dramas of our poet, a peculiar interest is felt to be attached, not arising from the fascination of a name, but from an intrinsic and almost inexplicable power of pleasing, which we in vain look for in the juvenile plays of other bards, and which serves, perhaps better than any other criterion, to ascertain the genuine property of Shakspeare; it is, in fact, a touchstone, which, when applied to Titus Andronicus, and what Las been termed the First Part of Henry the Sixth, must, if every other evidence were wanting, flash conviction on our senses."-DRAKE.

I can never sufficiently admire the wonderful activity of thought throughout the whole of the first scene of this play, rendered natural, as it is, by the choice of the characters, and the whimsical deter mination on which the drama is founded. A whimsical determination certainly ;—yet not altogether so very improbable to those who are conversant in the history of the middle ages, with their Courts of Love, and all that lighter drapery of chivalry which engaged even mighty kings with a sort of serio-comic interest, and may well be supposed to have occupied more completely the smaller princes, at a time when the noble's or prince's court contained the only theatre of the domain or principality. This sort of story, too, was admirably suited to Shakspeare's times, when the English court was still the foster mother of the state and the muses; and when, in consequence, the courtiers, and men of rank and fashion, affected a display of wit, point, and sententious observation, that would be deemed intolerable at present,—but in which a hundred years of controversy, involving every great political, and every dear domestic, interest, had trained all but the lowest classes to participate. Add to this, the very style of the sermons of the time, and the eagerness of the Protestants to distinguish themselves by long and frequent preaching, and it will be found that, from the reign of Henry the Eighth to the abdication of James the Second, no country ever received such a national education as England.

Hence the comic matter chosen in the first instance is a ridiculous imitation or apery of this constant striving after logical precision, and subtle opposition of thoughts, together with a making the most of every conception or image, by expressing it under the least expected property belonging to it, and this, again, rendered specially absurd by being applied to the most current subjects and occurrences. The phrases and modes of combination in argument were caught by the most ignorant from the custom of the age, and their ridiculous misapplication of them is most amusingly exhibited in Costard; whilst examples suited only to the gravest propositions and impersonations, or apostrophes to abstract thoughts impersonated, which are in fact the natural language only of the most vehement agitations of the mind, are adopted by the coxcombry of Armado as mere artifices of ornament.

"The same kind of intellectual action is exhibited in a more serious and elevated strain in many other parts of this play. Biron's speech at the end of the fourth act is an excellent specimen of it. It is logic clothed in rhetoric;-but observe how Shakspeare, in his two-fold being of poet and philosopher, avails himself of it to convey profound truths in the most lively images, the whole remaining faithful to the character supposed to utter the lines, and the expressions themselves constituting a further development of that character. This speech is quite a study;-sometimes you see this youthful god of poetry connecting disparate thoughts purely by means of resemblances in the words. expressing them, a thing in character in lighter comedy, especially of that kind in which Shakspeare delights, namely, the purposed display of wit, though sometimes, too, disfiguring his graver scenes;— but more often you may see him doubling the natural connection or order of logical consequence in the thoughts, by the introduction of an artificial and sought-for resemblance in the words, as, for instance, in the third line of the play :

'And then grace us in the disgrace of death;'

this being a figure often having its force and propriety, as justified by the law of passion, which, inducing in the mind an unusual activity, seeks for means to waste its superfluity,—when in the highest degree-in lyric repetitions and sublime tautology—(at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead,)—and, in lower degrees, in making the words themselves the subjects and materials of that surplus action, and for the same cause that agitates our limbs, and forces our very gestures into a tempest in states of high excitement.

"The mere style of narration in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' like that of Egeon in the first scene of the Comedy of Errors, and of the Captain in the second scene of Macbeth, seems imitated with its defects and its beauties from Sir Philip Sidney; whose Arcadia, though not then published, was already well known in manuscript copies, and could hardly have escaped the notice and admiration of Shakspeare as the friend and client of the Earl of Southampton. The chief defect consists in the parentheses and parenthetic thoughts and descriptions, suited neither to the passion of the speaker,

nor the purpose of the person to whom the information is to be given, but manifestly betraying the author himself, not by way of continuous under-song, but-palpably, and so as to show themselves addressed to the general reader. However, it is not unimportant to notice how strong a presumption the diction and allusions of this play afford, that, though Shakspeare's acquirements in the dead languages might not be such as we suppose in a learned education, his habits had, nevertheless, been scholastic, and those of a student. For a young author's first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits, and his first observations of life are either drawn from the immediate employments of his youth, and from the characters and images most deeply impressed on his mind in the situations in which those employments had placed him ;-or else they are fixed on such objects and occurrences in the world, as are easily connected with, and seem to bear upon, his studies and the hitherto exclusive subjects of his meditation. Just as Ben Jonson, who applied himself to the drama after having served in Flanders, fills his earliest plays with true or pretended soldiers, the wrongs and neglects of the former, and the absurd boasts and knavery of their counterfeits. So Lessing's first comedies are placed in the universities, and consist of events and characters conceivable in an academic life."-COLERIDGE.

"LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST is numbered among the pieces of Shakspeare's youth. It is a humorsome display of frolic; a whole cornucopia of the most vivacious jokes is emptied into it. Youth is certainly perceivable in the lavish superfluity of labour in the execution; the unbroken succession of plays on words, and sallies of every description, hardly leave the spectator time to breathe; the sparkles of wit fly about in such profusion, that they resemble a blaze of fireworks; while the dialogue, for the most part, is in the same hurried style in which the passing masks at a carnival attempt to banter each other. The young king of Navarre, with three of his courtiers, has made a vow to pass three years in rigid retirement, and devote them to the study of wisdom; for that purpose he has banished all female society from his court, and imposed a penalty on the intercourse with women. But scarcely has he, in a pompous harangue, worthy of the most heroic achievements, announced this determination, when the daughter of the king of France appears at his court, in the name of her old and bed-ridden father, to demand the restitution of a province which he held in pledge. Compelled to give her audience, he falls immediately in love with her. Matters fare no better with his companions, who on their parts renew an old acquaintance with the princess's attendants. Each, in heart, is already false to his vow, without knowing that the wish is shared by his associates; they overhear one another, as they in turn confide their sorrows in a love ditty to the solitary forest; every one jeers and confounds the one who follows him. Biron, who from the beginning was the most satirical among them, at last steps forth, and rallies the king and the two others, till the discovery of a love-letter forces him also to hang down his head. He extricates himself and his companions from their dilemma by ridiculing the folly of the broken vow, and after a noble eulogy on women, invites them to swear new allegiance to the colours of love. This scene is inimitable, and the crowning beauty of the whole. The manner in which they afterwards prosecute their love-suits in masks and disguise, and in which they are tricked and laughed at by the ladies, who are also masked and disguised, is, perhaps, spun out too long. It may be thought, too, that the poet, when he suddenly announces the death of the king of France, and makes the princess postpone her answer to the young prince's serious advances till the expiration of the period of her mourning, and impose, besides, a heavy penance on him for his levity, drops the proper comic tone. But the tone of raillery which prevails throughout the piece, made it hardly possible to bring about a more satisfactory conclusion: after such extravagance, the characters could not return to sobriety, except under the presence of some foreign influence. The grotesque figures of Don Armado, a pompous fantastic Spaniard, a couple of pedants, and a clown, who between whiles contribute to the entertainment, are the creation of a whimsical imagination, and well adapted as foils for the wit of so vivacious a society." --SCHLEGEL.

THE

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

"THE Comedie of Errors" is one of those plays no copy of which has been discovered prior to that in the folio of 1623. It is noticed by Meres, (Palladis Tamia, 1598,) and, in all probability, was written, and acted first, in the very dawn of Shakespeare's genius. The main incident appears to have been taken from the Menaechmi of Plautus, but whether directly, or through the medium of some early translation of the Roman comedy, will most likely remain a subject of interesting speculation to editors and commentators for ages yet unborn.

Steevens conceived that our author was indebted to an English version by W. W[arner], printed in 1595, but there are circumstances which militate strongly against this presumption. In the first place, we have almost decisive proof that the present play was publicly performed a year before Warner's Menæchmi appeared, since in the Gesta Grayorum of 1594 (published in 4t0, 1688) is the following entry :-" After such sports, a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the players; so that night was begun and continued to the end, in nothing but confusion and errors; whereupon it was ever afterwards called the Night of Errors." (P. 22.) Again, it is reasonable to expect, if Shakespeare had adopted Warner's version for the groundwork of his play, that some coincidence in the names of the characters, or at least some parallelism in the ideas and turns of expression, would be evident in the two works; but none has been detected. Another circumstance adverse to Steevens' conjecture, is the fact that the brothers Antipholus in Shakespeare's comedy are respectively distinguished, in the opening scenes, as Antipholus Erotes, or Errotis, and Antipholus Sereptus (corruptions, perhaps, of erraticus and surreptus), appellatives which are not found in Warner.* Taken singly, these facts are not of much weight, but together, they certainly tend to prove that the youthful dramatist either went at once to Plautus for so much of his fable and characters as are borrowed, or took them from some other source than the Menæchmi of Warner. The latter is the more probable and popular hypothesis. Without assenting to the opinion of those Commentators who deny to Shakespeare any acquaintance with Greek and Latin (languages, it should be remembered, which were better and more extensively cultivated in his day than in ours), we may safely suppose that,-engrossed as his time and mind must have been as an actor, a shareholder in the theatre, and a dramatic writer, whenever he had more than one source at command for the derivation of his story, he preferred that which gave him the least trouble to apprehend. That it was his practice, where the subject of his plot is taken from the ancients, to resort to existing translations, rather than apply to the originals themselves, we know, indeed, by comparing Coriolanus, Julius Casar, Antony and Cleopatra, &c. &c., with the translation of Plutarch extant in his time. The question then arises, did any English version of the Menæchmi, besides that by Warner, exist before the "Comedy of Errors" was written. We believe there

did. The indefatigable Malone was the first to discover evidence of an old play called "The Historie of Error," which, according to the Accounts of the Revels in Queen Elizabeth's Court preserved in the Audit Office, was acted at Hampton Court on New Year's Night, 1576-77, "by the children of Powles."+

The same accounts contain an entry, under the date of 1582-3, which may be assumed to refer to this play, although the title, through the ignorance or carelessness of the scribe, is misprinted, "A Historie of Ferrar shewed before her Majestie at Wyndesor on Twelfdaie at night, enacted by the Lord Chamberlayne's servauntes," &c.