A STUDY OF SHAKESPEAREBY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. PREFACE TO THIS EDITION Begun in the winter of 1874, a first instalment of "A Study ofShakespeare" appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ for May 1875, and asecond in the number for June 1876, but the completed work was not issuedin book form until June 1880. In a letter to me (January 31, 1875), Swinburne said: "I am now at work on my long-designed essay or study on the metrical progress or development of Shakespeare, as traceable by ear and _not_ by finger, and the general changes of tone and stages of mind expressed or involved in this change or progress of style. " The book was produced at the moment when controversy with regard to theinternal evidence of composition in the writings attributed toShakespeare was raging high, and the amusing appendices were added at thelast moment that they might infuriate the pedants of the New ShakespeareSociety. They amply fulfilled that amiable purpose. EDMUND GOSSE September 1918 CONTENTS A STUDY OF SHAKESPEAREI. FIRST PERIOD: LYRIC AND FANTASTICII. SECOND PERIOD: COMIC AND HISTORICIII. THIRD PERIOD: TRAGIC AND ROMANTIC APPENDIXI. NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLAY OF KING EDWARD III. II. REPORT OF THE PROCEEDINGS ON THIS FIRST ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF THE NEWEST SHAKESPEARE SOCIETYIII. ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE. I. The greatest poet of our age has drawn a parallel of elaborate eloquencebetween Shakespeare and the sea; and the likeness holds good in manypoints of less significance than those which have been set down by themaster-hand. For two hundred years at least have students of every kindput forth in every sort of boat on a longer or a shorter voyage ofresearch across the waters of that unsounded sea. From the paltriestfishing-craft to such majestic galleys as were steered by Coleridge andby Goethe, each division of the fleet has done or has essayed its turn ofwork; some busied in dredging alongshore, some taking surveys of this orthat gulf or headland, some putting forth through shine and shadow intothe darkness of the great deep. Nor does it seem as if there wouldsooner be an end to men's labour on this than on the other sea. But herea difference is perceptible. The material ocean has been so far masteredby the wisdom and the heroism of man that we may look for a time to comewhen the mystery shall be manifest of its furthest north and south, andmen resolve the secret of the uttermost parts of the sea: the poles alsomay find their Columbus. But the limits of that other ocean, the laws ofits tides, the motive of its forces, the mystery of its unity and thesecret of its change, no seafarer of us all may ever think thoroughly toknow. No wind-gauge will help us to the science of its storms, no lead-line sound for us the depth of its divine and terrible serenity. As, however, each generation for some two centuries now or more haswitnessed fresh attempts at pilotage and fresh expeditions of discoveryundertaken in the seas of Shakespeare, it may be well to study a littlethe laws of navigation in such waters as these, and look well to compassand rudder before we accept the guidance of a strange helmsman or makeproffer for trial of our own. There are shoals and quicksands on whichmany a seafarer has run his craft aground in time past, and others ofmore special peril to adventurers of the present day. The chances ofshipwreck vary in a certain degree with each new change of vessel andeach fresh muster of hands. At one time a main rock of offence on whichthe stoutest ships of discovery were wont to split was the narrow andslippery reef of verbal emendation; and upon this our native pilots weretoo many of them prone to steer. Others fell becalmed offshore in aGerman fog of philosophic theories, and would not be persuaded that thehouse of words they had built in honour of Shakespeare was "dark ashell, " seeing "it had bay-windows transparent as barricadoes, and theclear-stories towards the south-north were as lustrous as ebony. " Theseare not the most besetting dangers of more modern steersmen: what we haveto guard against now is neither a repetition of the pedantries ofSteevens nor a recrudescence of the moralities of Ulrici. Fresh folliesspring up in new paths of criticism, and fresh labourers in a fruitlessfield are at hand to gather them and to garner. A discovery of someimportance has recently been proclaimed as with blare of vociferoustrumpets and flutter of triumphal flags; no less a discovery thanthis--that a singer must be tested by his song. Well, it is somethingthat criticism should at length be awake to that wholly indisputablefact; that learned and laborious men who can hear only with their fingersshould open their eyes to admit such a novelty, their minds to acceptsuch a paradox, as that a painter should be studied in his pictures and apoet in his verse. To the common herd of students and lovers of eitherart this may perhaps appear no great discovery; but that it should atlength have dawned even upon the race of commentators is a sign which initself might be taken as a presage of new light to come in an epoch ofmiracle yet to be. Unhappily it is as yet but a partial revelation thathas been vouchsafed to them. To the recognition of the apocalyptic factthat a workman can only be known by his work, and that withoutexamination of his method and material that work can hardly be studied tomuch purpose, they have yet to add the knowledge of a further truth noless recondite and abstruse than this; that as the technical work of apainter appeals to the eye, so the technical work of a poet appeals tothe ear. It follows that men who have none are as likely to arrive atany profitable end by the application of metrical tests to the work ofShakespeare as a blind man by the application of his theory of colours tothe work of Titian. It is certainly no news to other than professional critics that no meansof study can be more precious or more necessary to a student ofShakespeare than this of tracing the course of his work by the growth anddevelopment, through various modes and changes, of his metre. But thefaculty of using such means of study is not to be had for the asking; itis not to be earned by the most assiduous toil, it is not to be securedby the learning of years, it is not to be attained by the devotion of alife. No proficiency in grammar and arithmetic, no science of numerationand no scheme of prosody, will be here of the least avail. Though thepedagogue were Briareus himself who would thus bring Shakespeare underthe rule of his rod or Shelley within the limit of his line, he wouldlack fingers on which to count the syllables that make up their music, the infinite varieties of measure that complete the changes and thechimes of perfect verse. It is but lost labour that they rise up soearly, and so late take rest; not a Scaliger or Salmasius of them allwill sooner solve the riddle of the simplest than of the subtlest melody. Least of all will the method of a scholiast be likely to serve him as aclue to the hidden things of Shakespeare. For all the counting up ofnumbers and casting up of figures that a whole university--nay, a wholeuniverse of pedants could accomplish, no teacher and no learner will everbe a whit the nearer to the haven where they would be. In spite of alltabulated statements and regulated summaries of research, the music whichwill not be dissected or defined, the "spirit of sense" which is one andindivisible from the body or the raiment of speech that clothes it, keepssafe the secret of its sound. Yet it is no less a task than this thatthe scholiasts have girt themselves to achieve: they will pluck out theheart not of Hamlet's but of Shakespeare's mystery by the means of ametrical test; and this test is to be applied by a purely arithmeticalprocess. It is useless to pretend or to protest that they work by anyrule but the rule of thumb and finger: that they have no ear to work by, whatever outward show they may make of unmistakable ears, the very natureof their project gives full and damning proof. Properly understood, thisthat they call the metrical test is doubtless, as they say, the surest orthe sole sure key to one side of the secret of Shakespeare; but they willnever understand it properly who propose to secure it by the ingeniousdevice of numbering the syllables and tabulating the results of acomputation which shall attest in exact sequence the quantity, order, andproportion of single and double endings, of rhyme and blank verse, ofregular lines and irregular, to be traced in each play by the horny eyeand the callous finger of a pedant. "I am ill at these numbers"; thosein which I have sought to become an expert are numbers of another sort;but having, from wellnigh the first years I can remember, made of thestudy of Shakespeare the chief intellectual business and found in it thechief spiritual delight of my whole life, I can hardly think myself lessqualified than another to offer an opinion on the metrical points atissue. The progress and expansion of style and harmony in the successive worksof Shakespeare must in some indefinite degree be perceptible to theyoungest as to the oldest, to the dullest as to the keenest ofShakespearean students. But to trace and verify the various shades andgradations of this progress, the ebb and flow of alternate influences, the delicate and infinite subtleties of change and growth discernible inthe spirit and the speech of the greatest among poets, is a task not lessbeyond the reach of a scholiast than beyond the faculties of a child. Hewho would attempt it with any chance of profit must above all thingsremember at starting that the inner and the outer qualities of a poet'swork are of their very nature indivisible; that any criticism is ofnecessity worthless which looks to one side only, whether it be to theouter or to the inner quality of the work; that the fatuity of pedanticignorance never devised a grosser absurdity than the attempt to separateaesthetic from scientific criticism by a strict line of demarcation, andto bring all critical work under one or the other head of this exhaustivedivision. Criticism without accurate science of the thing criticised canindeed have no other value than may belong to the genuine record of aspontaneous impression; but it is not less certain that criticism whichbusies itself only with the outer husk or technical shell of a greatartist's work, taking no account of the spirit or the thought whichinforms it, cannot have even so much value as this. Without study of hisforms of metre or his scheme of colours we shall certainly fail toappreciate or even to apprehend the gist or the worth of a painter's or apoet's design; but to note down the number of special words and cast upthe sum