SHAKSPEARE. From the German of W. SCHLEGEL. IN conformity with the plan | translations from Calderon made which we at first laid down, we their appearance. shall now proceed to treat of the English and Spanish theatres. We were compelled in passing to allude cursorily, on various occasions, sometimes to the one and sometimes to the other, partly for the sake of placing, by means of contrast, many ideas in a clearer light, and partly on account of the influence which these stages have had on the theatres of other countries. Both the English and Spaniards possess a very rich dramatic literature; both have had a number of fruitful dramatic poets of great talents, among whom even the least admired and celebrated, considered as a whole, display uncommon aptitude for dramatic animation and insight into the essence of theatrical effect. The history of their theatre has no connexion with that of the Italians and French; for it developed itself wholly from the fulness of its own strength without any foreign influence: the attempts to bring it back to an imitation of the ancients, or even of the French, have either been attended with no success, or not been made till a late period in the decay of the drama. The formation of these two stages is equally independent of each other; the Spanish poets were altogether unacquainted with the English; and in the older and most important period of the English theatre I could discover no trace any knowledge of Spanish plays, (though their novels and romances were certainly known;) and it was not till the time of Charles II. that of So many things among men have been handed down from century to century and from nation to nation, and the human mind has in general displayed such tardiness of invention, that originality in any department of mental exertion is every where a rare phenomenon. We are desirous of seeing the result of the efforts of enterprising heads when they proceed straight forward in invention, without concerning themselves with what has elsewhere been carried to a high degree of perfection; when they lay the foundation of the new edifice on uncovered ground, and derive all the preparations, all the building materials, from their own means. We participate, in some measure, in the joy of success, when we see them advance rapidly from their first helplessness and necessity to a finished mastery in their art. The history of the Grecian theatre would afford us this cheering prospect could we witness its rudest beginnings, which were not preserved, for they were not even committed to writing; but it is easy, when we compare together Eschylus and Sophocles to form some idea of the preceding period. The Greeks neither inherited nor borrowed their dramatic art from any other people; it was original and native, and for that very reason it could produce a living and powerful effect. But it ended with the period when Greeks imitated Greeks; namely, when the Alexandrian poets began learnedly and critically to compose dramas after the model of the great tragic writers. The reverse of this was the case with the Romans: they received the form and substance of their dramas from the Greeks; they never attempted to act according to their own discretion, and to express their own way of thinking; and thence they occupy so insignificant a place in the history of dramatic art. Among the nations of modern Europe, the English and Spaniards alone, as yet (for the German stage is but forming,) possess a theatre entirely original and national, which, in its own peculiar shape, has arrived at maturity. Those critics who consider the authority of the ancients as models to be such, that in poetry, as in all the other arts, there can be no salvation beyond the pale of imitation, affirm, that as the nations in question have not followed this course, they have brought nothing but irregular works on the stage, which, though they may possess occasional passages of splendour and beauty, as a whole, must ever be reprobated for barbarousness and want of form. We have already, in the introductory part of these lectures, stated our sentiments in a general manner respecting this way of thinking; but we must now examine this subject somewhat more closely. If the assertion were founded, all that distinguishes the works of the greatest English and Spanish dramatists, a Shakspeare and a Calderon, ought to rank them beneath the ancients; they would in no manner be of any importance for theory, and could at most appear remarkable, on the assumption that the obstinacy of these nations, in refusing to comply with the rules, might have afforded more ample scope to the poets to display their native originality, though at the expense of art. But even this assumption will, on a more narrow examination, appear extremely doubtful. The poetic spirit requires to be limited, that it may move within its range with a becoming liberty, as has been felt by all nations on the first invention of metre; it must act according to laws derivable from its own essence, otherwise its strength will be evaporated in boundless vacuity. The works of genius cannot therefore be allowed to be without form; but of this there is no danger. That we may answer this objection of want of form, we must first come to an understanding respecting the meaning of form, which most critics, and more es pecially those who insist on a stiff regularity, understand merely in a mechanical, and not in an organical sense. Form is