Sonnet 106.
In the Arrangement of the Plot also there are circumstances which point emphatically to Shakspeare's agency. Shakspere seen in the simplicity of the plot. One strong argument is furnished by a very prominent quality of the plot as it is managed,—its simplicity. He relied on the execution of the parts, not the complication of the whole. This quality is like him, as being in this case the result of a close adherence to the original story; but it is also like him in itself, since the arrangement of all his works indicates the operation of a principle tending to produce it, namely, a reliance for dramatic effect on the execution of the parts rather than on the mechanical perfection or complication of the whole. His contemporaries, in their own several ways, bestowed extreme care on their plots. Beaumont and Fletcher's plots depend more on surprise and incident. With Beaumont and Fletcher, hurry, surprise, and rapid and romantic revolution of incident are the main object, rather than tragic strength or even stage effect: their plays would furnish materials for extended novels, and are often borrowed from such without concentration or omission. Shakspeare's comparative poverty of plot is not approached by them even in their serious plays, and the lively stir of their comic adventures is the farthest from it imaginable. B. Jonson's plots admirably constructed. Jonson's plots are constructed most elaborately and admirably: one or two of them are without equal for skill of conduct and pertinency and connection of parts. This cautious and industrious poet never confided in his own capability of making up for feebleness of plan by the force of individual passages; and his distrust was well judged, for the abstract coldness of his mind
betrays itself in every page of his dialogue, and his scenes need all their beauty of outline to conceal the frigidity of their filling up. Ford and Massinger agree much in their choice of plots, both preferring incidents of a powerfully tragic nature: but their modes of management are widely different. Ford's gloomy plots softened by tenderness and regret. Ford, on the gloom of whose stories glimpses [74:1]of pathos fall like moonlight, delights, when he comes to work up the details of his tragic plan, in softening it down into the most dissolving tenderness; at his bidding tears flow in situations where we listen rather to hear Agony shriek, or look to behold Terror freezing into stone; his emotion is not the rising vehemence of present passion, but the anguish, subsiding into regret, which lingers when suffering is past, and suggests ideas of eventual resignation and repose;—his verse is like the voice of a child weeping itself to sleep. Massinger's stage effect by situations, and tragic design. His coldness of expression. Massinger crowds adventure upon adventure, and his situations are wound up to the height of unmixed horror; for stage effect and tragic intensity, some of them, as for example the last scene in 'The Unnatural Combat', and the celebrated one in 'The Duke of Milan', are unequalled in the modern drama, and worthy of the sternness of the antique; but it is in the design alone that the tragic spirit works; the colouring of the details is cold as monumental marble; the pomp of lofty eloquence apes the simplicity of grief, or silence is left to interpret alike for sorrow or despair. To the carefulness in outlining the plan and devising situations, thus shewn in different ways, Shakspeare's manner is perfectly alien. Shakspere's great aim to bring out character and feeling.He never exhausts himself in framing his plots, but reserves his strength for the great aim which he had before him, the evolution of human character and passion, a result which he relied on his own power to produce from any plot however naked. He does not want variety of adventure in many of his plays; but he has it only where his novel or chronicle gave it to him: he does not reject it when it is offered, but does not make the smallest exertion to search for it. Shakspere's plays with no plot: Some of his plays, especially his comedies, have actually no plot, and those, too, the very dramas in which his genius has gained some of its most mighty victories. The Tempest. 'The Tempest' is an instance: what is there in it? A ship's company are driven by wreck upon an island; they find an old man there who had been injured by certain of them,
and a reconciliation takes place. As You Like It. The only action of 'As You Like It' is pedestrian; if the characters had been placed in the forest in the first scene, the drama would have been then as ripe for its catastrophe as it is in the last. Midsummer Night's Dream has no plot.'The Midsummer Night's Dream' relates a midnight stroll in a wood; and the unreal na[75:1]ture of the incidents is playfully indicated in its name. It is from no stronger materials than those three frail threads of narrative that our poet has spun unrivalled tissues of novel thought and divine fancy. And, as in his lighter works he is careless of variety of adventure, so in his tragic plays he does not seek to heap horrors or griefs one upon another in devising the arrangement of his plots. In the plots of Shakspere's Tragedies, details and character are the main things. In this latter class of his works, the skill and force with which the interest is woven out of the details of story and elements of character, make it difficult for us to see how far it is that we are indebted to these for the power which the scene exerts over us. But with a little reflection we are able to discover, that there is scarcely one drama of his, in which, from the same materials, situations could not have been formed, which should have possessed in their mere outline a tenfold amount of interest and tragic effect to those which Shakspeare has presented to us. He could have made more striking effect out of Hamlet, Acts IV. & V. 4. 