-foul IMAGINARY eyes of blood"-One of the most frequent confusions of shades of meaning, in our old poets, which strikes the modern reader, is that of the active and passive significations, as delighted and delightful; as here "imaginary eyes," for imagining, or image-forming eyes. SCENE III. "The wall is high; and yet will I leap down." "Our author has here followed the old play. In what manner Arthur was deprived of his life is not ascertained. Matthew Paris, relating the event, uses the word evanuit; and, indeed, as King Philip afterwards publicly accused King John of putting his nephew to death, without mentioning either the manner of it, or his accomplices, we may conclude that it was conducted with impenetrable secrecy. The French historians, however, say, that John, coming in a boat, during the night-time, to the castle of Rouen, where the young prince was confined, ordered him to be brought forth, and having stabbed him, while supplicating for mercy, the king fastened a stone to the dead body, and threw it into the Seine, in ordor to give some colour to a report which he afterwards caused to be spread, that the prince, attempting to escape out of a window of the tower of the castle, fell into the river, and was drowned." -MALONE. "O me! my uncle's spirit is in these stones." In the old "King John," after his fall, Arthur speaks thus: Ho! who is nigh? Somebody take me up: Where is my mother? Let me speak with her: Who hurts me thus ?-speak, ho! where are you gone? Ah me, poor Arthur, I am here alone. Why called I mother? how did I forget? My fall, my fall hath killed my mother's son. How will she weep at tidings of my death! Sweet Jesu! save my soul; forgive my rash attempt: This fond recurrence of the dying youth to his mother is natural and affecting; and I can only account for Shakespeare's throwing it aside, upon the same reason that in LEAR he has purposely avoided one or two touching incidents of the old play, as thoughts pre-occupied by his predecessors, whose works he had taken for the groundwork of his plot, while it was his aim to give a new and original poetical character to the familiar plot. "Whose PRIVATE with me"-i. e. Whose private account of the Dauphin's affection to our cause is much more ample than the letters. "Till I have set a glory to this HAND, By giving it the worship of revenge." This is the original reading, giving the obvious sense of " till I have given renown to my hand, by bestowing on it the honour of revenge." "Worship" is thus taken for dignity, honour, in its old use, still retained in the title of your worship," "the worshipful." "Glory" is similarly used in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA:Let Eneas live, If to my sword his fate be not the glory. But many editions adopt the alteration of Pope, who thought that we should read "a glory to this head," pointing to the head of the dead prince, and using worship in its common acceptation. A glory is a circle of rays, such as is represented surrounding the heads of saints and other holy persons. The solemn confirmation of the other lords may support this sense. Gray, the poet, (says Dr. Farmer,) was much pleased with this correction. "Do not prove me so"-"Dr. Johnson has, I think, mistaken the sense of this passage, which he explains'Do not make me a murderer, by compelling me to kill you; I am hitherto not a murderer.' By Do not prove me so,' Hubert means, 'Do not provoke me, or try my patience so.' This was a common acceptation "An empty casket "-The most poetical lines of the old "King John" relate to the death of Arthur, of whom, when his body is first found by the peers, it is said, Lo! lords, the wither'd flower, Who in his life shin'd like the morning's blush, Cast out a-door. "FORAGE, and run"-"Forage' here seems to mean to range abroad; which Dr. Johnson says is its original sense: but fourrage the French source of it, is formed from the low Latin foderagium, food: the sense of ranging therefore appears to be secondary." NARES. SCENE II. "Return the PRECEDENT"-i. e. What we now call the draught of the instrument to be copied out. "And not TO SPEND it so unneighbourly." To "spend" it, taking "to" as the prefix of the infinitive, is quite clear, and, though not in strict grammatical congruity with the context, would hardly be considered as inaccurate in coloquial use. But Stevens and Knight print it to-spend, as used in the sense which to as an intensive or augmentative adjunct anciently had; as in the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, "to-pinch the unclean knight"-pinch him well, thoroughly. "Between COMPULSION, and a brave respect!" "This compulsion' was the necessity of a reformation in the state; which, according to Salisbury's opin ion, (who, in his speech preceding, calls it an enforced cause,) could only be procured by foreign arms: and the brave respect was the love of his country."