THE

AMERICAN MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

MAY, 1836.

OBSERVATIONS

ON SOME OF THE MALE CHARACTERS OF SHAKSPEARE.

ROMEO.

THE name of Romeo can never be separated from that of Juliet, as they, in their lives and their deaths, could not be divided. Yet there is nothing in either of their characters to mark them from the rest of mankind, except the feeling, and the principles and truths, of which they are illustrations. They are not wise, nor witty, nor renowned, nor powerful, nor in any way gifted with those things which attract the gaze of multitudes, and make their possessors to be watched and scanned, and their joys and sorrows to be erected into an importance beyond the joys and sorrows of common humanity. It is merely their fate which claims our attention; the story of eager, confident youth, drinking deeply of happiness, passing from happiness to despair, from despair to death. We are called, not to the study of great and striking peculiarities of individual being; but to contemplate a manifestation of the calamities to which our common nature is subjected. We are summoned to listen to some rich, deep strain of music, commencing in all the joy of life and youth; but into which the jarring notes of sorrow and peril are intruded, until it ends in a solemn dirge over the grave.

The story of Romeo and Juliet is said to be a national tradition in Italy. "It is an Italian subject," says a French writer, who had read the play with very acute observation;* meaning, doubtless, that the story not only occurred in that country, but that it is in itself more suitable to the Italian character than it perhaps could be to the genius and spirit of any other people. "Every thing in this play," continues the same writer, "is rapid in the sensations; but one feels all the while that these sensations can never be effaced. It is the force of Nature, and not the levity of the heart, which, under a powerful sky

hastens the development of the passions." This language is somewhat mystical; but what the writer means to indicate, is the characteristic rapidity and intensity of the feelings in such a country and climate as that of Italy. These two young persons have hardly seen each other before their mutual passion is as deep, as confident, and as familiar to their own minds, as if it were of months' or years' duration; a thing that to the slow motions and tardy spirit of the northern character would be almost unnatural. The rapid transition, too, from intense happiness to a state of heroic despair, is another characteristic of that southern feeling, which Shakspeare doubtless meant to indicate and recognise. It is the feeling, which has the energy, the vividness, and intensity of lightning; but which bears also its fatal and destructive power. If a similar story had occurred in England, in Germany, or in any other northern country, we should have looked to see the ill-fated lovers patiently devising some scheme to extricate themselves from their embarrassments, which should have been dictated by feelings more sober, but perhaps quite as strong. As dangers and difficulties thickened around them, their courage, instead of taking the form of despair, would have sought other inventions and escapes; and finally, as their fate became inevitable, they would have perished, the one in fighting his way through enemies with his own right arm, and the other by the slow and certain destiny of a broken heart. But Nature, in the diversities which climates, manners, institutions, and letters throughout the world have produced among her children, has moulded the human heart into many shapes without obliterating any where its permanent and common attributes. When the imagination and the feelings start into their full development before the judgment has ripened into maturity, every thing is made to contribute to individual joy or sorrow, and the universe seems only a theatre to the impassioned actors, in which they, and their fate, are the pervading and sole realities. Thus the intensity of their passion and the untoward circumstances of their lot, make these two lovers consecrated beings in their own and each other's eyes. Their happiness is in excess; they crowd into a few short hours years of ordinary life; and as soon as they are surrounded by insuperable obstacles on earth, they rise, as if they were subjects of a great destiny, into a lofty and heroic feeling, that expands beyond the gates of Death itself, into a region of uninterrupted bliss.

When the play opens, Romeo is represented as in love with one of the reigning beauties of his native city, at whose hands he has been long suffering the pains to which coquetry subjects its victims. It has come to be a very serious matter with him, for it has undermined his whole character. This is before he has seen Juliet; and on a superficial view, the circumstance would seem to mar the consistency of the

story and of his character. But it only illustrates still more vividly the power of that deeper and worthier feeling which succeeds this youthful folly. It shows how a character, in no respect remarkable, except for strength of affection and imagination, after wasting what it vainly fancies to be its whole power of feeling in some frivolous passion, may be nursed, by the Promethean touch of a worthier object, into energies and purposes of which it had never dreamed before; how it rises in its anticipating consciousness of a higher destiny, and spurns the weakness that would have dragged it down to earthly frivolity and show. If, by the ancient allegory of the blindness of Love, it is meant to be represented as capricious and inconsistent with all the recognised principles and motives of our nature, the representation is false; for it is always as consistent with a sufficient motive, as any other phenomenon exhibited by the human soul.

