The halo which surrounds the poetic beatitude has almost silenced criticism in its devotion; but a literary historian may not at all times be present in the choir of votaries; his labours lie outwards among the progressive opinions of a people, nor is he free to pass over what may seem paradoxical if it lies in his way.
The universal celebrity of Shakespeare is comparatively of recent origin: received, rejected, and revived, we must ascertain the alternate periods, and we must look for the causes of the neglect as well as the popularity of the poet. We may congratulate ourselves on the numerous escapes of our national bard from the oblivion of his dramatic brothers. The history and the works of Shakespeare, and perhaps the singularity of the poet’s character in respect to his own writings, are some of the most startling paradoxes in literary history.
Malone describes Shakespeare as “the great poet whom nature framed to disregard the wretched models that were set before him, and to create a drama from his own native and original stores.” This cautious but creeping commentator, notwithstanding that he had often laboured to prove the contrary, gaily shot this arrow drawn from the quiver of Dryden, who has delivered very contradictory notions of Shakespeare. Veritably—for we are now writing historically—Shakespeare never “created our drama, disregarding the wretched models before him;” far from this! the great poet had those models always before him, and worked upon them; no poet has so freely availed himself of the inventions of his predecessors, and in reality many of the dramas of Shakespeare had been written before he wrote.
It cannot be denied that our great poet never exercised his invention in the fables of his dramas; thus he spared himself half the toil of his work. He viewed with the prophetic eye of genius the old play or the old story, and at once discovered all its capabilities; he saw at once all that it had and all that it had not; its characterless personages he was confident that he could quicken with breath and action, and that his own vein, allowed to flow along the impure stream, would have the force to clear the current, and to expand its own lucid beauty.
Had not the felicitous genius of our bard revelled in this facility of adopting and adapting the ready-made inventions of many a luckless playwright, we might have lost our Shakespeare; for he never wrote for us, but for his little theatre. He had no leisure to afford whole days in constructing plots for plays, nor much troubled himself with those which he followed closely even to a fault; nor did the quickness of his genius neglect a solitary thought, nor lose a fortunate expression. To what extent were these borrowings from manuscript plays we cannot even surmise; we have one specimen of Shakespeare’s free use of whatever the poet’s judgment caught, in those copious passages which he transplanted from North’s “Plutarch” and Holinshed’s “Chronicles,” lending their words his own music.
One of his commentators, George Steevens, published six old plays on which Shakespeare had grounded six of his own; but this rash act was in the early days of the commentatorship; Steevens must soon have discovered the inconvenience of printing unreadable dramas, to exhibit the concealed industry of the mighty bard. The spells of Shakespeare did not hang on the artificial edifice of his fable; he looked abroad for mankind, and within his own breast for all the impulses of the beings of his imagination. All he required was a scene; then the whole “sphere of humanity,” as Jonson expressed it, lie wide before him. There was a Jew before the Merchant of Venice; a shrew had been tamed before Katherine by Petruchio; a King Lear and his three daughters, before the only one the world knows; and a tragical Hamlet had philosophised like Seneca, as the satirical Nash told, before our Shakespeare’s: but this list is needless, for it would include every drama he has left us. Even the beings of his creation lie before him in their embryon state. His creative faculty never required more than a suggestion. The prototype of the wonderful Caliban has not hitherto been discovered, but the fairies of the popular mythology become the creatures of his own imagination. Middleton first opened the incantations of “the witches.” The Hecate of Middleton is a mischief-brooding hag, gross and tangible, and her “spirits, black, white, and grey,” with her “devil-toad, devil-ram, devil-cat, and devil-dam,” disturb their spells by the familiar drollery of their names, and their vulgar instincts. Out of this ordinary domestic witchcraft the mightier poet raised “the weird sisters,”
| That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth, And yet are on’t, |
nameless, bodiless, vanishing shadows!
| And what seemed corporal Melted as breath into the wind. |
The dramatic personages which seem to me peculiar to Shakespeare, and in which he evidently revelled, serving his purposes on very opposite occasions, are his clowns and domestic fools. Yet his most famous comic personage, the fat knight, was the rich graft on the miserable scion of Sir John Oldcastle, in an old play; the slight hint of “a mere pampered glutton” was idealised into that inimitable variety of human nature combined in one man—at once so despicable and so delightful!