-WAR BURTON. "Acquainted me with interest To this land." This was the phraseology of Shakespeare's time. So in KING HENRY IV., (Part II:) He hath more worthy interest to the state, Again, in Dugdale's "Antiquities of Warwickshire :" He had a release from Rose the daughter and heir of Sir John de Arden, of all her interest to the manor of Pedimore." "VIVE LE ROY! as I have BANK'D their towns ?" It is doubtful in what sense we are to take "bank'd;" whether Lewis means to say that he has thrown up embankments before the towns, or whether he uses -bank'd" in reference to passing towns on the banks of the Thames, in the same way that we use the verb coast. In the old "King John" Lewis thus mentions "Rochester" as having submitted, and he may here refer to that and other places on the river's banks: Your city, Rochester, with great applause, The measure, which in this play has much regularity, requires "Vive" to be pronounced in two syllables, sounding the final e; which I take to be the old Norman pronunciation, and perhaps the general old French mode. I recollect such a habit of sounding the final e, where it is now mute, among the old Huguenots of the second and third generations in America, who had spoken French from their childhood. In the old "King John," Vive seems to be sounded in the same way. "Bank'd their towns" may be either, "as I have thrown embankments, or entrenchments, before them," or, as seems more probably the author's meaning, "as I passed along the river-banks, on which they are built:" in the sense of bank, as a verb, that we now apply to coast. The thought is from the old "King John," where the language supports this last interpretation. There these salutations are described as given to the Dauphin, as he sailed along the banks of the river. This, perhaps, Shakespeare calls banking the towns. We still say to coast, and to flank; and to bank has no less propriety, though it is not reconciled to us by modern usage. 44 This UNHEARD sauciness"-So the old copies, without exception, and we adhere to the most intelligible text, notwithstanding Theobald's suggestion, that "unheard" ought to be unhair'd, which modern editors have adopted and explained as "beardless, and therefore boyish." and make you take the hatch"-i. e. Leap over the hatch of the door; in the sense in which sportsmen still say, to take a ditch, or a gate. "at the crying of your nation's CROW"-Malone thinks that this line refers to "the voice or caw of the French crow," but Douce contends that the allusion is to the "crow" of a cock, that being the national bird of France; "gallus meaning both a cock and a Frenchman." "Unthread the rude EYE of rebellion"-" Theobald corrupted this passage into untread the rude way;' he turned, by an easy process, the poetry into prose. Malone, who agrees in the restoration of the passage, says Shakespeare was evidently thinking of the eye of a needle,' and he calls this, therefore, an humble metaphor. Nothing is humble, in poetry, that conveys an image forcibly and distinctly; and the eye of a needle,' by the application of the Poet, may become dignified. But the word thread, perhaps metaphorically, is used to convey the meaning of passing through anything intricate, narrow, difficult. They would not thread the gates— in CORIOLANUS, and One gains the thicket and one thrids the brakein Dryden, have each the same meaning. The 'rude eye,' in the line before us, is the rough and dangerous passage of rebellion.'"-KNIGHT. "RESOLVETH from his figure"-To resolve, of old. was the same as to dissolve. "This is said (remarks Stevens) in allusion to the images made by witches." Hollingshed observes, that it was alleged against dame Eleanor Cobham, and her confederates, "that they had devised an image of wax, representing the king, which, by their sorcerie, by little and little consumed, intending thereby, in conclusion, to waste and destroy the king's person." "Awakes my conscience to confess all this." "In the old King John' we find these lines, which form part of a speech by Melun, of the same tenour as that in Shakespeare: This I aver, if Lewis win the day, etc. Two causes, lords, makes me display this drift: That longs to leave this mansion free from guilt; For that my grandsire was an Englishman. In the old King John,' there is previously a long scene, in which Lewis takes the oath referred to by the dying Melun: There's not an English traitor of them all, Shakespeare has shown great judgment in the total omission of scenes which only served to lengthen out the old play, or to which, as in this instance, reference merely was necessary."-COLLier. SCENE V. "our TATTERING colours"-Here is another instance of the indiscriminate use, not uncommon in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, of the active and the passive participle" tattering" for tattered. Collier says that tattering" and "tattered" were almost invariably spelled, in our old writers, tottering and tottered, as it would be easy to accumulate instances from Marlowe, Stevens Decker, Heywood, Munday, Chapman, etc. altered "tattering," in the text, to tatter'd, against all the authorities. SCENE VI. "thou, and ENDLESS night"-" Endless night" seems a natural expression of impatience at the long and tedious night. Many editors have adopted the suggestion that this word was a misprint for eyeless night. "The king, I fear, is poisoned by a monk," etc. "Not one of the historians, (says Malone,) who wrote within sixty years after the death of King John, mentions this very improbable story. The tale is, that a monk, to revenge himself on the king for a saying at which he took offence, poisoned a cup of ale, and, having brought it to his majesty, drank some of it himself, to induce the king to taste it, and soon afterwards expired. Thomas Wykes is the first who relates it in his 'Chronicle,' as a report. According to the best accounts, John died at Newark, of a fever." The incident answered the purpose of Bishop Bale too well for him not to employ it in his "Kynge Johan." SCENE VII. "Leaves them, INSENSIBLE"-The old editions have "leaves them invisible," out of which it is difficult to extract a probable meaning. "The meaning of invisible (says Knight) is unlooked at, disregarded." Collier interprets thus-i. e. "invisibly. Death, after