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asks it. We cannot bear that he shall extinguish her and himselfboth having sipped only, and not quaffed from the cup of hymeneal felicity. Your soul is outraged by so harsh and malignant a procedure of the Three Sisters. Besides, in proper poetical equilibration, he should have enjoyed to the full, with soul and with body, the happiness which his soul annihilates. And men do not kill their wives the first week. It would be too exceptional a case. Extended time is required for the probability-the steps of change in the heart of Othello require it-the construction and accumulation of proofs require it—the wheel of events usually rolls with something of leisure and measure. So is it in the real World-so must it seem to be on the Stage-else no verisimilitude-no "veluti in speculum." "Two months shall elapse between marriage and murder," says Shakspere -going to write. They must pass at Venice, or they must pass at Cyprus. Place Shakspere in this position, and which will he choose? If at Venice, a main requiring condition is not satisfied. For in the fits and snatches of the clandestine marriage, Othello has never possessed with full embrace, and heart overflowing, the happiness which he destroys. If an earthquake is to ruin a palace, it must be built up to the battlements and pinnacles; furnished, occupied, made the seat of Pleasure, Pomp, and Power; and then shaken into heaps or you have but half a story. Only at Cyprus Othello possesses Desdemona. There where he is Lord of his Office, Lord over the Allegiance of soldier and civilian-of a whole population-Lord of the Island, which, sea-surrounded, is as a world of itself-Lord of his will-Lord of his Wife.

T. I feel, sir, in this view much poetical demonstration-although mathematical none-and in such a case Poetry is your only Principia.

N. Your hand. But if, my dear Seward, Shakspere elects time at Venice, he wilfully clouds his two excellent Persons with many shadows of indecorum, and clogs his Action with a procedure and a state of affairs, which your Imagination loses itself in attempting to define with improbabilities-with impracticabilities-with impossibilities. If he was resolute to have a well-sustained logic of Time, I say it was better for him to have his Two Months distinct at Cyprus. I say that, with his creative powers, if he was determined to have

Two Calendar Months from the First of May to the First of July, and then in One Day distinctly the first suspicion sown and the murder done, nothing could have been easier to him than to have imagined, and indicated, and hurried over the required gap of time; and that he would have been bound to prefer this course to that inexplicable marriage and no marriage at Venice.

B. How he clears his way!

N. But Shakspere, my dear Boys, had a better escape. Wittingly or unwittingly, he exempted himself from the obligation of walking by the Calendar. He knew-or he felt that the fair proportionate structure of the Action required liberal time at Cyprus. He took it; for there it is, recognized in the consciousness of every sitting or standing spectator. He knew, or he felt, that the passionate expectation to be sustained in the bosoms of his audience required a rapidity of movement in his Murder-Plot, and it moves on feet of fire.

S. Venice is beginning to fade from my ken.

N. The first of all necessities towards the Criticism of the Play, Seward, is to convince yourself that there was not-could not be a time of concealed marriage at Venice-that it is not hinted, and is not inferable.

B. Shall we give in, Seward?

S. Yes.

N. You must go to the TREMENDOUS DOUBLE TIME AT CYPRUS, knowing that the solution is to be had there, or nowhere. If you cast back a longing lingering look towards Venice, you are lost. Put mountains and waves between you and the Queen of the Sea. Help yourself through at Cyprus, or perish in the adventure.

T. Through that Mystery, you alone, sir, are the Man to help us through-and you must.

N. Not now-to-morrow. Till then be revolving the subject occasionally in your minds.1

Professor Wilson never resumed the subject in Blackwood.—ED.

388

I. c. THE DRAMATIC UNITIES OF SHAKSPERE,

BY REV. N. J. HALPIN.

"Ut pictura Poesis."

I. UNITY of Subject or Fable is an essential quality in any work of Art, in every department of the Arts. Whether in a ballad or a history, whether in statuary or architecture, in painting or music, unity of design is so absolute a necessity that its absence or infringement mars the beauty and excellences of the production whatever it may be. In this respect Shakspere is perfectly regular. Through all his pieces this unity of fable prevails; and wherever it appears to be infringed, it will be found, on the slightest examination, that the several parts constitute a whole of which each part is the sine quâ non of the rest. Thus the Merchant of Venice is supposed by the critics to be constructed of two fables, very artfully united, viz. the fortunes of Bassanio and Portia, and the misfortunes of Antonio and Shylock. But the fable is absolutely one and the same. The borrowing of the money on a bond is the sine quâ non of the marriage between Bassanio and the wealthy heiress; and this marriage, again, the sine quâ non of Antonio's deliverance from death and the confiscation of Shylock's property. Even the elopement of Jessica with a Christian husband and laden with Jewish wealth is a circumstance essential to the barbarity of Shylock's pursuit of vengeance. There is in no one drama of Shakspere an instance in which the bonds of unity are less stringent than the sine quâ non condition.

