SHAKSPEARE
This selection is from the “Lectures on the English Poets.” At the beginning of his lecture on Shakespeare and Milton, Hazlitt maintains that the arts reach their perfection in the early periods and are not continually progressive like the sciences—an idea which he frequently comes back to in his writings, notably in the “Round Table” paper, “Why the Arts are not Progressive.”
[P. 34.] the fault, etc. Cf. “Julius Cæsar,” i, 2, 140.
Shakspeare as they would be. Hazlitt may have had in mind Dr. Johnson’s comment in his preface to Shakespeare’s works: “the event which he represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effect would probably be such as he had assigned; he has not only shewn human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials to which it cannot be exposed.” (Nichol Smith: “Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare,” p. 117.)
[P. 35.] its generic quality. Coleridge applied the epithet “myriad-minded” to Shakespeare. See also Schlegel’s “Lectures on the Drama.” ed. Bohn, p. 363: “Never perhaps was there so comprehensive a talent for characterization as Shakespeare. It not only grasps the diversity of rank, age, and sex, down to the lispings of infancy; not only do the king and the beggar, the hero and the pickpocket, the sage and the idiot, speak and act with equal truthfulness ... his human characters have not only such depth and individuality that they do not admit of being classed under common names, and are inexhaustible even in conception; no, this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits, calls up the midnight ghost, exhibits before us the witches with their unhallowed rites, peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs; and these beings, though existing only in the imagination, nevertheless possess such truth and consistency, that even with such misshapen abortions as Caliban, he extorts the assenting conviction, that were there such beings they would so conduct themselves. In a word, as he carries a bold and pregnant fancy into the kingdom of nature, on the other hand, he carries nature into the region of fancy, which lies beyond the confines of reality. We are lost in astonishment at the close intimacy he brings us into with the extraordinary, the wonderful, and the unheard-of.”
a mind reflecting ages past. “These words occur in the first lines of a laudatory poem on Shakespeare printed in the second folio (1632). The poem is signed ‘J. M. S.’ and was attributed by Coleridge to ‘John Milton, Student.’ See his ‘Lectures on Shakespeare’ (ed. T. Ashe), pp. 129-130.” Waller-Glover, IV, 411.
[P. 36.] All corners, etc. “Cymbeline.” iii. 4, 39.
nodded to him. “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” iii, I, 177.
his so potent art. “Tempest,” v, i, 50.
When he conceived of a character, etc. Cf. Maurice Morgann, “On the Character of Falstaff”: “But it was not enough for Shakespeare to have formed his characters with the most perfect truth and coherence; it was further necessary that he should possess a wonderful facility of compressing, as it were, his own spirit into these images, and of giving alternate animation to the forms. This was not to be done from without; he must have felt every varied situation, and have spoken thro’ the organ he had formed. Such an intuitive comprehension of things and such a facility must unite to produce a Shakespeare.” (Nichol Smith: “Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare,” p. 247, n.)
subject to the same skyey influences. Cf. “Measure for Measure,” iii, I, 9: “servile to all the skyey influences.”
his frequent haunts. Cf. “Comus,” 314: “my daily walks and ancient neighborhood.”
[P. 37.] coheres semblably together. Cf. 2 “Henry IV,” v, i, 72: “to see the semblable coherence.”
It has been ingeniously remarked, by Coleridge, “Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton,” p. 116: “The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to instil that energy into the mind, which compels the imagination to produce the picture.... Here, by introducing a single happy epithet, ‘crying,’ a complete picture is presented to the mind, and in the production of such pictures the power of genius consists.”
me and thy crying self. “Tempest,” i, 2, 132.
What! man. “Macbeth,” iv, 3, 208.
Rosencrans. The early editions consistently misspell this name Rosencraus.
Man delights not me. “Hamlet,” ii, 2, 321.
a combination and a form. “Hamlet,” iii, 4, 60.
[P. 39.] There is a willow, etc. See “Hamlet,” iv, 7, 167:
“There is a willow grows aslant a brook
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.”
Now this is an instance, etc. Hazlitt elsewhere ascribes this observation to Lamb. See p. [83], n.
He’s speaking now. “Antony and Cleopatra,” i, 5, 24.
It is my birthday. Ibid., iii, 13, 185.
[P. 41.] nigh sphered in heaven. Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character.”
to make society. “Macbeth,” iii, 1, 42.
[P. 42.] with a little act. “Othello,” iii, 3, 328.
[P. 43.] while rage. “Troilus and Cressida,” i, 3, 52.
in their untroubled elements, etc. Cf. Wordsworth’s “Excursion,” VI, 763-766:
“That glorious star
In its untroubled element will shine
As now it shines, when we are laid in earth
And safe from all our sorrows.”
Satan’s address to the sun. “Paradise Lost,” IV, 31.
Oh that I were. “Richard II,” iv, 1, 260.
[P. 44.] His form. “Paradise Lost,” I, 591-594.
[P. 45.] With what measure. Mark, iv, 24; Luke, vi, 38.
It glances. “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” v, 1, 13.
puts a girdle. Ibid., ii, 1, 175.
I ask. “Troilus and Cressida,” i, 3, 227.
No man. Ibid., iii, 3, 15.
[P. 46.] Rouse yourself. Ibid., iii, 3, 222.
