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STUDIES OF UNDEVELOPED CHARACTERS
IN SHAKSPEARE;

FROM SKETCHES AND SUGGESTIONS IN HIS PLAYS.

No. V.-The Tempest.

WHEN the vessel which bears the King of Naples and his company, has foundered and is just going down, there is heard "a confused noise within,” and amidst the agonised cry, the following words are distinguishable:

Mercy on us!-we split! we split! - Farewell, my wife and children! - Farewell, brother! We split! we split! we split!"

We do not conjecture these expressions of terror and last leave-taking to have been personally addressed to the wives, brothers, and children, either of the drowning sailors (who were very unlikely to have such relations on board), or even of the passengers who formed the suite of Alonso; but that the feelings of the individuals gushed forth towards those far away, to whom their affections were strongest, and whom they never expected to see any more in this world. In those who uttered these expressions of love towards their dearest relatives, we perceive more unadulterated natures than in the nobles and courtiers, and the fratricidal Sebastian, who proposes to go and "take leave of the king," while the treacherous usurper Antonio characteristically manifests his devotion to externals by exclaiming "let's all sink with the king!" There was no atom of affection towards the person of the king in this; it was the mere desire to "break their fall" into the other world, by clinging to the greatest worldly power in the present. The contrast between the last words of the courtiers, and the "confused noise within," is worthy of some study, which might not prove unprofitable to the heart as well as head.

There were four or five women who attended Miranda during her very early childhood in Milan, but she only remembers them "like a dream;" and mention is made of the "brave son" of the usurping Duke of Milan, which son was supposed to have been drowned. But as no one was drowned we might have expected to have seen him. He does not, however, appear. Of Miranda's mother we are only informed that she was "a piece of virtue," who told Prospero that Miranda was truly his daughter; while in alluding to her grandmother, Miranda says that she "should sin to think otherwise than nobly" of her chaste ancestor, by supposing that the wicked Antonio was not her father's legitimate brother. And thus the virtue of both of the undeveloped ladies is most unnecessarily called in question by a gratuitous defence, showing the bad influence of a licentious court even upon so original a genius as that of Shakspeare. What could Miranda know of such things?

Sycorax, a native witch of Argier, the mother or dam of Caliban, is a far more tangible character- though in sooth one might rather object to touch her. There is something in her nature, as well as personal appearance, of which the ordinary impression of an ugly wicked old witch conveys no adequate idea. She was a frightful, haggard, and extremely dirty skeleton; her dull, yellow, and brown-baked, shrivelled skin, just covering her marrowless edifice of disjointed bones. Her long black nails

Studies of Undeveloped Characters in Shakspeare.

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inherited by her cub denoted her faculties as a "tearer," while her deep-set eyes, as blue as gall, gleamed forth in feverish quest on every side. Yet, with all this, there is a sense of imbecility associated in our minds with regard to old Sycorax. She was constantly half choked with the quantity of vice and wickedness within her, because she had not an equal degree of power to enable her to exercise her inward calling, by giving it off in all directions. Her envy of this power of evil in some of her intimate friends had bent her body hell-wards, accordant with this tendency of her soul. It is true that she is designated as

A witch; and one so strong

She could control the moon make flows and ebbs,
And deal in her command, without her power."

This power over the moon and the tides, doubtless accompanied with other elemental influences, was certainly not a trifle; yet Prospero would have been too strong for her. She was, in addition, so imbecile of mind as to make choice even of a god whose power was inferior to the magic of Prospero. To be sure we have only Caliban's word for this, and he might be very apt to judge by his own pinches. Still we are sceptical as to the occult forces of Sycorax; and the nasty vermin whereby she worked her charms, "toads, beetles, bats," tend to confirm us in the idea of the very low or limited degree of rank she enjoyed as a sorceress. She was accus tomed to brush

and this she dropped, or caused to be dropped, upon the bodies of her victims, and thus infected them with sickness, a fever, or a leprosy : but all these things are quite second-rate excellences, scarce worth being "damned for.” Meantime she had, no doubt, a most diabolical will (the worse from the constant irritation of feeling herself without any commensurate power), and this, we believe, rather than the toads, beetles, bats, and other charms of Sycorax, to have been at the bottom of the conquest she achieved over the heart of Caliban's father.

