ABSTRACT
My design being chiefly to consider whether SHAKESPEARE has been improved by the alterations lately made in this play, I shall waive the dispute about the excellencies of this or that actor, the little or the tall. In my opinion neither of them are fitted for the characters as drawn by the poet, but particularly the hero and heroine of Covent-Garden.1 They all seem to want what no actor can truly feign, no spectator can thoroughly be deceived in; I mean that degree of puberty, which is but just to be distinguished from childhood. That JULIET is no older than fourteen we are told by her nurse in the first act: ‘Of all the days in the year, come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.’ [1.3.17f.] The age of ROMEO, tho’ not expressly marked by our poet, we may suppose to be the same as represented in the original novel of BANDELLO on which this tragedy is founded, and which, as I remember, is eighteen. Indeed allowances should be made by considering that the scene is laid in Italy, a warm country, where the people arrive at maturity much sooner than in a colder northern climate: and let me add that in SHAKE-
SPEARE’S time luxury, debauchery and effeminacy had not yet stinted the growth and retarded the maturity of our robust ENGLISH ancestors. However, such artless simplicity and innocence are so strongly characterized in our two lovers as plainly determine their age to be about the time beforemention’d. Who therefore can help laughing to see a mother of children endeavouring to impose herself upon us for a raw girl just in her teens, and to hear her whining in this strain:
Give me my ROMEO, night, and when he dies, Take him and cut him into little stars, &c. [3.2.21f.]
or a great huge tall creature about six foot high, and big in proportion, wishing
O that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek. [2.2.24f.]
with a thousand other instances of a like nature. But in this I may perhaps seem hyper-critical.
