by virtue of it), what an unmatched master of stage management Shakspeare was. Witness, in this regard, the play of " Macbeth”— in some respects the greatest creation of the romantic mind. How the eye is held, the ear arrested, the heart enthralled. The scene opens with thunder, lightning, and the prophetic chorus of three witches. These vanish, and then, amid the throng and noise of a camp, with king and officers, comes a bleeding soldier, who tells, in passionate language, of the valour in a recent battle of two of the king's captains. In a moment more we are on the heath again, amid thunder, and with the witches; and to these enter the captains whose valour has been noised abroad. Presently we are in the King's palace, and when the court disappears, we are without the castle of Macbeth at Inverness. The crime on which the play hinges is here determined upon, and then the first curtain falls. The second curtain rises on a court of the castle at night. The King is asleep; the soldiers have drunk themselves sodden; and the castle itself is quiet; only the night is now unruly; the wind blows hard, and lamentations seem to be heard in the air; chimneys are blown down; the owl clamours at intervals; it is a terrible night. And now Macbeth is abroad on his guilty errand. We hear the bell tinkle that is the signal for the crime. There is a long hush, and then Lady Macbeth steals in. That which has made others drunk has made her bold; yet she starts at a sound. Macbeth is about it, and she trembles with fear lest the grooms have awaked; but no, it is done, and her husband enters with bloodstained hands-hands that all great Neptune's ocean will not cleanse, hands that would the multitudinous seas incarnadine. He has killed the King in his sleep, and for ever after sleep itself is killed for him. He is a shattered man; he rocks and reels with fears. When Lady Macbeth goes out, we hear in the silence following the knocking at the gate within. Then the lady returns; she has gilded the faces of the grooms with the blood; the knocking continues, and, with stiff red hands that dare not touch, they hurry away. "Wake Duncan with thy knocking! Ay, would thou could'st." Now comes the Porter's lascivious gossip, mocking the solemnity of the terrible hour. Macduff goes into the King's chamber, and quickly with frenzied eyes returns. The crime is discovered. In an instant the alarm-bell is rung; there is a cry of villany, murder, treason; in a moment more the stage is thronged with the soldiery, and so the second curtain falls on the first great climax.* * There is the short subsequent scene, "Without the Castle," but it has rarely been found possible to put it upon the stage. Nevertheless, it serves its purpose in the dramatic art of the author-namely, that of generating a fresh interest before the forthcoming great pause in the dramatic action. Shakspeare rarely drops his curtain when the action is at its highest; he waits until the story has reached a point at which repose can co-exist with expectation: instance the scene in the pit of Acheron, the play scene in "Hamlet," the church scene in "Much Ado," &c, With such splendour of effect the entire play develops; the banquet scene; the pit of Acheron; the castle near Dunsinane, with the cry of the women within as the Queen dies; until we reach that last scene of all on the plain where Macbeth himself is doomed to die. This is perhaps the grandest, certainly the most moving scene of the play. Macbeth is aweary of the sun; his way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf; he is fast growing old, but that which should accompany age-as honour, love, obedience, troops of friends he may not look to have; his Queen is dead; a wood has come to Dunsinane; the weird sisters have paltered with him in a double sense; infected be the air whereon they ride; nevertheless, he will die with harness on his back. Why should he play the Roman fool, and fall on his own sword? Macbeth is bruited in the thickest of the fray. The mind he sways by, and the heart he bears, shall never sagg with doubt, nor shake with fear. But he meets his last enemy at length, and then his last charm forsakes him. Yet will he try the last. And this surge and swell of incident leads to an apposite, but matterof-fact reflection—namely, that those of us who decry startling stage effects as necessarily bad art because melodramatic, must take cognizance of the fact that "Macbeth" contains, probably, a larger body of such effects than any other play extant. It is only by observing the more mechanical side of Shakspeare's art as a stage manager that we realize what he did for our national drama as apart from what he did for our national poetry. The advance he made upon the English drama as he found it is doubtless greater beyond comparison than the advance Eschylus made upon the primitive Athenian drama in forming the dialogue of the Greek stage by the addition of a second actor to the recitative and chorus, which made the sum of the dramatic business that preceded him. The importance of the work Marlowe did for the English stage it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to overstate; but between "Tamurlaine the Great," the most undramatic, or say urtheatrical, of Marlowe's works, and " Macbeth," the most dramatic and mature of Shakspeare's, the advance in sheer stage craftsmanship is probably without parallel in literature. Yet there is the astounding fact that the intervening period is merely some score years. There is another and simpler sense in which Shakspeare as a dramatic constructor is a melodramatist. Everywhere in his works the smile competes with the tear, everywhere there is song. The abstract meditations of Hamlet are interspersed with the axiomatic platitudes of Polonius; Hamlet himself is alternately grave and playful; the solemnity of the graveyard scene, where the young and beautiful Ophelia is being laid to rest, is broken by the ribald jests of the gravediggers; Othello's agony gives place to the drunken catches of his dissolute soldiery; Lear's ravings against fate are hurled out to the chorus of the fool's coarse slaps at folly. There is song in the sternest tragedy as well as in the lightest comedy. Shakspeare is always singing. He sings amid the storms of " Lear," as well as under the blue skies of the forest of Arden; amid the revels of the soldiers in "Othello," as well as in the pathetic madness of Ophelia in "Hamlet." It would certainly appear that the public appetite for what Goldsmith called the starts and attitudes of dramatic invention is something characteristically English; for