been decided, to cut out the comic character of the Porter. Coleridge and Collier are in favour of this omission, as they consider his soliloquy to be the unauthorized interpolation of an actor. It may be so. Yet at all events it is not inappropriate; there is an uncomfortable joviality, which by way of contrast is very suitable to the circumstances, when the drunken warder, whom Duncan's gifts and the festivities of the evening have left in a state of excitement, calls his post "hell's gate", in a speech in which every allusion bears a point. Garrick has been guilty of worse omissions than that of the customary omission of these scenes, and of still more awkward interpolations. Nevertheless he was the first to restore the piece to the public in an adequate form. Before him, Davenant had arranged it as a sort of opera with a highly laughable arrangement for the witches, and with the strangest additions. Garrick was obliged in his revival of the piece, in order to obtain a hearing for his new and different conception of the character, to write a humorous attack on himself, that he might take away the sting from the attacks of others. His acting has no doubt been handed down traditionally, as well as that of his Hamlet, which we may compare, according to Lichtenberg's relation, in some degree with that of the present day. When, even outside the theatre, he spoke the soliloquy where imagination pictures the dagger, his audience were transported with his burning gaze, his inimitable acting, and expressive language. Since his time, the part has remained an aim of all famous actors, of Kemble, Kean, and Macready; the first wrote a paper in illustration of this character. Mrs. Pritchard performed the part of Lady Macbeth with Garrick. Her conception also of this part

seems to have remained the standard. She gave a fearful picture of audacity in crime, of obduracy, and remorseless insensibility. Her acting in the banquet-scene was celebrated as the perfection of her part, as also in the scene when she walks in sleep; her acting here was like the sudden gleam of a flash of lightening which reveals more sensibly the horrors of darkness. In 1785, Mrs. Siddons played this part in London, and she too was the admiration of all who saw her. She looked like a figure of ancient tragedy, simple, statue-like, grand, and powerfully energetic. Her acting, in those words, where she protests that she could have dashed out the brains of her smiling babe, is described as violently overdrawn and distorted. It is singular that this woman who has written down her observations on the character, appears to differ in her theory and practice. She surmised a suppressed spark of womanly nature in this character, and went so far as even to imagine her a fair beauty with much feminine loveliness. In this she was evidently nearer the mark than in her acting. She might, however, suppose the character more popular, when she acted it as she did. This mode, of making something arbitrary out of a given part, is however a piece of art, allowable at the best in parts, when the poet himself could make nothing out of them. To attempt it with Shakespeare is ever a bungling business. He has left nothing for the actor to do, but to comprehend him; but he has throughout given him sufficient work, if he would comprehend him fully.

KING LEAR.

King Lear cannot have been written before 1603, because in that year there appeared a book by Harsnet, entitled "Discovery of Popish Impostors", out of which Shakespeare evidently borrowed the names of the different devils which Edgar mentions in his simulated madness. We know further, that Lear was acted at the Globe on the 26th December 1606; it must have been written between these two dates; and thus contemporaneous with Macbeth, we see our transition to this piece even chronologically justifiable. Not long after that performance, three editions in quarto appeared in one year (1608), a proof certainly that the play was a favourite, equally interesting to the refined critics and frequenters of the Shakespearian theatre, as to the public that had delighted in Titus and Tamburlaine.

The myth of King Lear and his daughters is related by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who places the death of this prince 800 years before Christ. From him it was copied by Holinshed. The story had been dramatized even before Shakespeare; a piece entitled "The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters" was reprinted in Steevens' Six Old Plays &c., having first appeared in 1594,

but having been written somewhat earlier. That Shakespeare may have made use of this rough and ill-arranged play, is only betrayed by a few trifling points. In it, the old king questions his daughters as to the degree of their filial love in order to practise a fatherly deception upon the youngest, to entrap her into the expected declaration of affection, that he might give her against her inclination in marriage to a British sovereign. Deceived in his expectation, he deprives her of her inheritance, and she becomes the wife of the king of France, who comes to England disguised as a pilgrim, and falls in with her by chance. Goneril next drives the weak old king from his house, then both daughters contrive a plot for the murder of him and his faithful Perillus (Kent in Shakespeare); they each mutually petition the appointed murderer for the life of the other, and he spares both. They flee to France; in the disguise of sailors, they meet the king and Cordelia, who in the dress of peasants are making an excursion to the sea; Lear is then brought back in triumph, and his wicked daughters and their husbands are banished. We see at once from the romantic touches which are here interwoven, that the piece is much less tragic than Shakespeare's; the scene is laid in christian times; Goneril's complaint against her old, weakminded, and guiltless father is here that he always scolded her, when she ordered a new-fashioned dress or gave a banquet; he goes weeping away from her, and comes with his finger in his eyes to Regan, who receives him on her knees and with flattery, whilst in her heart she plans his murder. Can it fail to strike that our poet in a more

us,

advanced state of theatrical taste, developed this story of

filial ingratitude into a much more fearful picture, than the

older poet had done in the ruder period of the English stage?

Shakespeare has heightened the horrors of this tragedy merely by enlarging the original plot. To the story of Lear, he has added the episode of Gloster, which is borrowed from Sidney's Arcadia (II. 10); the ruin of a second family, the snares laid by an unnatural son for a father and brother, a father incensed against a guiltless son, all these are added to the injustice which Lear commits against one of his children and suffers from the others. This episode, connected as it is by similarity of purport, Shakespeare has linked and united with the main action in the most spirited manner, weaving and combining the double action, as it were, into a single one; but he has not done this either, without greatly heightening its harshness and cruelty. By placing Gloster's bastard son in the service and love of the terrible sisters, he causes Goneril's attempt on her husband's life and the poisoning of her sister, he causes moreover Cordelia's execution and her father's death. These threefold and fourfold family-discords rest further on the broader ground of political intrigues. The degenerate daughters strive by secret designs to re-unite the divided kingdom of the old Lear, while, at the same time, it is threatened by France from without; the secret understanding between Cordelia and the English nobility, leads next to the cruel blinding of Gloster and in consequence of this to the death of Cornwall. If thus this play from the excess of wild and unnatural deeds is more bloody than any other of Shakespeare's tragedies, it becomes even more repulsive from the nature and manner, the form and appearance of its horrors. Even Coleridge, the steady upholder of Shakespeare, called the