drama, and constituting what may be called its living principle, it has escaped from violation even by our lawless Poet himself. The drama, as we know, in Greece, derived its origin from the choral odes, which were sung at certain seasons before the altar of Bacchus. To these, in the first instance, was added a dialogue of two persons; and, the number of speakers being subsequently increased, a regular dramatic fable was, at length, constructed, and the dialogue usurped the prime honours of the performance. But the chorus, though degraded, could not be expelled from the scene, which was once entirely its own; and, consecrated by the regard of the people, it was forced upon the acceptance of the dramatist, to act with it in the best manner that he could. It was stationed, therefore, permanently on the stage, and made to occupy its place with the agents who were to conduct the action of the fable. From the circumstance of its being stationary on the stage, it secured the strict observance of the unity of place: for with a stage, which was never vacant, and consequently with only one scene, the Grecian dramatist could not remove his agents whithersoever he pleased, in accommodation to his immediate convenience; but on the spot, where the scene opened, he was constrained to retain them till the action of the drama was closed, and what could not consistently be acted was necessarily consigned to narration. This was a heavy servitude to the dramatist; but it had its compensations in uninterrupted feeling, and in the greater conservation of probability. To the unity of time, as time is more pliant to the imagination than place, the Grecian dramatist seems to have paid little if any regard. In the Agamemnon of Eschylus, the fire signals have only just announced to Mycena the fall of Troy, when the herald arrives with the tidings of the victorious king's approach; who must thus have passed from Phrygia to the Peloponnesus, obstructed also as his passage was by a tempest, with the celerity nearly of a ray of light; and in the Trachiniæ of Sophocles, a journey of about one hundred and twenty miles is accomplished during the recitation of a hundred verses. The i VOL. I. transgression of the unity of time was not, perhaps, much the subject of the auditor's calculation, or in any degree of his concern. With his mind intent on the still occupied stage and the unchanging scene, he was ready to welcome the occurrence of any new event, or to listen with pleasure to any new narration of facts beyond the stage, without pausing to investigate the poet's due apportionment of time. If the scene had been shifted, the feelings of the spectator would have been outraged by such an infringement of the unity of place. When the arbitrary separation of the drama into acts was accomplished by the Roman dramatists, the observance of the unity of place became more easy, though stili it was not to be abandoned. An act constitutes a portion of the action of a drama, at the close of which the stage is vacated and the curtain drops. If, during the act, the scene be shifted, the unity of place is broken; the probability of the dramatic imitation is diminished, and our feelings are certainly offended: but in the interval between act and act, the scene may be removed to any place where it may suit the convenience of the poet to plant it, to Venice or to Cyprus; and any lapse of time may, readily and without absurdity, be imagined to intervene. The action of the drama must necessarily be maintained one and entire, and then, with the scene stationary during the act, all the dramatic unities will be sufficiently, if not rigidly, preserved. As we know nothing of the tragic writers of Rome, all their works having perished, with the exception of those of Seneca, from which not any thing of value can be learned, we cannot decide whether or not they availed themselves of the liberty which they had obtained by this division of their plays into acts; and that their plays were divided into acts, like those of the Roman comic writers, we are assured by Horace when he tells the Pisos "Neve minor, neu sit quinto productior actu But if they did not assert the liberty, which they had *De Arte Poetica, 1. 189. gained by thus breaking the continued representation of the Grecian theatre, they had themselves only to blame; for they certainly possessed the means of effectively preserving all the power of the unities at a very small expense of difficulty and labour. It is for his inattention to the integrity of the scene during the continuance of each single act that I conceive Shakspeare to be principally censurable; and the variety, to which we are instructed to look as the consequence of his lawlessness in this instance, to be an insufficient compensation for the outrage of probability, for the frequent violation of our feelings, and for the vicious example with which he has corrupted the good taste, and has diminished the efficiency of the English stage. A recent commentator, however, has discovered, and