stage, even at the present day, the most lively action prevails, and every player appears as if in his simple easy nature. As no prompter suggests, the actor is compelled to possess himself of his part, so that, as it were, he lives rather than acts that which he has to perform. The protraction of the answers, and the heavy lengthening of light scenes which ought to pass on rapidly, are thus prevented; the answer of the one addressed interrupts the last word of the speaker; the exit off the stage is so managed that the speakers pass off with the last syllable: with their departure one scene changes and a new one begins; the intervals between the different acts last but a few minutes; thus such a piece passes quickly before us and carries us with it; the exact delineation of any single situation is nevertheless stamped deeply on the mind. But for this even the subordinate parts must be performed by clever actors; the players must not be a second idle; all of them, even the mute persons, even the silent spectators of the action, must suit the circumstances of the case, according to the nature of every moment. But that which in Germany almost always spoils the Shakespearian pieces, in addition to lack of refinement and psychological knowledge, is the want in most actors of all natural and easy style. Their smooth, soulless, declamatory manner, devoid of all inner life, is at once fatal to these pieces, which should be performed in the tone of perfect nature and with plenty of life. Neither the agitation of the tragic, nor the emotion of the elegiac, nor the naïve seriousness of the burlesque parts of Shakespeare's works, are obtained by our actors. To what melting power and sweetness may such scenes be raised as that in Much Ado About Nothing where Balthazar sings, and that in Twelfth Night where the fool sings before Orsino; these compositions being for the most part from musicians of Handel's time or school, they often entwine a bond of the sweetest harmony around the great composer and our poet; but few actors on our own stage, have an idea of the tender deathlike attention which their effect can produce. But, above all, no one would condescend to act the ridiculous personages with such perfect devotion as to render evident that each of these characters is just as much or even more occupied with himself as the noblest creations of man placed near them. Each actor in such parts throws just so much irony in his acting as he thinks necessary to exhibit the superiority of his wisdom over the folly which he is to represent, and sufficient to ruin his acting, his character, and the piece.

IV. SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS.

WE have reached the close of the second period of Shakespeare's writings, and have surveyed the three-fold series of plays which belong to it. An abundance of poetic reflections, and of moral ideas and truths, meet us in these works, and have at all times fascinated us; but in the manner in which we have considered and grouped them, they seem to bring the poet himself personally somewhat nearer to us. We cannot have failed to perceive that there was manifold harmony in the design that originated these plays, and that here and there they were penetrated by the same ethical idea, however different were the subjects. Several characters appeared to us as transcripts of the poet's mind; various opinions, truths, and situations, treated with especial emphasis, seem to remind us of the poet's own experiences. We stated before, at the commencement of this second period, that after a survey of the works belonging to it we would return to the history of Shakespeare's life, and search if possibly we might discover a spiritual thread by which to trace a connection between the poems and the poet's life. If such a relation exists, it can only be sought for in Shakespeare's sonnets, for they are the only productions of the poet which afford us an immediate glance into his own inward life. It is, therefore, incumbent upon us, before we take a view of the further fortunes of the poet's life, to cast a glance upon this series of poems.

Shakespeare's sonnets are occasional poems, which were not originally intended for publication. The first mention of them is in Meres' 'Wits Treasury' in 1598. He designates them entirely as private poems, calling them 'Shakespeare's sugred Sonnets among his private friends,' over which the sweete wittie soule of Ovid' had passed. Immediately after this com

1 Goethe writes, in 1787, 'not a syllable of them but was lived, experienced, thought, enjoyed, suffered.'

Assuredly no true poet has ever composed in the random, extempore manner of our so-called German 'romantic' poets!

mendation, and it seems attracted by it, a bookseller named W. Jaggard hunted out these sonnets, and published in 1599, under the title of 'The Passionate Pilgrim,' a collection of short miscellaneous poems, among which were some avowedly by other poets; a few sonnets out of Love's Labour's Lost were inserted; two others upon the theme of Venus and Adonis might easily have been suggested by Shakespeare's poem on this subject, and have been composed by another pen; only two sonnets of the series of 'private poems' did the piratical publisher succeed in capturing. We may conclude from this that these poems were carefully kept secret; perhaps, also, there were no other sonnets of Shakespeare than the collection which was subsequently published in a more complete form. They appeared at the same time with the supplementary poem of 'The Lover's Complaint,' 1609, under the title: Shakespeare's Sonnets. Never before imprinted.' A mysterious obscurity surrounds even now this manifestly legitimate edition. It has the appearance of not being published by the poet himself. Contrary to all custom, the publisher T. T. (Thomas Thorpe) wrote a dedication to them, and this indeed to an unknown individual, designated only by the initials Mr. W. H., whom he styles the onlie begetter of these sonnets,' and to whom he wishes 'all happinesse and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet.'

