"is't not perfect conscience, To quit him with this arm?" But his will is still essentially powerless; and now he yields to the sense of predestination: "If it be now, 't is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." The catastrophe is perfectly in accordance with this prostration of Hamlet's mind. It is the result of an accident, produced we know not how. Some one has suggested a polite ceremonial on the part of Hamlet, by which the foils might be exchanged with perfect consistency. We would rather not know how they were exchanged. "The catastrophe," says Johnson, "is not very happily produced; the exchange of weapons is rather an expedient of necessity than a stroke of art. A scheme might easily be formed to kill Hamlet with the dagger, and Laertes with the bowl." No doubt. A tragedy terminated by chance appears to be a capital thing for the. rule-and-line men to lay hold of. But they forget the poet's purpose. Had Hamlet been otherwise, his will would have been the predominant agent in the catastrophe. The empire of chance would have been over-ruled; the guilty would have been punished; the innocent perhaps would have been spared. Have we lost any thing? Then we should not have had the Hamlet who is "the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered;"* then we should not have had the Hamlet who is a concentration of all the interests that belong to humanity; in whom there is a more intense conception of individual human life than perhaps in any other human composition; that is, a being with springs of thought, and feeling, and action, deeper than we can search;" then we should not have had the Hamlet, of whom it has been said, "Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet."+ STATE OF THE TEXT, AND CHRONOLOGY, OF CYMBELINE. "THE Tragedie of Cymbeline" was first printed in the folio collection of 1623. The play is very carefully divided into acts and scenes-an arrangement which is sometimes wanting in other plays of this edition. Printed as Cymbeline must have been from a manuscript, the text, although sometimes difficult, presents few examples of absolute error. Of course some palpable errors do occur, and these have been properly corrected by the modern editors; but they have in this, as in every other instance, carried their vocation too far.* We, upon the principle which we have invariably followed, have implicitly adhered to the text, except in those instances of manifest corruption which can be distinctly referred to the class of typographical errors. The Cymbeline of the first edition is, in one respect, printed with very remarkable care; it is full of such contractions as the following: "His daughter, and the heire of's kingdome, whom." We find this principle occasionally followed in some other of the plays; but in this it is invariably regarded. We do not, however, follow these elisions, which we may believe are not from the hand of the author, and which impair the freedom of his versification, without any real advantage to the reader. " When the original edition of the Pictorial Shakspere was published, about twenty-five years ago, we designated by the term "modern editors" those generally known by the name of "variorum," including principally Johnson, Steevens, and Malone. Boswell's edition of Malone's Shakspere bears the date of 1821. When, therefore, we now use the term "modern editors, we do not mean to indicate those who have been the recent labourers in the same field as ourselves-such as Mr. Dyce, Mr. Collier, Mr. Staunton, Mr. Grant White, and the Cambridge editors. We have often, in this new edition, substituted some other word for "modern," but in other cases we leave the term "modern" with the signification which we originally attached to it. N 2 66 In placing this drama (it can scarcely be called tragedy, although we must adhere to the criginal classification) immediately after Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, we are called upon to state the grounds upon which we classify it amongst the comparatively early plays. Malone has assigned it to 1609, Chalmers to 1606, and Drake to 1605. The external evidence adduced by Malone for this opinion appears to us not only extremely weak, but to be conceived in the very lowest spirit of the comprehension of Shakspere. He assumes that it was written after Lear and Macbeth, for the following reasons:-The character of Edgar in Lear is formed on that of Leonatus in Sidney's 'Arcadia,' Shakspeare having occasion to turn to that book while he was writing King Lear, the name of Leonatus adhered to his memory, and he has made it the name of one of the characters in Cymbeline." Having occasion to turn to that book!-a mode of expression which might equally apply to a tailor having occasion for a piece of buckram. Sidney's 'Arcadia' was essentially the book of Shakspere's age-more popular, perhaps, than the Fairy Queen,' as profoundly admired by the highest order of spirits, as often quoted, as often present to their thoughts. And yet the very highest spirit of that age, thoroughly imbued as he must have been with all the poetical literature of his own day and his own country (we pass by the question of his further knowledge), is represented only to know the great work of his great contemporary as a little boy in a grammar-school knows what is called a crib-book. But this is not all. The story of Lear, according to Malone, lies near to that of Cymbeline in Holinshed's Chronicle, and some account of Duncan and Macbeth is given incidentally in a subsequent page; and so this very humble reader, who never looked into a book but when he wanted to get something out of it, composes Lear, Macbeth, and Cymbeline (two of them unquestionably the greatest monuments of human genius) at one and the same time, because, forsooth, he happened about the same time to turn to Sidney's Arcadia and Holinshed's Chronicle. But this sort of reasoning does not even stop here. Cymbeline is not only produced after Lear and Macbeth for these causes, but about the same period as the Roman plays. In this play mention is made of Caesar's ambition and Cleopatra sailing on the Cydnus; ergo, says Malone, "I think it probable that about this time Shakspere perused the lives of Cæsar, Brutus, and Mark Antony." Perused the lives! But we really have not patience to waste another word upon this insolence, so degrading (for it is nothing less) to the country and the age which produced it George Chalmers fixes the date in 1606, because he conceives that Cloten's speech, in the second act,—“ a Jack-a-napes must take me up for swearing,"-alludes to the statute of 1606, for restraining the use of profane expressions on the stage. There is nothing to which we object in this ingenious suggestion, but it is not conclusive as to the date of Cymbeline: nor indeed can any such isolated passage be conclusive; for we know from the quartos that passing allusions were constantly inserted after the first production of Shakspere's plays. Drake assigns no reason for the date which he gives of 1605. In the Introductory Notice to Richard II. we have given an extract from "a book of plays and notes thereof, for common policy," kept by Dr. Symon Forman, in 1610 and 1611. These notes, which were discovered and first printed by Mr Collier, contain not only an account of some play of Richard II., at which the writer was present, but distinctly give the plots of Shakspere's Winter's Tale, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. We shall take the liberty of reprinting from Mr. Collier's 'New Particulars' Forman's account of the plot of Cymbeline: "Remember, also, the story of Cymbeline, King of England, in Lucius' time: how Lucius came from Octavius Caesar for tribute, and, being denied, after sent Lucius with a great army of soldiers, who landed at Milford Haven, and after were vanquished by Cymbeline, and Lucius taken prisoner, and all by means of three outlaws, of the which two of them were the sons of Cymbeline, stolen from him when they were but two years old, by an old man whom Cymbeline had banished; and he kept them as his own sons twenty years with him in a cave. And how one of them slew Cloten, that was the Queen's son, going to Milford Haven to seek the love of Imogen the King's daughter, whom he had banished also for loving his daughter. "And how the Italian that came from her love conveyed himself into a chest, and said it was a chest of plate sent from her love and others to be presented to the King. And in the deepest of the night, she being asleep. he opened the chest and came forth of it, and viewed her in her bed, and the marks of her body, and took away her bracelet, and after accused her of adultery to her love, &c. And, in the end, how he came with the Romans into England, and was taken prisoner, and after revealed to Imogen, who had turned herself into man's apparel, and fled to meet her love at Milford Haven; and chanced to fall on the cave in the woods where her two brothers were: and how by eating a sleeping dram they thought she had been dead, and laid her in the woods, and the body of Cloten by her, in her love's apparel that he left behind him, and how she was found by Lucius, &c." " 'This," Mr. Collier adds, "is curious; principally because it gives the impression of the plot upon the mind of the spectator, at about the time when the play was first produced." We can scarcely yield |