When we had the pleasure to spend an hour or two together after the play, the last time I was in London, I ventured to make a few remarks on theatrical subjects that seemed to meet with your approbation; and as, in the midst of so much hiliarity as was raging round us in the tap-room of the Ducrow's Head, you may have forgotten the purport of my observations, I will repeat them here. You were reclining with your back against the table, and a pewter pot of foaming beer resting on the knee of the red stocking-breeches in which you had performed the Crimson Fiend of the Haunted Dell, when, after some preliminary matter, I expressed an opinion—unusual, I grant, but still conscientiously entertained—of the immortal Shakspeare, on which you used language stronger perhaps than the occasion justified, and reminding me, by its conciseness and power, of some energetic M.P., against which I will enter a short protest before proceeding further in this letter. No, my dear Smith, Shakspeare was not "a bloody fool;" I should say he was very far from it; and you also added, that Fitzball would kick his soul out of his elbow in less than no time. What Mr Fitzball might be able to do by dint of great kicking, I have no means of judging; but I have no intention of placing the two authors in an antagonistic attitude on the present occasion, and therefore I trust the soul of Shakspeare will be left in peace.
What I stated was, as a general proposition, that Shakspeare has done more harm than good to the English stage.
It has always struck me that the phrase, "There is a time for all things," had a wider meaning than we usually attach to it. I think that the seed of all discoveries, past and present, was scattered ages ago—perhaps at the very creation of the world—in the mind of man; that when it had rested there long enough, and the season of its ripening came, up grew the stalk and the ear, and the harvest was gathered, and mankind garnered it up as a provision for them and their heirs for ever. The sense of beauty lay for generation and generation, germinating in the intellects and hearts of men; and, when the time came, a whole harvest of it was gathered at one time in the statues and pictures and temples of ancient Greece. But it was only the greater and more flourishing portion of the increase that grew in that birth-place of gods and heroes. The seed was scattered over a wider surface; and, if we could recover proofs of it, I should not at all fear to bet you two half-pints to one, that there were sculptors and painters in Asia and in Egypt, equal, in their several manners, to Phidias and Apelles. When printing, in the same way, had lain in furrow the proper time, the first blades of it began to appear in many regions at the same period. With steam it is the same; and, when the next invention is brought into practical use, it will be found that the thought of it had agitated hundreds of minds by the Rhine, by the Thames, by the Hudson, and perhaps by the sacred Ganges, or the still more sacred Nile.
I think I hear your deep sepulchral tones in the exclamation of, "All that 'ere is rubbage—cut it short!" and it is my intention, my dear Smith, to cut it short at once. When the drama's time was come, the whole of civilized Europe saw the glorious birth. In Spain and in England the soil was found most congenial; and the theatre in those countries took at once its place as the best possible instructor—next, of course, to the church—and its lessons were inculcated by the inspired possessors of the art, Lope de Vega and Shakspeare. The Spaniard was born in 1566—the Englishman two years earlier; so that, allowing both to have reached the maturity of their powers at thirty years of age, and to have retained them twenty years, the appointed hour for the perfection of the drama was the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the next. Now, my dear Smith, cast your luminous eye over the state of society at that period. Lope was a volunteer on board of the Spanish Armada. Shakspeare, perhaps, saw Elizabeth ride forth to review the troops at Tilbury. Middle-aged men, with whom Shakspeare conversed in his youth, had seen the execution of Anne Boleyn. Old fellows, with whom both of them associated, had been present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. And, above all, they had both of them watched, but with very different hopes, the ferocious progress of the Duke of Alva, and heard the echoes of the battle-cry of liberty and Protestantism beside the ditches and mounds of Holland; and the genius of these two men bears impress of the awful period in the world's history which had been reserved for their birth. They were both animated by the struggle in which the whole earth was engaged. Lope did battle for the church—the Pope—and, if need be, would have done so—for the devil, if he had worn a mitre; he wrote plays where the heretics required an immense quantity of rosin and blue lights to do justice to their appalling situation. He preached, and prayed, and excommunicated, and stirred up men's minds to enjoy the splendours of an auto-da-fé; and, for all these, he was honoured by Pope and Cæsar; was created a knight of Alcantara; and, as the acme to his glory, was made a familiar of the Holy Inquisition. Shakspeare no less felt the influence of the time. The old oppressive bonds under which bone and sinew were compressed in order to make jolly old England a footstool for the gouty toes of a wicked