twilled' as ridged, or made up in ridges-a sense it yet bears with reference to some kinds of linen. These ridges are produced by intermingling the threads; and hence, perhaps, the origin of the word in the French, (touiller.) The 'pioned and twilled brims' are, there fore, the brims which are dug and ridged."-COLLIER. It may be added, in reply to an objection to the more modern reading, that the Poet does not say that the banks were in full bloom of peonies and lilies in April, but that it was that month which then so bestrewed the banks with such a growth as would yield "chaste crowns for nymphs," etc. "with thy saffron wings"-Mr. Douce remarks that this is an elegant expansion of the following lines in Phaer's "Virgil's Eneid :" Dame rainbow down therefore with safron wings of dropping showres, Whose face a thousand sundry hues against the sun devoures, From heaven descending came. "this SHORT-GRASS'D green"-Many editors, since Rowe, have "short-graz'd green," or grazed down so as to be short; which is neither the genuine old reading, nor the sense. Ceres, as if finding herself out of place on the scanty wild-grass of an uncultivated island, naturally asks why she is summoned to this "shortgrass'd green." "Enter JUNO"-She appears in the air during the first speech of Iris; and there the stage-direction, in the folio, (1623,) is "Juno descends." Collier, who is very learned in the details of the ancient English stage, supposes that she was probably let down slowly by some machine, and did not reach the stage until Iris and Ceres were concluding their speeches. "-to MEET WITH Caliban"-i. e. To counteract, to play stratagem against stratagem. "The parson knows the temper of every one in his house, and accordingly either meets with their vices, or advances their virtues."-HERBERT'S Country Parson. "-lifted up their noses"-This passage is a most accurate description of the effect produced upon colts by music. On first hearing even a trumpet, instead of being terrified, they will often advance and thrust their nose up to the very mouth of the instrument, while it is blown, provided this be done with some consideration. "-king Stephano"-This is an allusion to the old ballad, "King Stephen was a worthy peer," of which Iago sings a verse in OTHELLO. "-a FRIPPERY"-i. e. A shop where old clothes were sold. "-Now is the jerkin under the LINE: now, jerkin, you are like to lose your HAIR"-Malone says, that goat's-hair jerkins, both plain and ornamented, formed part of the theatrical wardrobes of this period; and he suggests that in the present instance they were hung upon a hair line. Stevens thinks there is some gross allusion in the passage. Edwards says it refers to the loss of hair by fever on passing the equinoctial line! Did the sailors shave folks with an iron hoop in those days? Stephano, was, however, drunk; half with wine, and half with his ideas of royalty. "CAL. I will have none on't: we shall lose our time"It is an acute remark of Hazlitt's, that these drunken sailors (who are as like drunken sailors as they can be) serve as an indirect foil to Caliban, "whose figure acquires a classical dignity in the contrast." This passage depicts a truth which, in that age, the Poet must have rather inferred from his general acquaintance of human nature than gathered from immediate knowledge, but which the intercourse of civilized man with savages has, in later years, too often and too unhappily confirmedthat, degraded and brutal as the savage may be, he is still, mentally and morally, above the level to which a more wilful depravity can degrade his civilized visitor or neighbour. Hazlitt has presented the leading idea which pervades and individualizes Caliban's character with great taste and discrimination, as well as with sagacious insight into the principle on which manners are felt to be gross or refined: "Caliban is generally thought (and justly so) to be one of the author's master-pieces. It is not, indeed, pleasant to see this character on the stage, any more than it is to see the god Pan represented there. But, in itself, it is one of the wildest and most abstracted of all Shakespeare's characters, where deformity, whether of body or mind, is redeemed by the power and truth of the imagination displayed in it. It is the essence of grossness, but there is not a particle of vulgarity in it. Shakespeare has displayed the brutal mind of Caliban in contrast with the pure and original forms of nature; the character grows out of the soil where it is rooted, uncontrolled, uncouth, and wild, uncramped by any of the meannesses of custom. It is of the earth, earthy.' It seems almost to have been dug out of the ground, with a soul instinctively superadded to it, answering to its wants and origin. Vulgarity is not natural coarseness, but conventional coarseness, learned from others, contrary to or without entire conformity of natural power and disposition; as fashion is the common-place affectation of what is elegant and refined, without any seeking of the essence of it." "the LINE-GROVE"-This is usually printed limegrove; but the old name of the tree is "line," and not lime, and so it stands in the old copies. This error is pointed out by the Rev. Mr. Hunter, in his "Disquisition on the Tempest." He, however, insists, with less reason, that the line on which the "glistering apparel" is hung means a lime-tree. All the coarse jokes of the dialogue contradict this supposition. "Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes"-This speech is evidently suggested by Medea's, in Ovid: the expressions are (many of them) in the old translation by Golding, which is by no means literal, showing that the Poet had that in his mind, and not the original. But the exquisite fairy imagery is Shakespeare's own. ("Weak MASTERS though ye be")-i. e. "Ye are powerful auxiliaries, but weak if left to yourselves— your employment is then to make green ringlets, and midnight mushrooms, and to play the idle pranks, mentioned by Ariel in his next song; yet, by your aid, I have been enabled to invert the course of nature. say, proverbially, 'Fire is a good servant, but a bad master.'"-BLACKSTONE. We "There I couch when owls do cry"-There is some variation in the modes adopted by the several editors in printing and pointing this song, and in their understanding of it. In the first edition the text of the folios has been followed, and I see little difficulty in it. "When owls do cry" (i. e. at night) Ariel "couches in a cowslip's bell;" and he uses the "bat's back" as his pleasant vehicle, to pursue the summer in its progress round the globe, and thus live merrily under continual blossoms. But some of the commentators have rejected this, which is admitted to be the most obvious sense, because bats nó not migrate in search of summer, but become torpid in winter. Possibly the Poet did not advert to this, or more probably he did, but still saw no reason why Ariel might not make the bat serve as his locomotive, and obey his direction, without depending upon the bat's mere instinct to guide him. In reference to this zoological fact of the non-migration of bats, divers variations of the punctuation have been made. Theobald proposes sunset for summer. Capell and Collier place a period after "couch:" There I couch. When owls do cry, On the bat's back I do fly, After summer, merrily. characters, diversified with boundless invention, and preserved with profound skill in nature, extensive knowledge of opinions, and accurate observation of life. In a single drama, are here exhibited princes, courtiers, and sailors, all speaking in their real characters. There is the agency of airy spirits, and of an earthly goblin. The operations of magic, the tumults of a storm, the adventures of a desert island, the native effusion of untaught affection, the punishment of guilt, and the final happiness of the pair for whom our passions and reason are equally interested."-JOHNSON. "The TEMPEST has little action and progressive movement: the union of Ferdinand and Miranda is fixed at their first meeting, and Prospero merely throws apparent obstacles in their way; the shipwrecked band go leisurely about the island; the attempts of Sebastian and Antonio on the life of the king of Naples, and of Caliban and his drunken companions against Prospero, are nothing but a feint, as we foresee that they will be completely frustrated by the magical skill of the latter. Nothing remains, therefore, but the punishment of the guilty, by dreadful sights which harrow up their consciences, the discovery, and final reconciliation. Yet this want is so admirably concealed by the most varied display of the fascination of poetry and the exhilaration of mirth-the details of the execution are so very attractive, that it requires no small degree of attention to perceive that the denouement is, in some measure, already contained in the exposition. The history of the love of Ferdinand and Miranda, developed in a few short scenes, is enchantingly beautiful: an affecting union of chivalrous magnanimity on the one part, and, on the other, of the virgin openness of a heart which, brought up far from the world, on an uninhabited island, has never learned to disguise its innocent movements. The wisdom of the princely hermit Prospero has a magical and mysterious air; the impression of the black falsehood of the two usurpers is mitigated by the honest gossiping of the old and faithful Gonzalo: Trinculo and Stephano, two good-for-nothing drunkards, find a worthy associate in Caliban; and Ariel hovers sweetly over the whole, as the personified genius of the wonderful fable. "Caliban has become a bye-word, as the strange creation of a poetical imagination: a mixture of the gnome and the savage; half demon, half brute. In his behaviour we perceive at once the traces of his native disposition, and the influence of Prospero's education. The latter could only unfold his understanding, without, in the slightest degree, taming his rooted malignity: it is as if the use of reason and human speech should be communicated to a stupid ape. Caliban is malicious, cowardly, false, and base in his inclinations; and yet he is essentially different from the vulgar knaves of a civilized world, as they are occasionally pourtrayed by Shakespeare. He is rude, but not vulgar; he never falls into the low familiarity of his drunken associates, for he is a poetical being in his way. He has picked up every thing dissonant and thorny in