Shakspere's Twelfth Night. And the actual roof under which the happy company of benchers, and barristers, and students first listened to that joyous and exhilarating play, full of the truest and most beautiful humanities, especially fitted for a season of cordial mirthfulness, is still standing; and we may walk into that stately hall and think,-Here Shakspere's Twelfth Night was acted in the Christmas of 1601; and here its exquisite poetry first fell upon the ear of some secluded scholar, and was to him as a fragrant flower blooming amidst the arid sands of his Bracton and his Fleta; and here its gentle satire upon the vain and the foolish penetrated into the natural heart of some grave and formal dispenser of justice, and made him look with tolerance, if not with sympathy, upon the mistakes of less grave and formal fellow-men; and here its ever-gushing spirit of enjoyment,-of fun without malice, of wit without grossness, of humour without extravagance,-taught the swaggering, roaring, overgrown boy, miscalled student, that there were higher sources of mirth than affrays in Fleet Street, or drunkenness in Whitefriars. Venerable Hall of the Middle Temple, thon art to our eyes more stately and more to be admired since we looked upon that entry in the Tablebook of John Manningham! The Globe has perished, and so has the Blackfriars. The works of the poet who made the names of these frail buildings immortal need no associations to recommend them; but it is yet pleasant to know that there is one locality remaining where a play of Shakspere was listened to by his contemporaries; and that play, Twelfth Night.

Accepting, though somewhat doubtingly, the statement of the commentators that Twelfth Night was produced as late as 1614, Schlegel says, "If this was really the last work of Shakspere, as is affirmed, he must have enjoyed to the last the same youthfulness of mind, and have carried with him to the grave the whole fulness of his talents."* There is something very agreeable in this theory; but we can hardly lament that the foundation upon which it rests has been utterly destroyed. Shakspere did, indeed, carry "with him to the grave the whole fulness of his talents," but they were talents, perhaps not of a higher order, but certainly employed upon loftier subjects, than those which were called out by the delicious comedies of the Shakspere of forty. His “youthfulness of mind" too, even at this middle period of his life, is something very different from the honeyed luxuriance of his spring-time-more subjected to his intellectual penetration into the hidden springs of human action--more regulated by the artistical skill of blending the poetical with the comic, so that in fact they are not presented as opposite principles constrained to appear in a patchwork union, but are essentially one and the same creation of the highest imaginative power. We are told that of Twelfth Night the scenes in which Malvolio, and Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew appear are Shakspere's own. The Duke, and Olivia, and Viola, and Sebastian, belong to some one else, it is said, because they existed, before he evoked them from their hiding-places, in the rude outlines of story-books without poetry, and comedies without wit. Honoured be the memories of Bandello and Barnaby Rich, not so much for their own work as for the happy accident by which they saved some popular tradition from oblivion, for a Shakspere to make his own for all ages! Honoured be the learned or unlearned authors of the Inganni and the Ingannati, if they suggested to him that their shadowy representations of a wandering brother and sister coming through mistakes and crosses to love and happiness, had in them dramatic capabilities such as he could deal with! Honoured be they, as we would honour the man, were his name recorded, who set the palette of Raphael or made Paganini's violin! Whether a writer invents, in the commonly received meaning of invention, that is, whether his incidents and characters be spick-and-span new;—or whether he borrows, using the same ordinary phraseology, his incidents and characters from tradition, or history, or written legends, he is not a poet unless his materials are worked up into a perfect and consistent whole and if the poetry be not in him, it matters little whether he raises his fabric "all out of his own head," as children say, or adopts a bit here and a bit there, and pieces them together with a bit of his own,—for his house will not stand; it is built upon the sands. Now it is this penetration of his own imaginative power in and through all his materials which renders it of little more account than as a matter of antiquarian curiosity, where Shakspere picked up hints for the plots of his plays. He might have found the germ of Viola in Barnaby Rich; and he might have altogether invented Malvolio: but Viola and Malvolio are for ever indissolubly united, in the exact proportions in which the poetic and the comic work together for the production of a harmonious effect. The neutral title of Twelfth Night-conveying as it does a notion of genial mirth-might

* Lectures on Dramatic Literature, Black's Translation, vol. ii., p. 175.

warrant us in thinking that there was a preponderance of the comic spirit. Charles I. appears to have thought so, when, in his copy of the second edition of Shakspere, he altered the title with his own pen to that of Malvolio.* But Malvolio is not the predominant idea of the comedy; nor is he of that exclusive interest that the whole action, even of the merely comic portions, should turn upon him. When Shakspere means one character to be the centre of the dramatic idea, he for the most part tells us so in his title :-Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Timon. Not one of the comedies has such a personal title, for the evident reason that the effect in them must mainly depend upon the harmony of all the parts, rather than upon the absorbing passion of the principal character. The Twelfth Night is especially of this description. It presents us with the golden and the silver sides of human life,-the romantic and the humorous. But the two precious metals are moulded into one statue.