he seems to applaud himself on the felicitous discovery, that our great bard has been faithful to one unity of the drama, though he has treated the others with disregard-that he has been faithful to the unity of feeling-to the unity of feeling! What! when he transports us from the revels and the wit of Falstaff to the council chamber of the politic Bolingbroke, to the military array of the young Percy, to the field of Shrewsbury, to the castle of the plaintive Northumberland. The tragedies of Rowe, and the comedies of Congreve may vaunt of their unity of feeling: but that mixt species of drama, in which Shakspeare delights, will admit the praise of any other unity in preference to that of feeling. If the limits prescribed to me on the present occasion would admit of such a disquisition, I would submit to my readers an analysis of one of our Poet's finest plays, that I might distinctly show how much he has lost by his neglect of the dramatic unities; and how much more effectually he might have wrought for his purpose if he had not disdained or been too idle to solicit their assistance. In two lines of supreme fustian and nonsense, Johnson says of him, "Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign; If he spurn'd the reign of existence, he must have plunged into some illimitable void, if there be such, in the infinity of space; and what is the idea intended to be conveyed by "Panting time toiling after him in vain," I will confess that I do not precisely comprehend. I conclude, however, that of these lines the first refers to the superhuman creatures of the dramatist's invention, to his fairies, his magicians, and his ghosts: and these, indeed, are proud evidences of his imaginative powers; and that the second, in the ludicrous image, which it presents, of old Time, panting and toiling in vain to catch the active and runaway Poet, must allude to the contempt occasionally discovered by our lawless bard for probability and the limitation of time; and this, of which any scribbler may be guilty, is, in truth, the most effective dispraise. But it is more wonderful that Shakspeare, who may be regarded as the father of the English drama, accomplished so much for its perfection, than that he failed to accomplish more. We have now considered this extraordinary man as the giver of a poetic soul to historic narration, as the framer of a dramatic fable, and excelling equally in the sublime, the pathetic, and the ludicrous; as luxuriating by himself, in a sort of inaccessible glory, in a world of his own imagination; as neglecting the dramatic unities, either from ignorance of their effect, or from an indolent dislike of their restraint. We have made, in short, a cursory survey of his excellencies and his defects. His diction only now remains to be the subject of our attention; and in this subordinate portion of the drama, we shall find him to be as superior to competition as he is in the characteristic and the imaginative. His diction is an instrument, which is admirably adapted to all his purposes. In his tragic strains, it sounds every note of the gamut; and is either sublime or tender, vehement or pathetic, with the passion of which it is the organ in description it is picturesque, animated and glowing; and every where its numbers are so harmonious, so varied, almost to infinity, in their cadence and their pauses, that they give to the ear a perpetual feast, in which there is no satiety. As the diction of Shakspeare rises in his higher scenes, without effort or tumour, to the sublime of poetry, so does it fall, in bis comic, with facility and grace, into the humility of prose. It has been charged with being harsh and ungrammatical. I believe it to be harsh and unrhythmical (I confine the remark, of course, to the verse portion of it) only when it has been deformed by the perverse industry of tasteless commentators, referring us to incorrect transcriptions for authorities; and to the same cause may be ascribed, as I am satisfied, many if not all of its grosser grammatical errors. It will not, indeed, in every instance, as we are willing to allow, abide the rigid analysis of grammar; for it sometimes impresses the idea forcibly and distinctly on the mind without the aid of regular grammar, and without discovering the means by which the exploit has been achieved. As one example of this power of Shakspeare's diction, among many of a similar nature which might be adduced, we will transcribe the often-cited answer of Claudio to his sister, in "Measure for Measure," respecting the unknown terrors of death. The expressions in italics convey their meaning with great accuracy to the hearer's or the reader's mind; but, if submitted to the philosophical grammarian's examination, they will not easily stand under it; and they may puzzle us to account for their effect in the communication of the poet's ideas. "Ay, but to die, and go we know not where : This sensible warm motion to become Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death." |