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MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

FEW of Shakespeare's plays give so little pleasure as this. The fault is, in a great measure, in the plot, which is improbable and disgusting. But the play wants character. The principal persons are unindividualized men and women, and it may be doubted whether they always exhibit the feeling which really belongs to the strange situations in which they are placed. The Friars are but the Friars of Romeo and Juliet revived; and the Clowns who are forced upon the stage not brought into action by the necessities of the story, the least entertaining of their species. Yet the last Act is finely constructed; and, in the character of Mariana at the moated grange, we see what a few strokes of a master's pen may accomplish. Yet this slight portion of the play is better known since attention was called to it by Mr. Tennyson's poem, which may well deserve to find a place at the end of any edition of this play, just as Collins's Dirge is found at the end of Cymbeline.

The story has no doubt been often told, and applied to one unpopular person after another. To the writers named in the notes, by whom it has been told, may be added Goulart, of whom there is an English translation by Edward Grimston, entitled, Admirable and Memorable Histories of our Time, published in 1607. It is useless to inquire whether this were the first edition, as it was not to this work that Shakespeare was indebted, but to the Promos and Cassandra, a play printed in 1578, of which the author was George Whetstone, one of the many poets of the Elizabe

than age who were connected with the naval and military enterprise of the time.*

There are several striking passages in this play which live n men's memories, though the recollection of them is not stimulated by the recitation at the theatres. With remarks

upon two of these I dismiss this play.

III. 1. ISABELLA.

Darest thou die ?

The sense of Death is most in apprehension;

And the poor beetle that we tread upon,

In corporal sufferance, finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.

It is the singular fate of these words to be for ever quoted as containing a sentiment which is really the very opposite to that which they were meant to convey. It is no plea for the lower orders of animals, on the ground that they suffer as much in death as does man himself, and that, therefore, care should be taken not to injure them: but the speaker endeavours to remove from the mind of her unfortunate brother the natural dread of death, and of the pain which accompanies it, by representing that death is no more to man than to the poor beetle which is crushed beneath the foot, and in a moment all sense and feeling are annihilated. The amiable author of a treatise entitled Zoophilos, alluding to this passage, says he cannot recollect that humanity to brutes is "expressly inculcated as a virtue earlier than the

* Much has been done for Whetstone by the modern writers on the literature of this period. I add that he appears to have been a native of London. There is an inquisition abstracted in one of the volumes in the Harleian Library, known as Cole's Escheats, (Harl. 411,) on the death of a Robert Whetstone, who died in 1557, leaving five sons-Robert, Bernard, George, Francis, and John, of whom Robert, the eldest, was then aged 17. He had a tenement called The Three Gilded Anchors, in West Cheap, and five messuages in Gutter Lane. Fleetwood, the Recorder, was related to Whetstone, as appears by the dedication to him of Promos and Cassandra.

time of our own Shakespeare." The natural history of the passage, taken in either sense, is incorrect.

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Few expressions have exercised more the ingenuity of commentators than "the delighted spirit" of this passage. Some maintain that the passage is corrupt. Hanmer suggests dilated; Thirlby, delinquent; and Johnson, benighted: all equally objectionable. Those who adhere to the text as it has come down to us, explain it as conveying the idea of the spirit accustomed to delights.

I beg to offer a slightly different explanation. The poet evidently intends to shew how first the body, and next the spirit, are disposed of when the separation has taken place. The body he designates by an expression of singular appropriateness and beauty, "this sensible warm motion;" where "motion" is used in its sense of an ingeniously constructed machine, an automaton, a wooden puppet moved by strings, a very common meaning of the word. Such an ingeniously constructed work is the human frame, with the additional circumstances that it is " warm and sensible." This "motion," so curiously and wonderfully made, becomes no more than a "kneaded clod;" all its fine organization is broken to pieces and perishes.-He then turns to the soul which inhabited this body, and, full of the beautiful conception he had formed of it, speaks of "the spirit" as delighted" in having had such an habitation provided for it, loth to be torn away, and shrinking from the thought of

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the uncertain destiny which awaits it. Some critics have thought that, in the remainder of the passage, Shakespeare had certain passages in Dante in his mind.

That the word "motion" was used in the sense here attributed to it scarcely requires justification. The following line from Jonson's Bartholomew Fair may be sufficient:

The motion says you lie : he is called Dionysius.

Act v. Sc. 5.

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS.

THE REV. Mr. Barry, of Draycote, who has paid great attention to the state of the text of Shakespeare, pointed out to me a change silently introduced by the editors, and at the same time justified the old reading, which shews at once that the apparently true reading is not always the really true, that a change may be made in which both the readings may be said to express a sense that is not very bad, and that it is the wisdom and duty of an editor to be very cautious before he abandon the old text, and invent one of his own. The passage is in the first scene of the fifth act, where the Merchant says,

Anon, I am sure, the duke himself in person

Comes this way to the melancholy vale,

The place of death and sorry execution,
Behind the ditches of the abbey here.

This is Rowe's reading, and it has kept its place in all editions, including this last of Mr. Collier's.

Few readers would, on the first reading, suspect a corruption and deterioration of Shakespeare's genuine text; but in the third line "the place of death" has usurped upon the old reading, "the place of depth;" meaning in this Greek story, the Barathrum, the deep pit, into which offenders were cast. So Jonson :

Opinion let gross opinion sink
As deep as Barathrum.

EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR. Edit. 1601.*

* It is necessary to specify the edition, as the passage would be sought for in vain in the other old copies of this play; the long speech, of which these few words are the beginning, having been withdrawn by the author, perhaps as

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