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The Tempest essay features Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
famous critique based on his legendary and influential
Shakespeare notes and lectures.
THERE is a sort of improbability with which we are
shocked in dramatic representation, not less than in
a narrative of real life. Consequently, there must be
rules respecting it; and as rules are nothing but means
to an end previously ascertained—(inattention to
which simple truth has been the occasion of all the
pedantry of the French school),— we must first
determine what the immediate end or object of the drama
is. And here, as I have previously remarked, I find
two extremes of critical decision;—the French,
which evidently presupposes that a perfect delusion
is to be aimed at,—an opinion which needs no fresh
confutation; and the exact opposite to it, brought forward
by Dr. Johnson, who supposes the auditors throughout
in the full reflective knowledge of the contrary. In
evincing the impossibility of delusion, he makes no
sufficient allowance for an intermediate state, which
I have before distin-guished by the term, illusion,
and have attempted to illustrate its quality and character
by reference to our mental state, when dreaming. In
both cases we simply do not judge the imagery to be
unreal; there is a negative reality, and no more. Whatever,
therefore, tends to prevent the mind from placing itself,
or being placed, gradually in that state in which the
images have such negative reality for the auditor, destroys
this illusion, and is dramatically improbable.
Now the production of this effect—a sense of
improbability—will depend on the degree of excitement
in which the mind is supposed to be. Many things would
be intoler-able in the first scene of a play, that would
not at all interrupt our enjoyment in the height of
the interest, when the narrow cockpit may be made to
hold
The vasty field of France, or we may cram
Within its wooden 'O the very casqnes
That did affright the air at Agincourt.
Again, on the other hand, many obvious improbabilities
will be endured, as belonging to the groundwork of the
story rather than to the drama itself, in the first
scenes, which would disturb or disentrance us from all
illusion in the acme of our excitement; as for instance,
Lear's division of his kingdom, and the banishment of
Cordelia.
But, although the other excellences of the drama besides
this dramatic probability, as unity of interest, with
distinctness and subordination of the characters, and
appropriateness of style, are all, so far as they tend
to increase the inward excitement, means towards accomplishing
the chief end, that of producing and supporting this
willing illusion,—yet they do not on that account
cease to be ends themselves; and we must remember that,
as such, they carry their own justification with them,
as long as they do not contravene or interrupt the total
illusion. It is not even always, or of necessity, an
objection to them, that they prevent the illusion from
rising to as great a height as it might otherwise have
attained;—it is enough that they are simply compatible
with as high a degree of it as is requisite for the
purpose. Nay, upon particular occasions, a palpable
improbability may be hazarded by a great genius for
the express purpose of keeping down the interest of
a merely instrumental scene, which would otherwise make
too great an impression for the harmony of the entire
illusion. Had the panorama been invented in the time
of Pope Leo X., Raffael would still, I doubt not, have
smiled in contempt at the regret, that the broomtwigs
and scrubby bushes at the back of some of his grand
pictures were not as probable trees as those in the
exhibition.
The Tempest is a specimen of the purely romantic drama,
in which the interest is not historical, or depen-dent
upon fidelity of portraiture, or the natural connexion
of events,—but is a birth of the imagination, and
rests only on the coaptation and union of the elements
granted to, or assumed by, the poet. It is a species
of drama which owes no allegiance to time or space,
and in which, therefore, errors of chronology and geography—no
mortal sins in any species—are venial faults, and
count for nothing. It addresses itself entirely to the
imaginative faculty; and although the illusion may be
assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated
scenery and decorations of modem times, yet this sort
of assistance is dangerous. For the principal and only
genuine excitement ought to come from within,—from
the moved and sympathetic imagination; whereas, where
so much is addressed to the mere external senses of
seeing and hearing, the spiritual vision is apt to languish,
and the attraction from without will withdraw the mind
from the proper and only legitimate interest which is
intended to spring from within.
