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Page 3
The censure which he has incurred by mixing comick and tragick
scenes, as it extends to all his works, deserves more consideration.
Let the fact be first stated, and then examined.
Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense
either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind;
exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes
of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of
proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing
the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of
another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his
wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity
of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many
mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.
Out of this chaos of mingled purposes and casualties the ancient
poets, according to the laws which custom had prescribed, selected
some the crimes of men, and some their absurdities; some the
momentous vicissitudes of life, and some the lighter occurrences;
some the terrours of distress, and some the gayeties of prosperity.
Thus rose the two modes of imitation, known by the names of tragedy
and comedy, compositions intended to promote different ends by
contrary means, and considered as so little allied, that I do not
recollect among the Greeks or Romans a single writer who attempted
both.
Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow
not only in one mind, but in one composition. Almost all his plays
are divided between serious and ludicrous characters, and, in the
successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce seriousness
and sorrow, and sometimes levity and laughter.
That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be
readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism
to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry
is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all
the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because
it includes both in its alterations of exhibition, and approaches
nearer than either to the appearance of life, by shewing how
great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one
another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general system
by unavoidable concatenation.
It is objected, that by this change of scenes the passions are
interrupted in their progression, and that the principal event,
being not advanced by a due gradation of preparatory incidents,
wants at last the power to move, which constitutes the perfection
of dramatick poetry. This reasoning is so specious, that it is
received as true even by those who in daily experience feel it to
be false. The interchanges of mingled scenes seldom fail to produce
the intended vicissitudes of passion. Fiction cannot move so much,
but that the attention may be easily transferred; and though it
must be allowed that pleasing melancholy be sometimes interrupted
by unwelcome levity, yet let it be considered likewise, that
melancholy is often not pleasing, and that the disturbance of one
man may be the relief of another; that different auditors have
different habitudes; and that, upon the whole, all pleasure consists
in variety.
The players, who in their edition divided our authour's works into
comedies, histories, and tragedies, seem not to have distinguished
the three kinds, by any very exact or definite ideas.
An action which ended happily to the principal persons, however
serious or distressful through its intermediate incidents, in
their opinion constituted a comedy. This idea of a comedy continued
long amongst us, and plays were written, which, by changing the
catastrophe, were tragedies to-day and comedies to-morrow.
Tragedy was not in those times a poem of more general dignity or
elevation than comedy; it required only a calamitous conclusion,
with which the common criticism of that age was satisfied, whatever
lighter pleasure it afforded in its progress.
History was a series of actions, with no other than chronological
succession, independent of each other, and without any tendency to
introduce or regulate the conclusion. It is not always very nicely
distinguished from tragedy. There is not much nearer approach to
unity of action in the tragedy of "Antony and Cleopatra", than in
the history of "Richard the Second". But a history might be continued
through many plays; as it had no plan, it had no limits.
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