What, for instance, can be more opposed to each other, and to the youthful victims of the drama, than the characters of Mercutio, Friar Lawrence, and the Nurse; yet the brilliancy and gaiety of the first, the philosophic dignity of the second, and the humorous garrulity of the third, while they afford a welcome repose to our feelings, are essential to the developement of the plot, and to the full display of those scenes of terror and distress which alternately freeze and melt the heart, to the last syllable of this sweet and mournful tale.
Numerous as have been its relators, who has told it like our matchless bard? "It was reserved for Shakspeare," remarks Schlegel, in a tone of the finest enthusiasm, "to unite purity of heart and the glow of imagination, sweetness and dignity of manners and passionate violence, in one ideal picture. By the manner in which he has handled it, it has become a glorious song of praise on that inexpressible feeling which ennobles the soul, and gives to it its highest sublimity, and which elevates even the senses themselves into soul, and at the same time is a melancholy elegy on its frailty, from its own nature, and external circumstances; at once the deification and the burial of love. It appears here like a heavenly spark that, descending to the earth, is converted into a flash of lightning, by which mortal creatures are almost in the same moment set on fire and consumed. Whatever is most intoxicating in the odour of a southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous in the first opening of the rose, is breathed into this poem. But even more rapidly than the earliest blossoms of youth and beauty decay, it hurries on from the first timidly-bold declaration of love and modest return, to the most unlimited passion, to an irrevocable union; then, amidst alternating storms of rapture and despair, to the death of the two lovers, who still appear enviable as their love survives them, and as by their death they have obtained a triumph over every separating power. The sweetest and the bitterest, love and hatred, festivity and dark forebodings, tender embraces and sepulchres, the fullness of life and self-annihilation, are all here brought close to each other; and all these contrasts are so blended in the
harmonious and wonderful work, into a unity of impresions, that the echo which the whole leaves behind in the mind, resembles a single but endless sigh."[364:A]
8. The Taming of the Shrew: 1594. Nothing appearing to invalidate the conclusion of Mr. Malone, that this was one of our author's earliest plays, we have adhered to his chronology; for the lines quoted by Mr. Chalmers, in order to establish a posterior date,
"'Tis death for any one in Mantua
To come to Padua," &c.[364:B]
would, if there be any weight in this instance, procure a similar assignment, as to time, for the Comedy of Errors, where we find a like prohibition of intercourse:—
——— "If any Syracusan born
Come to the bay of Ephesus, he dies;"[364:C]
yet no one, in consequence of such a passage, has entertained an idea of ascribing this comedy to the year 1598.