old man at Rome, (unless you choose rather to consider him an unfortunate female, clothed in scarlet, and sitting on seven hills,) had been snapt asunder. Henry VIII. (to borrow your own classical expression, my dear Smith, as applied to your stage manager, "the regularest beast as ever was," but the most useful beast mentioned in any natural history I have ever met with) had determined to sit on the seven hills himself; and little Edward had built a nice villa on the sunny slope of one of them; and Mary had tried to tumble it down again; and Elizabeth had planted round it, and laid out the grounds for national recreation and use—like the park at Battersea, whenever that scheme is carried into effect; and all men's minds were in a flurry. Some drank themselves to death; some took to privateering; and many took to having visions and dreaming dreams; and, in the midst of it, Shakspeare rushed in a fury to his pen, and wrote play after play—very noble, very bright, very wonderful—but mad—decidedly mad—the whole time. Every body was mad; Essex galloped through London streets, thinking, by mere dint of hard riding, to rouse the peaceful citizens to take up arms in his behalf, as if the very stones would rise and mutiny—a very mad idea, you will grant; Raleigh set off to seize as much wealth as would have bought the fee-simple of a moderate kingdom, with scarcely a sufficient force to follow the heroic Widdicombe at the battle of Waterloo—not a very wise proceeding, you will allow; and the greatest proof of the universal insanity is, that nobody thought Essex or Raleigh mad for doing as they did. Nor did the calmest observers—if there were any "calm observers" in those days—perceive that Shakspeare was labouring under an access of the most confirmed delirium. They listened to Hamlet, and Lear, and Othello, and did not discover that his inspiration was the effect of over-excitement; that his energy was the preternatural strength bestowed on him by convulsion; and that, in fact, instead of being a swan of Avon, he was neither more nor less than a March hare.
Pardon me, my dear Smith, in the escapade in the last page or two—it is a figurative mode of speech, and you will at once dissect the alligator through all its scales, and see every thing it is intended to convey. It was a mad world, my masters; and, as you generally find an inferior dauber magnify the peculiarities of a great man's style, so as to give a better idea of his manner than you gather from his own performances, let us see the prodigious insanity developed in the imitators of Shakspeare. Never, till I saw the brass knocker on the door of the Vizier's palace in Timor the Tartar, painted, you told me, by Wilkins of the Yorkshire Stingo, did I know how you produced your marvellous effects on the door of Billy Button, the tailor of Brentford. The Vizier's knocker was a caricature; but it showed your style. So, read the love-scenes of any dramatist during Shakspeare's period—or the heroic passages of any poetaster copying his manner;—isn't that Bedlam, my dear Smith? isn't that Hanwell? Read the rhapsodies of Nat Lee—(by a stretch of truth-speaking which it would be wise to make more common)—called mad Nat Lee. What do you see in him more indicative of insanity than in any play of Shakspeare you like to name? Not, understand me, that Shakspeare was mad according to the standard of sanity in his own day. Far from it; he was infinitely wise compared to any man in his century, except, perhaps, Bacon and Burleigh, and retired to Stratford-on-Avon with a realized fortune equal to twelve or fifteen hundred a-year. But all mankind run the risk of having a different standard applied to them from that according to which they were measured during life. Diocletian was thought an excellent emperor for persecuting the Christians—we think him a considerable beast for doing so, now. Cortez was thought the perfect image of a hero for slaughtering the Mexicans, and the noblest of Christian missionaries for putting the heretical Montezuma to death—we think Cortez not quite so respectable a character as Greenacre or Burke. And it is most just that each century should pass its predecessors in review, and apply its own lights to bring every feature forward. What progress would there be open to the human mind if we were for ever to go on viewing incidents exactly as they were viewed when they occurred? Are we to go on believing Galileo an infidel, because his discoveries were condemned by his contemporaries? Are we to think all the butchers, conquerors, and destroyers of mankind, great men, because their own age was terrified at their power, and proclaimed them heroes? The time may come when the great Bunn's efforts to make Drury-Lane into a squeaking, dancing, and dirty imitation of the Italian Opera, will not be considered conducive to the triumph of the legitimate English drama. Many things of this sort, my dear friend, may take place, and most justly; for each present generation is as the highest court of legislation—it can repeal all old acts, but it cannot bind its successors. Now, do me the favour to finish the pot of porter which, in my mind's eye, I see you dandling on your crossed knee, while your left hand, with easy elegance, is supporting the bowl of your pipe—and see how these observations apply to Shakspeare. He has ruined the stage; he has fixed its taste for ever, by establishing one unvarying standard for plot, language, and character—and that