There is little to be explained or studied in the mere character of Romeo. We see at once how the one reigning feeling gives a hue to every object in nature, every circumstance in life; how the richness of language and imagery, and the many different forms which the same idea is made to take, are the result of that luxurious southern imagination which is here recognised; how a deep intoxication of Life, a glory of expression, and an eloquence which lays under contribution the whole imagery of the world, are to be accounted for. There is little over which to pause, and comment, and reflect. We are hurried on with the same rapidity of feeling as the sufferers themselves, through their short bliss, their perplexities, dangers, and fond despair, until we come suddenly upon the catastrophe which terminates the varied course down which they have rushed, from the joyous scenes of life to the cold damp horrors of the grave. Here we pause, to ask ourselves, why are we made to contemplate these things as the sad termination of young hopes? Why thrust upon us such a painful spectacle? What would it teach us - what does it mean?

"I have considered," says Coleridge, "the disproportion of human passions to their ordinary objects among the strongest evidences of our future destination; and the attempt to illustrate this, the most imperious duty as well as the noblest task of Genius."

The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is such an illustration. Here are two children of humanity, born, as it would seem, only to glide easily and uninterruptedly through the world, their path all roses, the air around them all perfume. There is nothing to mark them from the many of a frivolous age and a frivolous society, in which they live, until a passion for each other, stronger than the fear of death itself, raises them into fit subjects for the solemn destinies of the Tragic Muse. What is it that enables them to brave peril and to rise above all misfortune? What should, for a moment, induce one human

being to hazard all the ordinary glories and ease of this world, and to go down to the last depths of suffering and wo for the sake of another? Where are the dictates of prudence and self-regard? Where are they, but thrown into the shade and annihilated by that immortality of affection which nothing can wear out. What should induce to such conduct, but the very nature of the human mind, which has made heroism and fidelity and generosity its noblest attributes. If, therefore, without other teachings concerning our nature, we were to follow these children of mortality down to the place of their final rest, could we be persuaded that their story had a consistent meaning if we were to regard this as the end of all things? Is it possible that they could have been so deluded, as to meet death as the triumphant liberator from their calamities, and yet find him only their destroyer? Could they be thus cheated into annihilation by an unfounded hope? Nature taught them that they could not.

But these characters are not to be erected into examples; such is not the object of Tragic Poetry. It is true, that they are the victims of self-destruction; the one deliberately, the other in the desperation of the moment, when she discovers that Romeo is dead. It is equally true, that by patiently awaiting the end of their trials, or bearing them, if no end had come, they would be better entitled to moral approbation. So that, in no sense, moral or poetical, are they to be looked upon as examples. But it is to be remembered that we are not called upon to sit in judgment upon the characters of Tragedy for the sake of making them examples or objects of warning. They are exhibited to us in joy or sorrow, in triumph or destruction, virtuous or vicious, under the moral laws which the Creator of man has ordained; and as we look upon the fearful scene, it is our province to learn that knowledge of our nature which the poet would teach us.

There are often involved in Tragic Poetry some of the most common truths in our nature; but which-being clothed in the garb of poetic diction, and surrounded with the solemn pall in which Tragedy sweeps by, and illustrated by the solemn events and consecrated persons with which it deals, seem to put on a mystery and a meaning that are far away from the truths of actual life, however they may be remotely deduced, by a subtle alchemy, from its experience. Thus we create for the poet a high mysterious world, where we are apt to fancy he is moving "among the stars ;" and all the elements of that lofty sphere are, in our imaginations, only refined metaphysical truths, which he has deduced, indeed, from our common nature, but deduced by a refined and subtle process that almost changes the laws of their primitive constitution. No theory can be more unjust, or more untrue to the nature of Poetry itself. There may be metaphysical poets, whose meaning is as far from the broad light of Nature as is the