precisely the same instructions as in Brooke are given to Peter "Take there a letter which, as soon as he shall ryse, Present it in the morning to my loving father's eyes. And straight when I am gone fro thee, my Juliet to bemone I charge thee that thou come not nere while I abyde beneath.” In this scene Shakespeare introduces incidents, and very important ones, which are not in Brooke's poem, namely, the entrance of Paris and his interview and duel with Romeo, together with Romeo's reflections while gazing on the body of Paris after he has killed him. "Romeo and Juliet" is one of the most elaborately finished of Shakespeare's plays. And this elaboration is seen in the diction and style, which have every attraction that rhetoric can give them; nothing could possibly be more finished and perfect in expression than the many soliloquies and set speeches with which the play abounds, or than the dialogues, all of which, whatever be their tone and theme, are the perfection of composition, ranging as they do from coarse prosaic colloquy to the very heights of ornate and impassioned rhetoric. The play has all the complexity and variety of life itself, both in relation to incident and in relation to character, and it is easy to see that the poet spared no pains to secure this effect. We need go no further than its dramatis personæ, at once so studiously finished as individual portraits and so elaborately and strikingly contrasted, to illustrate this. It is indeed wonderful that in a single drama we should have such a gallery of living figures as is presented to us in Romeo, in Friar Laurence, in Mercutio, in Tybalt, in old Montague, and in old Capulet, in Juliet, in the nurse, in Lady Capulet. Another illustration of the careful and subtle art with which the drama was composed is the use which is made of the supernatural, the influence of which is made in some insensibly mysterious way to pervade the whole action, so that some unseen power seems to be imperceptibly urging the lovers to their doom, which adds to the pathos. "My mind misgives Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars, With this night's revels " (I, iv), are Romeo's ominous words as he is about to meet Juliet. "O God! I have an ill-divining soul. Methinks I see thee, now thou art below, As one dead in the bottom of a tomb” (III, v). exclaims Juliet, as she parts from her lover. So Romeo, just when he is about to hear the news which will bring death to him, observes: "My bosom's lord sits lightly on his throne. Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts. I dreamt my lady came and found me dead And breathed such life with kisses in my lips "How oft to-night Have my old feet stumbled at graves!" (V, iii) is Friar Laurence's remark just before he is to discover the dead bodies of the lovers. And lastly we have Balthasar's dream, "As I did sleep under this yew-tree here, Irony, which was to play so important a part in his later dramas, is in this play twice introduced with appallingly impressive effect, as where poor Juliet on first meeting Romeo says, "If he be married, My grave is like to be my wedding bed " (I, v), or that more awful flash from Lady Capulet's lips, “I would the fool were married to her grave!" (III, v). │ The tremendous pace at which the action of this play, impelled by the passions of hatred and love, proceeds, "Sweet as a shadow short as any dream - though difficult to reconcile with probability, has strict dramatic propriety; and this consideration no doubt induced Shakespeare to substitute his own chronology for that of Brooke. It has been doubted whether, if Shakespeare had not visited Italy or Spain, he could have written this drama, for its world and its atmosphere are not easily realisable in northern latitudes. The reply to this is that the poet of “Venus and Adonis," of the "Rape of Lucrece" and the "Sonnets," could with Brooke's narrative in his hands have had little difficulty in conceiving what finds embodiment in its incidents and in its characters. With those works it links itself, and is, so far as the passion suffusing it goes, simply the objective expression of what in them assumes subjective form. But Shakespeare was now an artist and dramatist rapidly approaching the fullest maturity of his powers, and if "Romeo and Juliet" is the link between his work as a poet and his work as a dramatic artist, it forms also another link. It is perhaps the earliest of his plays in which he strikes a note essentially characteristic of his mature work, namely, high seriousness. This finds expression in the weighty words placed in the mouth of Friar Laurence, in which it will be seen we have the moral key to the action of the play, — if" "Within the infant rind of this small flower Poison hath residence, and medicine power: For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part, Two such opposed kings encamp them still In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will; And where the worser is predominant, Full soon the canker death eats up that plant " (II, iii), and again in the words of Escalus at the end of the play, "Capulet! Montague! See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate, That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love! And I, for winking at your discords too, Have lost a brace of kinsmen: all are punish'd" (V, iii). -- It is remarkable that the play opens with bringing into emphatic prominence an illustration of the anarchy resulting from the feuds between the two families, an anarchy to which every disaster included in the action can be directly or indirectly traced, and the impotence of the power which should have suppressed such evils. It is in this all-embracing, deep-seated sympathy and insight, and in this habitual interpretation of life, not in relation to mere phenomena or second causes, but in the light of eternal principles and of essential truth, that the greatness of Shakespeare lies. J. CHURTON COLLINS. |