The romance opens with a busy scene admirably appropriate
to the kind of drama, and giving, as it were, the keynote
to the whole harmony. It prepares and initiates the
excitement required for the entire piece, and yet does
not demand any thing from the spectators, which their
previous habits had not fitted them to understand. It
is the bustle of a tempest, from which the real horrors
are abstracted;—therefore it is poetical, though
not in strictness natural—(the distinction to which
I have so often alluded)—and is purposely restrained
from concentering the interest on itself, but used merely
as an induction or tuning for what is to follow.
In the second scene, Prospero's speeches, till the
entrance of Ariel, contain the finest example, I remember,
of retro-spective narration for the purpose of exciting
immediate interest, and putting the audience in possession
of all the information necessary for the understanding
of the plot.
Pro. Mark his condition, and th,' event; then tell
me,
If this might be a brother. Mira. I should sin,
To think but nobly of my grandmother ;
Good wombs have bore bad sons.
Pro. Now the condition, &c.
Theobald has a note upon this passage, and suggests
that Shakspeare placed It thus:—
Pro. Good wombs have bore bad sous,—
Now the condition.
Mr. Coleridge writes in the margin: 'I cannot but
believe that Theobald is quite right.'— Ed.
Observe, too, the perfect probability of the moment
chosen by Prospero (the very Shakspeare himself, as
it were, of the tempest) to open out the truth to his
daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how completely
any thing that might have been disagreeable to us in
the magician, is reconciled and shaded in the humanity
and natural feelings of the father. In the very first
speech of Miranda the simplicity and tenderness of her
character are at once laid open;— it would have
been lost in direct contact with the agitation of the
first scene. The opinion once prevailed, but, happily,
is now abandoned, that Fletcher alone wrote for women;—
the truth is, that with very few, and those partial,
exceptions, the female characters in the plays of Beaumont
and Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not decent;
when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakspeare all
the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the
sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that continuates
society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity
unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the
analytic processes, but in that same equipoise of the
faculties, during which the feelings are representative
of all past experience,—not of the individual only,
but of all those by whom she has been educated, and
their predecessors even up to the first mother that
lived. Shakspeare saw that the want of prominence, which
Pope notices for sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of
the woman's character, and knew that it arose not from
any deficiency, but from the more exquisite harmony
of all the parts of the moral being constituting one
living total of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed,
in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience,
constancy, fortitude,—shown in all of them as following
the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and
happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive
faculty, sees all things in and by the light of the
affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations
of love alone. In all the Shakspearian women there is
essentially the same foundation and principle ; the
distinct individuality and variety are merely the result
of the modification of circumstances, whether in Miranda
the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katherine the
queen.
But to return. The appearance and characters of the
super or ultra-natural servants are finely contrasted.
Ariel has in every thing the airy tint which gives the
name; and it is worthy of remark that Miranda is never
directly brought into comparison with Ariel, lest the
natural and human of the one and the supernatural of
the other should tend to neutralize each other; Caliban,
on the other hand, is all earth, all condensed and gross
in feelings and Images; he has the dawnings of understanding
without reason or the moral sense, and in him, as in
some brute animals, this advance to the intellectual
faculties, without the moral sense, is marked by the
appearance of vice. For it is in the primacy of the
moral, being only that man is truly human; in his intellectual
powers he is certainly approached by the brutes, and,
man's whole system duly considered, those powers cannot
be considered other than means to an end, that is, to
morality.
In this scene, as it proceeds, is displayed the impression
made by Ferdinand and Miranda on each other ; it is
love at first sight;—
at the first sight
They have chang'd eyes:—
and it appears to me, that in all cases of real love,
it is at one moment that it takes place. That moment
may have been prepared by previous esteem, admiration,
or even affection,—yet love seems to require a
momentary act of volition, by which a tacit bond of
devotion is imposed,— a bond not to be thereafter
broken without violating what should be sacred in our
nature. How finely is the true Shakspearian scene contrasted
with Dryden's vulgar alteration of it in which a mere
ludicrous psychological experiment, as it were, is tried—displaying
nothing but indelicacy without passion. Prospero's interruption
of the courtship has often seemed to me to have no sufficient
motive; still his alleged reason—
lest too light winning
Make the prize light—
is enough for the ethereal connections of the romantic
imagination, although it would not be so for the historical.
