Is our sweet Rosabelle!
REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.
Lives of the Early British Dramatists. By Thomas Campbell, Leigh Hunt, George Darley and William Gifford. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart. 1 vol. 12mo.
This volume contains the biographies prefixed to Moxon’s library editions of the elder dramatists. The Life of Shakspeare, by Campbell, embodies all that is known of the poet, with some reasonable conjectures in regard to what is unknown, together with a short criticism on each of the plays. Though it has not that sustained excellence, either in composition or criticism, we might expect from the pen of such a writer, it still abounds in felicitous expressions and striking remarks, and, with the exception of De Quincy’s Life of Shakspeare, published in the Encyclopedia Britannica, is the most interesting biography of Shakspeare, for the general reader, we can bring to mind. A few of the criticisms are very lame, and all of them imperfect—but the last objection is a natural consequence of the limited space in which the life is compressed. The style glitters occasionally with those smart impertinences which Campbell affected in his later compositions. Some of these are exceedingly pleasant. Thus in speaking of Much Ado About Nothing, he remarks that he once knew such a pair as Benedick and Beatrice. “The lady was a perfect Beatrice; she railed hypocritically at wedlock before her marriage, and with bitter sincerity after it. She and her Benedick now live apart, but with entire reciprocity of sentiments, each devoutly wishing that the other may soon pass into a better world.” Again, in some slight observations on Coriolanus, which neither charity nor flattery could call criticism, there occurs a good hit at a common play-house profanation: “The enlightened public, in 1682, permitted Nahum Tate, the executioner of King David, to correct the plays of Shakspeare, and he laid his hangman hands on Coriolanus. . . . This mode of rewriting Shakspeare, was, for the time being, called correcting the saint of our stage. In like manner the Russians correct their patron saint when they find him deaf to their prayers for more favorable weather; they take him out in his wooden effigy and whip him soundly and publicly. I suspect they borrowed this custom from our mode of correcting Shakspeare.”
The best piece in the volume is Mr. Darley’s biography and criticism of Beaumont & Fletcher. The style is a little too much elaborated, and the opinions are not always free from prejudice, but the author writes like a poet, and really paints his subjects to the intellect of the reader—catching and conveying the spirit of the dramatists, as well as subjecting it to a high and manly criticism.
In most essays of this kind it is impossible to gain any notion of the author’s mind and individuality, amid all the words squandered on events of his life and the detail of his writings. This is illustrated in the biography of Ben Jonson, by Gifford. The “mountain belly and rocky face” of old Ben are hidden behind the form of his reviewer. It is like reading a snapping-turtle’s account of a whale, in which the said snapping-turtle contrives to make it out that the whale is just his size and conformation, and proves it by “undoubted facts.”
The account of Massinger and Ford is by Henry Nelson Coleridge, the son of the poet. It is rather brilliantly written, and contains much information relating to the time of James I. and Charles I. The lives of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, are in Leigh Hunt’s most characteristic style of thought and expression, and consequently sparkle with many a bright fancy and jaunty impertinence. As his band of dramatists were gentlemen of easy virtue, both in literature and life, and violated all the decencies and moralities which keep society together in the most brilliant way imaginable, they are very fortunate in having a biographer who launches no thunderbolts of indignation, and indulges in no yelps of rhetorical horror.
This volume of “lives” is almost indispensable to the lover of the old dramatists, and gives on the whole, the best account of their moral and intellectual character which can be obtained. The publishers have done well in presenting them in such an elegant and available form.