The sonnets of Shakespeare, from the mystery in which they were veiled with respect to this 'begetter,' and from the obscurity of their whole purport, have ever been a perplexity to the interpreter and biographer; and in the only clear and distinct part of this purport, they have been a perplexity to the admirers of the poet. The first 126 sonnets in the collection are addressed to a friend; the last 28, the contents of which we have before characterised, bespeak that intercourse with a lightminded woman which was an outrage to all who wished to see no defect in the poet. But even the greater part, it was here and there believed, must be interpreted to the disadvantage of the poet. With such blind prejudice were these poems long read, that as late as Malone's time they all, even the first 126, were believed to have been addressed to a woman! And even after it had happily been ascertained that they were intended for a male friend, Chalmers came with his 'Apology for the believers in the Shakespeare papers,' in 1797, and explained that the person to whom they were addressed was Queen Elizabeth! When at length it was established (a fact at the outset impossible to be mistaken) that the sonnets were written

to a young friend, the enthusiastic and amorous style awakened a severe suspicion, from which even other poets of the time were not free. It belonged to the superabundant style of this Italian school of poetry, as it did to the complimentary character of the age, that an unmeasured expression of flattery and tenderness distinguished all writers of that day, and all clients of noble art-patrons from Naples to London. Shakespeare, in the dedication of his Lucrece to the Earl of Southampton, speaks of the love without end' which he devoted to him; Ben Jonson subscribes himself to Dr. Donne as his 'true lover;' Shakespeare also in his sonnets call his favourite young friend his 'lovely boy.' This was in harmony with the style of the age, although the age itself did not always thus regard it. Barnfield, in his Passionate Shepherd' (1595), bewails in a series of sonnets his love for a beautiful youth; it was an innocent imitation of one of Virgil's Eclogues; but the same construction was put upon it as upon Shakespeare's sonnets. On closer consideration this revealed itself. But uncertainty still prevailed as to the youth who won from Shakespeare such extraordinary deep affection or such shallow pompous flattery. It was of no use for interpreters to suggest that the sonnets should be regarded as if they were merely addressed to a creature of the imagination, as if they were fictions of the fancy, and as if they had been written in the name of other friends; they must indeed have had scarcely a presentiment of the nature of this realistic poet seriously to believe that he had used his pen thus dipped in his own heart's blood in the hire of another, or that he could ever with his free choice have suffered his art to depict so strange a fiction as that most strange connection delineated in these sonnets. For where the subjects are distinct, where profound reflections and feelings occupy the poet, what in all the world could have induced him to utter these emotions of his soul in the form of amorous outpourings to a friend, if such a friend were not truly and bodily at his side, sharing his inner life? We are too much accustomed to see this form of sonnet only employed in the idle play of forced fancy among spiritualistic poets. But if the Shakespeare sonnets are really to be distinguished above others, they are so only because a warm life lies within them, because actual circumstances of life appear even under the pale colouring of this form of poetry, and because the full pulsation of a deeply excited heart penetrates the thick veil of poetic formalism.

It is clear that the sonnets are addressed only to one and the same youth; even the last twenty-eight sonnets to a woman relate from their purport to the one connection between Shakespeare and his young friend; and Regis, in his German translations of the sonnets, has justly perceived that these should properly be arranged with the sonnets 40-42. The sonnettist says himself that he is continually expressing one old love in a new form. The same caressing tone ever returns, even after it has been interrupted by more serious subjects of discussion; the 'sweet boy' is the poet's bud and rose to the last. If we must even admit, as has been often the case, that the sonnets originated at great intervals of time, the poet has himself told us why he continues even at a later period to ascribe in poetic fiction the bloom of youth to his friend; he would, he says in sonnet 108, 'like prayers divine, each day say over the very same, counting no old thing old;' his 'eternal love' weighed not the dust and injury of age. To this ever-loved one Shakespeare assigns beauty, birth, learning, and riches; from the most superficial reading it is evident that he was a young man of high rank in society, whose distance from the poet rendered it necessary that their mutual relation should be concealed from the world. was evidently on account of this outward incongruity that the sonnets, when they appeared, were neither dedicated by Shakespeare himself, nor was the name of the only begetter' designated by the publisher; indeed, we may admit with certainty that the initials Mr. W. H. were intended to mislead. The begetter, that is the person to whom the sonnets were addressed, was evidently not of the middle class. Collier and others, indeed, have understood by the 'begetter' only the procurer who collected the sonnets for the publisher, but the publisher himself in the dedication plainly designates that 'begetter' as the very man to whom Shakespeare in the sonnets promised immortality through his verse. This 'begetter' is necessarily the same man whom the 38th sonnet calls in a similar sense 'the tenth muse' and the 'argument' which never suffers the poet to want 'subject to invent;' the same man whom the 78th sonnet enjoins to be 'most proud' of the poet's works, because their influence is his, and born of him.'

It

That the man to whom the sonnets in the edition of 1609 are dedicated is therefore the man to whom they were addressed is quite indubitable. We shall scarcely guess his name, however, from the initials Mr. W. H., by which the dedication designates him, as they were evidently intended to deceive. They might