is his own. There can be no progress—not merely meaning, by progress, improvement, but, positively, no change. He blocks up every access to the dramatic Parnassus—he has acquired an entire monopoly of the heroines in Collins' Ode—and woe to the intruder into the sacred precincts of his zenana. Well, he was a tremendous Turk, that old swan of Avon—there is no denying the fact; but what I complain of is, that no other Leda should be looked at for a moment but only his. No man can look at the Swan for an instant, and doubt that the king of gods and men has disguised himself in that avatar of web-feet and feathers. Jupiter is only enveloped, not concealed; but, at the same time, is it possible to be blind to the fact, that he has degraded himself to the habits of the flat-billed bird—that he waddles most unmercifully when by chance he leaves the lake?—that he hisses and croaks most unmusical, most melancholy?—and that he gathers all unclean garbage for his food—newts, and frogs, and crawling worms? In short, that though, in his pride, and grandeur, and passionate energy, he is the Tyrant of Olympus, he is, in many other respects, an animal not greatly to be admired—by no means comparable as a dish at Christmas to a well-fed goose, or even a couple of ducks. For reading aloud to ladies after tea, I prefer Ion to Othello. And now, my excellent friend, I will tell you the reason—not why I prefer Ion, which, though I have introduced it in this flippant manner, I consider a very beautiful and poetical drama—but why no play of Shakspeare is fit to be read to a party of ladies after tea. It is this—that ladies, in one sense of the word, were as unknown in Shakspeare's days as tea. There were certain human beings that wore petticoats, and, in due course of time, fulfilled the original command, and died; but, shades of Hannah More and Anne Seward! to call them ladies would be as absurd as to call Dulcinea del Tobosa a princess of the blood. A friend of mine—a well-known non-commissioned officer in the Devil's Own—told me this story, which I mention to you, my dear Smith, in strict confidence, in case the heroine of the anecdote should find that her confession is made known. An old lady—properly so called, both as respects the adjective and the noun, for she was past eighty, and was refined and pure—astonished my friend, by asking him one day to try and get a volume or two for her of the works of Assa Behn. He did so—no little wondering at such a choice of books—and in a day the novel was returned, "I send you back these volumes," she said, "as I am unable to get through the first. Is it not strange that I, an old woman, sitting in my own room, am positively ashamed and disgusted at the scenes and conversations which were read aloud to me in mixed companies, without a blush or shudder, when I was eighteen?"
Now, in Shakspeare's time, there was no female in the land that would have stumbled at the grossest passages in Assa Behn. The tenderness, delicacy, and beauty of the feminine character were still in the future tense; and, therefore, it is not a matter of surprise that the female characters in Shakspeare were original creations, and not transcripts from human life. For the time and the state of society when the plays were written, they are instances of the most marvellous imagination. But they were as purely fictitious as Caliban or Ariel. They borrowed from the infinite riches of the poet their noble or tender thoughts; but whenever he tried to make them more than abstractions—to unite them to the sympathies of his audience—or to clothe them in real flesh and blood—look at the means he takes—listen to the conversations of Miss Juliet and the songs of Ophelia—and you will perceive what were the lessons his experience in actual men and women had taught him.
It is impossible, my dear Smith, for a Frenchman to write an English comedy—and why? Because the turn of his mind, and unacquaintance with the peculiarities of our dispositions, unfit him for it. But not more separated from us is the Parisian Feuilletonist by his language and manners, not to mention the Channel, than the author of Elizabeth's and James's days by the lapse of two hundred years, and the total alteration of our modes of thought; and yet how frightfully you would be laughed at for applying the remark to Shakspeare, though, between ourselves, my dear fellow, he is the very man to call it forth! Oh, how vividly I can fancy the exclamations of Jiggles of the Victoria, or Pumpkins of the Stepney Temple of Thespis! "He is the poet of all time!" says Jiggles, with a thump on the table that sets all the pewter pots dancing. "Do you mean, Mr Bobson," cries Pumpkins, with a triumphant curl of his lip, "to say, that the laws of nature are transitory as the fashion of a coat, and that what was nature at one period will not be nature at another?" If he should ask you this question, my dear sir, tell him at once that that is decidedly your opinion, or, if it is not, tell him that it is most unquestionably mine; for most assuredly the same train of thought that would be natural among the chiefs of the Druids, would be most absurdly out of character if attributed to the bench of Bishops. "Oho!" exclaims Pumpkins, "what has the bench of Bishops to do with it? We maintain that Shakspeare, or any one else, having written a play wherein the sentiments of the Druids were once true to nature, those sentiments will continue true to nature to the end of time."
