AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE.* IF we were asked to give

any one feature which had especially struck us in reading Dr. Corson's Introduction to Shakespeare, we should at once answer,—its common-sense. Upon reflec- tion, and in dread of misconstruction, we might substitute the expression, clearness of judgment, or simplicity and direct- ness of insight or thought; but to ourselves, in all the comfort of intimacy, where there is no danger of misunderstandings, we said common-sense, and are tempted to leave the expres- sion for those to whom it will carry its full weight of commendation.

Impatient of the "species of criticism which interests itself in everything in a play of Shakespeare, except its own in- dependent dramatic vitality," Dr. Corson gives it as his aim to afford some help to the study of the plays as plays. He is rightly imbued with the notion that to a student of Shake- speare, "a full appreciation of his dramatic power" is "the one great thing needful." Throughout the book we are led to feel how very much is included in this full appreciation of the dramatic power; how much, keeping within its bounds, we may learn of Shakespeare's general attitude towards things, of the moral proportion, the harmony, and truthfulness which so eminently characterised his genius, and which are obscured to those who study the plays as embodying philosophical, religious, or psychological ideas, or as written t3 point a moral. How much, when these are obscured, we lose of the education which is everywhere present in Shakespeare, and are led into extravagant notions concerning him, is one of the points Dr. Corson never ceases to impress upon his readers. Though a close student of detail, he has not entered so deeply into the minutiae of Shakespearian lore that he is blinded to the general outlines of the artistic and dramatic form of the plays ; he can also regard their heroes and heroines from the point of view of "the unphilosophical but sympathetic reader, with no critical theories to maintain."

His contempt for the owners of some of these critical theories receives expression in a parenthesis occurring near the begin- ning of his commentary on Romeo and Juliet :—

"The leading object of a literary and artistic education should be to take in the concrete and the personal as a direct, immediate language, not an indirect, a mediate language which has to be translated into the notional before it means anything. But such is the set of the general mind in these days, learned and unlearned, that the concrete and the personal are, more or less, like a foreign language which has to be translated into the more familiar language of the intellect, of the abstract and the notional."

Passing by a very suggestive introduction and a glance of

enlightened scorn at the Shakespeare-Bacon theory, we come to a chapter, on "The Authenticity of the First Folio," of less interest to the general reader. Then follow two on 4- Shakespeare's Verse" and on his "Distinctive Use of Verse

and Prose" respectively, and one with a cumbersome heading, but short and clear in its contents, on "The Latin and the Anglo-Saxon Elements of Shakespeare's English, and the Monosyllabic Vocabulary, in their Relations to the Intellectual, the Emotional, and the Dramatic." Into the observations and suggestions of all these the reader can enter with understanding and pleasure. The difficulty which the not very imaginative student must feel, after reading about the infinite little modu- lations of expression and construction which, as he is shown, go to make up Shakespeare's perfect language, is to dissociate it all from conscious effort on the poet's part. If we may be pardoned

the triviality of the remark, we could almost imagine such a student, in a distorted kind of way, applying to Shakespeare some of the pity he has felt for the centipede in the story—

(the toad has inconsiderately asked him which leg he first put forward in walking, and at the end),—

" He lay distracted in a ditch, Considering how to walk,"—

and sympathetically hoping that at no period of his career Shakespeare had met with so tactless a questioner.

With the exception of some notes and jottings at the end of the volume on various matters, interesting, no doubt, to con- scientious students of Shakespeare, the rest of Dr. Corson's book deals directly with a few of the individual plays, and this naturally is the part which will be best appreciated by general readers. We find ourselves easily agreeing with the writer on most points where apparently he is at variance with the majority of the critics. We are constantly coming

• An Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare. By Hiram Corson, LL.D.,

Professor of English Literature in the Cornell University. Boston D. C. Heath and Co. 1889.

into collision with these critics all through ; and we hope Dr. Corson has been fair to them, for they strike us as very stupid people, with a strong bent towards moralising, Of Romeo and Juliet simply as a drama, having for its subject the passion of true love in conflict with adverse circumstances of overwhelming force, reaching its triumph, not its failure, in death, rather than as a setting forth of the moral lesson on the fatal consequences of too strong a passion, which meets with inevitable and deserved failure,—we think nothing need be aided in favour of Dr. Corson's conception. The extract we quote below gives his general view of the play, and of the nature of the contending circumstances,—objective, not sub- jective. Here we entirely agree with him. Later on, where be applies the same interpretation to the nature of the cir- cumstances which stand in the way of Hamlet's revenge, we cannot go so far with him in his opinion :—

