to the long and quaint title of the old play of Cambyses: "A lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth,"[4] &c.
Shakespeare's elevation of mind, however, is most clearly apparent in the playful irony with which he treats his own art, the art of acting, and the theatre of the day, with its scanty and imperfect appliances for the production of illusion. The artisan who plays Wall, his fellow who enacts Moonshine, and the excellent amateur who represents the Lion are deliciously whimsical types.
It was at all times a favourite device with Shakespeare, as with his imitators, the German romanticists of two centuries later, to introduce a play within a play. The device is not of his own invention. We find it already in Kyd's Spanish Tragedie (perhaps as early as 1584), a play whose fustian Shakespeare often ridicules, but in which he nevertheless found the germ of his own Hamlet. But from the very first the idea of giving an air of greater solidity to the principal play by introducing into it a company of actors had a great attraction for him. We may compare with the Pyramus and Thisbe scenes in this play the appearance of Costard and his comrades as Pompey, Hector, Alexander, Hercules, and Judas Maccabæus in the fifth act of Love's Labour's Lost. Even there the Princess speaks with a kindly tolerance of the poor amateur actors:—
"That sport best pleases, that doth least know how:
Where zeal strives to content, and the contents
Die in the zeal of them which it presents,
Their form confounded makes most form in mirth;
When great things labouring perish in their birth."
Nevertheless, there is here a certain youthful cruelty in the courtiers' ridicule of the actors, whereas in A Midsummer Night's Dream everything passes off in the purest, airiest humour. What can be more perfect, for example, than the Lion's reassuring address to the ladies?—
"'You, ladies, you, whose gentle hearts do fear
The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor
May now, perchance, both quake and tremble here,
When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.
Then know, that I, one Snug the joiner, am
No lion fell, nor else no lion's dam;
For, if I should as lion come in strife
Into this place, 't were pity on my life.'"
And how pleasant, when he at last comes in with his roar, is Demetrius' comment, of proverbial fame, "Well roared, lion!"
It is true that A Midsummer Night's Dream is rather to be described as a dramatic lyric than a drama in the strict sense of the word. It is a lightly-flowing, sportive, lyrical fantasy, dealing with love as a dream, a fever, an illusion, an infatuation, and making merry, in especial, with the irrational nature of the instinct. That is why Lysander, turning, under the influence of the magic flower, from Hermia, whom he loves, to Helena, who is nothing to him, but whom he now imagines that he adores, is made to exclaim (ii. 3):—
"The will of man is by his reason sway'd,
And reason says you are the worthier maid."
Here, more than anywhere else, he is the mouthpiece of the poet's irony. Shakespeare is far from regarding love as an expression of human reason; throughout his works, indeed, it is only by way of exception that he makes reason the determining factor in human conduct. He early felt and divined how much wider is the domain of the unconscious than of the conscious life, and saw that our moods and passions have their root in the unconscious. The germs of a whole philosophy of life are latent in the wayward love-scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
And it is now that Shakespeare, on the farther limit of early youth, and immediately after writing A Midsummer Night's Dream, for the second time takes the most potent of youthful emotions as his theme, and treats it no longer as a thing of fantasy, but as a matter of the deadliest moment, as a glowing, entrancing, and annihilating passion, the source of bliss and agony, of life and death. It is now that he writes his first independent tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, that unique, imperishable love-poem, which remains to this day one of the loftiest summits of the world's literature. As A Midsummer Night's Dream is the triumph of grace, so Romeo and Juliet is the apotheosis of pure passion.
[1] N. J. Halpin: Oberon's Vision in the Midsummer Night's Dream, illustrated by a Comparison with Lylie's Endymion, 1842.
[2] New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1880-86, p. 67.
[3] The passage in The Maydes Metamorphosis runs as follows:—
"Mopso. I pray you, what might I call you? 1st Fairy. My name is Penny. Mopso. I am sorry I cannot purse you. Frisco. I pray you, sir, what might I call you? 2nd Fairy. My name is Cricket. Frisco. I would I were a chimney for your sake."
[4] The passion for alliteration in his contemporaries is satirised in these lines of the prologue to Pyramus and Thisbe:—
"Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broach'd his boiling bloody breast."
XIII
ROMEO AND JULIET—THE TWO QUARTOS—ITS ROMANESQUE STRUCTURE—THE USE OF OLD MOTIVES—THE CONCEPTION OF LOVE
Romeo and Juliet, in its original form, must be presumed to date from 1591, or, in other words, from Shakespeare's twenty-seventh year.
The matter was old; it is to be found in a novel by Masuccio of Salerno, published in 1476, which was probably made use of by Luigi da Porta when, in 1530, he wrote his Hystoria novellamente ritrovata di dui nobili Amanti. After him came Bandello, with his tale, La sfortunata morte di due infelicissimi amanti; and upon it an English writer founded a play of Romeo and Juliet, which seems to have been popular in its day (before 1562), but is now lost.
An English poet, Arthur Brooke, found in Bandello's Novella the matter for a poem: The tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, written first in Italian by Bandell and now in Englishe by Ar. Br. This poem is composed in rhymed iambic verses of twelve and fourteen syllables alternately, whose rhythm indeed jogs somewhat heavily along, but is not unpleasant and not too monotonous. The method of narration is very artless, loquacious, and diffuse; it resembles the narrative style of a clever child, who describes with minute exactitude and circumstantiality, going into every detail, and placing them all upon the same plane.[1].
Shakespeare founded his play upon this poem, in which the two leading characters, Friar Laurence, Mercutio, Tybalt, the Nurse, and the Apothecary, were ready to his hand, in faint outlines. Romeo's fancy for another woman immediately before he meets Juliet is also here, set forth at length; and the action as a whole follows the same course as in the tragedy.
The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet was published in 1597, with the following
