nearly akin, that the processes used are, amidst many secondary diversities, subject primarily to the same theoretical laws.

Modern habits cause the Narrative poem and the Dramatic to wear a greater appearance of dissimilarity than they wore in older times. We consider the one as designed to be read, the other as designed to be acted. Before the invention of printing, and long afterwards, recitation was the mode of communication used for both. The romance, in which the poet told his tale in his own person, was chanted by the minstrel; just as the morality or miracle-play, in which every word was put into the mouths of the characters, was declaimed by the monks or their assistants. Our recollection of this fact suggests several considerations. It is exceedingly probable that the expectation, which our middle-age poets must have had, of this recitative use of their works, may have been one chief cause of the vigorous animation which atones for so many of their irregularities. It is at all events certain, that a similar feeling acted powerfully on those dramatic poems, whose progress we are now about to study. All of them wrote for the stage: none of them, not even Shakspeare himself, wrote for the closet. Their having this design tended, beyond doubt, to lower the tone both of their taste and of their morality; but as certainly it was the mainspring of their passionate elasticity, the principal source of the life-like energy which they poured into their dramatic images of human life.

Another doctrine also should be remembered, both for its own importance and for its bearing on the history of our dramatic literature. Works which we are accustomed to call Poems are almost always written in verse. But the distinction between Verse and Prose, a distinction of form only, is no more than secondary; the primary character of a literary work depends on the purpose for which it is designed, the kind of mental state which it is intended to excite in the hearers or readers. Consequently a work which, having a distinctively poetical purpose, is justly describable as a poem, would not cease to deserve the name, though it were to be couched in prose. It would, however, by being so expressed, lose much of its poetical power. The truth of this last assertion has been clearly perceived in all kinds of poetry except the dramatic. No one would dream of composing an ode in prose; and the adoption of that form for a narrative poem is an experiment which, though it has been tried, as in the Telemachus of Fenelon, has never been successful. But metrical language has not always prevailed in the drama. In our own country the example of Shakspeare has fortunately preserved Tragedy from the intrusion of prose: no man of genius has ever written an

English tragic drama in any other form but that of verse; and even the frequent intermixture of prose, in which our great dramatist indulges, has not found many imitators. But, with us as elsewhere, prose has gradually become almost universal as the form of language in Comedy. Now, this class of dramas, by reason of its comparative lowness of purpose, has in its own nature a much stronger tendency than the other, to sink below the poetical sphere and it is, in a degree yet greater, liable to that risk of moral corruption, by which the drama of Modern Europe has always been beset. Both of these dangers are aggravated by the use of prose. Comedy, on decisively adopting this form, not only loses more rapidly its poetical and imaginative character, but becomes more readily a minister and teacher of evil. The fact is pertinently illustrated by the state of the comic stage in the time of Charles the Second: and the better period with which we are at present engaged does not want proofs of it, proofs, especially strong in their bearing on the moral part of the question. Even for Comedy, verse continued to be the prevalent form of expression till the fall of the Old Drama: prose was introduced but occasionally, though oftener than in Tragedy. The poetical declension, however, caused by the writing of whole dramas in prose, is exemplified in comedies of Ben Jonson: and, of the coarse indecencies that deform so many of our old plays, a large majority (and those the worst) are written in prose, as if the poets had been ashamed to invest them with the garb of verse.

2. Before beginning to consider the works of Shakspeare and his fellow-dramatists, we must still pause for a moment. They will be better understood if we know a little as to certain peculiarities, which distinguish the Old English Drama from that of some other nations.

When our National Drama is described as Romantic, in contradistinction to the Classical Drama, whose masterpieces were framed in ancient Greece, principles are implied which relate to the poetical spirit and tone of the works, and which are applicable to all kinds of poetry. The inquiry into these lies beyond our competency.

When the English Drama is called Irregular, and contrasted with the Regular Drama of Greece, and of modern France, the comparison is founded on differences of form. In regard to these it is well we should learn something. The epithet given to our dramatic works intimates that they do not obey certain rules, which, it is alleged, are observed by those of the other class We cannot here attempt to take account of the Greek Drama; nor are we called on to do so. We know enough

when we are told, that its forms were the models on which the French forms were founded; but that, in more than one important respect, the true character of the ancient works was misapprehended by the imitators; and that, especially, the drama of France became a thing very different from its supposed original, by refusing to adopt its chorus or lyrical element, while it adopted those other forms which had their just effect only when the chorus was used along with them.

To criticise Shakspeare according to the French dramatic rules, is really to judge him by a code of laws, which had not been enacted when he wrote. The critics by whom the Parisian theory of dramatic art was systematized, belonged to the reign of Louis the Fourteenth and Corneille, the earliest of the great dramatists of France, and himself hardly an adherent of the regular school, was a child when our poet died. Nevertheless the foreign standard has so often been applied to our old drama, that some knowledge of its principles is required by way of introduction; and, indeed, the dramatic forms of Greece and Rome were neither quite unknown in Shakspeare's time nor altogether unimitated.

The principal law of the French system prescribed obedience to the Three Unities, of Time, Place, and Action.