mechanical when, through external influence, it is communicated to any material merely as an accidental addition without reference to its quality; as, for example, when we give a particular shape to a soft mass that it may retain the same after its induration. Organical form, again, is innate; it unfolds itself from within, and acquires its determination along with the complete developement of the germ. We every where discover such forms in nature throughout the whole range of living powers, from the crystallization of salts and minerals to plants and flowers, and from them to the human figure. In the fine arts, as well as in the province of nature, the highest artist, all genuine forms are organical, that is, determined by the quality of the work. In a word, the form is nothing but a significant exterior, the speaking physi by no destructive accidents, which gives a true evidence of its hidden essence. ognomy of each thing, disfigured | the conjecture will naturally occur to him, that the same, or, at least, a kindred principle must have prevailed in the developement of both. This comparison, however, of the English and Spanish theatre, in their common contrast with all the dramatic literature which has grown up from imitation of the ancients, has, so far as we know, never yet been attempted. Could we raise from the dead a country. man contemporary and intelligent admirer of Shakspeare, and another of Calderon, and introduce to their acquaintance the works of the poet to which they were stran. gers, they would both, without doubt, considering the subject rather from a national than a general point of view, enter with difficulty into the above idea, and have many objections to urge against it. But here a reconciling criticism must step in; and this perhaps may be best exercised by a German, who is free from the nationalities of either the English or Spaniards, yet friendly from inclination to both, and prevented by no jealousy from acknowledging the greatness which has been exhibited in other countries earlier Hence it is evident that the spirit of poetry, which, though imperishable, wanders as it were through different bodies, so often as it is newly born in the human race, must, from the nutrimental substance of an altered age, be fashioned into a body of a different conformation. The forms vary with the direction of the poetical sense; and when we give to the new kinds of poetry the old names, and judge of them according to the ideas conveyed by these names the application of the authority of classical antiquity which we make is altogether unjustifiable. No one should be tried before a tribunal to which he does not belong. We may safely admit, that the most of the dramatic works of the English and Spaniards are neither tragedies nor comedies in the sense of the ancients: they are romantic dramas. That the stage of a people who, in its foundation and formation, neither knew nor wished to know any thing of foreign models, will possess many peculiarities, and not only deviate from, but even exhibit a striking contrast to, the theatres of other nations who had a common model for imitation before their eyes, may be very easily supposed, and we should only be astonished were it otherwise. But when in two nations differing, in a physical, moral, political, and religious respect, so widely as the English and Spanish, the stages which arose at the same time without being known to each other possess, along with external and internal diversities, the most striking features of affinity, the attention of the most thoughtless must be turned to this phenomenon; and than in his own. The similarity of the English and Spanish theatres does not merely consist in the bold neglect of the unities of place and time, and in the mixture of comic and tragic ingredients: that they were unwilling or unable to comply with the rules and with reason (which, in the meaning of certain critics, are words of equal signification) may be considered as an evidence of properties of merely a negative description; it lies much deeper,. in the inmost substance of the fables, and in the essential relations, through which every deviating form becomes a true requi site that has its signification along with its validity. What they have in common with each other is the spirit of the romantic poetry dramatically pronounced. However, to explain ourselves with due limitation, the Spanish theatre, in our opinion, down to its decline and fall since the commencement of the eighteenth century, is almost altogether romantic; the English is only completely so in Shakspeare, its founder and greatest master: in later poets the romantic principle appears more or less degenerated, or is no longer perceivable, although the force introduced by it into the march of dramatic composition has been outwardly pretty well retained. The manner in which the different ways of thinking of two nations, a northern and southern, have been expressed; the former endowed with a gloomy, the latter with a glowing imagination; the one nation possessed of a scrutinizing seriousness disposed to withdraw within themselves, the other impelled outwardly by the violence of passion; this we shall be enabled to explain in the most satisfactory manner at the close of this section, when we come to institute a parallel between Shakspeare and Calderon, the only two poets who are entitled to be called great. Of the origin and essence of the romantic I treated in the