Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher Part 10

I have always thought this, in itself so beautiful speech, the least explicable from the mood and full intention of the speaker of any in the whole works of Shakespeare. I cherish the hope that I am mistaken, and that, becoming wiser, I shall discover some profound excellence in that, in which I now appear to detect an imperfection.

"Julius Caesar."

Act i. sc. 1.-

"_Mar._ What meanest _thou_ by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow!"

The speeches of Flavius and Marullus are in blank verse. Wherever regular metre can be rendered truly imitative of character, pa.s.sion, or personal rank, Shakespeare seldom, if ever, neglects it. Hence this line should be read:-

"What mean'st by that? mend me, thou saucy fellow!"

I say regular metre: for even the prose has in the highest and lowest dramatic personage, a Cobbler or a Hamlet, a rhythm so felicitous and so severally appropriate, as to be a virtual metre.

_Ib._ sc. 2.-

"_Bru._ A soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March."

If my ear does not deceive me, the metre of this line was meant to express that sort of mild philosophic contempt, characterising Brutus even in his first casual speech. The line is a trimeter,-each _dipodia_ containing two accented and two unaccented syllables, but variously arranged, as thus:-

u - - u | - u u - | u - u - A soothsayer | bids you beware | the Ides of March.

_Ib._ Speech of Brutus:-

"Set honour in one eye, and death i' the other, And I will look on _both_ indifferently."

Warburton would read "death" for "both;" but I prefer the old text. There are here three things, the public good, the individual Brutus' honour, and his death. The latter two so balanced each other, that he could decide for the first by equipoise; nay-the thought growing-that honour had more weight than death. That Ca.s.sius understood it as Warburton, is the beauty of Ca.s.sius as contrasted with Brutus.

_Ib._ Caesar's speech:-

... "He loves no plays As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music," &c.

"This is not a trivial observation, nor does our poet mean barely by it, that Ca.s.sius was not a merry, sprightly man; but that he had not a due temperament of harmony in his disposition."-Theobald's note.

O Theobald! what a commentator wast thou, when thou would'st affect to understand Shakespeare, instead of contenting thyself with collating the text! The meaning here is too deep for a line ten-fold the length of thine to fathom.

_Ib._ sc. 3. Caesar's speech:-

"Be _factious_ for redress of all these griefs; And I will set this foot of mine as far, As who goes farthest."

I understand it thus: "You have spoken as a conspirator; be so in _fact_, and I will join you. Act on your principles, and realize them in a fact."

Act ii. sc. 1. Speech of Brutus:-

"It must be by his death; and, for my part, I know no personal cause to spurn at him, But for the general. He would be crown'd: How that might change his nature, there's the question.

... And, to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affections sway'd More than his reason.

... So Caesar may; Then, lest he may, prevent."

This speech is singular;-at least, I do not at present see into Shakespeare's motive, his _rationale_, or in what point of view he meant Brutus' character to appear. For surely-(this, I mean, is what I say to myself, with my present _quantum_ of insight, only modified by my experience in how many instances I have ripened into a perception of beauties, where I had before descried faults;) surely, nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here attributed to him-to him, the stern Roman republican; namely,-that he would have no objection to a king, or to Caesar, a monarch in Rome, would Caesar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be! How, too, could Brutus say that he found no personal cause-none in Caesar's past conduct as a man? Had he not pa.s.sed the Rubicon? Had he not entered Rome as a conqueror? Had he not placed his Gauls in the Senate?-Shakespeare, it may be said, has not brought these things forward-True;-and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What character did Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be?

_Ib._ Speech of Brutus:-

"For if thou _path_, thy native semblance on."

Surely, there need be no scruple in treating this "path" as a mere misprint or mis-script for "put." In what place does Shakespeare-where does any other writer of the same age-use "path" as a verb for "walk?"

_Ib._ sc. 2. Caesar's speech:-

"She dreamt to-night, she saw my _statue_."

No doubt, it should be _statua_, as in the same age, they more often p.r.o.nounced "heroes" as a trisyllable than dissyllable. A modern tragic poet would have written,-

"Last night she dreamt that she my statue saw."

But Shakespeare never avails himself of the supposed license of transposition, merely for the metre. There is always some logic either of thought or pa.s.sion to justify it.

Act iii. sc. 1. Antony's speech:-

"Pardon me, Julius-here wast thou bay'd, brave hart: Here didst thou fall; and here thy hunters stand Sign'd in thy spoil, and crimson'd in thy lethe.

_O world! thou wast the forest to this hart,_ _And this, indeed, O world! the heart of thee._"

I doubt the genuineness of the last two lines;-not because they are vile; but first, on account of the rhythm, which is not Shakespearian, but just the very tune of some old play, from which the actor might have interpolated them;-and secondly, because they interrupt, not only the sense and connection, but likewise the flow both of the pa.s.sion, and (what is with me still more decisive) of the Shakespearian link of a.s.sociation.

As with many another parenthesis or gloss slipt into the text, we have only to read the pa.s.sage without it, to see that it never was in it. I venture to say there is no instance in Shakespeare fairly like this.

Conceits he has; but they not only rise out of some word in the lines before, but also lead to the thought in the lines following. Here the conceit is a mere alien: Antony forgets an image, when he is even touching it, and then recollects it, when the thought last in his mind must have led him away from it.

Act iv. sc. 3. Speech of Brutus:-

... "What, shall one of us, That struck the foremost man of all this world, But for _supporting robbers_."

This seemingly strange a.s.sertion of Brutus is unhappily verified in the present day. What is an immense army, in which the l.u.s.t of plunder has quenched all the duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or differenced only as fiends are from ordinarily reprobate men? Caesar supported, and was supported by, such as these;-and even so Buonaparte in our days.

I know no part of Shakespeare that more impresses on me the belief of his genius being superhuman, than this scene between Brutus and Ca.s.sius. In the Gnostic heresy it might have been credited with less absurdity than most of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed him to create, previously to his function of representing, characters.

"Antony And Cleopatra."

Shakespeare can be complimented only by comparison with himself: all other eulogies are either heterogeneous, as when they are in reference to Spenser or Milton; or they are flat truisms, as when he is gravely preferred to Corneille, Racine, or even his own immediate successors, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ma.s.singer and the rest. The highest praise, or rather form of praise, of this play, which I can offer in my own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether the _Antony and Cleopatra_ is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of _Macbeth_, _Lear_, _Hamlet_, and _Oth.e.l.lo_. _Feliciter audax_ is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakespeare's other works, even as it is the general motto of all his works compared with those of other poets. Be it remembered, too, that this happy valiancy of style is but the representative and result of all the material excellencies so expressed.

This play should be perused in mental contrast with _Romeo and Juliet_;-as the love of pa.s.sion and appet.i.te opposed to the love of affection and instinct. But the art displayed in the character of Cleopatra is profound; in this, especially, that the sense of criminality in her pa.s.sion is lessened by our insight into its depth and energy, at the very moment that we cannot but perceive that the pa.s.sion itself springs out of the habitual craving of a licentious nature, and that it is supported and reinforced by voluntary stimulus and sought-for a.s.sociations, instead of blossoming out of spontaneous emotion.

Of all Shakespeare's historical plays, _Antony and Cleopatra_ is by far the most wonderful. There is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so much;-perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. This is greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force is sustained throughout, and to the numerous momentary flashes of nature counteracting the historic abstraction. As a wonderful specimen of the way in which Shakespeare lives up to the very end of this play, read the last part of the concluding scene. And if you would feel the judgment as well as the genius of Shakespeare in your heart's core, compare this astonishing drama with Dryden's _All For Love_.