Preface to Shakespeare | Page 3

other;
to make them meet in rapture and part in agony; to fill their mouths
with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as
nothing human ever was distressed; to deliver them as nothing human
ever was delivered, is the business of a modern dramatist. For this
probability is violated, life is misrepresented, and language is depraved.
But love is only one of many passions, and as it has no great influence
upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who

caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw
before him. He knew, that any other passion, as it was regular or
exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity.
Characters thus ample and general were not easily discriminated and
preserved, yet perhaps no poet ever kept his personages more distinct
from each other. I will not say with Pope, that every speech may be
assigned to the proper speaker, because many speeches there are which
have nothing characteristical; but, perhaps, though some may be
equally adapted to every person, it will be difficult to find, any that can
be properly transferred from the present possessor to another claimant.
The choice is right, when there is reason for choice.
Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated
characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the
writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a
dwarf; and he that should form his expectations of human affairs from
the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakespeare has
no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as
the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the
same occasion: Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is
level with life. Other writers disguise the most natural passions and
most frequent incidents: so that he who contemplates them in the book
will not know them in the world: Shakespeare approximates the remote,
and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not
happen, but if it were possible, its effects would be probably such as he
has assigned; and it may be said, that he has not only shewn human
nature as it acts in real exigences, but as it would be found in trials, to
which it cannot be exposed. This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare,
that his drama is the mirrour of life; that he who has mazed his
imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up
before him, may here be cured of his delirious extasies, by reading
human sentiments in human language; by scenes from which a hermit
may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the
progress of the passions.
His adherence to general nature has exposed him to the censure of
criticks, who form their judgments upon narrower principles. Dennis
and Rhymer think his Romans not sufficiently Roman; and Voltaire
censures his kings as not completely royal. Dennis is offended, that

Menenius, a senator of Rome, should play the buffoon; and Voltaire
perhaps thinks decency violated when the Danish Usurper is
represented as a drunkard. But Shakespeare always makes nature
predominate over accident; and if he preserves the essential character,
is not very careful of distinctions superinduced and adventitious. His
story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on men. He knew
that Rome, like every other city, had men of all dispositions; and
wanting a buffoon, he went into the senate-house for that which the
senate-house would certainly have afforded him. He was inclined to
shew an usurper and a murderer not only odious but despicable, he
therefore added drunkenness to his other qualities, knowing that kings
love wine like other men, and that wine exerts its natural power upon
kings. These are the petty cavils of petty minds; a poet overlooks the
casual distinction of country and condition, as a painter, satisfied with
the figure, neglects the drapery.
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