-when we surrendered up our reason to the garden with an alcove in it,-a street, or the poet, as children to their nurses and their piazza of Covent-garden, does well enough elders; and we laugh at our fears as children, in a scene; we are content to give as much who thought they saw something in the dark, credit to it as it demands; or rather, we triumph when the bringing in of a candle think little about it,-it is little more than discovers the vanity of their fears. For this reading at the top of a page, "Scene, a exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage garden;" we do not imagine ourselves there, is truly bringing in a candle to expose their but we readily admit the imitation of familiar own delusiveness. It is the solitary taper objects. But to think by the help of painted and the book that generates a faith in these trees and caverns, which we know to be terrors: a ghost by chandelier light, and in painted, to transport our minds to Prospero, good company, deceives no spectators,-a and his island and his lonely cell;* or by ghost that can be measured by the eye, and the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in his human dimensions made out at leisure. an interval of speaking, to make us believe The sight of a well-lighted house, and a well- that we hear those supernatural noises of dressed audience, shall arm the most nervous which the isle was full: the Orrery Lecturer child against any apprehensions: as Tom at the Haymarket might as well hope, by Brown says of the impenetrable skin of his musical glasses cleverly stationed out of Achilles with his impenetrable armour over sight behind his apparatus, to make us it, "Bully Dawson would have fought the believe that we do indeed hear the crystal devil with such advantages." spheres ring out that chime, which if it were to enwrap our fancy long, Milton thinks,

"Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,
And speckled Vanity

Would sicken soon and die,

And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;
Yea, Hell itself would pass away,

And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day."

Tempest of The garden of Eden, with our first parents stage repre- in it, is not more impossible to be shown on a stage, than the Enchanted isle, with its no less interesting and innocent first settlers.

Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest: doubtless without some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have sate out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the Shakspeare at all a subject for sentation? It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we are reading it; but to have a conjuror brought before us in his conjuringgown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself and some hundred of favoured spectators before the curtain are supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted,-they can only be believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A parlour or a drawingroom, a library opening into a garden-a

The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses, which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of garment which he varied, the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity of the public eye, require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish monarch was fairly a counterpart to that which our King wears when he goes to the Parliamenthouse, just so full and cumbersome, and set out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be represented, I see not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what

It will be said these things are done in pictures. But pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a world of itself, but in scene-painting there is the attempt to deceive: and there is the discordancy, never to be got over, between painted scenes and real people.

wants to see the pictures? But in the acting, a miniature must be lugged out; which we know not to be the picture, but only to show how finely a miniature may be represented. This showing of everything levels all things: it makes tricks, bows, and curtseys, of importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in Macbeth: it is as much remembered as any

robe are we conscious of? Some dim images of royalty—a crown and sceptre may float before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it? Do we see in our mind's eye what Webb or any other robe-maker could pattern? This is the inevitable consequence of imitating everything, to make all things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of external appearances as to make us feel that we are among of her thrilling tones or impressive looks. flesh and blood, while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character. But in acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible things, call upon us to judge of their naturalness.

But does such a trifle as this enter into the imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful scene? Does not the mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can? Does it care about the gracefulness of the doing it? But by acting, and judging of acting, all these non-essentials are raised into an importance, injurious to the main interest of the play.

Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with I have confined my observations to the that quiet delight which we find in the read- tragic parts of Shakspeare. It would be no ing of it, to the different feelings with which very difficult task to extend the inquiry to a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer, his comedies; and to show why Falstaff, reads a fine poem. The accursed critical Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest, are habit the being called upon to judge and equally incompatible with stage representapronounce, must make it quite a different tion. The length to which this Essay has thing to the former. In seeing these plays run will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently acted, we are affected just as judges. distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, When Hamlet compares the two pictures of without going any deeper into the subject at Gertrude's first and second husband, who present.

CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,

CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE.

WHEN I selected for publication, in 1808, | unimpassioned deities, passionate mortals Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who-Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, and lived about the time of Shakspeare, the kind Amaryllis. My leading design was to illusof extracts which I was anxious to give trate what may be called the moral sense of were not so much passages of wit and our ancestors. To show in what manner humour, though the old plays are rich in they felt, when they placed themselves by such, as scenes of passion, sometimes of the the power of imagination in trying circumdeepest quality, interesting situations, seri- stances, in the conflicts of duty and passion, ous descriptions, that which is more nearly or the strife of contending duties; what allied to poetry than to wit, and to tragic sort of loves and enmities theirs were; how rather than to comic poetry. The plays their griefs were tempered, and their fullwhich I made choice of were, with few swoln joys abated: how much of Shakspeare exceptions, such as treat of human life and shines in the great men his contemporaries, manners, rather than masques and Arcadian and how far in his divine mind and manners pastorals, with their train of abstractions, he surpassed them and all mankind. I was

also desirous to bring together some of whole nunneries, invents infernal machines. the most admired scenes of Fletcher and He is just such an exhibition as a century or Massinger, in the estimation of the world two earlier might have been played before the only dramatic poets of that age entitled the Londoners "by the royal command," to be considered after Shakspeare, and, by when a general pillage and massacre of the exhibiting them in the same volume with Hebrews had been previously resolved on in the more impressive scenes of old Marlowe, the cabinet. It is curious to see a superHeywood, Tourneur, Webster, Ford, and stition wearing out. The idea of a Jew, others, to show what we had slighted, while which our pious ancestors contemplated with beyond all proportion we had been crying so much horror, has nothing in it now revoltup one or two favourite names. From the ing. We have tamed the claws of the beast, desultory criticisms which accompanied that and pared its nails, and now we take it to publication, I have selected a few which our arms, fondle it, write plays to flatter it; I thought would best stand by themselves, it is visited by princes, affects a taste, patronas requiring least immediate reference to ises the arts, and is the only liberal and the play or passage by which they were gentlemanlike thing in Christendom. suggested.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.