The first two of these rest on a principle quite different from that which is involved in the third. They were founded on a desire to make each drama imitate as closely as possible the series of events which it represents. If this aim were to be prosecuted with strict consistency, the incidents constituting the story of a play ought to be such, that all of them, if real, might have occurred during the two or three hours occupied in the acting; and, the stage actually remaining the same, the place of the action represented ought to remain unchanged from beginning to end. But, the composition of a drama so cramped being the next thing to an impossibility, some relaxation of the statute was needed and allowed: the time of the action, it was decreed, (somewhat arbitrarily,) might extend to twenty-four hours; and the scene might be shifted from place to place in the same city. By Shakspeare, on the other hand, and by most of his contemporaries, no fixed limits whatever were acknowledged, in regard either of time or of place. In some of his plays, though not in any of his greatest, the action stretches through many years; in all of them the scene is shifted frequently, and sometimes to very wide distances.

Now, if the dramatic art has for its paramount aim the imparting to the spectators the pleasure which they may receive from

contemplating exact imitations of reality, we ought surely to refuse to the dramatist even the slender concessions granted him by the French critics. If, on the contrary, the drama aims at imparting some pleasure which is higher than this, the value of close adherence to reality ought to be estimated according to the effect which it may have in promoting that higher end. The latter is undoubtedly the true state of the case; and without insisting on having a very clear apprehension of the nature of the end really aimed at by the drama, we shall perhaps be disposed to believe that the attainment of that end may be impeded, equally, by a slavish imitation of the realities of time and place, and by a wanton and frequent deviation from them. If this is the tendency of our opinion, it will be strengthened by a glance at the third section of the French law.

3. The rule prescribing unity of action, is founded on a principle much sounder than that which supports the other two. The phrase imports a requirement that the action or story of a drama shall be one, not two actions or more; and that, by consequence, every thing introduced shall be treated as subordinate to the series of events which is taken as the guiding thread. The doctrine thus expounded is not only true, but holds in regard to every process by which we design to effect any change on the minds of others. The poet, whether in narrative or dramatic composition, aims at conveying to his audience such suggestions, as shall enable them to imagine for themselves promptly and vividly the series of events he describes, and to experience strongly the train of emotions which has passed through his own mind. It is a truth not only evident, but exemplified sometimes in the works of Shakspeare himself, that a total neglect of the unities of time and place exposes the poet to a risk of losing unity of action altogether; or that, if it does not go so far as this, it issues in his having only a unity so complex and so little obvious, that the observer may find it difficult to grasp it, and may lose altogether the train of feeling which is intended to issue from the apprehension of it. Yet, in most of our great poet's works, and in not a few other dramas of his time, this unity of impression (as it has aptly been called) is not only preserved with obvious mastery, but becomes instinctively perceptible through the harmonious repose of feeling in which the work leaves us at its close. On the other hand, the punctilious observance of the two minor unities does really not carry with it advantages so decisive as we might suppose. The imagination, the power appealed to, yields with wonderful flexibility when the poetic pleasure begins to dawn on the mind: and the prosaic scale of reality is utterly

forgotten, unless critics dispel the dream of fancy by recalling it. Indeed it is further true, that the first and second unities, as managed in the French school, go much farther than the most outrageous of our English licenses, in impairing the general effect of the works. They carry with them, unless in a few felicitous instances, a bareness of story, a difficulty of devising means of fully developing passion and character, and a consequent necessity of constant recourse to little artificial expedients, which are disappointingly apt to chill both fancy and emotion, in all minds but those that are fortified by habitual prepossession.

There is another doctrine of the French school, to which our old dramatists paid still less regard than to the unities. It forbade the union of Tragedy and Comedy in the same piece. This prohibition is a practical corollary from the law which enjoins unity of action: but, like several other rules laid down in the same quarter, it violates the spirit of the law by formal adherence to the letter. Every drama ought to be characteristically either a tragedy or a comedy: a work as to which we are left in doubt whether it is the one or the other, cannot have produced either a forcible or an harmonious impression on us. There are instances in which it may fairly be doubted, whether Shakspeare himself has not thus failed. But there does not seem to be any good reason, why a work of the one class should not admit subordinate elements borrowed from the other. The refusal of the permission narrows very disadvantageously the field which tragedy is entitled to occupy, as a picture of human life in which the serious and sad are relieved by being contrasted with the gay; it lowers the tone of comedy, both in its poetical and in its moral relations.

SHAKSPEARE AND THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMA.

4. All the events which we are called on here to notice in the history of the Old English Drama, are comprehended in a period of little more than sixty years, beginning about 1585, and closing in 1645. Before the first of these dates, no very perceptible advance had been made beyond the point which we had previously observed: the second of the dates is that of the shutting up of the theatres on the breaking out of the Civil War. For the whole of this period, we may take the history of Shakpeare's works as our leading thread. Men of eminent genius ved around and after him: but there were none who do not deve much of their importance from the relation in which they and to him; and there were hardly any whose works do not we much of their excellence to the influence of his.