Fer. Yes, faith, and all his Lords, the Duke of
Milan,
And his brave son, being twain.
Theobald remarks that no body was lost in the wreck;
and yet that no such character is introduced in the
fable, as the Duke of Milan's son. Mr. C. notes: 'Must
not Ferdinand have believed be was lost in the fleet
that the tempest scattered?'—Ed.
The whole courting scene, indeed, in the beginning
of the third act, between the lovers, is a masterpiece;
arid the first dawn of disobedience in the mind of Miranda
to the command of her father is very finely drawn, so
as to seem the working of the Scriptural command Thou
shalt leave father and mother, &c. O! with what
exquisite purity this scene is conceived and executed!
Shakspeare may sometimes be gross, but I boldly say
that he is always moral and modest. Alas! in this our
day decency of manners is preserved at the expense of
morality of heart, and delicacies for vice are allowed,
whilst grossness against it is hypocritically, or at
least morbidly, condemned.
In this play are admirably sketched the vices generally
accompanying a low degree of civilization; and in the
first scene of the second act Shakspeare has, as in
many other places, shown the tendency in bad men to
indulge in scorn and contemptuous expressions, as a
mode of getting rid of their own uneasy feelings of
inferiority to the good, and also, by making the good
ridiculous, of rendering the transition of others to
wickedness easy. Shakspeare never puts habitual scorn
into the mouths of other than bad men, as here in the
instances of Antonio and Sebastian. The scene of the
intended assassination of Alonzo and Gonzalo is an exact
counterpart of the scene between Macbeth and his lady,
only pitched in a lower key throughout, as de-signed
to be frustrated and concealed, and exhibiting the same
profound management in the manner of familiarizing a
mind, not immediately recipient, to the suggestion of
guilt, by associating the proposed crime with something
ludicrous or out of place,—something not habitually
matter of reverence. By this kind of sophistry the imagination
and fancy are first bribed to contemplate the suggested
act, and at length to become acquainted with it. Observe
how the effect of this scene is heightened by contrast
with another counterpoint of it in low life,—that
between the conspirators Stephano, Caliban, and Trinculo
in the second scene of the third act, in which there
are the same essential characteristics.
In this play and in this scene of it are also shown
the springs of the vulgar in politics,—of that
kind of politics which is inwoven with human nature.
In his treatment of this subject, wherever it occurs,
Shakspeare is quite peculiar. In other writers we find
the particular opinions of the individual; in Massinger
it is rank republicanism; in Beaumont and Fletcher even
jure divino principles are carried to excess;—but
Shakspeare never promulgates any party tenets. He is
always the philosopher and the moralist, but at the
same time with a profound veneration for all the established
institutions of society, and for those classes which
form the permanent elements of the state— especially
never introducing a professional character, as such,
otherwise than as respectable. If he must have any name,
he should be styled a philosophical aristocrat, delight-ing
in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency
to bind one age to another, and in that distinction
of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession,
all enjoy the advantages. Hence, again, you will observe
the good nature with which he seems always to make sport
with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational
animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content
with holding up its absurdities to its face; and sometimes
you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority,
something like that in which a father speaks of the
rogueries of a child. See the good-humoured way in which
he describes Stephano passing from the most licentious
freedom to absolute despotism over Trinculo and Caliban.
The truth is, Shak-speare's characters are all genera
intensely individualized; the results of meditation,
of which observation supplied the drapery and the colours
necessary to combine them with each other. He had virtually
surveyed all the great component powers and impulses
of human nature,—had seen that their different
combinations and subordinations were in fact the individualizers
of men, and showed how their harmony was produced by
reciprocal disproportions of excess or deficiency. The
language in which these truths are expressed was not
drawn from any set fashion, but from the profoundest
depths of his moral being, and is therefore for all
ages.
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