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His plays are properly to be diftinguished only into comedies and tragedies. Those which are called hiftories, and even some of his comedies, are really tragedies, with a run or mixture of comedy amongst them. That way of tragi-comedy was the common mistake of that age, and is indeed become so agreeable to the English taste, that though the severer criticks among us cannot bear it, yet the generality of our audiences seein to be better pleased with it than with an exact tragedy. The Merry Wives of Windfor, The Comedy of Errors, and The Taming of a Shrew, are all pure comedy; the rest, however they are called, have something of both kinds. It is not very easy to deter mine which way of writing he was most excellent in. There is certainly a great deal of entertainment in his comical humours; and though they did not then strike at all ranks of people, as the fatire of the present age has taken the liberty to do, yet there is a pleasing and a well-diftinguished variety in those characters which he thought fit to meddle with. Falstarf is allowed by every body to be a masterpiece; the character is always well sustained, though drawn out into the length of three plays; and even the account of his death, given by his old landlady Mrs. Quickly, in the first act of Henry the Fifth, though it be extremely natural, is yet as diverting as any part of his life. If there be any fault in the draught he has made of this lewd old fellow, it is, that though he has made him a thief, lying, cowardly, vain-glorious, and in short every way vicious, yet he has given him so much wit as to render him almoft too agreeable; and I do not know whether some people

people have not, in remembrance of the diverfion he had formerly afforded them, been forry to fee his friend Hal use him so scurvily when he comes to the crown in the end of The Second Part of Henry the Fourth. Amongst other extravagancies, in The Merry Wives of Windfor he has made him a deer stealer, that he might at the same time remember his Warwickshire profecutor, under the name of Justice Shallow; he has given him very near the same coat of arms which Dugdale, in his Antiquities of that county, describes for a family there, and makes the Welsh parson descant very pleasantly upon them. That whole play is admirable; the humours are various and well oppofed; the main design, which is to cure Ford of his unreafonable jealousy, is extremely well conducted. In Twelfth-Night there is something fingularly ridiculous and pleasant in the fantastical steward Malvolio. The parafite and the vain-glorious in Parolles, in All's Well that Ends Well, is as good as any thing of that kind in Plautus or Terence. Petruchio, in The Taming of the Shrew, is an uncommon piece of humour. The conversation of Benedick and Beatrice, in Much Ado about Nothing, and of Rosalind, in As you like it, have much wit and sprightliness all along. His clowns, without which character there was hardly any play writ in that time, are all very entertaining: and, I believe, Therfites in Troilus and Creffida, and Apemantus in Timon, will be allowed to be master-pieces of ill-nature, and fatirical snarling. To these I might add, that incomparable character of Shylock the Jew, in The Merchant of Venice; but though we have seen that play received

and

and acted as a comedy, and the part of the Jew performed by an excellent comedian, yet I cannot but think it was designed tragically by the author. There appears in it such a deadly spirit of revenge, such a favage fierceness and fellness, and such a bloody defignation of cruelty and mischief, as cannot agree either with the style or characters of comedy. The play itfelf, take it altogether, seems to me to be one of the moft finished of any of Shakspeare's. The tale indeed, in that part relating to the cafkets, and the extravagant and unusual kind of bond given by Antonio, is too much removed from the rules of probability; but taking the fact for granted, we must allow it to be very beautifully written. There is fomething in the friendship of Antonio to Bassanio very great, generous, and tender. The whole fourth act (fuppofing, as I faid, the fact to be probable) is extremely fine. But there are two paffages that deserve a particular notice. The first is, what Portia says in praise of mercy, and the other on the power of musick. The melancholy of Jacques, in ds you like it, is as fingular and odd as it is diverting. And if, what Horace says,

Difficile est proprie communia dicere,

it will be a hard task for any one to go beyond him in the defcription of the several degrees and ages of man's life, though the thought be old, and common enough.

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And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,

And

And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms:
And then, the whining school-boy with his fatchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then, the lover
Sighing like furnace, with a woful ballad
Made to his mistress' eye-brow. Then, a soldier;
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, fudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation

Ev'n in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice;
In fair round belly, with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wife saws and modern instances;
And fo he plays his part. The fixth age shifts
Into the lean and flipper'd pantaloon;
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well fav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk thank and his big manly voice,
Turning again tow'rd childish treble, pipes
And whittles in his found: Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, fans eyes, fans taste, sans every thing."

His images are indeed every where so lively, that the thing he would represent stands full before you, and you possess every part of it. I will venture to point out one more, which is, I think, as strong and as uncommon as any thing I ever faw; it is an image of Patience. Speaking of a maid in love, he says,

She never told her love,

But let concealment, like a worm i th' bud,

Feed

1

Feed on her damask cheek: she pin'd in thought,
And fate like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at Grief.

What an image is here given ! and what a task would it have been for the greatest masters of Greece and Rome to have expressed the passions designed by this sketch of statuary! The style of his comedy is, in general, natural to the characters, and easy in itself; and the wit most commonly sprightly and pleasing, except in those places where he runs into doggerel rhimes, as in The Comedy of Errors, and some other plays. As for his jingling sometimes, and playing upon words; it was the common vice of the age he lived in: and if we find it in the pulpit, made use of as an ornament to the fermons of fome of the gravest divines of those times, perhaps it may not be thought too light for the stage.

But certainly the greatness of this author's genius does no where so much appear, as where he gives his imagination an entire loose, and raises his fancy to a flight above mankind, and the limits of the visible world. Such are his attempts in The Tempest, A MidSummer-Night's Dream, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Of these, The Tempest, however it comes to be placed the first by the publishers of his works, can never have been the first written by him: it seems to me as perfect in its kind, as almost any thing we have of his. One may observe, that the unities are kept here, with an exactness uncommon to the liberties of his writing; though that was what, I suppose, he valued himself leaft

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