Shakspeare and His Times

by François Guizot

This distinction is made with such precision in the original, that, in general, the comic part is written in prose, while the tragic part is written almost uniformly in verse; a kind of mixture which Shakspeare ordinarily used with most marvelous dexterity, but which the French translator has not ventured to introduce upon our stage.

The comic part appeared to be long and rather overdrawn; the general effect which it produced was a feeling of disapprobation and impatience.

To what is this to be attributed? Was it merely the effect of the admixture of comedy and tragedy? a feeling of the incompatibility of these equally simultaneous impressions? Doubtless the majority of the audience would thus have interpreted what they felt. But suppose the comic part had been of a different character—that it had been better managed, disposed more judiciously, distributed according to a juster proportion—would the same effect have been produced? There was nothing to indicate that it would; and the favor with which some salient points were received, and the universal laughter which they excited, may even induce a contrary opinion.

The idea of allotting an equal, or nearly an equal share of attention to two opposite elements, appears to us a violation of due proportions, and to rest upon a false principle. We are not usually sticklers for the unities; still, however, we believe that a certain fundamental unity is, in every case, a condition under which the beautiful is manifested here below. The effect, the legitimate effect of the beautiful, whatever it may be, is to raise the soul above itself, to transport it, by a kind of magic enchantment, into a sphere where all its transitory interests disappear, and to abolish for a time the sentiment of its individuality. Now the soul of man, as it is at present constituted, can not entirely abandon itself; it can not forget itself, and lose itself, either in simultaneous, or in two successive impressions of a precisely opposite character and of equal force. To attempt this is to do violence to its constitution.

If the subject of "Othello" had been perfectly unknown to the public, if the public could have freely allowed itself to be carried unresistingly along with the constant mysteriousness that is connected with Roderigo, the surprise and the wrath of Brabantio, the drunkenness of Cassio, and the ill-natured jokes of the buffoon, uttered in a strain of mere pleasantry, it would from the first have ascended to the proper elevation of gladness and hilarity; but the shock could not but be unpleasant to them when they were so soon to pass abruptly from this gay and playful disposition to the terrible pathos of the gigantic scenes of jealousy which terminate the third act.

But as they, on the contrary, had entered the theatre with their expectations directed entirely to those scenes of jealousy, and to other scenes not less terrible, which were to grow out of these, as they were anxiously looking forward to the catastrophe, two or more acts full of sarcasms, facetiæ, and jokes appeared to the public a severe trial, a somewhat grim preparation; they saw in it something not merely contrary, but opposed and shocking to their tastes, something which overshot the mark, whatever that mark may be.

Were they wrong? Was this mere prejudice? We, for our part, can hardly think so.

The mixture of comedy and tragedy is not, or certainly ought not to be, a purely arbitrary thing. The two are not brought together merely for the sake of the union. Opposition, antithesis, in works of art, is not in itself a merit, has no intrinsic value. They are brought together when a certain kind of beauty results naturally from their juxtaposition; they are united because, in the vicinity of those events which change and reverse an entire life, there are the world, society, and the crowd of indifferent egotists who move on without caring for these events, whose movements are neither disturbed nor disarranged by them, who pursue their individual interests, ruled by their habits, abandoned to selfishness; and because the contrast between situations of such an opposite character, and sentiments so unlike to one another, after it has compelled us to smile, opens to us a point of view from which human life is seen shaded with a fanciful and melancholy tinge. Comedy and tragedy are blended, because a flash of unpremeditated gayety sometimes crosses the minds of those who are corroded by remorse or stricken by despair, and restores them for an instant to a state which is lost to them—irremediably and hopelessly lost—leaving them immediately afterward, as a ray of light which only glittered for a moment to exhibit more clearly the depth of the abyss: