On the other hand, when Shakespeare wishes to impress a doctrine, not raise a dream, he attunes us to it beforehand, but after another fashion. We naturally remain in doubt before a cruel action: we divine that the red irons which are about to put out the eyes of little Arthur are painted sticks, and that the six rascals that besiege Rome, are supernumeraries hired at a shilling a night. To conquer this mistrust we must employ the most natural style, circumstantial and rude imitation of the manners of the guardroom and of the alehouse; I can only believe in Jack Cade's sedition on hearing the dirty words of bestial lewdness and mobbish stupidity. You must let me have the jests, the coarse laughter, drunkenness, the manners of butchers and tanners, to make me imagine a mob or an election. So in murders, let me feel the fire of bubbling passion, the accumulation of despair or hate which have unchained the will and nerved the hand. When the unchecked words, the fits of rage, the convulsive ejaculations of exasperated desire, have brought me in contact with all the links of the inward necessity which has moulded the man and guided the crime, I no longer think whether the knife is bloody, because I feel with inner trembling the passion which has handled it. Have I to see if Shakespeare's Cleopatra be really dead? The strange laugh that bursts from her when the basket of asps is brought, the sudden tension of nerves, the flow of feverish words, the fitful gayety, the coarse language, the torrent of ideas with which she overflows, have already made me sound all the depths of suicide,[406] and I have foreseen it as soon as she came on the stage. This madness of the imagination, incited by climate and despotic power; these woman's, queen's, prostitute's nerves; this marvellous self-abandonment to all the fire of invention and desire--these cries, tears, foam on the lips, tempest of insults, actions, emotions; this promptitude to murder, announce the rage with which she would rush against the least obstacle and be dashed to pieces. What does Dryden effect in this matter with his written phrases? What of the maid speaking, in the author's words, who bids her half-mad mistress "call reason to assist you?"[407] What if such a Cleopatra as his, designed after Lady Castlemaine,[408] skilled in artifices and whimpering, voluptuous and a coquette, with neither the nobleness of virtue, nor the greatness of crime: "Nature meant me A wife; a silly, harmless household dove, Fond without art, and kind without deceit."[409]