SHAKESPEARE AS A HISTORIAN.

THE spectators of Henry VIII. at the Lyceum have an unequalled opportunity for entering into the spirit of a play which must often have recalled to its readers, till they were reassured by the theory which questions its Shakespearian authorship, the conclusion of that eminent critic, George III.:

Shakespeare wrote sad stuff, but we musn't say so." A play which might be cited with equal felicity as an illustration of the views of Dr. Lingard or Mr. Fronde—which presents its hero at first as a greedy and insolent bully, without a single rise into pure or disinterested feeling, and then transforms him into a saint, may be not unjustly described as a moral laarlequinade. The transformation-scene, moreover, is only one incident in a string of incoherences and a bundle of problems. Which is the real Henry ? Is the King a Royal Tartuffe, or a bluff, impetuous John Bull What is the real Wolsey? Is the Cardinal a wily actor, choosing the per- sonage of the saint when that of the successful courtier has become impossible ? or—bat we really cannot classify the per- plexities he suggests into coherent alternatives. He is an amalgam of obstinately incompatible conceptions, and none are carefully worked out even for the moment. His finest reflections are dramatically false, and bear signs of impatience when taken alone. Even the pathetic lament which will always recur to every English ear with the name of Wolsey, contains passages which show how carelessly it was written. The lines, "And when I am forgotten, as I shall be, And sleep in dull, cold marble, where no mention Of me must more be beard of,"

remind us of a passage in a once popular book—Hemy's "Meditations among the Tombs "—where the visitor to a funeral vault is made to exclaim, as if in disappointment : "Not one trace of cheerful society !" The Cardinal is sup- posed, we presume, to deplore a vanished fame, and the loneliness of an unvisited tomb. But we have to stretch the words to get out of them even so much meaning as this, and it is poor enough then.

This ribaldry is the result of a perusal of Henry VIII. We

have never so vividly realised, as in watching the representa- tion of the splendid masque provided for us at the Lyceum, that Shakespeare (or his imitator) wrote for spectators, not readers. The images, which seem blurred and distorted in the study, fall into focus in the theatre. Inconsistencies do not disappear, but they cease to emerge. The accessories, which might seem to appeal only to a childish or a vulgar mind, do in fact set forth the very meaning of a representa- tion associating a pageant of earthly glory with a sermon on its transience. Mr. Irving, we will venture to say, gives us the play far better than Shakespeare could have done, for the later rendering resembles far more nearly that actual world of regal pomp which it was the poet's object to reproduce. There is a close connection between the depths of our nature and its surface. In some sense,

the intermediate region (however we explain the para- dox) is more remote from either than they are from each other. In the crash of dance-music, or at a picture-gallery that recalled mainly what was external in the past, we bare all felt at times as if the "painted veil that men call life" were suddenly lifted, and showed a strange beyond. Perhaps the mirth of a festive gathering or the attention of artistic criticism is interrupted only for a moment by such emotions, yet it is these moments which give us the clue to some of the most perennial experiences of life. They bridge the chasm of thousands of years, they show us as our intimate acquaintance Kings or philosophers who lacked knowledge now familiar to schoolchildren, and teach us how far the sentiments that seem most fleeting and are most fitful, exceed in their en- during sway the permanence of all that the mere understanding can grasp and analyse.

Turn, for instance, to the most Shakespearian of historians, open the History of Herodotns, and you may find a rich and brilliant variation to the melody of the first two acts of our play in the story of Crcesus. The musicians are separated by two millenniums, but their harmonies correspond, and their melody is identical. "0 Cronus!" says the Athenian sage whom Herodotus has violated history to bring to the Court of the Lydian monarch, "I see thee possessed of boundless wealth and the King of many peoples, but I cannot call thee supremely happy till I know how thy life is to end." Those words might supply a fit motto for Henry VIII. The change from braggart to philosophic saint, which on the page of Shakespeare strikes us as mere incoherence, becomes on the page of Herodotus a clue to the inner meaning of history. It is announced by a harmonious prelude, and explained by an adequate series of events. The King who ascends the blazing pile kindled to consume him a baffled tyrant, and descends from it a wise and far- seeing counsellor to his conqueror, is Wolsey made intelligible. He shows us that man is incomplete till he knows adversity, —as the lesson exists in an ideal world, which detaches and expands the hidden truth of life. It is the world of reality which is lit up by such imaginations, even when they seem most dissimilar to anything we know in the world of fact.

