Shakespeare surely ought to have made Posthumus revert to perfect faith. He ought to have borrowed something from his own Beatrice. Posthumus wishes Imogen saved, because, if her life had been spared, she might have repented.
Iachimo is impossible, simple blackness, worse than Iago. He is unactable, for some motivation is necessary.
Shakespeare’s genius is so immense that it overpowers us, and we must be on our guard lest it should twist our instinct for what is true and right. The errors of a fool are not dangerous, but those of a Shakespeare, Goethe, or Byron it is almost impossible to resist.
Twelfth Night.—The play is two plays in one without much connection. The Viola play is improbable. Why did Shakespeare omit that part of the story which tells us that Silla (Viola) had seen the Duke when he was shipwrecked on Cyprus where she lived, and had fallen in love with him? In the play, hearing of the Duke, she discloses a design to make her ‘own occasion mellow.’
Malvolio shut up as mad—
Clown. ‘What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?
Malvolio. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.
Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion?
Malvolio. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.’
Malvolio was a gentleman, but he was more. Shakespeare may go a little too far with the yellow stockings and cross-gartering, but the liability to deception by a supposed profession of love is a divine weakness, not inconsistent with true nobility of intellect and with sagacity. There is no reason to suppose he was often deceived in worldly matters. Maria is a bad sort of clever barmaid, and was not unwilling to marry the drunken Sir Toby. When I last saw Twelfth Night acted, the whole of the latter part of the fifth act was omitted, for the purpose, apparently, of strengthening the representation of Malvolio as a comic fool whose silly brain is turned by conceit. It was shocking, but the manager knew his audience.
Julius Cæsar.—Casca is indignant that Cæsar should be offered the crown, but he despises the applause of the mob when Cæsar rejected it. ‘The rabblement hooted and clapped their chopped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Cæsar refused the crown that it had almost choked Cæsar; for he swounded and fell down at it; and for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.’
Brutus. ‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.’
I cannot think Dr. Johnson, Mason, and Delius are right in supposing the Genius to be the power which watches over us for our protection, and that the mortal instruments are the passions which rebel against it, and, as Johnson says, ‘excite him to a deed of honour and danger.’ The Genius and the mortal instruments are in council. The Genius is the president and the mortal instruments are subordinates. The insurrection is their resistance because they cannot at once be brought to do what the Genius directs. There is no hint in what goes before of ‘safety.’ The mortal instruments suggest