h laughter at his coarsest
remarks. But they are not comic enough to allow one to forget for a
moment what has preceded and what must follow. And I am far from
complaining of this. I believe that it is what Shakespeare intended, and
that he despised the groundlings if they laughed. Of course he could
have written without the least difficulty speeches five times as
humorous; but he knew better. The Grave-diggers make us laugh: the old
Countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra makes us smile at least. But
the Grave-digger scene does not come at a moment of extreme tension; and
it is long. Our distress for Ophelia is not so absorbing that we refuse
to be interested in the man who digs her grave, or even continue
throughout the long conversation to remember always with pain that the
grave is hers. It is fitting, therefore, that he should be made
decidedly humorous. The passage in _Antony and Cleopatra_ is much nearer
to the passage in _Macbeth_, and seems to have been forgotten by those
who say that there is nothing in Shakespeare resembling that
passage.[246] The old Countryman comes at a moment of tragic exaltation,
and the dialogue is appropriately brief. But the moment, though tragic,
is emphatically one of exaltation. We have not been feeling horror, nor
are we feeling a dreadful suspense. We are going to see Cleopatra die,
but she is to die gloriously and to triumph over Octavius. And therefore
our amusement at the old Countryman and the contrast he affords to these
high passions, is untroubled, and it was right to make him really comic.
But the Porter's case is quite different. We cannot forget how the
knocking that makes him grumble sounded to Macbeth, or that within a few
minutes of his opening the gate Duncan will be discovered in his blood;
nor can we help feeling that in pretending to be porter of hell-gate he
is terribly near the truth. To give him language so humorous that it
would ask us almost to lose the sense of these things would have been a
fatal mistake,--the kind of mistake that means want of dramatic
imagination. And that was not the sort of error into which Shakespeare
fell.

To doubt the genuineness of the passage, then, on the ground that it is
not humorous enough for Shakespeare, seems to me to show this want. It
is to judge the passage as though it were a separate composition,
instead of conceiving it in the fulness of its relations to its
surroundings in a stage-play. Taken by itself, I admit,