'Hamlet' offers, especially in the two last acts, some remarkable proofs of his indifference to the means which he held in his hands for increasing the tragic interest of his situations, and of the boldness with which he threw himself on his own resources for the creation of the most intense effect out of the slenderest outline. Othello, Act III. But no example can shew more strikingly his independence of tragic situation, and his power of concocting dramatic power out of the most meagre elements of story, than the third act of the Othello. It contains no more than the development and triumph of the devilish design which was afterwards to issue in murder and remorse; and other writers would have treated it in no other style than as necessary to prepare the way for the harrowing conclusion. In the Moor's dialogues with Iago, the act of vengeance, ever and anon sternly contemplated, and darkening all with its horror, is yet but one ingredient in the misery of the tale. So in the end of Lear, These scenes are a tragedy in themselves, the story of the most hideous revolution in a noble nature; and their catastrophe of wretchedness is complete when
the tumult of doubt sinks into resolved and desolate conviction,—when the Moor dashes Desdemona from him, and rushes out in uncontrollable agony.—Read also the conclusion of Lear, and learn the same lesson from the economy of that most touching scene. all is left clear for the one group, the father and his dead child. The horrors which have gathered so thickly [76:1]throughout the last act, are carefully removed to the background, and free room is left for the sorrowful groupe on which every eye is turned. The situation is simple in the extreme; but how tragically moving are the internal convulsions for the representation of which the poet has worthily husbanded his force! Lear enters with frantic cries, bearing the body of his dead daughter in his arms; he alternates between agitating doubts and wishing unbelief of her death, and piteously experiments on the lifeless corpse; he bends over her with the dotage of an old man's affection, and calls to mind the soft lowness of her voice, till he fancies he can hear its murmurs. Then succeeds the dreadful torpor of despairing insanity, during which he receives the most cruel tidings with apathy, or replies to them with wild incoherence; and the heart flows forth at the close with its last burst of love, only to break in the vehemence of its emotion,—commencing with the tenderness of regret, swelling into choking grief, and at last, when the eye catches the tokens of mortality in the dead, snapping the chords of life in a paroxysm of agonised horror.
Oh, thou wilt come no more;
Never, never, never, never, never!
—Pray you, undo this button: Thank you, Sir.—
Do you see this?—Look on her—look—HER LIPS!
Look there! Look there!
The application here of the differences thus pointed out is easy enough. Fletcher either would not have chosen so bare a story, or he would have treated it in another guise. Incidents of The Two Noble Kinsmen story The incidents which constitute the story are neither many nor highly wrought: they are only the capture of the two knights,—their becoming enamoured of the lady,—the combat which was to decide their title to her,—and the death of Arcite after it. And no complexity of minor adventures is inserted to disturb the simplicity so presented. wouldn't have suited Fletcher. In all this there is nothing which Fletcher could have found sufficient to maintain
that continuity and stretch of interest which he always thought necessary. He'd have added to 'em. He would have invented accessory circumstances, he would have produced new characters, or thrust the less important person[77:1]ages who now fill the stage, further into the foreground, and more constantly into action: the one simple and inartificial story which we have, possessing none of his mercurial activity of motion, and scarcely exciting a feeling of curiosity, would have been transformed into a complication of intrigues, amidst which the figures who occupy the centre of the piece as it stands, would have been only individuals sharing their importance with others, and scarcely allowed room enough to make their features at all distinguishable.
Shakspere's handling seen in certain scenes of The Two Noble Kinsmen.
In the management of particular scenes of this play, likewise, certain circumstances are observable, which, separately, seem to go a certain length in establishing Shakspeare's claim to the arrangement, and have considerable force when taken together. Act I. scene ii. design'd by Shakspere. The second scene of the first act would appear to have been sketched by him rather than Fletcher, from its containing no activity of incident, and serving no obvious purpose but the development of the character and situation of the two princes; a mode of preparation not at all practised by Fletcher. Act I. scene iii. also. And Neither does any consequence flow from the beautiful scene immediately following; a circumstance which points out Shakspeare as having arranged the scene, and would strengthen the evidence of his having written the dialogue, if that required any corroboration. Act V. scenes i. ii. iii. [? Emilia with the pictures.] The bareness and undiversified iteration of situation in the first three scenes of the last act form one presumption against the devising of those scenes by Fletcher. Act V. scene v. also designd by Shakspere. The economy of the fifth scene of that act, in which Emilia, left alone on the stage, listens to the noise of the combat, is also, to me, strongly indicative of Shakspeare. The contrivance is unusual, but extremely well imagined. I do not recollect an instance in Fletcher bearing the smallest likeness to it, or founded on any principles at all analogous to that which is here called into operation. In Shakspeare, I think we may, in more than one drama, discover something which might have given the germ of it. Shakspere's expedients for avoiding spectacles; in He has not only in his historical plays again and again regretted the insufficiency of the means possessed by his stage, or any other, for the representation of such