was no safety in making unseemly jests too openly about him is highly probable; and the enemy of Essex and Raleigh* could not be an object of admiration to Shakespeare. Lord Burleigh, in his courtly demeanor, was as observant of etiquette as Polonius, and as ready in using indirections to find thereby directions out. The Queen was fond of both ceremony and statecraft: but I doubt much that the old gentleman in Hamlet is intended for anything more than a general personification of ceremonious courtiers. If Lord Chesterfield had designed to write a commentary upon Polonius, he could not have more completely succeeded than by writing his famous letters to his son. His Lordship, like every man of taste and virtue, and what Pope has comprehended in the expressive term of "all that," in his time utterly despised Shakespeare. There is nothing to blame in this. What can we talk on but of what we know? One of the grandest of the herd, Horace Walpole, wrote the Mysterious Mother, and therefore he had a right (had he not?) to offer an opinion on Macbeth, and to pronounce Midsummer's Night's Dream a bundle of rubbish, far more ridiculous than the most absurd Italian opera. Lord Chesterfield wrote nothing, that I know of, to give him a name as an author, except his letters. Of course, he wrote despatches, protocols, and other such ware, worthy, no doubt, of the Red Tapery of which he was so eminent a member. *Even in these precepts his Lordship can not avoid a "gird” at those remarkable men whose accomplishments were, however, much more likely to please poets and adventurers than sober statesmen. We know how Spenser immortalizes the Shepherd of the Ocean, and with what pomp of verse the general of our gracious emperess" is introduced almost by name in the chorus of Henry V., Shakespeare's most national play, as a fit object of comparison with the hero of Azincour himself. In Lord Burleigh they only appear as suiteth examples to point the moral of a maxim. Yet I advise thee not to affect or neglect popularity too much. Seek not to be Essex-shun to be Raleigh."-W. M. NO. VII.-IAGO. I HAVE been accused by some, who have taken the trouble of these reading papers, that I am fond of paradoxes, and write not to comment upon Shakespeare, but to display logical dexterity in maintaining the untenable side of every question. To maintain that Falstaff was in heart melancholy and Jaques gay, to contrast the fortunes of Romeo and Bottom, or to plead the cause of Lady Macbeth, is certainly not in accordance with the ordinary course of criticism; but I have given my reasons, sound or unsound as they may be, for my opinions, which, I have said with old Montaigne, I do not pretend to be good, but to be mine. What appears to me to be the distinguishing feature of Shakespeare is, that his characters are real men and women, not mere abstractions. In the best of us all there are many blots, in the worst there are many traces of goodness. There is no such thing as angels or devils in the world. We have passions and feelings, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, pretty equally distributed among us; and that which actuates the highest and the lowest, the most virtuous and the most profligate, the bravest and meanest, must, in its original elements, be the same. People do not commit wicked actions from the mere love of wickedness; there must always be an incentive of precisely the same kind as that which stimulates to the noblest actions-ambition, love of adventure, passion, necessity. All our virtues closely border upon vices, and are not unfrequently blended. The robber may be generous, the miser just, the cruel man conscientious, the rake honorable, the fop brave. In various relations of life, the same man may play many characters as distinct from one another as day from night. I venture to say that the creatures of Boz's fancy, Fagin or Sikes, did not appear in every circle as the unmitigated scoundrels we see them in Oliver Twist.* It is, I suppose, necessary to the exigencies of the tale, that no other part of their characters should be exhibited; but, after all, the Jew only carries the commercial, and the housebreaker the military principle, to an extent which society can not tolerate. In element, the feeling is the same that covers the ocean with the merchant-flags of England, and sends forth the hapless boys to the trade of picking pockets -that inspires the highwayman to stop a traveller on Hounslow, and spirits the soldier to face a cannon at Waterloo. Robber, soldier, thief, merchant, are all equally men. It is necessary, for a critical investigation of character, not to be content with taking things merely as they seem. We must endeavor to strip off the covering with which habit