nothing with us seems now so popular in the shape of theatrical production as the melodrama that affords most of them. Indeed, it may be questioned if at any period English taste has pronounced emphatically in favour of any other species of play. Shakspeare is, as we have seen, himself full of the surprises and the accidents that are the salient features of melodrama—though not the basis of its essential principle-and the best-remembered among his coadjutors (being also the most favoured in their day), Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, and in certain notable performances, Ben Jonson also, are almost as melodramatic as Shakspeare is in "Hamlet." For a brief period, culminating in the reign of Queen Anne, the love of ingenious dramatic invention gave way to an admiration of the quieter and subtler effects of sheer verbal wit, which often, of course, degenerated into obscenity, and derived its appetizing qualities from gross innuendo. This was, however, by no means an indigenous dramatic growth. It came of that feeble effort on the part of the younger and lower English nobility to imitate the vices of a certain fringe of French and Italian society, which Shakspeare did not come too early to perceive, and which he ridiculed repeatedly in the persons of the "water flies," spacious in the possession of dirt, who travelled to the disparagement of their native country, and "swum in gondolas" to the detriment of their home-bred manners and morals. But, following Congreve, Wycherley and Farquhar, came the two purest writers of English comedy, Goldsmith and Sheridan, and in them there found expression the spirit of fine gentlemanship which took hold of a section of English society in the interval between the decadence of the Bohemianism of the period of Elizabeth and James, and the advent of the very different Bohemianism of the period of the last of the Georges. It was inevitable that a species of play designed to reflect such a social condition should depend for its effects much less upon ingenuity of construction than contrast of character, and yet (as I have said) the "starts and attitudes" of Shakspearean melodrama are not entirely absent even from "The School for Scandal," where the dropping of a screen serves the purpose which a modern dramatist would probably seek to attain by the firing of a city. Shakspeare was necessarily not too much in the sun when "She Stoops to Conquer" and "The Rivals" were in the ascendant, for the author of the one comedy could seriously and disparagingly leash his name with that of one of the least of his successors, and the author of the other (being then manager of the National theatre) could produce as his work the impudent and ludicrous forgery of a boy of seventeen years. But the restoration of Shakspeare was soon afterwards forthcoming, and thereupon ensued that revival of Romanticism which began, perhaps, with "Bertram" and "Remorse," and of which we have not yet seen the last. The first influence to be sensibly felt among dramatists was the broad influence of melodramatic design, which Goldsmith limited to "starts and attitudes," but which, as we see, meant more than tableau and climax. And this, which was the first influence of the Shakspearean drama on dramatic creators, is likely also to be the last, or, at least, the most permanent. It gives Mr. Charles Reade and his many followers a singular ascendancy over Mr. Browning and Mr. Tennyson. On its lowest ground, the Shakspearean influence covers the art of stage management, and perhaps the secret of all the best success in that direction is dramatic Surprise. Now Surprise may, like Accident, be a lower agent in art; Expectation may be the higher agent, just as (to recall a memorable simile) the surprise with which we start at seeing a star shoot is lower than the expectation with which we await the rising of the sun at a preconceived moment. But Surprise and Expectation may work together in a play, and the foreshadowing of the inevitable catastrophe need not exclude the employment of subsidiary incidents that startle and arrest. Nay, to return to the simile of that author from whom I have drawn so much, we may stand upon the hill-top and await the rising of the sun, and thereby experience the exaltation of feeling which is properly called Expectation; but if to the splendour of the sunrise which we looked for there is given us the glory of the northern aurora, we enjoy the added emotion of Surprise. So in Shakspeare is surprise linked to expectation, and the higher art that forewarns is united to the lower but no less alluring art that startles. T. HALL CAINE. INSANITY, SUICIDE, AND CIVILIZATION. "Insanity attains its maximum development among civilized nations."-Bucknill. "Civilization renders men more liable to mental disease."-Tuke, "Education and suicide are increasing all over Europe."-Crichton Browne. I. THE INCREASE OF INSANITY. THE increase of insanity, so long doubted by the Lunacy Commis THE sioners, is now, as Dr. Tuke observes, too patent to admit of question, and, as it is accompanied both here and on the Continent by an increase of suicide, it is beginning to attract the notice of Europe. That there is a close relationship between insanity and civilization, appears from the fact that where schools and newspapers are few the number of insane is small, the ratio rising in the various countries so regularly that we might almost say the circulation of daily papers determines the proportion of lunatics. The countless blessings of civilization are, however, no more responsible for insanity and suicide than commerce and free trade are for cases of bankruptcy. But if such evils are, in a measure, inseparable from civilization, it is as palpably within our power to reduce and minimize their ravages as it was for Dr. Farr to diminish by one-half the death-rate of our soldiers in Indian barracks. It is hot new lunacy laws that are wanted, so much as a general understanding of the duties that those who think owe to those who work, for elevating the tone and strengthening the fibre of the working-classes, among whom insanity is making the greatest havoc. In the United Kingdom the number of insane has almost doubled in twenty years, increasing three times faster than population, viz. :— 2,326 per million inhabitants. 3,217 99 1860 . 65,130 = . 112,590 = The number registered is only 93,385, who are under the care of the Lunacy Commissioners, the unregistered amounting to 19,205, who reside with their friends. Those maintained by the public cause an annual expenditure of £23 per head in Ireland, £24 in Scotland, |