Doubtless the lesson of the mutability of earthly splendour (if we must translate the Shakespearian music into our own trite words) would be much better illustrated by a play showing us human inconsistencies in place of such obstinate incoherences as we meet with in Henry and Wolsey. But these incoherences lose their importance when we see that it is not Henry or Wolsey who is the true hero of the play, but a being more august than King or Cardinal,—t hat mystic Fate whose whispers are heard through the pageants of earthly glory, whose full proportions are revealed only in the colossal design of history, but whose pathos finds an echo in humble and obscure lives, and is intelligible to every one who has had leisure to feel, and space to remember. A scrap of an old letter suggests to many an unknown pilgrim through this life all the emotions of Wolsey's "long farewell to all his greatness." There need not have been any greatness to teach the meaning of that to which the famous soliloquy owes its perennial' power. It is enough to have known the glow and fervour of life, and that which succeeds it. It is enough, we mean, to enable us to appropriate and respond to the inter- pretation of genius. The lesson itself is most intelligible on a grand scale, and with illustrations coloured with earthly splendour, and associated with the pomp and pageantry of Courts.

The "extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty" with which, according to Sir Henry Wotton, the play was set

forth in 1613, led to the Globe Theatre being burnt down. On that occasion, we are told, it was performed under the title Allis True. The very fact that the poet could not allow him-

self an unfettered treatment of characters and circumstances so recent, while it impaired the literary value of the play, must have added much to the moral impressiveness of the spectacle.

The pageant presented at the coronation of Anne Boleyn needs no words to fill out its meaning. The eager throng of spectators, the joyous throb throughout the expectant crowd at her approach, the flower-bedecked houses, the crowded windows, and the bright procession, holding the young bride as in a frame of glittering splendour-all affects us the more forcibly because a poet writing in the last days of Elizabeth—or in the first of her successor—could not exhibit

more than half the picture of her mother's fate, or even com- plete distinctly what he painted. We fill in the sequel with

traditions more effective than even the words of Shakespeare. The bright glimpse of the laughing face in its gorgeous surroundings affects us like the glimpse of Marie Antoinette at Versailles in the eloquence of Burke. We do not need the horror that succeeded, to recur in more than unspoken suggestion. "I would not be a Queen," says Anne to the sarcastic old lady ; and the words, false as they were, take a sense in which they probably convey more truth than any ever spoken by those coral lips. Even the words,- " I swear, 'tis better to be lowly born, And range with humble livers in content, Than to be perked up in a glistering grief, And wear a golden sorrow," seem to take something from the force of the tragedy. A "glistering sorrow" is too weak for the lurid vista of the second procession in which Anne Boleyn took part. The compassion she expresses for her predecessor, as sincere as it is fugitive, reminds us of the days, so near at hand, when Catherine must have been remembered by her with envy.

And if the poet who paints her triumph cannot admit to his picture the black shadow of her ruin, he must have felt it all the more.