language, out of which he has composed his vocabulary; and of the whole variety of nature, the hateful, repulsive, and pettily deformed have alone been impressed on his imagination. The magical world of spirits, which the staff of Prospero has assembled on the island, casts merely a faint reflection into his mind, as a ray of light which falls into a dark cave, incapable of communicating to it either heat or illumination, merely serves to put in motion the poisonous vapours. The whole delineation of this monster is inconceivably consistent and profound, and notwithstanding its hatefulness, by no means hurtful to our feelings, as the honour of human nature is left untouched. "In the zephyr-like Ariel the image of air is not to be mistaken; his name even bears an allusion to it. On the other hand, Caliban signifies the heavy element of earth. Yet they are neither of them allegorical personifications, but beings individually determined. In general we find, in the MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM, in the TEMPEST, in the magical part of MACBETH, and wherever Shakespeare avails himself of the popular belief in the invisible presence of spirits, and the possibility of coming in contact with them, a profound view of the inward life of Nature and her mysterious springs; which, it is true, ought never to be altogether unknown to the genuine poet, as poetry is altogether incompatible with mechanical physics, but which few have possessed in an equal degree with Dante and himself."-SCHLEGEL. "The TEMPEST is a specimen of the purely romantic drama, in which the interest is not historical, or dependent upon fidelity of portraiture, or the natural connection of events; but is a birth of the imagination, and rests only on the coaptation and union of the elements granted to, or assumed by, the Poet. It is a species of drama which owes no allegiance to time or space, and in which, therefore, errors of chronology and geogra phy-no mortal sins in any species-are venial faults, and count for nothing. It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty; and although the illusion may be assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of modern times, yet this sort of assistance is dangerous. For the principal and only genuine excitement ought to come from within-from the moved and sympathetic imagination; whereas, where so much is addressed to the mere external senses of seeing and hearing, the spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without will withdraw the mind from the proper and only legitimate interest which is intended to spring from within. "The romance opens with a busy scene admirably appropriate to the kind of drama, and giving, as it were, the key-note to the whole harmony. It prepares and initiates the excitement required for the entire piece, and yet does not demand any thing from the spectators which their previous habits had not fitted them to understand. It is the bustle of a tempest, from which the real horrors are abstracted; therefore it is poetical, though not in strictness natural, (the distinction to which I have so often alluded,) and is purposely restrained from concentering the interest on itself, but used merely as an induction or tuning for what is to follow. "In the second scene, Prospero's speeches, till the entrance of Ariel, contain the finest example, I remember, of retrospective narration, for the purpose of exciting immediate interest, and putting the audience in possession of all the information necessary for the understanding of the plot. Observe, too, the perfect probability of the moment chosen by Prospero (the very Shakespeare himself, as it were, of the tempest) to open out the truth to his daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how completely any thing that might have been disagreeable to us in the magician, is reconciled and shaded in the humanity and natural feeling of the father. In the very first speech of Miranda, the simplicity and tenderness of her character are at once laid open; it would have been lost in direct contact with the agitation of the first scene. The opinion once prevailed, but, happily, is now abandoned, that Fletcher alone wrote for women. The truth is, that with very few, || and those partial, exceptions, the female characters in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not decent; when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that continuates society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic processes, but in that same equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are representative of all past experience-not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their predecessors even up to the first mother that lived. Shakespeare saw that the want of prominence, which Pope notices for sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman's character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being constituting one living total of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude-shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty-sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shakespearian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety are merely the result of the