of love and friendship, of gratitude and fidelity, the melancholy of genius, and the exhilaration of innocent mirth, as opposed to the desolating effects of malice, envy, and ambition; and the latter unfolding, with the richest glow of fancy, landscapes to which, as objects of imitation, the united talents of Ruysdale, Claude, and Salvator Rosa, could alone do justice. From the forest of Arden, from that wild wood of oaks, "whose boughs were moss'd with age, And high tops bald with dry antiquity," from the bosom of sequestered glens and pathless solitudes, has the poet called forth lessons of the most touching and consolitory wisdom. Airs from paradise seem to fan with refreshing gales, with a soothing consonance of sound, the interminable depth of foliage, and to breathe into the hearts of those who have sought its shelter from the world, an oblivion of their sorrows and their cares. The banished Duke, the much-injured Orlando, and the melancholy Jaques, lose in meditation on the scenes which surround them, or in sportive freedom, or in grateful occupation, all corrosive sense of past affliction. Love seems the only passion which has penetrated this romantic seclusion, and the sigh of philosophic pity, or of wounded sensibility, (the legacy of a deserted world,) the only relique of the storm which is passed and gone.. Nothing, in fact, can blend more harmoniously with the romantic glades, and magic windings of Arden, than the society which Shakspeare has placed beneath its shades. The effect of such scenery, on the lover of nature, is to take full possession of the soul, to absorb its very faculties, and, through the charmed imagination, to convert the workings of the mind into the sweetest sensations of the heart, into the joy of grief, into a thankful endurance of adversity, into the interchange of the tenderest affections; and find we not here, in the person of the Duke, the noblest philosophy of resignation; in Jaques, the humorous sadness of an amiable misanthropy; in Orlando, the mild dejection of self-accusing humility; in Rosalind and Celia, the purity of sisterly affection, whilst love in all its innocence and gaiety binds in delicious fetters, not only the younger exiles, but the pastoral natives of the forest. A day thus spent, in all the careless freedom of unsophisticated nature, seems worth an eternity of common-place existence ! The nice discrimination of Shakspeare and his profound knowlege of human nature are no where more apparent than in sketching the character of Jaques, whose social and confiding affections, originally warm and enthusiastic, and which had led him into all the excesses and' credulities of thoughtless attachment, being blighted by the desertion of those on whom he had fondly relied, have suddenly subsided into a delicately blended compound of melancholy, misanthropy, and morbid sensibility, mingled with a large portion of benevolent though sarcastic humour. The selfishness and ingratitude of mankind are, consequently, the theme of all his meditations, and even tinge his recreations with the same pensive hue of moral invective. We accordingly first recognise him in a situation admirably adapted to the nurture of his peculiar feelings, laid at length "Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out Upon the brook that brawls along the wood," and assimilating the fate of an unfortunate stag, who had been wounded by the hunters, and who "Stood on the extremest verge of the swift brook, to the too common lot of humanity VOL. II. "Duke. But what said Jaques? Lord. O yes, into a thousand similes. As worldings do, giving the sum of more To that which had too much. Then, being there alone, 'Tis right, quoth he; thus misery doth part 3 K magined, music, the food of melancholy as well as edited consolation of Jaques; he tells Amiens, who, wag, had objected to his request of singing again, that him melancholy. "I thank it. More, I pr'ythee can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs: pythee, more † ;" and we can well conceive with what de pleasure he listened to the subsequent song of the same Coleman: "Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man's ingratitude; Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen, Although thy breath be rude. Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, Thou dost not bite so nigh As benefits forgot; Though thou the waters warp, As friend remember'd not."‡ From this interesting and finely shaded character, the result of a false estimate of what is to be expected from human nature and society, much valuable instruction may be derived; but as a similar delineation will soon occur in the person of Timon, we shall defer what may be required upon this subject to a subsequent page. * Reed's Shakspeare, vol. viit. pp. 43, 44. Act ii. sc. 1. + Ibid. p. 59. Act ii. sc. 5. Ibid. p. 76, 77. Act ii. sc. 7. 21. MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 1601. It does not appear to us that Mr. Chalmers has succeeded in his endeavours to set aside the general tradition relative to this comedy, as recorded by Mr. Rowe, who says, that Queen Elizabeth" was so well pleased with the admirable character of Falstaff in The Two Parts of Henry the Fourth, that she commanded Shakspeare to continue it for one play more, and to show him in love." * Rowe adopted this from Dennis, who mentions it as the tradition of his time; and has also related, that being "eager to see it acted," she ordered it "to be finished in fourteen days †,” and was highly gratified by the representation. A tradition of the seventeenth century thus general in its diffusion, and particular in its circumstances, cannot, and ought not, to be shaken by the mere observations that "she (the Queen) was certainly too feeble in 1601 to think of such toys," and that at this time "she was in no proper mood for such fooleries ‡;" more especially when we recollect, that at this very period, she was guilty of fooleries greatly more extravagant and out of character, than that of commanding a play to be written. At a "mask at Blackfriars, on the marriage of Lord Herbert and Mrs. Russel," relates Lord Orford, on the authority of the Bacon Papers, "eight lady maskers chose eight more to dance the measures. Mrs. Fritton, who led them, went to the Queen, and wooed her to dance. Her Majesty asked, what she was? AFFECTION,' she said. 'AFFECTION!' said the Queen;-AFFECTION is false.' Yet her majesty rose and danced. She was then SIXTY-EIGHT! {" If, at the age of SIXTY-EIGHT, she was not too feeble to dance, nor too wise to fancy herself in love, we may easily conceive, that she had both strength and inclination to attend and to enjoy a play! -- Another objection of the same critic to the probability of this tradition, turns upon the extraordinary assumption, that it was not within * Reed's Shakspeare, vol. i. p. 66. + Epistle Dedicatory to The Comical Gallant, 1702. § Royal and Noble Authors, apud Park, vol. i. p. 82. the omnipotence of Elizabeth "to bring Falstaff to real life, after being positively as dead as nail in door *;" as if Falstaff had ever possessed a real existence, and the Queen had been expected to have occasioned his bodily resurrection from the dead. In accordance with this supposed impossibility, impossible only in this strange point of view, we are further told, that “whatever a capricious Queen might have wished to have seen, the audience would not have borne to see the dead knight on the living stage;" thus again confounding the dramatic death of an imaginary being, with the physical dissolution incident to material nature! Surely Shakspeare had an unlimited control over the creatures of his own imagination, and had he reproduced the fat knight in half-a-dozen plays, after the death which he had already assigned him in Henry the Fifth, who, provided he had supported the merit and consistency of the character, would have charged him with a violation of probability? When Addison killed Sir Roger de Coverley, in order, as tradition says, to prevent any one interfering with the unity of his sketch, he could only be certain of the non-resumption of his imaginary existence in the very work which had detailed his decease; for if Addison himself, or any of his contemporaries, had reproduced Sir Roger, in a subsequent periodical paper, with the same degree of skill which had accompanied the first delineation, would it have been objected as a sufficient condemnation of such a performance, that the knight had been previously dispatched? We see no reason, therefore, for distrusting the generally received tradition, and have, accordingly, placed the Merry Wives of Windsor, with Mr. Malone, after the three plays devoted to Henry the Fourth, and Fifth. In this very entertaining drama, which unfolds a vast display of incident, and a remarkable number of well-supported characters, we are presented with an almost unrivalled instance of pure domestic comedy, and which furnishes a rich draught of English minds and * Supplemental Apology, p. 345. |