The representation at the Lyceum, we are bold enough to believe, excels the representation at the Globe not only in what it exhibits, but in what it omits. As we are allowed to doubt whether, after all, we are criticising our greatest poet, we may avow our belief that the excision of the bulk of the fifth act disentangles the true drama from what is in effect, if not in fact, an embarrassing interpolation. After the hero and heroine have passed from splendour to ruin, the dragging- out of the drama by the rise of Cranmer, even though it pro- vide us, as, indeed, does every name in the play except the King's, with another example of the like vivid contrast, must be confessed to interrupt the interest of the whole with a dis- proportionate and ill-supported episode. We read more truly the production of a poet when we discard what is temporary in his work; and to pass at once from the death of Catherine to the birth of Elizabeth, is surely to give the drama unity and completeness. None are better interpreters of genius than those who cut away its accidental accretions. As it is, the birth of one Queen comes in to emphasise with its opening vista the lesson brought from the death-bed of another, with no entangling interruption of minor interests. The sombre and the brilliant stand in that close and telling contrast which gives the drama its power, and all is omitted which interferes with that effect.

When we pass from the manager to the actor, we are inclined to more criticism, or rather, we should be, if our intention were to criticise the play as a whole, and not to suggest a few reflections springing from the representation.

We cannot say that Wolsey's transformation-scene is managed ideally. We would have had a long pause between all else and the "long farewell to all my greatness,"—a slow, bewildered air, as in awaking from a vivid dream. Mr. Irving's Cardinal Wolsey, moreover, would, it seems to us, better suit a present- ment of Cardinal Richelieu. Surely the butcher's son was not intended to suggest the wily, astute courtier, the polished actor, the wearer of an unchanging mask, who is brought before us at the Lyceum. One observation, comparatively insignificant, seems to us enough to demolish such a view,— the fact that Shakespeare (or his imitator) has made his Wolsey more careless than the real Wolsey was. The dramatic excuse for Henry's sudden rejection of his favourite— the blunder by which a letter to the Pope unfolding the Plans

of the Cardinal's unscrupulous ambition is forwarded in the packet sent to the King—is not, indeed, the invention of the poet, for it happened with another ecclesiastic; but it is no part of the biography of Wolsey. Shakespeare has made his hero commit a blunder impossible, we should think, to the real Wolsey, but rural more impossible to the finished diplomat whom Mr. Irving suggests to us. However, although we would

have had Wolsey more recall the butcher's son, and less suggest an experience of foreign Courts and a various exercise of difficult relations, the mistake is not an important one. To make the great Cardinal so much of an actor is, 'we should say, untrue to this particular creation of Shakespearian art, as well as to ; but it falls in with the general range Of Shakespearian ideas, and even points towards what is most characteristic in them. Shakespeare, like most other men,

great or small, was specially interested in his own art. It is true that he seems to have specially felt the slur which rested upon it, but that did not hinder him from realising the sense in which it was typical of life. "All the world's a stage," is a refrain that recurs in almost every great play, and in many, as it seems to us, with much more force than in its original utterance. The poet gives a voice to the dumb experience of humanity. There is no man or woman, probably, who has known anything that is worthy the name of experience, who has not felt at times :— 'This apparatus of position which makes up to the eyes of my fellow-men all that they mean when they speak my name,— this is not myself. The shadow I cast on their imagination is the result of circumstances as extrinsic to my true being as the dress the actor lays aside. Within these surroundings hides a human spirit that perhaps one or two,' or it may be not one, has caught a glimpse of for a moment. I have played a part—played it decently perhaps, or perhaps villainously—but I have never for more than a. moment had leisure and opportunity to be myself.' This, we repeat, is the experience of humanity. But when the poet catches its faint whisper, and sets it to his sonorous music, il. seems an experience as rare as his own genius. In truth, it is. as common as the deeper emotions of human nature, them- selves, no doubt, not absolutely universal in their range. It is this realm of the distinctively human, as distinguished from the exceptionally gifted on the one hand, and on the other, a frivolous or merely external life missing the true stature of a man, which makes the horizon of the great artist. He uses pomp and pageantry to light up experience known in commonplace homes ; he shows, under the limelight of Royalty, the workings of experience that all can understand who leave life knowing anything of its regrets, its hopes, and its undying memories.