he has preyed on the outward parts, invisibly leaves them." To me it seems evident that invisible, for "insensible," was an error of the press, or more probably of the copy ist of the manuscript used by the folio editors. O! I am dull, and the cold hand of sleep Hath thrust his icy fingers in my breast, And made a frost within me. This passage is found in a play called 'Lust's Dominion,' assigned to Marlowe; but the historical portion of the incidents did not occur until five years after his death. In the History of Dramatic Poetry and the Stage,' reasons are given for attributing Lust's Dominion' to Decker, Haughton, and Day; and in Decker's Gull's Hornbook' (1609) we meet with this expression: 'the morning waxing cold, thrust his icy fingers into thy bosom.' Shakespeare's KING JOHN was indisputably written before 1598, and Lust's Dominion' was probably not produced until 1600; so that, although the authors of that play may have copied Shakespeare, there can be no pretence for saying that he imitated them."-COLLIER. MODULE of confounded royalty" — -"Module' and model were, in our author's time, different modes of spelling the same word. Model signified not an archetype, after which something was to be formed, but the thing formed after an archetype; and hence it is used by Shakespeare, and his contemporaries, for a representation. So, in the London Prodigal,' (1605:)— 66 Dear copy of my husband! O let me kiss thee! [Kissing a picture.] MALONE. How like him is this model !" My liege! my lord!-But now a king, now thus." The tragic Poet has here brought the death of John into immediate contact with his most atrocious crime, as the natural sequence and just retribution of his guilt towards young Arthur. The matter-of-fact commentators complain, with Mr. Courtenay, ("Commentaries on Shakespeare's Historical Plays,") that here is a long interval leaped over at once, in which "foreign and cruel wars had raged with varied success, and one event had happened of which, although it is that by which we now chiefly remember King John, no notice is taken whatever. This event is no other than the signature of Magna Charta." The plain answer to this is, that the Poet's design was not to turn the chronicle of John's reign into dramatic dialogue, but to produce from the materials an historical tragedy; for which purpose Constance, Arthur, and the half fictitious Faulconbridge, afforded more suitable materials for his imagination than Magna Charta, and the political rights of Englishmen acquired under it. By the selection he made he was naturally led to the exhibition of female character, as intense, as passionate, and as overflowing with feeling, and with the most eloquent expression, as his own Juliet, but with the same all-absorbing affection transferred from the lover to an only child. On the other hand, had he chosen the great political question for the turning point of interest in his drama-and if touched on at all it must have been made the main and central point of the action-it would have required all the Poet's skill to have avoided the too literal but unpoetical truth, which Canning has so drolly ridiculed in his mockGerman play, when one of the exiled Barons informs the other that The charter of our liberties received The royal signature at five o'clock, Mr. Knight's remarks on this point are exceedingly jast and eloquent:-"The interval of fourteen years, between the death of Arthur and the death of John, is annihilated. Causes and consequences, separated in the proper history by long digressions and tedions episodes, are brought together. The attributed murder of Arthur lost John all the inheritances of the house of Anjou, and allowed the house of Capet to triumph in his overthrow. Out of this grew a larger ambition, and England was invaded. The death of Arthur, and the events which marked the last days of John, were separated in their cause and effect by time only, over which the Poet leaps. It is said that a man, who was on the point of drowning, saw, in an instant, all the events of his life in connexion with his approaching end. So sees the poet. It is his to bring the beginnings and the ends of events into that real union and dependence, which even the philosophical historian may overlook, in tracing their course. It is the poet's office to preserve a unity of action; it is the historian's to show a consistency of progress. In the chroniclers, we have manifold changes of fortune in the life of John, after Arthur of Brittany has fallen. In SHAKESPEARE, Arthur of Brittany is at once revenged. The heart-broken mother and her boy are not the only sufferers from double The spirit of Constance is appeased by the fall of John. The Niobe of a Gothic age, who vainly sought to shield her child from as stern a destiny as that with which Apollo and Artemis pursued the daughter of Tantalus, may rest in peace!" courses. "-Nought shall make us rue"-A splendid, animated, and poetical passage, formed from the concluding lines of the old play, which are quite as patriotic, but without any poetic glow: Let England be but true within herself, And all the world can never wrong her state, etc. "The tragedy of KING JOHN, though not written with the utmost power of Shakespeare, is varied with a very pleasing interchange of incidents and characters. The lady's grief is very affecting; and the character of the Bastard contains that mixture of greatness and levity which this author delighted to exhibit."