the stories supplied by Italian novelists. His forms and modes of composition, with some degrading peculiarities of style, are also those of the age. Every thing else was his own. He possessed a power of depicting the characters of men in all their various shades, such as no writer of his own or any other age possessed; and his works abound with such strokes of wisdom, tenderness, fancy, and humour, as must still be pronounced unrivalled. After having lived for some years as a player, he became the manager of a theatre and company, and appears to have given up acting, for which, indeed, he is said to have not been highly qualified. In 1614, finding himself possessed of a small competency, he retired to his native town; and two years after, he died, and was buried in Stratford church. Little else is known of this wonderful man, whose modesty appears to have been as great as his genius. Though his writings were popular on the stage, he seems to have been hardly considered in his own age as a poet of any eminence; and it was not till about a century and a half after his death, that his transcendant merits were fully appreciated.

The plays of Shakspeare are thirty-five in number, some of them being ranked as tragedies, others as comedies, and some as historical dramas, though, in many of them, the characteristics of these classes are not very distinct. According to Mr Malone, they were produced in the following order, between the years 1591 and 1614-Love's Labour Lost, King Henry VI. (three parts,) Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Winter's Tale, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, King John, King Richard II., King Richard III., Henry IV. (first part,) Merchant of Venice, All's Well that Ends Well, King Henry IV. (second part,) King Henry V., Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Henry VIII., Troilus_and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, King Lear, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Cæsar,

Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Othello, The Tempest, What You Will. Eight other plays have been attributed to him, but, though received by German commentators, are rejected by the countrymen of the author. The most of the plays of Shakspeare were published in a detached form during his lifetime; but it was not till 1623, seven years after his death, that the first collected edition was published in one folio volume. This was thrice reprinted before the close of the seventeenth century, but without any attention being paid to the accuracy of the text. At length, in 1714, the poet Nicholas Rowe presented an edition in which an attempt was made to correct many words and phrases, which were either wrong or supposed to be so ; now also was it thought, for the first time, necessary to gather a few particulars respecting the life of the author. The works of Shakspeare were subsequently edited by Pope, Theobald, Johnson, and other eminent persons of the eighteenth century, but without any great advantage to the text, till Mr Isaac Reed, Mr Steevens, and Mr Malone, by a diligent search in contemporary literature, and an intimate acquaintance with the domestic history of the time, were finally able to restore the works of this

illustrious person to the state in which they were probably written at first. No English author has engaged so much of the attention of learned commentators, nor were any writings ever the subject of so passionate an admiration, as his have now become with the English people.

The most remarkable peculiarities of the mind of Shakspeare were certainly his power of conceiving characters, and, after conceiving them, or adopting them from history, the readiness with which he could throw himself, as it were, into them, so as to bring from them a discourse which every one will pronounce to be exactly what they might be expected to speak under the supposed circumstances. In none of the persons of his dramas, is any thing of their author to be seen. Every one speaks and acts for himself, and as he ought to speak and act. Even where

By.

the character is a supernatural being, it conducts and delivers itself precisely according to the rules which might be conceived to affect it, and is as natural in its own way, as any other individual in the play. He not only had in himself the genius of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them intuitively into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought; and when he conceived a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which would occur in reality. In reading this author, you do not merely learn what his characters say-you see their persons. something expressed or understood, you are at no loss to decipher their peculiar physiognomy, the meaning of a look, the grouping, the by-play, as we might see it on the stage. A word, an epithet, paints a whole scene, or throws us back whole years in the history of the persons represented. His plays are properly expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. His characters speak like men, not like authors. Passion with him is not some one habitual feeling or sentiment, preying upon itself, growing out of itself, and moulding every thing to itself; it is modified by all the other feelings to which the individual isliable, and to which others are liable with him; subject to all the fluctuations of caprice and accident. The dialogues in King Lear, in Macbeth, that between Brutus and Cassius, and nearly all those in which the interest is wrought up to the highest pitch, afford examples of this dramatic fluctuation of passion.'

, *

Shakspeare's imagination is of the same powerful kind as his conception of character and passion. It unites the most opposite extremes. He has a magic power over

*The above quotation is a combination of detached passages in Mr Hazlitt's Essay on Shakspeare.'

words; one of which is often found to be employed so happily, that it is a picture in itself. Most of his epithets and single phrases are equally well applied, and many of them have now become part of the familiar language of the people.

Comparatively rude as the drama was in the days of Shakspeare, except in so far as his own compositions were concerned, and defective as all the theatres were in scenery and machinery, there has never been a period during which play-writing experienced so much public encouragement. To supply the fourteen playhouses which then existed in the metropolis, there were almost as many dramatists, who, in their own day, enjoyed a respectable celebrity, and may still be referred to for productions of merit. It is remarkable, however, that none of these writers, though most of them seem to have been men of good education, wrote with such pure taste as the unlettered son of the Stratford wool-stapler. Owing to their many glaring deficiencies, their impossible plots and fantastical characters, and the horrible incidents which they sometimes introduce, they were condemned to obscurity for about two centuries; but since the beginning of the present, the plays of a considerable number have been collected and printed, with notes and illustrations by learned individuals, and they now enjoy a considerable share of public notice, being appreciated for the fine snatches of poetry, passion, and humour, which are scattered through them.” Overlooking Greene, Middleton, Rowley, and some inferior names, we may mention JOHN MARSTON, author of the tragedy of Antonio and Mellida, and the comedies of What you Will, Parasitaster, and The Malcontent, besides some of less merit. The forte of Marston is not sympathy with either the softer or the stronger emotions, but an impatient scorn and bitter indignation against the vices and follies of men; he was rather a satirist than a dramatist. GEORGE CHAPMAN (1557-1634), who is also distinguished as the first translator of Homer into English verse, has a high philosophical vein in his tragedies, and a very lively

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humour in his comedies, but wants passion and imagination. His All Fools, Widows' Tears, and Eastward Hoe, are his most esteemed plays of the latter kind; the last contains the first idea of Hogarth's Idle and Industrious Apprentices.' THOMAS DEKKAR exceeds most of his contemporaries in whimsical drollery; but yet, in the midst of all his humour, glances at the deepest and most touching of human emotions. He was the author of eleven distinct plays, besides portions of others, and of fourteen other publications, chiefly of a humorous kind.

JOHN WEBSTER, a tailor in London, and who appears in private life to have been a somewhat conceited person, is one of the most impressive of this class of writers. The plans of his dramas, like those of his contemporaries in general, are irregular and confused, the characters often wildly distorted, and the whole composition in some degree imperfect. Yet there are single scenes in his works, which, as exhibitions of the more violent passions, are inferior to nothing in the whole range of the British drama. He was a man of truly original genius, and seems to have felt strong pleasure in whatever was terrible, even though it might border on extravagance. The two best tragedies of Webster are The Duchess of Malfy, and The White Devil; in the former the interest turns upon the sufferings of an innocent and amiable woman, while in the latter it arises from the delineation of one of the worst of female characters. The Duchess is the victim of an atrocious enmity on the part of her two brothers, one of whom forms the design of having her murdered in prison, but first gratifies his fiendish malice by sending the inmates of a lunatic hospital to dance around her, for the purpose of driving her into madness. After the dance, a hired assassin named Bosola, who has throughout the play been her bitter enemy, enters in the disguise of an old man; and there ensues a scene, which may be given here, as a specimen of the tragic manner of these old dramatists.