"Again, we see in other dramatists, a predetermination to elucidate the effects of some mastering passion, or of some social principle. In the case of Shakespeare the critic is likely to go astray, if he see such predeterminations ; is likely to ascribe an undue place, in his creative work, to the conscious understanding, and to moral verdicts on the part of the poet. I cannot but think that critics have gone more astray in this respect, in their treat- ment of Romeo and Juliet, simple as is the melody of the passion, than in the treatment of almost any other play. They have, with but few exceptions, attributed to Shakespeare the predetermina- tion in this play, of exhibiting the bad, the fatal consequences of violent, unrestrained passion : and the importance of moderation —of observing the golden mean between too much and too little ; and in accordance with this view, they have regarded Friar Laurence as the poet's own spokesman, put into the play for the special purpose of vicariously giving voice to the moderate and the prudential. Such a mode of proceeding may be necessary to dramatists of an inferior order, whose work moves under the con- dition of a notion of some kind. But Shakespeare's plays, none of them, move under such condition. He chose the subject of Romeo and Juliet for its passionate capabilities ; he is the artistic physiologist of human passions. And by artistic physiologist I mean, that he treats the passions under the condition of the moral constitution of things, but not as a moralist. Shakespeare is always especially happy in the opening scenes of his Plays. They generally strike the key-note of the whole dramatic action. Romeo and Juliet is no exception to this. Furthermore, the opening scene is, of itself, a sufficient refutation of much of the commentary on the play, which ascribes, as we shall see further on, the misadventured piteous overthrows of the two lovers, to subjective causes—to causes existing within themselves—to the immoderateness, the rashness, the impetuosity, of their loves, rather than to objective causes—to the ancient grudge between the 'two households, both alike in dignity,' which, in the words of the Prologue, 'break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.'"

With the higher dramatic conception of the play itself, the characters of the lovers rise to a far greater dignity, and their development, under the influence of combined love and sorrow, to the point where each in turn casts off everything extraneous and stands alone in complete self-reliance, is very nobly followed up by the commentator.

In Macbeth, two points are dwelt upon as those "all-important to be considered,"—the relations of the witches to Macbeth, and of Lady Macbeth to her husband. Recent interpretations will have a little prepared our minds for a reversal of our old ideas in regard to the two last characters. In the chapter on "The Witch Agency in Macbeth," combating the opinions of Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and others, which represent the witches as originating the temptation to crime in Macbeth, Dr. Corson contends that the witches have already scented the evil leanings in him without which they, the powers of evil, would have had no influence over him. For this theory he draws confirmation from the meeting and conversation of the witches in the first scene,—the first scene, as he points out elsewhere, generally striking the key-note of Shakespeare's dramatic action. In our opinion, this confirmation is very slight, and would tell equally both ways. After giving some of the generally received interpretations of the witch agency, he thus refutes them and introduces his own

:- "In the first place, it may be said that such views are incon- sistent with the whole theory of the entire Shakespearian drama. Shakespeare never presents a character to us as a victim of fate at the outset. The fatalism of passion is exhibited in all his great tragedies; but those characters through whom it is exhibited begin their several careers as free agents. A true dramatic interest demands this. As a great passion is evolved, it destroys more and more the power of self-assertion, and its victim is finally swept passively and helplessly along. Only free agency is dramatic. The weird sisters represent the night side of Nature, the powers of evil which are ever attracted to the soul whose elective affinities favour such attraction. The devil visits those only who invite him in." Altogether, perhaps, there is more depth and-more imagina- tion in this chapter than we find elsewhere throughout the course of the book ; on two small points, however, Dr. Corson is carried away -too far in his zeal for explanation. HaVing called the witches "powers of evil" and the "night side of Nature," he might leave their methods of action unexplained, as they may be supposed to be 'unexplainable. It jars upon our sense of the mysterious to light upon such a plirenthesis as the following, after the salutation, "Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor 1":" (and it must be inferred that they got their knowledge by being invisibly present at the time when the King commanded his ministers to pronounce the traitorous Thane of Cawdor's immediate death, and with his former title to greet Macbeth, and thus were able to convey to Macbeth the information ahead of Rosse and Angus)"—where the witches are spoken of as if they were telegraph-clerks. And again, our minds are not in the condition to appreciate such ex- pressions as "shrewd dodges," as in the following, in reading the awful witch-scene in the fourth act :—" It should be especially noted that, after the witches vanish, Macbeth learns from Lenox that Macduff has fled to England. This fact the witches must be supposed to know, and they give -Macbeth a gratuitous warning against Macduff, and thus secure for themselves his faith in their guardianship of him ; a gratuitous warning, because, Macduff being out of 'Macbeth's reach, the latter cannot make assurance doubly sure by putting his dreaded enemy out of the way. This is a shrewd dodge of the witches. Their warning is not for his safety, but for his destruction."

The commentary on Antony and Cleopatra is the longest in the volume, and here, as elsewhere, Dr. Corson's interpreta- tions are those which bring into prominence the dramatic action and the moral interests involved. Repetitions of para- graphs as well as of sentences, and familiarity of language degenerating occasionally into slang, spoil the book from an artistic point of view ; from all others it will be deservedly welcomed as an education and a pleasure.