-JOHNSON. "The present historic drama is pronounced, by Johnson, to be not written with the utmost power of Shake speare.' The truth is, the Poet had no utmost power.' He has told us in this very play When workmen strive to do better than well, They do confound their skill in covetousness, There were no throes, there was nothing spasmodic. in the genius of Shakespeare. He never confounded his skill.' Take any two of his plays written in his maturer years, and if a well-judged preference is to be ject, not its execution. In his historical plays, he was given to either, it will be found to arise from the subcontrolled, and was content to be so. He might have made King John a more striking character, with less art and labour; but he spared neither, when he was to paint him as he lived."-Illustrated SHAKESPEARE. T. CAMPBELL, after remarking on the materials which Shakespeare turns to his use, in the old play, which gives so little anticipation of the high painting of the present KING JOHN, proceeds : 'It is remarkable that the Poet of England, and the most eloquent Poet who ever summed up the virtues of Brutus, should have dramatized the reign of John, without the most distant allusion to Magna Charta. Was he afraid of offending Elizabeth? I think not; for he brought out JULIUS CAESAR in the reign of King James, whose petty mind was more jealous of popular principles than that of Elizabeth. His main object was probably to recast, with all dispatch, an old piece into a new one for the stage. I regret further, that this mighty genius did not turn to poetical account another event in King John's reign, namely, the superstitions desolation of the English mind, which immediately followed the papal excommunication that was issued from Rome against England and her king. The shutting up of the churches, the nation's sudden deprivation of all That great representative of maternal love and courage—of “proud grief and majestic desolation"-left behind her, in manuscript, her own analysis of the chief character of the tragedy; and we extract, from Campbell's Life of Siddons," this commentary of a great artist on the Poet: "The idea one naturally adopts of her qualities and appearance are, that she is noble in mind, and commanding in person and demeanour; that her countemance was capable of all the varieties of grand and tender expression, often agonized, though never distorted by the vehemence of her agitations. Her voice, too, must have been propertied like the tuned spheres,' obedient to all the softest inflections of maternal love, to all the pathos of the most exquisite sensibility, to the sudden burst of heart-rending sorrow, and to the terrifying imprecations of indignant majesty, when writhing under the miseries inflicted on her by her dastardly oppressors and treacherous allies. The actress whose lot it is to personate this great character should be richly endowed by nature for its various requirements; yet, even when thus fortunately gifted, much, very much remains to be effected by herself; for in the performance of the part of Constance great difficulties, both inental and physical, present themselves. And perhaps the greatest of the former class is that of imperiously holding the mind reined in to the immediate perception of those calamitous circumstances which take place during the course of her sadly eventful history. The necessity for this severe abstraction will sufficiently appear, when we remember that all those calamitous events occur while she herself is absent from the stage; so that this power is indispensable for that reason alone, were there no other to be assigned for it. Because, if the representative of Constance shall ever forget, even behind the scenes, those disastrous events which impel her to break forth into the overwhelming effusions of wounded friendship, disappointed ambition, and maternal tenderness, upon the first moment of her appearance in the third act, when stunned with terrible surprise she exclaims Gone to be married-gone to swear a peace! False blood to false blood joined-gone to be friends!if, I say, the mind of the actress for one moment wanders from these distressing events, she must inevitably fall short of that high and glorious colouring which is indispensable to the painting of this magnificent portrait. The quality of abstraction has always appeared to me so necessary in the art of acting, that I shall probably, in the course of these remarks, be thought too frequently and pertinaciously to advert to it. I am now, however, going to give a proof of its usefulness in the character under our consideration; and I wish my opinion were of sufficient weight to impress the importance of this power on the minds of all candidates for dramatic fame. Here, then, is one example, among many others which I could adduce. Whenever I was called upon to personate the character of Constance, I never, from the beginning of the play to the end of my part in it, once suffered my dressing-room door to be closed, in order that my attention might be constantly fixed on those distressing events which, by this means, I could plainly hear going on upon the stage, the terrible effects of which progress were to be represented by me. Moreover, I never omitted to place myself, with Arthur in my hand, to hear the march, when, upon the reconciliation of England and France, they enter the gates of Angiers to ratify the contract of marriage between the Dauphin and the Lady Blanch; because the sickening sounds of that march would usually cause the bitter tears of rage, disappointment, betrayed confidence, baffled ambition, and, above all, the agonizing feelings of maternal affection to gush into my eyes. In short, the spirit of the whole drama took