modification of circumstances, whether in Miranda the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katharine the queen. "But to return. The appearance and characters of the super or ultra-natural servants are finely contrasted. Ariel has in every thing the airy tint which gives the name; and it is worthy of remark that Miranda is never directly brought into comparison with Ariel, lest the natural and human of the one and the supernatural of the other should tend to neutralize each other. Caliban, on the other hand, is all earth-all condensed and gross in feelings and images; he has the dawnings of understanding without reason or the moral sense, and tellectual faculties, without the moral sense, is marked in him, as in some brute animals, this advance to the inby the appearance of vice. For it is in the primacy of the moral being only that man is truly human; in his intellectual powers he is certainly approached by the brutes, and, man's whole system duly considered, those powers cannot be considered other than means to an end, that is, to morality. "In this scene, as it proceeds, is displayed the impression made by Ferdinand and Miranda on each other; it is love at first sight at the first sight They have chang'd eyes. And it appears to me that, in all cases of real love, it is is enough for the ethereal connections of the romantic "In this play are admirably sketched the vices generally accompanying a low degree of civilization; and in the first scene of the second act Shakespeare has, as in many other places, shown the tendency in bad men to indulge in scorn and contemptuous expressions, as a mode of getting rid of their own uneasy feelings of inferiority to the good, and also, by making the good ridiculous, of rendering the transition of others to wickedness easy. Shakespeare never puts habitual scorn into the mouths of other than bad men, as here in the instances of Antonio and Sebastian. The scene of the intended assassination of Alonzo and Gonzalo is an exact counterpart of the scene between Macbeth and his lady, only pitched in a lower key throughout, as designed to be frustrated and concealed, and exhibiting the same profound management in the manner of familiarizing a mind, not immediately recipient, to the suggestion of guilt, by associating the proposed crime with something ludicrous or out of place-something not habitually matter of reverence. By this kind of sophistry the imagination and fancy are first bribed to contemplate the suggested act, and at length to become acquainted with it. Observe how the effect of this scene is heightened by contrast with another counterpart of it in low life-that between the conspirators Stephano, Caliban, and Trinculo, in the second scene of the third act, in which there are the same essential characteristics. "In this play and in this scene of it are also shown the springs of the vulgar in politics-of that kind of politics which is inwoven with human nature. In his treatment of the subject, wherever it occurs, Shakespeare is quite peculiar. In other writers we find the particular opinions of the individual-in Massinger it is rank republicanism-in Beaumont and Fletcher even jure divino principles are carried to excess; but Shakespeare never promulgates any party tenets. He is always the philosopher and the moralist, but at the same time with a profound veneration for all the established institutions of society, and for those classes which form the permanent elements of the state-especially never introducing a professional character, as such, otherwise than as respectable. If he must have any name, he should be styled a philosophical aristocrat, delighting in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks the of advantages. Hence, again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an im tional animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its absurdities to its face; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of the rogueries of a child. See the good-humoured way in which he describes Stephano passing from the most licentious freedom to absolute despotism over Trinculo and Caliban. The truth is, Shakespeare's characters are all genera intensely individualized; the results of meditation, of which observation supplied the drapery and the colours necessary to combine them with each other. He had virtually surveyed all the great component powers and impulses of human naturehad seen that their different combinations and subordi nations were in fact the individualizers of men, and showed how their harmony was produced by reciprocal disproportions of excess or deficiency. The language in which these truths are expressed was not drawn from any set fashion, but from the profoundest depths of his moral being, and is therefore for all ages."-COLERIDGE. which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy [Coleridge has, more suo, given to his idolized Poet his own opinions in making him "a philosophical aris tocrat," etc.; but, as more appropriate occasions are presented elsewhere for considering his political inclinations or opinions, we shall omit further consideration of it in this place, where it requires all Coleridge's excursive ingenuity to introduce it at all.] |