"An if a man did need a poison now, Whose sale is present death in Mantua, Here lives a caitiff wretch would sell it him." When he did need a poison, all these documents of the misery that was to serve him came with a double intensity upon his vision. The shaping of these things into words was not for the audience. It was not to produce "a long and minute description in tragedy" that had no foundation in the workings of nature. It was the very cunning of nature which produced this description. Mischief was, indeed, swift to enter into the thoughts of the desperate man; but the mind once made up, it took a perverse pleasure in going over every item of the circumstances that had suggested the means of mischief. All other thoughts had passed out of Romeo's mind. He had nothing left but to die; and everything connected with the means of his death was seized upon by his imagination with an energy that could only find relief in words. Shakspere has exhibited the same knowledge of nature in his sad and solemn poem of 'The Rape of Lucrece,' where the injured wife, having resolved to wipe out her stain by death, "calls to mind where hangs a piece Of skilful painting, made for Priam's Troy." She sees in that painting some fancied resemblance to her own position, and spends the heavy hours till her husband arrives in its contemplation. "So Lucrece set a-work, sad tales doth tell To pencill'd pensiveness and colour'd sorrow; She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow." It was the intense interest in his own resolve which made Romeo so minutely describe his apothecary. But, that stage past, came the abstraction of his sorrow :— "What said my man, when my betossed soul Did not attend him as we rode? I think He told me Paris should have married Juliet." Juliet was dead; and what mattered it to his "betossed soul" whom she should have married? "Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night," was the sole thought that made him remember an "apothecary," and treat what his servant said as a "dream." Who but Shakspere could have given us the key to these subtle and delicate workings of the human heart? 3 SCENE I." Whose sale is present death in Mantua." Sir Walter Raleigh, in his Discourse of Tenures,' says, "By the laws of Spain and Portugal it is not lawful to sell poison." A similar law, if we are rightly informed, prevailed in Italy. There is no such law in our own statute-book; and the circumstance is a remarkable exemplification of the difference between English and continental manners. 4 SCENE II.—“ Going to find a barefoot brother out." In the old poem of Romeus and Juliet' we have the following lines:— "Apace our friar John to Mantua hies; And, for because in Italy it is a wonted guise, That friars in the town should seldom walk alone, But of their convent aye should be accompanied with one Of his profession." Friar Laurence and his associates must be supposed to belong to the Franciscan order of friars. The good friar of the play, in his kindliness, his learning, and his inclination to mix with, and perhaps control, the affairs of the world, is no unapt representative of one of this distinguished order in their best days. Warton, in his "History of English Poetry,' has described the learning, the magnificence, and the prodigious influence of this remarkable body. Friar Laurence was able to give to Romeo He was to Romeo "Adversity's sweet milk-philosophy." " a divine, a ghostly confessor, A sin-absolver, and my friend profess'd;" but he was yet of the world. He married Romeo and his mistress, partly to gratify their love, and partly to secure his influence in the reconciliation of their families. Warton says the Franciscans "managed the machines of every important operation or event, both in the religious and political world." 5 SCENE III." The watch is coming." Malone maintains, here and elsewhere, that there is no such establishment as the watch in Italy. Mr. Charles Armitage Brown, who, to an intimate knowledge of Shakspere in general, adds a particular knowledge of Italian customs, says, “If Dogberry and Verges should be pronounced nothing else than the constables of the night in London, before the new police was established, I can assert that I have seen those very officers in Italy." 6 SCENE III.-" Some shall be pardon'd," &c. The government of the Scaligers, or Scalas, commenced in 1259, when Mastino de la Scala was elected Podesta of Verona; and it lasted 113 years in the legitimate descendants of the first Podesta. The following is a representation of the tomb of this illustrious family at Verona, from an original sketch. "OF the truth of Juliet's story, they (the Veronese) seem tenacious to a degree,-insisting on the fact, giving a date (1303), and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden, once a cemetery, now ruined to the very graves. The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love." Byron thus described the tomb of Juliet to his friend Moore, as he saw it at the close of autumn, when withered leaves had dropped into the decayed sarcophagus, and the vines that are trailed above it had been stripped of their fruit. His letter to Moore, in which this passage occurs, is dated the 7th November.