MR. STOPFORD BROOKE ON SHAKESPEARE.* THE interest of the Shakespearean

drama does not diminish. "Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale." Occasionally, as part of a pose, a clever farceur like Mr. Bernard Shaw may protest that Shakespeare is overrated, if not altogether obsolete, but this is only as a pose. Mr. Stopford Brooke's volume of lectures is the latest wreath laid upon the poet's tomb. The plays discussed are Midsummer Night's Dream, _Romeo and Juliet, Richard II., Richard III., Merchant of 'Venice, As You Like It, Macbeth, Coriolanu-s, Winter's Tale, Tempest. Thus in only one case—the play of Macbeth—does Mr. Brooke traverse the same ground as Mr. Bradley in his recently published lectures on Shakespearean tragedy. Perhaps in no better way can we appraise Mr. Stopford Brooke's con- tribution to criticism than by a comparison of his treat- ment of this tragedy with Mr. Bradley's. As to method, it would be true to say that what Mr. Brooke aims at giving us is an impressionist record of the effect made by the play upon a sympathetic mind, while Mr. Brad- ley attempts the more laborious task of giving this imaginative experience by way of detailed analysis. We should anticipate, therefore, that the one account would prove more minutely accurate, and that the other would present the leading features of the play with greater intensity. And on the whole this anticipation proves true ; and the agreement as to the broad significance of the play, despite superficial differences, is consoling to the student. It may be interesting to mention a few of these differences. The first of any im- portance concerns the witches. Mr. Bradley makes a point of insisting that they are witches and nothing more, and he tells us that their qualities and behaviour are all drawn straight • On Ten Plays of Shakespeare. By Stopford A. Brooke. London : A. Constable and Co. [7e. ad. net.] from Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft. Mr. Brooke identifies them with those spiritual beings on whom Lady Macbeth calls— "Murdering ministers

Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief "—

and describes them as "not only creatures that have power over the natural forces which do harm to men, but also creatures that have a spiritual power over the soul which has cherished guilty thoughts." Then he adds :— "Shakespeare from the common notions of witchcraft, added to this conception (since he was a playwright) the cave, the cauldron, the gruesome ingredients in the wicked broth, the wild and withered aspect of the Weird Sisters, the skinny finger and the choppy lip, the grim mirth of these inhuman Things. These additions did not interfere with the spiritual conception. They belonged to the witches only when they materialised themselves for a material purpose. And, as I think, no one despised them more than the witches themselves. Indeed these material adjuncts were illusions. They vanish with those that formed them into the filthy air from whence they came."

A reader with the play and the two commentaries before him would perhaps decide that although Mr. Stopford Brooke scores a point by his last sentence, the scene where Hecate rates the witches goes to show that Shakespeare meant them to be witches, as witches were conceived in his day ; while at the same time their significance in the play is what Mr. Brooke so eloquently describes. This significance Mr. Bradley also allows, for he says "The witches must represent not only the evil slumbering in the hero's soul, but all those obscurer influences of the evil around him in the world which aid his own ambition and the incitements of his wife."

Another much-debated point in this play is the Porter scene. This, as against Coleridge, both commentators defend : Mr. Bradley to the extent that no one but the author of the scene of Duncan's murder could have conceived it, though he does not consider the writing especially Shakespearean; while Mr. Brooke goes further :— " The Porter's soliloquy, his fancy of himself as porter of Hell- gate; his inventive conversation with those who seek admittance into hell ; his sudden, drunken turn that he is mistaken,—the place is too cold for hell ; his disquisition on the effects of drink; his sudden leap into poetic imagination= that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire '—are all in Shakespeare's manner and invention. I do not believe thero was another Elizabethan dramatist who could have written this."

But the main point of interest, of course, is the character of the hero himself. And here it is interesting to observe that both lay stress on Macbeth's imaginativeness, Mr. Stopford Brooke apparently thinking be does so for the first time, and Mr. Bradley stating in a footnote that he does not know who first called attention to this salient characteristic. From some fine paragraphs in Mr. Brooke's lecture we extract a few sentences :— " Imagination—that is his trouble ! It is this lively shaping, various imagination, continually multiplying new aspects of any- thing to be done, or that has been done, which is at the root of

his hesitations, his fears, his outbursts of agony Every-. thing he says in this play is poetically said, cast in keen imagina- tion's mould, thought and form equally good ; and rising easily, at times of great emotion, into words equal to the emotion Before, during, and after the murder this imagination, blown into a white heat by the intense passion of the hour, is so alive and powerful that it doubles the horror of the murder. It sees an air-drawn dagger. It blackens all Nature with this thought. It drags in the remotest things to increase the terror of the present —Hecate, Tarquin, whose strides towards his design are like those of withered murder with her sentinel the wolf. In the very midst of his slaughter he hears a voice : 'Sleep no more ! Macbeth bath murdered sleep,' and at the word his imagination takes fire and runs away from the horror of the moment into all the poetry of sleep This great imaginative power in a rude and ignorant time, and in a man who had no natural opportunity of expressing it in its proper forms, was sure to have, as its child, not only superstition, which is ignorant imagination in a wrong place, but also the fears which accompany superstition. Shakespeare lays this deep in Macbeth's tempera- ment. Its presence is one of the main keys to his thoughts and acts. What seems supernatural sets at once his nerves in a storm."

As to the interpretation of this imaginative nature our two critics differ. Mr. Bradley treats it as the channel through which Macbeth's better nature speaks to him :—

" Macbeth's better nature—to put the matter for clearness' sake too broadly—instead of speaking to him in the overt language of moral ideas, commands, and prohibitions, incorporates

itself in images which alarm and horrify His conscious or reflective mind moves chiefly among considerations of out- ward success and failure, while his inner being is convulsed by

conscience. And his inability to understand himself is repeated and exaggerated in the interpretations of actors and critics."

To this, it seems to us, it might fairly be replied that the nature of the conscience in the particular case must be inferred from the nature of the images which present them- selves. Accordingly, Mr. Stopford Brooke seems justified in refusing to use the word " conscience " of Macbeth :—

"If we would see Macbeth clearly we must not dwell on his conscience, of which so much is made, but on his sense of honour. They are, of course, related to one another, but the realm of each

is quite distinct Macbeth is honourable, but without the conscience which is honour's guard."

But here again we find Mr. Bradley agreeing, for he says in another place : "He has never, to put it pedantically, accepted

as the principle of his conduct the morality which takes shape in his imaginative fears." One curious difference of interpre- tation emerges as to the speech, "Had I but died an hour

before this chance." Mr. Brooke remarks on its cool, deliberate hypocrisy, its poetic turn, "as of an orator over the honoured dead"; Mr. Bradley, while allowing that it was meant to deceive, regards it as uttering at the same time Macbeth's profoundest feeling. Might not the views be recon- ciled by referring it to the class of " ironical " speeches, of which the play has many,—those which carry to the audience a different significance from that which they have to the actor who speaks them ? It seems hardly fair to parallel this speech, as Mr. Bradley does, with "Duncan is in his grave" and "Better be with the dead," which are almost soliloquies.

We have spent all our space upon one of Mr. Brooke's lectures ; but the reader may justly argue from the fine quality of this to the others in his book. They are all the product of a fresh and imaginative mind, alive to all the subtle influences of poetry, and capable of conveying its im- pressions to others. Perhaps the best of all are those upon As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet.