of January; where that great and good man, whose every sentence is an acorn of wisdom, speaks of a class of men who try appearances upon themselves as well as upon the world, and with at least as much success; and choose to manage so as to make their own minds easy with their faults, which can scarce be done without management, rather than to mend them." Thus Angelo for self-ends imitates sanctity, and gets taken in by his own imitation. His original fault lay in forgetting or ignoring his own frailty. As a natural consequence, his "darling sin is pride that apes humility"; and his pride of virtue, his conceit of purity, "my gravity wherein (let no man hear me) I take pride," while it keeps him from certain vices, is itself a far greater vice than any it keeps him from; insomuch that Isabella's presence may almost be said to elevate him into lust. And perhaps the array of low and loathsome vices, which the Poet has clustered about him in the persons of Lucio, the Clown, and Mrs. Over-done, was necessary to make us feel how unspeakably worse than any or all of these is Angelo's pride of virtue. It can hardly be needful to add, that in Angelo this "mystery of iniquity" is depicted with a truth and sternness of pencil, that could scarce have been achieved but in an age fruitful in living examples of it. HUDSON: The Works of Shakespeare. V. The Duke. The Duke has been rather hardly dealt with by critics. The Poet-than whom it would not be easy to find a better judge of what belongs to wisdom and goodness—seems to have meant him for a wise and good man; yet he has represented him as having rather more skill and pleasure in strategical arts and roundabout ways than is altogether compatible with such a character. Some of his alleged reasons for the action he is going about reflect no honour on him; but it is observable that the result does not approve them to have been his real ones: his conduct at the end infers better motives than his speech offered at the beginning; which naturally suggests that there may have been more of purpose than of truth in his statement of them. A liberal, sagacious, and merciful prince, but with more of whim and caprice than suits the dignity of his place, humanity speaks richly from his lips; yet in his action the philosopher and divine is better shown than the statesman; and he seems to take a very questionable delight in moving about as an unseen providence, by secret counsels leading the wicked designs of others to safe and wholesome issues. Schlegel thinks "he has more pleasure in overhearing his subjects than in governing them in the usual way of princes"; and sets him down as an exception to the old proverb,-"A cowl does not make a monk" and perhaps his princely virtues are somewhat obscured by the disguise which so completely transforms him into a monk. Whether he acts upon the wicked principle with which that fraternity is so often reproached, or not, it is pretty certain that some of his means can be justified by nothing but the end: so that if he be not himself wrong in what he does, he has no shield from the charge but the settled custom of the order whose functions he undertakes. Schlegel justly remarks, that "Shakespeare, amidst the rancour of religious parties, delights in painting monks, and always represents their influence as beneficial; there being in his plays none of the black and knavish specimens, which an enthusiasm for Protestantism, rather than poetical inspiration, has put some modern poets upon delineating. He merely gives his monks an inclination to be busy in the affairs of others, after renouncing the world for themselves; though in respect of pious frauds he does not make them very scrupulous." As to the Duke's pardon of Angelo, though Justice seems to cry out against the act, yet in the premises it were still more unjust in him to do otherwise; the deception he has practised upon Angelo in the substituting of Mariana having plainly bound him to the course he takes. HUDSON: The Works of Shakespeare. VI. The Minor Characters. They [the comic scenes], as well as the loftier scenes of the piece, are but too faithful pictures of the degrading and hardening influence of licentious passion, from the lighter profligacy of Lucio, the dissipated gentleman, to the grosser and contented degradation of the Clown; and. if these are all painted with the truth of Hogarth or Crabbe, they are depicted with no air of sport or mirth, but rather with that of bitter scorn. The author seems to smile like his own Cassius, "as if he mocked himself." Thus Elbow, in his self-satisfied conceit and pedantic ignorance, would appear, as some of the critics regard him, simply as an inferior version of Dogberry. But he is not a Dogberry in whose absurdities the author himself luxuriates, but one whose peculiarities are delineated with a contemptuous sneer. Lucio, again, is a character unfortunately too common in civilized, and especially in city, life-a gentleman in manners and education, and of good natural ability, made frivolous in mind and debased in sentiment and disposition by licentious and idle habitsthus substantially not a very different character from some of the lighter personages of the prior dramas; but he differs mainly from them because exhibited under a very different light, and regarded in a different temper. The others are represented in his scenes as they appeared to the transient acquaintance, or the companions of their pleasures. But the poet looks deeper into the heart and life of Lucio, and portrays this man of pleasure in the same mood which governs the higher and more tragic scenes of this drama-a mood sometimes contemptuous, sometimes sad, often indignant, but never such as had been his former wont, either merely playful or imaginative. Thus it seems to me that, if his comic scenes excite mirth from their truth, it is a mirth in which the author did not participate; and their sarcastic humour assimilates itself in feeling to that of the stern and grave interest of the plot, and the strong passion of its poetic scenes. Characters, in themselves light and amusing, are branded with contempt from the degradation of licentious habits; while the same passion, in a form of less grossness, but of deeper guilt, prostrates before it high reputation, talent, and wisdom. The intellectual and amiable Claudio, willing to purchase "the weariest and most loathed worldly life," at any cost of shame and sin, is strangely contrasted with the drunken Barnardine, "careless, reckless, and fearless of what is past, present, or to come." Indeed, the higher characters are mainly discriminated from the lower ones, in this moral delineation, in that conscience is dull or dead in the latter, while it appears in all its terrors in Angelo and Claudio, and in all the majesty of purity in Isabella. VERPLANCK: The Illustrated Shakespeare. VII. The Play as a Whole. There is very much in Measure for Measure that of itself would assign it to the period of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, All's Well that Ends Well, Titus Andronicus, Love's Labour's Lost-plays which are all equally remarkable for imperfections, and for the beauties and displays of genius associated with them. The city of Vienna is the scene of the play—it is represented as a very sink of sensual defilement, corrupted and ravaged in every physical and moral quality, the consequence of the suspension, for fourteen years, of the activity of most severe statutes framed to check the national tendency to grossness and licence. The delineation of such a state of course presents us with images and persons disgusting and contemptible in every sense; and this is one great cause of the uncongenial effect of the entire play. The progress of public demoralization is rather exaggerated than relieved by the character of the reaction to which it has conduced. Dissoluteness in one quarter is compensated by austerity equally in excess in another, and the pride of unblushing and ostentatious vice is matched by equal parade of ostentatious virtue. The picture is a true one of the effect on morals of laws or maxims too severe to be executed; and the action of the play exhibits the farther disorder and complication resulting from the mere revival of unamended statutes, that had never become obsolete but for their need of amendment, and can scarcely have a better fate again. All the questions involved are brought to issue in the play, though it scarcely leaves assurance in conclusion that the instructive experience will have its full weight for the future. We are spectators of a receptacle of stagnant impurities in vehement ferment, and working through stages of decomposition, but the hope of ultimate purification is scarcely set forth so cheeringly as to compensate for the disagreeableness of what we witness. LLOYD: Critical Essays on the Plays of Shakespeare. [Measure for Measure] is perhaps, after Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth, the play in which Shakspeare struggles, as it were, most with the over-mastering power of his own mind; the depths and intricacies of being, which he has searched and sounded with intense reflection, perplex and harass him; his personages arrest their course of action to pour forth, in language the most remote from common use, thoughts which few could grasp in the clearest expression; and thus he loses something of dramatic excellence in that of his contemplative philosophy. I do not value the comic parts highly: Lucio's impudent profligacy, the result rather of sensual debasement than |