* But this wild and desolate garden only struck Byron as appropriate to the legend to that simple tale of fierce hatreds and fatal loves which tradition has still preserved, amongst those who may never have read Luigi da Porto or Bandello, and who, perhaps, never heard the name of Shakspere. To the legend only is the blighted place appropriate. For who that has ever been thoroughly imbued *Moore's Life of Byron,' 8vo. : 1838, p. 327. with the story of Juliet, as told by Shakspere,-who that has heard his "glorious song of praise on that inexpressible feeling which ennobles the soul and gives to it its highest sublimity, and which elevates even the senses themselves into soul,"*—who that, in our great poet's matchless delineation of Juliet's love, has perceived "whatever is most intoxicating in the odour of a southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous on the first opening of the rose,"+-who, indeed, that looks upon the tomb of the Juliet of Shakspere, can see only a shapeless ruin amidst wildness and desolation? "A grave? O, no: a lantern, For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes Wordsworth has a philosophical remark upon Shakspere which is applicable to all his tragedies :-"Shakspere's writings, in the most pathetic scenes, never act upon us as pathetic beyond the bounds of pleasure." Wordsworth adds, that this effect, "in a much greater degree than might at first be imagined, is to be ascribed to small, but continual and regular, impulses of pleasurable surprise from the metrical arrangement." In Romeo and Juliet the principle of limiting the pathetic according to the degree in which it is calculated to produce emotions of pleasure, is interwoven with the whole structure and conduct of the play. The tragical part of the story, from the first scene to the last, is held in subjection to the beautiful. It is not only that the beautiful comes to the relief of the tragic, as in Lear' and 'Othello,' but here the tragic is only a mode of exhibiting the beautiful under its most striking aspects. Shakspere never intended that the story of Romeo and Juliet' should lacerate the heart. When Mrs. Inchbald, therefore, said, in her preface to the acted play, "Romeo and Juliet' is called a pathetic tragedy, but it is not so in reality-it charms the understanding and delights the imagination, without melting, though it touches, the heart," she paid the highest compliment to Shakspere's skill as "Otan artist, for he had thoroughly worked out his own idea. way," Mrs. Inchbald adds, "would have rendered it more effective." Otway did render it " more effective." It is quite sufficient to refer to his Caius Marius,' to show his success in converting beauty into what is called force. He did exactly what Garrick's less skilful hand ventured to do-to make Juliet wake before Romeo dies. It is marvellous how acute and ingenious men, such as *A. W. Schlegel's Lectures,' Black's translation, vol. ii., p. 187. Observations prefixed to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads.' † Ibid. Thomas Warton, for example, should be betrayed into criticism which deals with such a poem as Romeo and Juliet' as if there were no unity of feeling, no homogeneousness, in its entire construction. Warton says, "Shakspere, misled by the English poem, missed the opportunity of introducing a most affecting scene by the natural and obvious conclusion of the story. In Luigi's novel, Juliet awakes from her trance in the tomb before the death of Romeo." * Shakspere misled! Shakspere missing the opportunity! Shakspere working in the dark! Let us see what has been done by those who were not " misled," and who seized upon "the opportunity.” Garrick has written sixty lines of good, orthodox, commonplace dialogue between Romeo and Juliet in the tomb, in which Romeo, before he begins to rave, talks very much in the style of one of Shenstone's shepherds,-as, for example, "And all my mind was happiness and thee." Garrick, moreover, has omitted all such Shaksperean images as would be offensive to superfine ears, such as And yet, with all his efforts to destroy the beautiful, and all his managerial skill to thrust forward that species of pathetic which the actor delights in, for the purpose of exhibiting himself and bringing down the galleries, 'Romeo and Juliet,' according to Mrs. Inchbald, "seldom attracts an elegant audience. The company that frequent the side-boxes will not come to a tragedy, unless to weep in torrents; and 'Romeo and Juliet' will not draw even a copious shower of tears." Why, no! The vulgar pathos that Garrick has daubed over Shakspere's catastrophe, with the same skill with which a picture-dealer would mend a Correggio, only serves to make the beauty, that he has been constrained to leave untouched, more unintelligible to "the company that frequent the side-boxes." The whole thing has become out of keeping. Instead of the sweetness that "ends with a long deep sigh, like the breeze of the evening,"t we have a rant about "cruel, cursed fate," which shrieks like the gusty wind in the chinks of a deserted and poverty-stricken hut. Instead of that beautiful close in which "the spring and the winter meet, winter assumes the character of spring, and spring the sadness of winter," we have here a fierce storm,-" such sheets of *History of English History,' vol. iv. p. 301, (1824). Coleridge; Drake's Memorials.' Coleridge, Literary Remains.' |