In his rank and capacity of father to Caliban, the freedom being solely qualified by this extenuating circumstance, we have ventured to allude to a distinguished individual of inextinguishable genius, whose amiable qualities have hitherto been hidden in darkness. The individual was not a native of the isle he seems to have sojourned a while in Argier, but his actual birth-place, or parish, was lower down. Perhaps Argier is a corruption of Algiers. How this paternal personage came to Algiers or Argier, might be accounted for by the simple process which would enable us to discover the ascent of a soul from Erebus if we knew what that process was; that he descended, however, like a bolt of lightning into the earth, we have the written attestation of several respectable descendants of Algerine eye-witnesses. Shakspeare does not mention his real name, merely designating him with some degree, as we think, of opprobrium and disparagement, as "the devil." The same poetical chronicler also terms his son Caliban a demidevil, which of course clenches the fact as to the entire status of the sire. So much for this undeveloped paternity; but as to the "charms" aforesaid, and all personal causes of attraction,-what he could possibly see in Sycorax, absolutely stagnates the very sources of human conjecture!

We cannot, however, bid a final adieu to Sycorax without a further observation. Besides the great additional support to opinions already ex

pressed concerning her, something important is suggested in the dialogue. which first occurs between Prospero and Ariel:

Prosp.

Hast thou forgot

The foul witch, Sycorax, who, with age and envy, Was grown into a hoop? Hast thou forgot her? "Ariel. No, sir.

"Prosp. Thou hast where was she born? - speak, tell me!

"Ariel. Sir, in Argier.

"Prosp. O, was she so? I must,

Once in a month, recount what thou hast been,

Which thou forget'st. This damn'd witch, Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible

To enter human hearing, from Argier,

Thou know'st, was banished; for one thing she did,

They would not take her life: Is not this true?

"Ariel. Ay, sir.

Prosp. This blue-ey'd hag was hither brought with child,
And here was left by the sailors: thou, my slave,

As thou report'st thyself, was then her servant :

And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate

To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands,

Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
By help of her more potent ministers,
And in her most unmitigable rage,
Into a cloven pine; within which rift
Imprison'd, thou did'st painfully remain

A dozen years; within which space she died,

And left thee there; where thou did'st vent thy groans,

As fast as mill-wheels strike: then was this island,

(Save for the son that she did litter here,

A freckled whelp, hag-born), not honour'd with
A human shape.

We have scarcely been able to finish the transcription of the above quotation, from our extreme impatience to ask the reader what he imagines could have been that one thing which Sycorax had done, which occasioned her life to be spared? It must have been of some service to the people, or more probably, the potentate of Argier; there must have been some good in what she did, though doubtless it was not for the love of the good, but because a greater evil was elsewhere produced. Yet to what the thing was, no sort of clue is given. Did she, once upon a time, raise a storm and shipwreck a fleet of Christian invaders, for the pleasure of seeing their drowning faces look up amidst the flashes of the lightning? Did she save the king's life by some necromantic medicine,—a pungent extract of bat and beetle, because he was a horrible tyrant and the scourge of his people? Did she protect the king's only child (who promised to be a worse tyrant even than his father) from two snakes who had secreted themselves in the garden,her onslaught being impelled by a sudden fierce propensity towards the same, whereof the writhing tails were seen sticking up out of her gustacious jaws, during full ten minutes, by the whole court of Argier? Non equidem invideo, miror magis!

Claribel, the daughter of Alonso, king of Naples, was the involuntary cause of the circumstances through which the plot of the Tempest is developed. The king, her father, was determined to marry her against her inclination to the king of Tunis, and set sail with her himself in order to enforce obedience. In returning from the celebration of this unholy rite, his tyrannical and short-sighted cruelty was visited with the horrors of the shipwreck, which wrought to the ends of Prospero. This unhappily married daughter of the king seems to have been an amiable and interesting victim. Even the "men about court" speak of the sacrifice with regret :

"Gonzalo. Methinks, our garments are now as fresh as when we put them on first in Afric, at the marriage of the king's fair daughter Claribel to the king of Tunis. "Sebastian. 'Twas a sweet marriage, and we prosper well in our return. “Adrian. Tunis was never graced before with such a paragon to their queen.

"Gonzalo. Sir, we were talking that our garments seem now as fresh as when we were at Tunis at the marriage of your daughter, who is now queen. And the rarest that e'er came there.

"Antonio.

"Gonzalo. When I wore it at your daughter's marriage. "Alonso. You cram these words into mine ears against The stomach of my sense. Would I had never

Married my daughter there! for, coming thence,

My son is lost; and, in my rate, she too,

Who is so far from Italy remov'd

I ne'er again shall see her."

