This is Mr. Halliwell’s note: “Death a sence.—‘Earth a sense,’ ed. 1633. Mr. Dilke suggests: ‘For me, why, earth’s as sensible.’ The original is not necessarily corrupt. It may mean,—why, you might as well think Death was a sense, one of the senses. See a like phrase at p. 77.” What help we should get by thinking Death one of the senses, it would demand another Œdipus to unriddle. Mr. Halliwell can astonish us no longer, but we are surprised at Mr. Dilke, the very competent editor of the “Old English Plays,” 1815. From him we might have hoped for better things. “Death o’ sense!” is an exclamation. Throughout these volumes we find a for o’,—as, “a clock” for “o’clock,” “a the side” for “o’ the side.” A similar exclamation is to be found in three other places in the same play, where the sense is obvious. Mr. Halliwell refers to one of them on p. 77,—“Death a man! is she delivered?” The others are,—“Death a justice! are we in Normandy?” (p. 98); and “Death a discretion! if I should prove a foole now,” or, as given by Mr. Halliwell, “Death, a discretion!” Now let us apply Mr. Halliwell’s explanation. “Death a man!” you might as well think Death was a man, that is, one of the men!—or a discretion, that is, one of the discretions!—or a justice, that is, one of the quorum! We trust Mr. Halliwell may never have the editing of Bob Acres’s imprecations. “Odd’s triggers!” he would say, “that is, as odd as, or as strange as, triggers.”
Vol. III. p. 77, “the vote-killing mandrake.” Mr. Halliwell’s note is, “vote-killing.—‘Voice-killing,’ ed. 1613. It may well be doubted whether either be the correct reading.” He then gives a familiar citation from Browne’s “Vulgar Errors.” “Vote-killing” may be a mere misprint for “note-killing,” but “voice-killing” is certainly the better reading. Either, however, makes sense. Although Sir Thomas Browne does not allude to the deadly property of the mandrake’s shriek, yet Mr. Halliwell, who has edited Shakespeare, might have remembered the
“Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake’s groan.”
(Second Part of Henry VI., Act III. Scene 2.)
and the notes thereon in the variorum edition. In Jacob Grimm’s “Deutsche Mythologie,” (Vol. II. p. 1154,) under the word Alraun, may be found a full account of the superstitions concerning the mandrake. “When it is dug up, it groans and shrieks so dreadfully that the digger will surely die. One must, therefore, before sunrise on a Friday, having first stopped one’s ears with wax or cotton-wool, take with him an entirely black dog without a white hair on him, make the sign of the cross three times over the alraun, and dig about it till the root holds only by thin fibres. Then tie these by a string to the tail of the dog, show him a piece of bread, and run away as fast as possible. The dog runs eagerly after the bread, pulls up the root, and falls stricken dead by its groan of pain.”
These, we believe, are the only instances in which Mr. Halliwell has ventured to give any opinion upon the text, except as to a palpable misprint, here and there. Two of these we have already cited. There is one other,—“p. 46, line 10. Iuconstant.—An error for inconstant.” Wherever there is a real difficulty, he leaves us in the lurch. For example, in “What you Will,” he prints without comment,—
“Ha! he mount Chirall on the wings of fame!”
(Vol. I. p. 239.)
which should be “mount cheval,” as it is given in Mr. Dilke’s edition (Old English Plays, Vol. II. p. 222). We cite this, not as the worst, but the shortest, example at hand.
Some of Mr. Halliwell’s notes are useful and interesting,—as that on “keeling the pot,” and a few others,—but the greater part are utterly useless. He thinks it necessary, for instance, to explain that “to speak pure foole, is in sense equivalent to ‘I will speak like a pure fool,’”—that “belkt up” means “belched up,”—that “aprecocks” means “apricots.” He has notes also upon “meal-mouthed,” “luxuriousnesse,” “termagant,” “fico,” “estro,” “a nest of goblets,” which indicate either that the “ general reader” is a less intelligent person in England than in America, or that Mr. Halliwell’s standard of scholarship is very low. We ourselves, from our limited reading, can supply him with a reference which will explain the allusion to the “Scotch barnacle” much better than his citations from Sir John Maundeville and Giraldus Cambrensis,—namely, note 8, on page 179 of a Treatise on Worms, by Dr. Ramesey, court physician to Charles II.