Lust's Dominion, or the Lascivious Queen. -This tragedy is in King Cambyses' vein; rape, and murder, and superlatives; "huffing braggart puft lines," such as the play-writers anterior to Shakspeare are full of, and Pistol but coldly imitates.

Tamburlaine the Great, or the Scythian Shepherd. The lunes of Tamburlaine are perfect midsummer madness. Nebuchadnezzar's are mere modest pretensions compared with the thundering vaunts of this Scythian Shepherd. He comes in drawn by conquered kings, and reproaches these pampered jades of Asia that they can draw but twenty miles a day. Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, I never believed that it was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of mine Ancient's. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set down in a play, which their ancestors took to be serious.

Edward the Second.-In a very different style from mighty Tamburlaine is the Tragedy of Edward the Second. The reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints, which Shakspeare scarcely improved in his Richard the Second; and the deathscene of Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene ancient or modern with which I am acquainted.

Doctor Faustus.—The growing horrors of Faustus's last scene are awfully marked by the hours and half hours as they expire, and bring him nearer and nearer to the exactment of his dire compact. It is indeed an agony and a fearful colluctation. Marlowe is said to have been tainted with atheistical positions, to have denied God and the Trinity. To such a genius the history of Faustus must have been delectable food: to wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden to go, to approach the dark gulf, near enough to look in, to be busied in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit that fell from the tree of knowledge.* Barabas the Jew, and Faustus the conjuror, are offsprings of a mind which at least delighted to dally with interdicted subjects. They both talk a language which a believer would have been tender of putting into the mouth of a character though but in fiction. But the holiest minds have sometimes not thought it reprehensible to counterfeit impiety in the person of another, to bring Vice upon the stage speaking her own dialect; and, themselves being armed with an unction of selfconfident impunity, have not scrupled to handle and touch that familiarly which would be death to others. Milton, in the person of Satan, has started speculations hardier than any which the feeble armoury of the atheist ever furnished; and the precise, strait-laced Richardson has strengthened Vice, from the mouth of Lovelace, with

The Rich Jew of Malta.-Marlowe's Jew does not approach so near to Shakspeare's, as his Edward the Second does to Richard the Second. Barabas is a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to knowledge itself, and from the rotten kernels of that please the rabble. He kills in sport, poisons | fatal apple.—Howell's Letters.

• Error, entering into the world with Sin among us

poor Adamites, may be said to spring from the tree of

against her adversary Virtue, which Sedley, Villiers, and Rochester wanted depth of libertinism enough to have invented.

entangling sophistries and abstruse pleas expose the enormity of those appetites in other men. When Cervantes, with such proficiency of fondness dwells upon the Don's library, who sees not that he has been a great reader of books of knight-errantry— perhaps was at some time of his life in danger of falling into those very extravagances which he ridiculed so happily in his hero!

THOMAS DECKER.

Old Fortunatus.-The humour of a frantic lover in the scene where Orleans to his friend Galloway defends the passion with which himself, being a prisoner in the English king's court, is enamoured to frenzy of the king's daughter Agripyna, is done to the life. Orleans is as passionate an innamorato as any which Shakspeare ever drew. He is just such another adept in Love's reasons. The sober people of the world are with him,

"A swarm of fools

Crowding together to be counted wise."

He talks "pure Biron and Romeo;" he is almost as poetical as they, quite as philosophical, only a little madder. After all, Love's sectaries are a reason unto themselves. We have gone retrograde to the noble heresy, since the days when Sidney proselyted our nation to this mixed health and disease: the kindliest symptom, yet the most alarming crisis, in the ticklish state of youth; the nourisher and the destroyer of hopeful wits; the mother of twin births, wisdom and folly, valour and weakness; the servitude above freedom; the gentle mind's religion; the liberal superstition.

JOHN MARSTON.

Antonio and Mellida.-The situation of Andrugio and Lucio, in the first part of this tragedy,-where Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, banished his country, with the loss of a son supposed drowned, is cast upon the territory of his mortal enemy the Duke of Venice, with no attendants but Lucio an old nobleman, and a page-resembles that of Lear and Kent, in that king's distresses. Andrugio, like Lear, manifests a king-like impatience, a turbulent greatness, an affected resignation. The enemies which he enters lists to combat, "Despair and mighty Grief and sharp Impatience," and the forces which he brings to vanquish them, cornets of horse," &c., are in the boldest style of allegory. They are such a race of mourners" as the "infection of sorrows loud" in the intellect might beget on some pregnant cloud” in the imagination. The prologue to the second part, for its passionate earnestness, and for the tragic note of preparation which it sounds, might have preceded one of those old tales of Thebes or Pelops' line, which Milton has so highly commended, as free from the common error of the poets in his day, of

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and gravity, brought in without discretion corruptly to gratify the people." It is as solemn a preparative as the "warning voice which he who saw the Apocalypse heard cry."

The Honest Whore.-There is in the second part of this play, where Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her profession, a simple picture of honour" intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and shame, contrasted without violence, and expressed without immodesty; which is worth all the strong lines against the harlot's profession, with which both parts of this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is always to be suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective fondness. But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his unregenerate state served but to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him, a little turned, to

What You Will.-O I shall ne'er forget how he went cloath'd. Act I. Scene 1.-To judge of the liberality of these notions of dress, we must advert to the days of Gresham, and the consternation which a phenomenon habited like the merchant here described would have excited among the flat round caps and cloth stockings upon 'Change, when those "original arguments or tokens of a citizen's vocation were in fashion, not more for thrift and usefulness than for distinction