It is scarcely necessary for us to enter into any analysis of the plot of this charming comedy, or attempt any dissection of its characters, for the purpose of opening to the reader new sources of enjoyment. It is impossible, we think, for one of ordinary sensibility to read through the first act without yielding himself up to the genial temper in which the entire play is written. "The sunshine of the breast" spreads its rich purple light over the whole champain, and penetrates into every thicket and every dingle. From the first line to the last-from the Duke's

to the Clown's

"That strain again;-it had a dying fall,"

"With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,"—

there is not a thought, or a situation, that is not calculated to call forth pleasurable feelings. The love-melancholy of the Duke is a luxurious abandonment to one pervading impression-not a fierce and hopeless contest with one o'ermastering passion. It delights to lie "canopied with bowers,❞— to listen to "old and antique" songs, which dally with its "innocence," to be "full of shapes," and "high fantastical." The love of Viola is the sweetest and tenderest emotion that ever informed the heart of the purest and most graceful of beings with a spirit almost divine. Perhaps in the whole range of Shakspere's poetry there is nothing which comes more unbidden into the mind, and always in connexion with some image of the ethereal beauty of the utterer, than Viola's “she never told her love." The love of Olivia, wilful as it is, is not in the slightest degree repulsive. With the old stories before him, nothing but the refined delicacy of Shakspere's conception of the female character could have redeemed Olivia from approaching to the auti-feminine. But as it is we pity her, and we rejoice with her. These are what may be called the serious characters, because they are the vehicles for what we emphatically call the poetry of the play. But the comic characters are to us equally poetical-that is, they appear to us not mere copies of the representatives of temporary or individual follies, but embodyings of the universal comic, as true and as fresh to-day as they were two centuries and a half ago. Malvolio is to our minds as poetical as Don Quixote; and we are by no means sure that Shakspere meant the poor cross-gartered Steward only to be laughed at, any more than Cervantes did the knight of the rueful countenance. He meant us to pity him, as Olivia and the Duke pitied him; for, in truth, the delusion by which Malvolio was wrecked, only passed out of the romantic into the comic through the manifestation of the vanity of the character in reference to his situation. But if we laugh at Malvolio we are not to laugh illnaturedly, for the poet has conducted all the mischief against him in a spirit in which there is no real malice at the bottom of the fun. Sir Toby is a most genuine character,-one given to strong potations and boisterous merriment; but with a humour about him perfectly irresistible. His abandon to the instant opportunity of laughing at and with others is something so thoroughly English, that we are not surprised the poet gave him an English name. And like all genuine humorists Sir Toby must have his butt. What a trio is presented in that glorious scene of the second act, where the two Knights and the Clown "make the welkin dance; "-the humorist, the fool, and the philosopher!-for Sir Andrew is the fool, and the Clown is the philosopher. We hold the Clown's epilogue song to be the most philosophical Clown's song upon record; and a treatise might be written upon its wisdom. It is the history of a life, from the condition of " a

*This copy, which formerly belonged to Steevens, was purchased for the private library of George III., and was retained when George IV. gave that valuable collection to the nation.

little tiny boy," through "man's estate," to decaying age-"when I came unto my bed;" and the conclusion is, that what is true of the individual is true of the species, and what was of yesterday was of generations long past away-for

"A great while ago the world begun."

Steevens says this "nonsensical ditty" is utterly unconnected with the subject of the comedy. We think he is mistaken. Gervinus holds a different opinion from Steevens. He says "The Clown appears here as a singer by profession, who sings love-songs of a cheerful or tragic nature, merry jigs and heart-rending canons, with equal skill. Together with this, he is represented as a careless, cheerful fellow, who troubles himself about nothing, placed in the midst of a much-occupied society, a wise fool amongst foolish wits. He indeed says it often, and proves it oftener, that his foolish wisdom is in reality not folly, that it is a mistake to call him a fool, that the hood does not make the monk, and that his brain is not as motley as his coat. The poet has not brought the Clown's acts and deeds in this piece into a main relation with the main idea, but placed him more as a separate person in his individual expressions. In the play, where these instructive passages are found, it is required by the Clown's difficult office that he should well know the right time, place, and person with whom he jeste, so as to level his arrows at the weak points. He is at home wherever placed, or, as he says, is 'for all waters;' he lives with all in their own way, knowing their foibles, observing their natures, attentively watching the humour of the moment."