ACT II. Sc. I.

As to the king of Tunis we may suppose him to have been a very disagreeable object (no doubt a black personage) in the eyes of the fair Claribel. But "that's no rule," and he might have been a marvellous, handsome, amiable, and proper man in the eyes of other ladies. It is not unlikely that Claribel had a previous attachment to some one else. Her aversion, however, to the king of Tunis, is unequivocally expressed :—

"Sebastian. Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss, That would not bless our Europe with your daughter,

But rather lose her to an African;

Where she, at least, is banish'd from your eye

Who hath cause to wet the grief on 't.

"Alonso. Pr'ythee, peace!

"Sebastian. You were kneel'd to, and importun'd otherwise By all of us; and the fair soul herself

Weigh'd between loathness and obedience, at

Which end o' the beam she'd bow."

ACT II. Sc. I.

We have hitherto avoided, in the previous plays of the series, almost all the numerous unsubstantial or purely spiritual entities and hints of being, that skip and glance athwart the vision in Shakspeare's poetry. To the idea of the fair queen with her lute (in Henry IV.) we ought, perhaps, to have added the magic musicians, conjured up by the fervid imagination of Glendower.

"And those musicians that shall play to you,
Hang in the air a thousand leagues from hence,
And straight they shall be here!

The writer of an article in a musical periodical (and the reader will easily discover the writer to have been Mr. Leigh Hunt) has recently singled out the foregoing passage, and illustrated it with a beauty vieing with its "Here is a cloud of invisible musicians hanging in the air a thousand leagues off, that is to say, three thousand miles, somewhere (not to interfere

own.

with the main American land) down in the Atlantic, towards Cape Horn. But supposing us to sail near this enchanted air, are they invisible? —or may we not (if our eyes be gifted enough) rather just discern them up aloft, hanging somewhat like a dim cluster of bees in the noon-tide, a mile higher than the lark reaches?-and if we listen, may we not hear them dimly sounding a numerous music, like what we might suppose to be that of some star inhabited by none but musicians, and so diffusing downwards a soft, trembling sound over the waters, analogous to quivering beams of light, and making the boats thereabouts hush along with mixed fear and rapture.

After this, which seems to belong more appropriately to the "Tempest" than any other play, we shall say nothing of the "elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves," &c. whom Prospero invokes; the urchins who cramped Caliban; the ministers of Sycorax, &c. The reader, however, may smile when we ask him to observe the following passage. Stephano and Trinculo, led by Caliban, discover the rich garments hung upon a line to decoy them:

"Stephano. Be you quiet, monster. Mistress line; is not this my jerkin? Now is the jerkin under the line: now, jerkin! you are like to lose your hair, and prove a bald jerkin.” ACT IV. Sc. I.

The passage in itself is sufficiently trashy, and an appropriate effervescence of the drunken fancy of such a fellow as Stephano; we offer it, nevertheless, as manifesting a peculiar characteristic of Shakspeare's love of personification in short, of Life. He cannot even let a clothes-line and a jerkin alone, but must needs put them en rapport (as the animal magnetists say) with the interlocutors of the scene.

When we have mentioned Gonzalo's son, whose extravagant love of toys equalled, perhaps, his father's extravagant humour (the latter, on being accused by Sebastian, of intending to carry home Prospero's island “in his pocket," and give it to the said son "for an apple," replies that he will sow" the kernels of it in the sea, and bring forth more islands !") our task, with regard to the "Tempest," will have been nearly completed. But something still remains; and fortunately for the less malleable and less suggestive qualities of prose, which would but ill have served us in this last extremity, we have raked up from a mouldy chronicle the following batch of olden verse, interpolated, no doubt, by some well-meaning traditionmonger, who honestly thought that the grim biographical hints it contains of the death of Sycorax and other matters, would supply its deficiencies in all poetic elegancies. We give it just as we found it:

"It was the hideous idol, Setebos!

Swift generated, as a thunder-stone,

That on a magic isle hath fallen, and stuck

I' the burst earth! Passive as a flint its face;
Passive the large white rings of its flat eyes;

Petrific were its low-set kernell'd horns.

The mouth, combustion's black and shapeless work,
Was but a trap for apprehension's brood

Of quick revulsions, — but no life was in it :
And yet a ravening horror iced the air,
Which made the silence like a constant ghost,
Haunting the scene of sacrifice.