ut the play is
beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and
stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough
that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has
put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his
followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about
more easily. A happy ending!--as if the living martyrdom that Lear had
gone through,--the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair
dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If
he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's
burden after, why all this pudder and preparation,--why torment us
with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of
getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over
again his misused station,--as if at his years, and with his
experience, anything was left but to die.

Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how
many dramatic personages are there in Shakespeare, which though more
tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some
circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be
shown to our bodily eye. Othello for instance. Nothing can be more
soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts of our natures, than to
read of a young Venetian lady of highest extraction, through the force
of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying aside
every consideration of kindred, and country, and colour, and wedding
with _a coal-black Moor_--(for such he is represented, in the
imperfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those
days, compared with our own, or in compliance with popular notions,
though the Moors are now well enough known to be by many shades less
unworthy of a white woman's fancy)--it is the perfect triumph of
virtue over accidents, of the imagination over the senses. She sees
Othello's colour in his mind. But upon the stage, when the imagination
is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor
unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello played,
whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in his
colour; whether he did not find something extremely revolting in the
courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether
the actual sight of the thing did not over-weigh all that beautiful
compromise which we make in rea