or necessity has enveloped the human mind, and to inquire after motives as well as look at actions. It would not be an unamusing task to analyze the career of two persons starting under similar circumstances, and placed in situations not in essence materially different- one ending at the debtors' door of Newgate, amid hootings and execrations, and the other borne to his final resting-place in Westminster Abbey, graced by all the pomps that heraldry can bestow. As Shakespeare therefore draws men, and not one-side sketches of character, it is always possible to treat his personages as if they were actually existing people; and there is * This paper was published in Bentley's Miscellany in 1839, and Oliver Twist had appeared in the same periodical shortly before. The reference to the work, therefore, was very natural. — M. always some redeeming point. The bloody Macbeth is kind and gentle to his wife; the gore-stained Richard, gallant and daring; Shylock is an affectionate father, and a good-natured master; Claudius, in Hamlet, is fond of his foully-won queen, and exhibits, at least, remorse for his deed in heart-rending soliloquies; Angelo is upright in public life, though yielding to sore temptation in private; Cloton is brutal and insulting, but brave; the ladies are either wholly without blemishes, or have merits to redeem them: in some plays, as Julius Cæsar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, and several others, no decidedly vicious character is introduced at all. The personages introduced are exposed to the frailties of our nature, but escape from its grosser crimes and vices. But Iago! Ay! there's the rub. Well may poor Othello look down to his feet, and, not seeing them different from those of others, feel convinced that it is a fable which attributes a cloven hoof to the devil.* His next test "While the Moor bears the nightly color of suspicion and deceit only on his visage, Iago is black within. He haunts Othello like his evil genius, and with his light (and therefore the more dangerous) insinuations, he leaves him no rest; it is as if by means of an unfortunate affinity, founded however in nature, this influence was by necessity more powerful over him than the voice of his good angel Desdemona. A more artful villain than this Iago was never portrayed; he spreads his nets with a skill which nothing can escape. The repugnance inspired by his aims becomes tolerable from the attention of the spectators being directed to his means: these furnish endless employment to the understanding. Cool, discontented, and morose, arrogant where he dare be so, but humble and insinuating when it suits his purposes, he is a complete master in the art of dissimulation; accessible only to selfish emotions, he is thoroughly skilled in rousing the passions of others, and of availing himself of every opening which they give him: he is as excellent an observer of men as any one can be who is unacquainted with higher motives of action from his own experience; there is always some truth in his malicious observations on them. He does not merely pretend an obdurate incredulity as to the virtue of women, he actually entertains it; and this, too, falls in with his whole way of thinking, and makes him the more fit for the execution of his purpose. As in every thing he sees merely the hateful side, he dissolves in the rudest manner the charm which the "If that thou be'st a devil, I can not kill thee”*. affords a proof that Iago is not actually a fiend, for he wounds "Demand me nothing: what you know, you know; for, with his utmost ingenuity, he could hardly find any thing for himself. Is there nothing, then, to be said for him by any body else? to say No more than this. He is the sole exemplar of studied personal revenge in the plays. The philosophical mind of Hamimagination casts over the relation between the two sexes: he does so for the purpose of revolting Othello's senses, whose heart otherwise might easily have convinced him of Desdemona's innocence. This must serve as an excuse for the numerous expressions in the speeches of Iago from which modesty shrinks. If Shakespeare had written in our days he would not perhaps have dared to hazard them; and yet this must certainly have greatly injured the truth of his picture."-SCHLEGEL. * After this line he wounds Iago. Then follows: "Lod. Wrench his sword from him. Iago. I bleed, sir, but not killed." This is strange language. Should it not be "I [i. e., Ay, as usual in Shakespeare], bled, sir, but not killed"? - W. M. † In the late Professor Wilson's latest writings ("Christopher under Canvass"), one of the Dies Boreales-April, 1850-is devoted to an eloquent though desultory dialogue-criticism on the tragedy of "Othello." He says |