first lecture, and I shall here, therefore, merely mention the subject in a brief manner. The antique art and poetry separate, in a strict manner, things which are dissimilar; the romantic delights in indissoluble mixtures; all contrarieties: nature and art, poetry and prose, seriousness and mirth, recollection and anticipation, spirituality and sensuality, terrestrial and celestial life and death are blended toge ther by them in the most intimate manner. As the oldest lawgivers delivered their mandatory instructions and prescriptions in measured melodies; as this is in a fa, bulous manner attributed to Or pheus, the first softener of the yet untamed race of mortals: in like manner the whole of the ancient poetry and art is as it were a rhythmical nomos (law) an harmonious promulgation of the permanently established legislation of a world submitted to a beautiful or der, and reflecting in itself the eternal images of things. The romantic poetry again is the expression of the secret attraction to a chaos which is concealed beneath the regulated creation even in its very bosom, and which is perpe. tually striving after new and wonderful births; the animating spirit of original love hovers here anew above the waters. The former is more simple, clear, and like to nature in the self-existent perfection of her separate works; the latter, notwithstanding its fragment-like appearance, approaches more to the secret of the universe. For the conception can only circumscribe each thing separately, but nothing can ever in truth exist separately; feeling perceives all in all at one and the same time. Respecting the poetical species with which we are here occupied, we compared the antique tragedy to a group in sculpture: the figures correspond to the characters, their grouping to the action, and to these the consideration in both productions of art is exclusively directed as the only subject exhibited. But the romantic drama must be viewed as a large picture, where not merely figure and motion are exhibited in richer groupes, but where even what surrounds the persons is also portray ed; where we see not merely the | nearest objects, but are allowed the prospect of a considerable distance, and all this under a magical light, which assists in giving to the impression that particular determination which may be wanted. Such a picture must be bounded in a less perfect manner than the group; for it is like a fragment cut out of the optic scene of the world. However the painter, by enclosing his foreground, by throwing the whole of his light and other means of giving due stability to the view towards the middle, will know that he must neither wander beyond the composition, nor omit any thing within it. In the representation of the figure, painting cannot compete with sculpture, while the former only exhibits it by a deception and from a single point of view; but, on the other hand, it communicates more life to its imitations, by colours which are made to express the finest gradations of mental expression in the countenance. The look which can be given only in a very imperfect manner by sculpture enables us in painting to read much deeper in the mind, and to perceive its lightest movements. Its peculiar charm, in short, consists in this, that it enables us to see in bodily objects what is least corporeal, namely, light and air. The very same description of beauties are peculiar to the romantic drama. It does not, like the old tragedy, separate seriousness and the action in a rigid manner from among the ingredients of life; it embraces at once the whole of the checkered drama with all its circumstances; and while it seems only to represent subjects brought accidentally together, it satisfies the indefinite demands of fancy, buries us in reflections on the in expressible signification of the objects which we view blended by distribution, proximity and distance, light and colouring, into one harmonious whole; and thus lends, as it were, a soul to the prospect before us. The alternation of times and places, supposing its influence on the mind to be included in the picture, and that it comes to the aid of the theatrical perspective with reference to what is indicated in the distance or half-concealed by the objects under which it is covered; the contrast of mirth and seriousness, supposing that in degree and kind they bear a relation to each other; finally, the mixture of dialogical and lyrical ingredients, by which the poet is enabled to transform, in a greater or less degree, his characters into poetical natures: these, in my opinion, are not mere licenses but true beauties in the romantic drama. In all these points, and in many others besides, we shall find the English and Spanish works, which are particularly deserving of that name, fully alike to each other, however different they may be in other respects. We proceed first to the English theatre, as it more early arrived at maturity than the Spanish. In both we must occupy ourselves more particularly with Shakspeare and Calderon, but in an inverted order. Shakspeare may be considered as the first of the English; any remarks on the earlier or contemporary antiquities of the English stage may be made in a review of its history. But Calderon had many predecessors; he is at once the summit and almost the conclusion of the dramatic art among the Spaniards. While I wish to speak with that brevity which the nature of my subject requires of a poet in the |