the deceiving hope become clothed with the dignity that in ordinary cases belongs to And, though thou now confess thou didst but patient suffering and reasonable expectations. jest With my vex'd spirits, I cannot take a truce, But they will quake and tremble all this day." Here is the timid helpless woman, sick even at the shadows of coming events; but, when the shadows become realities, the haughty will, Soon, however, this conflict of feeling-almost as terrible as the "hysterica passio" of Lear is swallowed up in the mother's sense of her final bereavement : "Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world! My widow-comfort, and my sorrows' cure!" Matchless as is the art of the poet in these scenes;-matchless as an exhibition of maternal sorrow only, apart from the whirlwind of conflicting passions that are mixed up with that sorrow ;-matchless in this single point of view when compared with the 'Hecuba' which antiquity has left us*, and with the 'Merope' which the imitators of the Greek drama have attempted to revive; * In the Troades' of Euripides. the 66 —are we to believe that Shakspere intended | showing us, as it were, the sting which that our hearts should sustain this laceration, wounds, and the slaver which pollutes, of the and that the effects should pass away when venomous and loathsome reptile. The Constance quits the stage? Are we to believe "Come hither, Hubert. O my gentle Hubert, that he was satisfied that his "incidents We owe thee much"should be various and affecting,” but “independent on each other, and without any tendency to produce and regulate the conclusion?" Was there to be no "unity of feeling" to sustain and elevate the action to the end? Was his tragedy to be a mere dance of Fantoccini? No, no. The remembrance of Constance can never be separated from the after-scenes in which Arthur appears; and, at the very last, when the poison has done its work upon the guilty king, we can scarcely help believing that the spirit of Constance hovers over him, and that the echo of the mother's cries is even more insupportable than the "burn'd bosom" and the "parched lips," which neither his "kingdom's rivers" nor the "bleak winds" of the north can "comfort with cold." Up to the concluding scene of the third act we have not learnt from Shakspere to hate John. We may think him an usurper. Our best sympathies may be with Arthur and his mother. But he is bold and con fident, and some remnant of the indomitable spirit of the Plantagenets gives him a lofty and gallant bearing. We are not even sure, from the first, that he had not something of justice in his quarrel, even though his mother confidentially repudiates "his right." In the scene with Pandulph we completely go with him. We have yet to know that he would one day crouch at the feet of the power that he now defies; and he has therefore all our voices when he tells the wily and sophistical cardinal "That no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions." But the expression of one thought that had long been lurking in the breast of John sweeps away every feeling but that of hatred, and worse than hatred; and we see nothing, hereafter, in the king, but the creeping, cowardly assassin, prompting the deed which he is afraid almost to name to himself, with the lowest flattery of his instrument, and "By Heaven, Hubert, I am almost ashamed To say what good respect I have of thee—” make our flesh creep. The warrior and the his consummate art in making John move king vanish. If Shakspere had not exercised had made the suggestion of Arthur's death thus stealthily to his purpose of blood-if he what John afterwards pretended it was"the winking of authority "-the "humour" "Of dangerous majesty, when, perchance, it frowns," we might have seen him hemmed in with revolted subjects and foreign invaders with something like compassion. But this exhibition of low craft and desperate violence we can never forgive. At the end of the third act, when Pandulph instigates the Dauphin to the invasion of England, the poet overleaps the historical succession of events by many years, and makes the expected death of Arthur the motive of policy for the invasion: "The hearts Of all his people shall revolt from him, And kiss the lips of unacquainted change; And pick strong matter of revolt, and wrath, Out of the bloody fingers' ends of John." Here is the link which holds together the dramatic action still entire; and it wonderfully binds up all the succeeding events of the play. In the fourth act the poet has put forth all his power of the pathetic in the same ultimate direction as in the grief of Constance. The theme is not now the affection of a mother driven to frenzy by the circumstances of treacherous friends and victorious foes; but it is the irresistible power of the very helplessness of her orphan boy, triumphing in its truth and artlessness over the evil nature of the man whom John had selected to destroy his victim, as one |