PR 2894 189 1895 Viz Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, BY HENRY N. HUDSON, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington TYPOGRAPHY BY J. S. CUSHING & Co., BOSTON, U.S.A. PRESSWORK BY GINN & Co., BOSTON," U.S.A. SHAKESPEARE'S CHARACTERS. S HISTORICAL PLAYS. KING JOHN. HAKESPEARE has probably done more to diffuse a knowledge of English history than all the historians put together; our liveliest and best impressions of "merry England in the olden time" being generally drawn from his pages. Though we seldom think of referring to him as authority in matters of fact, yet we are apt to make him our standard of old English manners and character and life, reading other historians by his light, and trying them by his measures, without being distinctly conscious of it. It scarce need be said that the Poet's labours in this kind are as far as possible from being the unsouled political diagrams of history; they are, in the right and full sense of the term, dramatic revivifications of the Past, wherein the shades of departed things are made to live their life over again, to repeat themselves, as it were, under our eye; so that they have an interest for us such as no mere narrative of events can possess. If there are any others able to give us as just notions, provided we read them, still there are none who come near him in the art of causing themselves to be read. And the further we push our historical researches, the more we are brought to recognize the substantial justness of his representations. Even when he makes free with chronology, and varies from the actual order of things, it is commonly in quest of something higher and better than chronological accuracy; and the result is in most cases favourable to right conceptions; the persons and events being thereby so knit together in a sort of vital harmony as to be better understood than if they were ordered with literal exactness of time and place. He never fails to hold the mind in natural intercourse and sympathy with living and operative truth. Kings and princes and the heads of the State, it is true, figure prominently in his scenes; but this is done in such a way as to set us face to face with the real spirit and sense of the people, whose claims are never sacrificed, to make an imposing pageant or puppet-show of political automatons. If he brings in fictitious persons and events, mixing them up with real ones, it is that he may set forth into view those parts and elements and aspects of life which lie without the range of common history; enshrining in representative ideal forms the else neglected substance of actual character. But the most noteworthy point in this branch of the theme is, that out of the materials of an entire age and nation he so selects and uses a few as to give a just conception of the whole; all the lines and features of its life and action, its piety, chivalry, wisdom, policy, wit, and profligacy, being gathered up and wrought out in fair proportion and clear expression. Where he deviates most from all the authorities known to have been consulted by him, there is a large, wise propriety in his deviations, such as might well prompt the conjecture of his having written from some traditionary matter which the historians had failed to chronicle. And indeed some of those deviations have been remarkably verified by the researches of later times; as if the Poet had exercised a sort of prophetic power in his dramatic retrospections. So that our latest study and ripest judgment in any historical matter handled by him will be apt to fall in with and confirm the impressions at first derived from him; that which in the outset approved itself to the imagination as beautiful, in the end approving itself to the reason as true. These remarks, however, must not be taken as in dispar |