Part 37

In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona."

There is an allusion to this court language of love in "All Well that Ends Well," where Helena says,--

There shall your master have a thousand loves-- A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign; A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear, His humble ambition, proud humility, His jarring concord, and his discord dulcut, His faith, his sweet disaster, with a world Of pretty fond adoptious Christendoms That blinking Cupid gossips.--ACT I SCENE 1

The courtly poets of Elizabeth's time, who copied the Italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, are full of these quaint conceits.

Since this was written, I have met with some remarks of a similar tendency in that most interesting book, "The Life of Lord E. Fitzgerald."

Juliet, courageously drinking off the potion, after she has placed before herself in the most fearful colors all its possible consequences, is compared by Schlegel to the famous story of Alexander and his physician.

Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm! Perhaps 'tis tender, too, and pretty, At each wild word to feel within A sweet recoil of love and pity. And what if in a world of sin (O sorrow and shame should this be true!) Such giddiness of heart and brain Comes seldom save from rage and pain, So talks as it's most used to do?

COLERIDGE.

These lines seem to me to form the truest comment on Juliet's wild exclamations against Romeo.

"The censure," observes Schlegel, "originates in a fanciless way of thinking, to which every thing appears unnatural that does not suit its tame insipidity. Hence an idea has been formed of simple and natural pathos which consists in exclamations destitute of imagery, and nowise elevated above every-day life; but energetic passions electrify the whole mental powers and will, consequently, in highly-favored natures, express themselves in an ingenious and figurative manner."

The "Giulietta" of Luigi da Porta was written about 1520. In a popular little book published in 1565, thirty years before Shakspeare wrote his tragedy, the name of Juliet occurs as an example of faithful love, and is thus explained by a note in the margin. "Juliet, a noble maiden of the citie of Verona, which loved Romeo, eldest son of the Lord Monteschi; and being privily married together, he at last poisoned himself for love of her: she, for sorrow of his death, slew herself with his dagger." This note, which furnishes, in brief, the whole argument of Shakspeare's play, might possibly have made the first impression on his fancy. In the novel of Da Porta the catastrophe is altogether different. After the death of Romeo, the Friar Lorenzo endeavors to persuade Juliet to leave the fatal monument. She refuses; and throwing herself back on the dead body of her husband, she resolutely holds her breath and dies.--"E voltatasi al giacente corpo di Romeo, il cui capo sopra un origliere, che con lei uell' arca era stato lasciato, posto aveva; gli occhi meglio rinchiusi avendogli, e di lagrime il freddo volto bagnandogli, disse;" Che debbo senza di te in vita più fare, signor mio? e che altro mi resta verso te se non colla mia morte seguirti? "E detto questo, la sua gran sciagura nell' animo recatasi, e la perdita del caro amante ricordandosi, deliberando di più non vivere, raccolto a se il fiato, e per buono spazio tenutolo, e poscia con un gran grido fuori mandandolo, sopra il morto corpo, morta ricadde."

There is nothing so improbable in the story of Romeo and Juliet as to make us doubt the tradition that it is a real fact. "The Veronese," says Lord Byron, in one of his letters from Verona, "are tenacious to a degree of the truth of Juliet's story, insisting on the fact, giving the date 1303, and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden--once a cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love." He might have added, that when Verona itself, with its amphitheatre and its Paladian structures, lies level with the earth, the very spot on which it stood will be consecrated by the memory of Juliet.

When in Italy, I met a gentleman, who being then "dans le genre romantique," wore a fragment of Juliet's tomb set in a ring.

Foster's Essays

I have read somewhere that the play of which Helena is the heroine, (All's Well that Ends Well,) was at first entitled by Shakspeare "Love's Labor Won." Why the title was altered or by whom I cannot discover.

i. e. I care as much for as I do for heaven.

New Monthly Magazine, vol. iv.

Percy's Reliques.

i. e. canzons, songs

Percy's Reliques, vol. iii.--see the ballad of the "Lady turning Serving Man."

By this word, as used here, I would be understood to mean that inexpressible something within the soul, which tends to the good, the beautiful, the true, and is the antipodes to the vulgar, the violent, and the false;--that which we see diffused externally over the form and movements, where there is perfect innocence and unconsciousness, as in children.

i. e. In the story of the drama; for in the original "History of Amleth the Dane," from which Shakspeare drew his materials, there is a woman introduced who is employed as an instrument to seduce Amleth, but not even the germ of the character of Ophelia.

In the Oedipus Coloneus

"And recks not his own read," i. e. heeds not his own lesson.

Blackwood's Magazine, vol. 11.

Act iii. scene 1.

Goëthe. See the analysis of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister

The Iphigenia in Aulis of Euripides.