In Shakspeare, any other word, etc. In the essay “On Application to Study,” in the “Plain Speaker,” Hazlitt gives further illustrations of this point.
[P. 47.] Light thickens. “Macbeth,” iii, 2, 50.
the business of the state. “Othello,” iv, 2, 166.
Of ditties highly penned. 1 “Henry IV,” iii, 1, 209.
And so. “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” ii, 7, 31.
The universality of his genius, etc. Cf. “On Gusto,” “Round Table”: “The infinite quality of dramatic invention in Shakspeare takes from his gusto. The power he delights to show is not intense, but discursive. He never insists on anything as much as he might, except a quibble.”
[P. 48.] He wrote for the great vulgar, etc. The same remark had been made by both Pope and Johnson. See Nichol Smith’s “Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare,” pp, 49 and 141.
the great vulgar and the small. Cowley’s “Translation of Horace’s Ode III, i.”
his delights. “Antony and Cleopatra,” v, 2, 88.
[P. 49.] His tragedies are better than his comedies. Hazlitt is here deliberately opposing the view of Dr. Johnson expressed in the latter’s preface to Shakespeare: “In tragedy he often writes with great appearance of toil and study, what is written at last with little felicity; but in his comick scenes, he seems to produce without labour, what no labour can improve. In tragedy he is always struggling after some occasion to be comick, but in comedy he seems to repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of thinking congenial to his nature. In his tragick scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire.” (Nichol Smith’s “Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare,” p. 121.) In the second lecture of the “English Comic Writers,” Hazlitt recurs to this opinion of Johnson’s with the following comment: “For my own part, I so far consider this preference given to the comic genius of the poet as erroneous and unfounded, that I should say that he is the only tragic poet in the world in the highest sense, as being on a par with, and the same as Nature, in her greatest heights and depths of action and suffering. There is but one who durst walk within that mighty circle, treading the utmost bound of nature and passion, showing us the dread abyss of woe in all its ghastly shapes and colours, and laying open all the faculties of the human soul to act, to think, and suffer, in direst extremities; whereas I think, on the other hand, that in comedy, though his talents there too were as wonderful as they were delightful, yet that there were some before him, others on a level with him, and many close behind him.... There is not only nothing so good (in my judgment) as Hamlet, or Lear, or Othello, or Macbeth, but there is nothing like Hamlet, or Lear, or Othello, or Macbeth. There is nothing, I believe, in the majestic Corneille, equal to the stern pride of Coriolanus, or which gives such an idea of the crumbling in pieces of the Roman grandeur, ‘like an unsubstantial pageant faded,’ as the Antony and Cleopatra. But to match the best serious comedies, such as Molière’s Misanthrope and his Tartuffe, we must go to Shakspeare’s tragic characters, the Timon of Athens or honest Iago, where we shall more than succeed. He put his strength into his tragedies and played with comedy. He was greatest in what was greatest; and his forte was not trifling, according to the opinion here combated, even though he might do that as well as any one else, unless he could do it better than anybody else.” See also p. [99].
CHARACTERS OF SHAKSPEARE’S PLAYS
CYMBELINE
[P. 51.] Dr. Johnson is of opinion. “It may be observed that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the labour to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented.” (Nichol Smith: “Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare,” p. 123.)
It is the peculiar excellence, etc. Cf. Coleridge’s Works, IV, 75-76: “In Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that continuates society, a sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic process, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are representative of all past experience,—not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their predecessors even up to the first mother that lived. Shakespeare saw that the want of prominence which Pope notices for sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman’s character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being constituting one living total of head and heart. He has drawn it indeed in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude,—shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone.”
[P. 52.] Cibber, in speaking. See “Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber” (1740), I, iv.
My lord. i, 6, 112.
[P. 53.] What cheer. iii, 4, 41. The six quotations following are in the same scene.
[P. 54.] My dear lord. iii, 6, 14.
And when with wild wood-leaves. iv, 2, 389.
[P. 55.] With fairest flowers. iv, 2, 218.
Cytherea, how bravely. ii, 2, 14.
Me of my lawful pleasure. ii, 5, 9.
[P. 56.] whose love-suit. iii, 4, 136.
the ancient critic. Aristophanes of Byzantium, who lived in the third century before the Christian era.
the principle of analogy. This point is enforced by Hazlitt in connection with “Lear,” “The Tempest,” “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and “As You Like It.” Coleridge had previously remarked, “A unity of feeling and character pervades every drama of Shakespeare” (Works IV, 61), and Schlegel had written in the same manner concerning “Romeo and Juliet”: “The sweetest and the bitterest love and hatred, festive rejoicings and dark forebodings, tender embraces and sepulchral horrors, the fulness of life and self-annihilation, are here all brought close to each other; and yet these contrasts are so blended into a unity of impression, that the echo which the whole leaves behind in the mind resembles a single but endless sigh.” (ed. Bohn, p. 401).
[P. 57.] Out of your proof. iii, 3, 27.
[P. 58.] The game’s afoot. “The game is up,” iii, 3, 107.
Under the shade. “As You Like It,” ii, 7, 111.
[P. 59.] See, boys. “Stoop, boys,” iii, 3, 2.
Nay, Cadwell. iv, 2, 255.
Stick to your journal course. iv, 2, 10.
Your highness. i, 5, 23.