COMMENTS By SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLARS PROSPERO We may well believe that Prospero stands for Shakespeare, the mighty magician who wove his airy charms, woke sleepers from their graves, and set before us many a majestic vision; whose life was dedicated to the liberal arts, these being all his study; and who would spend his latter days in retirement at his Milan, where every third thought should be his grave.-LUCE, Handbook to Shakespeare's Works. Prospero is to me the representative of wise and virtuous manhood in its true relation to the combined elements of existence, the physical powers of the external world, and the varieties of character with which it comes into voluntary, accidental or enforced contact. Of the wonderful chain of being, of which Caliban is the densest and Ariel the most ethereal extreme, Prospero is the middle link. He the wise and good man-is the ruling power, to whom the whole series is subject. First, and lowest in the scale, comes the gross and uncouth but powerful savage, who represents both the more ponderous and unwieldy natural elements (as the earth and water), which the wise magician by his knowledge compels to his service; and the brutal and animal propensities of the nature of man which he, the type of its noblest development, holds in lordly subjugation. MRS. KEMBLE, Some Notes on the Text of Shake speare. Ariel is swayed more by fear than gratitude, a fact which excites Prospero's anger. And here let it be remarked what necessities belong to dramatic characterization. Although Shakspere would not exhibit Prospero with his clear spiritual will and power obscured and turmoiled by the sensual appetites and passions that made the lives of Antony and Cleopatra “a storm whereon they rode”; yet, had he depicted his benevolent magician as basking perpetually in the sunshine of an open conscience and uninterruptedly serene, we should have had a being elevated so far above the condition of humanity that we could not have sympathized with him. He therefore presents him as chafed with certain obstacles in the magic sphere of his working, and as occasionally wroth with Ariel and Caliban for resistance expressed or implied. He is also liable to perturbation of mind from forgetfulness, as in the Fourth Act, when he suddenly remembers the conspiracy of Caliban. And thus, with all his moral excellence, Prospero is made to awaken our sympathy for a natural imperfection. Meanwhile, all has the wonderful coherence and mystery of a dream.-HERAUD, Shakspere-His Inner Life. MIRANDA The character of Miranda resolves itself into the very elements of womanhood. She is beautiful, modest, and tender, and she is these only; they comprise her whole being, external and internal. She is so perfectly unsophisticated, so delicately refined, that she is all but ethereal. Let us imagine any other woman placed beside Miranda-even one of Shakespeare's own loveliest and sweetest creationsthere is not one of them that could sustain the comparison for a moment; not one that would not appear somewhat coarse or artificial when brought into immediate contact with this pure child of nature, this "Eve of an enchanted Paradise." What, then, has Shakespeare done?-"O wondrous skill and sweet wit of the man!"-he has removed Miranda far from all comparison with her own sex; he has placed her between the demi-demon of earth and the delicate spirit of air. The next step is into the ideal and supernatural; and the only being who approaches Miranda, with whom she can be contrasted, is Ariel. Beside the subtle essence of this ethereal sprite, this creature of elemental light and air, that "ran upon the winds, rode the curl'd clouds, and in the colors of the rainbow lived," Miranda herself appears a palpable reality, a woman, "breathing thoughtful breath," a woman, walking the earth in her mortal loveliness, with a heart as frail-strung, as passion-touched, as ever fluttered in a female bosom. I have said that Miranda possesses merely the elementary attributes of womanhood, but each of these stand in her with a distinct and peculiar grace. She resembles nothing upon earth; but do we therefore compare her, in our own minds, with any of those fabled beings with which the fancy of ancient poets peopled the forest depths, the fountain, or the ocean?-oread or dryad fleet, sea-maid, or naiad of the stream? We cannot think of them together. Miranda is a consistent, natural, human being. Our impression of her nymph-like beauty, her peerless grace, and purity of soul, has a distinct and individual character. Not only is she exquisitely lovely, being what she is, but we are made to feel that she could not possibly be otherwise than as she is portrayed. She has never beheld one of her own sex; she has never caught from society one imitated or artificial grace. The impulses which have come to her, in her enchanted solitude, are of heaven and nature, not of the world and its vanities. She has sprung up into beauty beneath the eye of her father, the princely magician; her companions have been the rocks and woods, the many-shaped, many-tinted clouds, and the silent stars; her playmates the ocean billows, that stooped their foamy crests, and ran rippling to kiss her feet. Ariel and his attendant sprites hovered over her head, ministered duteous to her every wish, and presented before her pageants of beauty and grandeur. The very air, made vocal by her father's art, floated in music around her. If we can presuppose such a situation with all its circumstances, do we not behold in the character of Miranda, not only the credible, but the natural, the necessary results of such a situation? She retains her woman's heart, for that is unalterable and inalienable, as a part of her being; but her deportment, her looks, her language, her thoughts—all these, from the supernatural and poetical circumstances around her, assume a cast of the pure ideal; and to us, who are in the secret of her human and pitying nature, nothing can be more charming and consistent than the effect which she produces upon others, who never having beheld anything resembling her, approach her as "a wonder," as something celestial. It is most natural that in a being thus constituted, the first tears should spring from compassion, "suffering with those that she saw suffer"; and that her first sigh should be offered to a love at once fearless and submissive, delicate and fond. She has no taught scruples of honor like Juliet; no coy concealments like Viola; no assumed dignity standing in its own defense. Her bashfulness is less a quality than an instinct; it is like the selffolding of a flower, spontaneous and unconscious. JAMESON, Shakespeare's Heroines. Miranda is "created of every creature's best"; she is the wonder-child of the enchanted island, wellnigh too ethereal to be mated to any of the sons of men. Reared among the "untrodden ways" she has drawn into her blood the influences of this tropical solitude; she might have inspired the modern poet's vision of a maiden molded into grace by "the silent sympathy" of elemental things: "The stars of midnight shall be dear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, Shall pass into her face." Save her father, and the half-brute Caliban, whom she fears to look on, she has known no human creature, and her character is without the complexity bred by artificial surround ings. The primal instincts of womanhood, as Shakspere conceived them, tenderness, modesty, simple faith in good, alone stir her breast. So unlearned is she in worldly experience that when Ariel's music draws Ferdinand to her father's cell she takes him for a spirit, "a thing divine." The prince, in equal amaze, salutes her as "the goddess on whom these airs attend."-BoAs, Shakspere and his Prede cessors. Miranda is representative of a love which, without historic influence, can develop its highest ideality, like a flower in a virgin soil which only fairy feet may tread. The songs of Ariel have molded her heart, and sensuality never appeared to her but in the revolting, hateful shape of Caliban. The love, therefore, which Ferdinand inspires, is not merely naïve but of a holy sincerity, of a primeval purity verging on the awesome.-HEINE, Shakespeare's Mädchen und Frauen. FERDINAND AND MIRANDA Ferdinand and Miranda confess their love while Prospero watches them at some distance. A short space of time has sufficed indissolubly to unite the two hearts which were destined for one another. In fact, love, in the narrower sense of the word, is always the birth of an instant; long acquaintance, mutual esteem and affection, may or may not precede it-this is a matter of indifference to love; it does not grow out of these like a bud from its calyx, acquaintance and affection are, so to say, but the fuel which the flash of love has first to strike before fire and flame are produced. Ferdinand and Miranda form the loveliest companion-piece to Romeo and Juliet, with this difference, that here, in comedy, love has exchanged the tragic cothurnus for the comic soccus. In place of the melancholy, devouring heat of immoderate passion which in Romeo and Juliet tears everything along with it in its headlong course, overcasting the horizon as with a thunder-cloud ready to |