We turn now to Mr. Hazlitt’s edition of Webster. We wish he had chosen Chapman; for Mr. Dyce’s Webster is hardly out of print, and, we believe, has just gone through a second and revised edition. Webster was a far more considerable man than Marston, and infinitely above him in genius. Without the poetic nature of Marlowe, or Chapman’s somewhat unwieldy vigor of thought, he had that inflammability of mind which, untempered by a solid understanding, made his plays a strange mixture of vivid expression, incoherent declamation, dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, a great dramatist. Shakespeare is the only one of that age. Marlowe had a rare imagination, a delicacy of sense that made him the teacher of Shakespeare and Milton in versification, and was, perhaps, as purely a poet as any that England has produced; but his mind had no balance-wheel. Chapman abounds in splendid enthusiasms of diction, and now and then dilates our imaginations with suggestions of profound poetic depth. Ben Jonson was a conscientious and intelligent workman, whose plays glow, here and there, with the golden pollen of that poetic feeling with which his age impregnated all thought and expression; but his leading characteristic, like that of his great namesake, Samuel, was a hearty common sense, which fitted him rather to be a great critic than a great poet. He had a keen and ready eye for the comic in situation, but no humor. Fletcher was as much a poet as fancy and sentiment can make any man. Only Shakespeare wrote comedy and tragedy with truly ideal elevation and breadth. Only Shakespeare had that true sense of humor which, like the universal solvent sought by the alchemists, so fuses together all the elements of a character, (as in Falstaff,) that any question of good or evil, of dignified or ridiculous, is silenced by the apprehension of its thorough humanity. Rabelais shows gleams of it in Panurge; but, in our opinion, no man ever possessed it in an equal degree with Shakespeare, except Cervantes; no man has since shown anything like an approach to it, (for Molière’s quality was comic power rather than humor,) except Sterne, Fielding, and perhaps Richter. Only Shakespeare was endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose point of rest was midway between the imagination and the understanding,—that perfectly unruffled brain which reflected all objects with almost inhuman impartiality,—that outlook whose range was ecliptical, dominating all zones of human thought and action,—that power of veri-similar conception which could take away Richard III. from History, and Ulysses from Homer,—and that creative faculty whose equal touch is alike vivifying in Shallow and in Lear. He alone never seeks in abnormal and monstrous characters to evade the risks and responsibilities of absolute truthfulness, nor to stimulate a jaded imagination by Caligulan horrors of plot. He is never, like many of his fellow-dramatists, confronted with unnatural Frankensteins of his own making, whom he must get off his hands as best he may. Given a human foible, he can incarnate it in the nothingness of Slender, or make it loom gigantic through the tragic twilight of Hamlet. We are tired of the vagueness which classes all the Elizabethan playwrights together as “great dramatists,”—as if Shakespeare did not differ from them in kind as well as in degree. Fine poets some of them were; but though imagination and the power of poetic expression are, singly, not uncommon gifts, and even in combination not without secular examples, yet it is the rarest of earthly phenomena to find them joined with those faculties of perception, arrangement, and plastic instinct in the loving union which alone makes a great dramatic poet possible. We suspect that Shakespeare will long continue the only specimen of the genus. His contemporaries, in their comedies, either force what they call “a humor” till it becomes fantastical, or hunt for jokes, like rat-catchers, in the sewers of human nature and of language. In their tragedies they become heavy without grandeur, like Jonson, or mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster too often do. Every new edition of an Elizabethan dramatist is but the putting of another witness into the box to prove the inaccessibility of Shakespeare’s stand-point as poet and artist.
Webster’s most famous works are “The Duchess of Malfy” and “Vittoria Corombona,” but we are strongly inclined to call “The Devil’s Law-Case” his best play. The two former are in a great measure answerable for the “spasmodic” school of poets, since the extravagances of a man of genius are as sure of imitation as the equable self-possession of his higher moments is incapable of it. Webster had, no doubt, the primal requisite of a poet, imagination, but in him it was truly untamed, and Aristotle’s admirable distinction between the Horrible and the Terrible in tragedy was never better illustrated and confirmed than in the “Duchess” and “Vittoria.” His nature had something of the sleuth-hound quality in it, and a plot, to keep his mind eager on the trail, must be sprinkled with fresh blood at every turn. We do not forget all the fine things that Lamb has said of Webster, but, when Lamb wrote, the Elizabethan drama was an El Dorado, whose micaceous sand, even, was treasured as auriferous,—and no wonder, in a generation which admired the “Botanic Garden.” Webster is the Gherardo della Notte of his day, and himself calls his “Vittoria Corombona” a “night-piece.” Though he had no conception of Nature in its large sense, as something pervading a whole character and making it consistent with itself, nor of Art, as that which dominates an entire tragedy and makes all the characters foils to each other and tributaries to the catastrophe, yet there are flashes of Nature in his plays, struck out by the collisions of passion, and dramatic intensities of phrase for which it would be hard to find the match. The “prithee, undo this button” of Lear, by which Shakespeare makes us feel the swelling of the old king’s heart, and that the bodily results of mental anguish have gone so far as to deaden for the moment all intellectual consciousness and forbid all expression of grief, is hardly finer than the broken verse which Webster puts into the mouth of Ferdinand when he sees the body of his sister, murdered by his own procurement:—