possession of my mind and frame, by my attention being incessantly riveted to the passing scenes. Thus did I avail myself of every possible assistance, for there was need of all in this most arduous effort; and I have no doubt that the observance of such circumstances, however irrelevant they may ap pear upon a cursory view, was powerfully aidant in the representations of those expressions of passion in the remainder of this scene, which have been only in part considered, and to the conclusion of which I now proceed. "Goaded and stung by the treachery of her faithless friends, and almost maddened by the injuries they have heaped upon her, she becomes desperate and ferocious as a hunted tigress in defence of her young, and it seems that existence itself must nearly issue forth with the utterance of that frantic and appalling exclamation A wicked day, and not a holy day, What hath this day deserved? what hath it done, etc. "When King Philip says to her— By heaven, lady, you shall have no cause Arm, arm, you heavens, against these perjur'd kings! "If it ever were, or ever shall be, portrayed with its appropriate and solemn energy, it must be then, and then only, when the power I have so much insisted on, co-operating also with a high degree of enthusiasm, shall have transfused the mind of the actress into the person and situation of the august and afflicted Constance. The difficulty, too, of representing, with tempered rage and dignified contempt, the biting sarcasm of the speeches to Austria, (act iii. scene 1,) may be more easily imagined than explained. "But, in truth, to beget, in these whirlwinds of the soul, such temperance as, according to the lesson of our inspired master, shall give them smoothness, is a ditticulty which those only can appreciate who have made the effort. hausts the frame which endeavours to express its agitations." "I cannot, indeed, conceive, in the whole range of dramatic character, a greater difficulty than that of representing this grand creature. Brought before the audience in the plenitude of her afflictions; oppression Constance reminds the reader at once of Volumnia and falsehood having effected their destructive mark; and of Juliet-of the Roman matron in her loftiness, her the full storm of adversity, in short, having fallen upon her in the interval of their absence from her sight, the deep maternal affection, and her energy of characterand of Juliet in her all-absorbing passion, her self-devoeffort of pouring properly forth so much passion as past tion to the single object of her affection, her excitable events have excited in her, without any visible previous fancy, and her consequent vivid and luxuriant imagery. progress towards her climax of desperation, seems aland passionate eloquence. Both these parallels have most to exceed the power of imitation. Hers is an affliction of so sudden floodgate and o'erbearing na-crimination, who thus states her conception of the leadbeen traced by Mrs. Jameson, with great taste and disture,' that art despairs of realizing it, and the effort is almost life-exhausting. Therefore, whether the majestic, the passionate, the tender Constance, has ever yet been, or ever will be, personated to the entire satisfaction of sound judgment and fine taste, I believe to be doubtful; for I believe it to be nearly impossible. "I now come to the concluding scene; and I believe I shall not be thought singular when I assert, that though she has been designated the ambitious Constance, she has been ambitious only for her son. It was for him, and him alone, that she aspired to, and struggled for, hereditary sovereignty. For example, you find that, from that fatal moment when he is separated from her, not one regret for lost regal power or splendour ever escapes from her lips; no, not one idea does she from that instant utter, which does not unanswerably prove that all other considerations are annihilated in the grievous recollections of motherly love. That scene, (act iii. scene 4,) I think, must determine that maternal tenderness is the predominant feature of her character. "Her gorgeous affliction, if such an expression is allowable, is of so sublime and so intense a character, that the personation of its grandeur, with the utterance of its rapid and astonishing eloquence, almost overwhelms the mind that meditates its realization, and utterly ex54 ing attributes of the character: "That which strikes us as the principal attribute of Constance is power-power of imagination, of will, of passion, of affection, of pride: the moral energy, that faculty which is principally exercised in self-control, and gives consistency to the rest, is deficient; or rather, to speak more correctly, the extraordinary development of sensibility and imagination, which lends to the character its rich poetical colouring, leaves the other quali ties comparatively subordinate. Hence it is that the whole complexion of the character, notwithstanding its amazing grandeur, is so exquisitely feminine. The weakness of the woman, who, by the very consciousness of that weakness, is worked up to desperation and defiance-the fluctuations of temper and the bursts of sublime passion, the terrors, the impatience, and the tears, are all most true to feminine nature. The energy of Constance, not being based upon strength of character, rises and falls with the tide of passion. Her haughty spirit swells against resistance, and is excited into frenzy by sorrow and disappointment; while neither from her towering pride, nor her strength of intellect, can she borrow patience to submit, or fortitude to endure." |