Observe the level, unobtrusive nature of Shakspeare's Sonnets and of the songs in the plays. The difference between them and our later scaling of the falsetto is like the difference between the moderately strung violins of Salo and Amati and the violin of the present day. Those antique violins were made to accompany soprano voices which had no ambition to reach high C, as all men's ears were then content with the medium register. "Their gently veiled, yet satisfactorily clear, silver tone, of virgin character," describes the songs of Shakspeare, and the sentiment for music which is scattered through the plays. In the middle notes almost every thing that is worth having in music is to be found. Behind those bars the melodies which can be domesticated under man's roof and by his hearthside are patiently waiting to be led forth and be installed. Shakspeare used to listen lovingly to the cheerful, healthy madrigal of Elizabeth's age, so wholesome in effect, so downright sincere in expression, so full of the robust, sensuous life of those brave English days, when human habits and emotions dwelt in the middle register of life, and there found Nature's own fulness and harmony, the finely blended color of passion and thought. But nowadays the daffodils that used to
"Take
The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath;...
... bold oxlips, and
The crown-imperial,"
have been plied with guano, dosed with new-fangled liquid manures, till their cosmetic and perfume announce a kind of harlotry: we ogle, sigh, languishingly sniff, and die of a rose in a rheumatic pain.
The gamut of feeling among Shakspeare's women is the clear and perfect octave which built the English glee and madrigal, whose untutored music was "the food of love." And love was entirely welcome, like the daylight; not put off and played with as if by the effeminacies of some Asiatic musical scale, whose eighth and quarter tones cannot be distinguished by a well modulated ear.
"What is Love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure;
In delay there lies no plenty:
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure."
Does this have a crude ring of the bivouac to any ear which has been accustomed to the macaronic variations of modern artists, who torture the great theme and force its simple blitheness through the brass crooks of a keyed cornet? 'Tis an honest love whose month is ever May, when the pipe of Pan is breathed upon by the clear west wind through the budding willows. Nothing competes with it but the throstle and song-sparrow: they seem to be weaving sacred nests out of the tones, to gather them into domestic privacy. Climb, count with delight the jealously guarded eggs, and do not blow them for your cabinet.
Nature was so prodigal of health to Shakspeare's women that it overflowed the clay banks of their bodies, and spread in a freshet of gayety. Beatrice and Rosalind never tire of keeping in the air the light shuttlecock of their wit. It floats in an æther of animal spirits; and, if it now and then touches earth, Nature promptly lends it a rebound. They engage in a masked revel to conceal their emotions. Will Orlando and Benedick penetrate the disguise and claim the lips that mockingly escape thus? If these women suspect their hearts to be distilling a sigh, laughter sparkles into the recess and exposes the illicit business. It is just like the men to roam about in disordered attire, with blue, inclement features, shaking with the "quotidian-tertian" of their love-turn. If they do not go about thus, it is all the same: then they are rallied for not being in Cupid's fashion. "Your hose should be ungarter'd, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and every thing about you demonstrating a careless desolation." The gladness of these women would be cautioned at the lorn sight to defend themselves from infection.
Orlando sticks his rhymes up in the forest, like a bill-poster of Radway's Ready Relief, deforming the sturdier oaks. Rosalind goes about pulling them down, and is in the best of spirits when Touchstone declares that he could "rhyme you so, eight years together; dinners, and suppers, and sleeping-hours excepted:" his verses have the regular butter-woman's jog-trot. She was never so nearly berhymed to death since she was an Irish rat in the time of Pythagoras. But, for all that, she is full of bliss to discover that this fancy-monger of rhymes is Orlando; and she is dying to know "what did he? What said he? How look'd he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see him again? Answer me in one word." To be sure, she wears a double disguise of wit and male attire; so when Orlando says to her, "Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love," it is easy for her to reply, "Me believe it? You may as soon make her that you love believe it; which, I warrant, she is apter to do than to confess she does; that is one of the points in the which women still give the lie to their consciences." But when, pretending to ridicule his emotion, she tells him that "men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love," he protests that Rosalind's frown might kill him. "By this hand," she says, "it will not kill a fly." So all the exuberant frolic of these fine women is the sparkle of healthy brains: the heart's-blood of love does not trickle through hepatic sentiment, but is briskly pumped through the lungs up into the head, flashes from the eye, and becomes a ruddy zest upon the tongue.
Benedick complains that the Lady Beatrice said he was the prince's jester, that he was "duller than a great thaw; huddling jest upon jest, with such impossible conveyance, upon me, that I stood like a man at a mark, with a whole army shooting at me. While she is here, a man may live as quiet in hell as in a sanctuary; and people sin upon purpose, because they would go thither."