By no means, Mr Pumpkins. Certain sentiments were thought true to nature by the critics and audience at the beginning of the seventeenth century; but nature, like every thing else, assumes a different appearance according to the point it is viewed from. At a time when human life was not very highly valued, and woman's feelings were held in no reverence or respect, it was, perhaps, thought "natural" that the Prince of Denmark should stab old Polonius and bully his daughter to death; but in this nineteenth century of time, no amount of insanity, real or assumed, will make us think it in accordance with the high and noble nature of the philosophic prince, either to sneer at the poor old whiteheaded courtier he has murdered, or taunt the little trusting girl he has taught to love him. If it were not for the name of Shakspeare, Hamlet would be set down as nearly the beau-ideal of a snob—a combination of the pedantry of James and the unmanliness of Buckingham. Read the play, with this key to the character, and you will find it quite as true to nature as in the laborious glosses of Schlegel and Göethe.
If I ever have the honour to meet you again at the Ducrow Arms, I will enter more fully into this part of my view of the injuries inflicted on the stage by Shakspeare. It will be sufficient, at the present time, to condense my meaning into this one remark, that the nature of 1600 is not necessarily the nature of 1846, and probably is as different as the statesmanship of Sir Robert Cecil from that of Sir Robert Peel. If there had been a controller of politicians as powerful as the controller of the stage, we should have had the right honourable baronet making Popery punishable with death, dressed in trunk breeches and silver shoe-buckles—or taking measures to lessen the alarming power of Spain.
You think, perhaps, that I have let you off altogether, because I have declined enlarging on this particular point; but no, my dear Smith, I have not had half my say out yet. It is not only that things are presented to us in Shakspeare's plays in a way that was admirable, because adapted to the feelings and fancies of the time, when they first enriched the Globe, but not so admirable now: I have also to find fault with the manner in which the characters—granting that they are true to nature—are developed and made palpable to vulgar eyes. The fact is, my benevolent friend, that every thing is gigantic in his conceptions. He is like a sculptor who despises the easy flow of the resting figure, and fills his studio with agonizing athletes—every muscle on the stretch—the eyeballs projecting, and the hair on end. Even when he carves a slumbering nymph, her proportions are tremendous—she is like a sleeping tigress, calm and hushed, but giving evidence of preternatural strength; her very softness is the softness of melted gold—when it hardens it will kill like lead; or, if that is a bad image, her very quiet is the quiet of the sea—let the wind blow, and then——! Don't you see that Ophelia—Juliet—Imogen—all of them, are endowed with tremendous power, as well as other qualities? And that, as to the heroes, they are regular volcanoes every one of them? Is not this proved by the fact, that there is no hero in Shakspeare who does not demand as much bodily labour from his representative as would tire out a coal-whipper on the Thames? Is there one leading part in any of his plays that does not require an enormous outlay of voice? Now, can it be possible that no deep passion can coexist with a weak thorax? Run over the principal plays—Macbeth, Richard, Romeo, Hamlet again, Lear—and depend on it, that this loudness of exclamation is not stage trick; it is part of the development of the character; and therefore I shall always blame that infernal asthmatical tendency of mine for having induced Mr Whibbler, of the Whitechapel Imperial, to decline my services when I offered to act Coriolanus for my own benefit, gratis. The consequence, however, of this Shakspearian fancy, of placing characters of passion in positions where they must split the ears of the groundlings, is, that it has become an English article of faith, that without some prodigious explosions, calling out the whole strength of the actor's lungs, the character falls dead. The Indian could not believe the air-gun had killed the bird, because he did not hear the report. We have reversed the Indian mode of reasoning, and always believe it is the noise that kills the bird. Oh, Smith! think of the bellowings of Sir Giles Overreach—and Barbarossa—and Zanga—and the diabolical howlings of Belvidera, and Isabella, and the Mourning Bride. Can people have no passion that don't disturb the whole neighbourhood with their noise? Can a woman not find out she has been jilted without risking a bloodvessel? Is this the way they do in common life? I remember when that girl at Bermondsey hauled me up before David Jardine, and produced all my letters, and the ring I had given her * * * * she never spoke above her breath. And I was very glad to hush it up with four-and-sixpence a-week.