II. The Unity of Place is a condition which the Greek lawgivers themselves did not think worthy of a rigid observance. Thus Euripides in The Suppliants, during the transit of a single ode, marches an army from Athens to Thebes, where the battle is fought, and whence the General returns victorious; and in the Trachinians of Sophocles, the voyage from Thessaly to Euboea is thrice accomplished in the course of the piece. Nor was Terence more straightlaced than his masters. The action of his Heautontimorumenos

commences in a city, migrates for a space to the country, and thence it returns to town. Place, or rather, the distance between two places (for with nothing more is dramatic action concerned), is treated by Shakspere simply as an element of time; that is to say, the time necessarily occupied in measuring the interval, whether on foot or by any sort of vehicle. Time and place in Shakspere's system are

"a just equinox,

The one as long as the other."

His distances therefore never exceed "twenty miles "1 by land, or the " narrow seas " by water; and whenever he wants the advantage of an indefinite idea of time and distance, he systematically sends one party by sea and another by land to the same place. Thus in the Merchant of Venice, Bassanio goes first from Venice to Belmont by water, and Jessica and Lorenzo by land. In the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Valentine and Protheus travel by sea from Verona to Milan, and Julia by land; the Poet's object being, first to create an indefinite idea of the distance between the two places, and next, to check off the difference, by means of the several modes of traversing the interval in a given time.

And this is the invariable practice of Shakspere.

It is, however, in his treatment of the unity of Time as a dramatic element that Shakspere has (I believe) invented, but (most certainly) carried into execution, a species of unity more true, natural, and comprehensive, and not less artistic and symmetrical, than that of the ancients, and which far surpasses in its illusive powers "all Greek, all Roman Art." The narrow limits which Aristotle has graciously extended to a single revolution of the sun, that is to say, to four-and-twenty hours, are by far too combined and confined, either for the complete evolution of a noble and comprehensive action, or for the full and satisfactory development, of the human character. 1 I know but of one exception, and that is where the Prince says: 'Go, Poins, to horse, to horse; for thou and I

Have thirty miles to ride ere dinner time."

1 Henry IV, Act III. sc. iii.

? This expression, which was the ordinary name of the Straits between Dover and Calais, invariably suggests to the English mind a voyage which may be made in a couple of hours, with a favourable wind, or even in less time, with such gales as the Poet can supply at will.

With respect to the action, it must needs be compassed within an arbitrary limit of from three to four-and-twenty hours, partly visible to the spectator,-a limit too short for any great transaction—and partly audible through the dull, cold, and uninteresting narrative of the Nuncius. With reference to character, we can know but that brief phase of it which displays itself in the sudden and short transit of a single day, and in a single passion. It requires, in our actual experience of the world, weeks or months to become acquainted with the whole man, his passions, and his temperament, ere we can be probably assured that his character and conduct upon any given occasion is in harmony with what we would know of him in his general, ordinary, and habitual developments. In these respects it must be acknowledged that Shakspere's system has infinitely the advantage of the Grecian. Of the Medea of Euripides we know no more than the single phase in which we behold her in the play called by her name. With the Hamlet of Shakspere we have, as it were, a life-long acquaintance; we know, in the single transaction before us, the accordance of his present behaviour with the tenor of his general conduct.

But how is this long acquaintance to be reconciled with the confessedly brief period in which it has actually been acquired? Dramatic time is a very different thing from natural time. While natural time has no limit but that of experience, dramatic time has limits which the dramatist cannot pass without merging into barbarity. But there is a natural law limiting the time of the drama; and if we ask ourselves what is the drama, the answer will help us to ascertain the natural limit, and to distinguish it from the arbitrary.

The Drama, then, is the imitation by gesture, and in dialogue, of an action which the spectator is privileged to witness with unbroken (or sleepless) attention, at a single sitting, or "watch."

Its limit, therefore, as to time, corresponds with the period, more or less extended, during which a spectator may be supposed to be a sleepless witness of a transaction sufficiently interesting and important to engage his attention throughout that watch. But measured into days, or hours, what the length of that watch may be is a matter

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