She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.”
HISTORY AND FICTION.
The archbishop of Canterbury once put the following question to Betterton, the actor: “How is it that you players, who deal only with things imaginary, affect your auditors as if they were real; while we preachers, who deal only with things real, affect our auditors as if they were imaginary?” “It is, my lord,” replied the player, “because we actors speak of things imaginary as if they were real, while you preachers too often speak of things real as if they were imaginary.” Whitefield used to tell this anecdote as an explanation of his own vehement and dramatic style of preaching. The remark may be applied to historical and fictitious writing. The old school historians were so solid and stately that they conveyed only feeble images to the mind, while poets and romancers out of airy nothings have created living and breathing beings. How much more readily we remember romance than history, and yet “truth is stranger than fiction.” Shakspeare’s Macbeth and Richard are not the Macbeth and Richard of history, yet we cling to the poet’s portraits of them, and discard the sober truth. “Macbeth,” Sir Walter Scott tells us, “broke no law of hospitality in his attempt on Duncan’s life. He attacked and slew the king at a place called Bothgowan, or the Smith’s house, near Elgin, in 1039, and not, as has been supposed, in his own castle of Inverness. The act was bloody, as was the complexion of the times; but in very truth, the claim of Macbeth to the throne, according to the rules of Scottish succession, was better than that of Duncan. As a king, the tyrant so much exclaimed against, was, in realty, a firm, just and equitable prince. Early authorities show us no such persons as Banquo and his son Fleance, nor have we reason to think that the latter ever fled further from Macbeth than across the flat scene according to the stage direction. Neither were Banquo or his son ancestors of the house of Stuart. All these things are now known, but the mind retains pertinaciously the impressions made by the imposition of genius. While the works of Shakspeare are read, and the English language exists, history may say what she will, but the general reader will only recollect Macbeth as the sacrilegious usurper and Richard as the deformed murderer.”
CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM.
Robert Greene, the Elizabethan dramatist and novelist, indulged in the following disparaging criticism in reference to Shakspeare:—
“There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers that, with his tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”
The line in italics is a parody of one in 3 Henry VI., i. 4:—
“O! tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide,” which was taken from an old play called the First Part of the Contention of the two famous Houses of York and Lancaster. Shakspeare is known to have founded his Henry VI. upon this piece and another which are supposed to have been written by Greene or his friends, and hence, no doubt, Greene’s acrimonious remark.
Says Dugald Stewart in his Essays:—A curious specimen of cotemporary criticism is found in the Letters of the celebrated Waller, who speaks thus of the first appearance of Paradise Lost:—“The old blind schoolmaster, John Milton, hath published a tedious poem on the Fall of Man. If its length be not considered as merit, it has no other!” Johnson also says, in his Lives of the Poets: “Thompson has lately published a poem, called the Castle of Indolence, in which there are some good stanzas!”
Why do not men of superior talents strive, for the honor of the arts which they love, to conceal their ignoble jealousies from the malignity of those whom incapacity and mortified pride have leagued together as the covenanted foes of worth and genius? What a triumph has been furnished to the writers who delight in levelling all the proud distinctions of humanity! and what a stain has been left on some of the fairest pages of our literary history by the irritable passions and petty hostilities of Pope and Addison!