of superfluous syllables used once or twice or twenty times inthe structure of a single poem will help us exactly as much as a nakedcatalogue of the colours employed in a particular picture. A tabulatedstatement or summary of the precise number of blue or green, red or whitedraperies to be found in a precise number of paintings by the same handwill not of itself afford much enlightenment to any but the youngest ofpossible students; nor will a mere list of double or single, masculine orfeminine terminations discoverable in a given amount of verse from thesame quarter prove of much use or benefit to an adult reader of commonintelligence. What such an one requires is the guidance which can begiven by no metremonger or colour-grinder: the suggestion which may helphim to discern at once the cause and the effect of every choice or changeof metre and of colour; which may show him at one glance the reason andthe result of every shade and of every tone which tends to compose and tocomplete the gradual scale of their final harmonies. This method ofstudy is generally accepted as the only one applicable to the work of agreat painter by any criticism worthy of the name: it should also berecognised as the sole method by which the work of a great poet can bestudied to any serious purpose. For the student it can be no lessuseful, for the expert it should be no less easy, to trace through itsseveral stages of expansion and transfiguration the genius of Chaucer orof Shakespeare, of Milton or of Shelley, than the genius of Titian or ofRaffaelle, of Turner or of Rossetti. Some great artists there are ofeither kind in whom no such process of growth or transformation isperceptible: of these are Coleridge and Blake; from the sunrise to thesunset of their working day we can trace no demonstrable increase and novisible diminution of the divine capacities or the inborn defects ofeither man's genius; but not of such, as a rule, are the greatest amongartists of any sort. Another rock on which modern steersmen of a more skilful hand than theseare yet liable to run through too much confidence is the love of theirown conjectures as to the actual date or the secret history of aparticular play or passage. To err on this side requires more thought, more learning, and more ingenuity than we need think to find in a wholetribe of finger-counters and figure-casters; but the outcome of thesegood gifts, if strained or perverted to capricious use, may prove no lessbarren of profit than the labours of a pedant on the letter of the text. It is a tempting exercise of intelligence for a dexterous and keen-wittedscholar to apply his solid learning and his vivid fancy to the detectionor the interpretation of some new or obscure point in a great man's lifeor work; but none the less is it a perilous pastime to give the reins toa learned fancy, and let loose conjecture on the trail of any dubiouscrotchet or the scent of any supposed allusion that may spring up in theway of its confident and eager quest. To start a new solution of somecrucial problem, to track some new undercurrent of concealed significancein a passage hitherto neglected or misconstrued, is to a critic of thishigher class a delight as keen as that of scientific discovery tostudents of another sort: the pity is that he can bring no such certainor immediate test to verify the value of his discovery as lies ready tothe hand of the man of science. Whether he have lit upon a windfall or amare's nest can be decided by no direct proof, but only by time and thegeneral acceptance of competent judges; and this cannot often bereasonably expected for theories which can appeal for support orconfirmation to no positive evidence, but at best to a cloudy andshifting probability. What personal or political allusions may lurkunder the text of Shakespeare we can never know, and should consequentlyforbear to hang upon a hypothesis of this floating and nebulous kind anyserious opinion which might gravely affect our estimate of his work orhis position in regard to other men, with whom some public or privateinterest may possibly have brought him into contact or collision. * * * * * The aim of the present study is simply to set down what the writerbelieves to be certain demonstrable truths as to the progress anddevelopment of style, the outer and the inner changes of manner as ofmatter, of method as of design, which may be discerned in the work ofShakespeare. The principle here adopted and the views here put forwardhave not been suddenly discovered or lightly taken up out of any desireto make a show of theoretical ingenuity. For years past I have held andmaintained, in private discussion with friends and fellow-students, theopinions which I now submit to more public judgment. How far they maycoincide with those advanced by others I cannot say, and have not beencareful to inquire. The mere fact of coincidence or of dissent on such aquestion is of less importance than the principle accepted by eitherstudent as the groundwork of his theory, the mainstay of his opinion. Itis no part of my project or my hope to establish the actual date of anyamong the various plays, or to determine point by point the lineal orderof their succession. I have examined no table or catalogue of recent orof earlier date, from the time of Malone onwards, with a view to confuteby my reasoning the conclusions of another, or by the assistance of histheories to corroborate my own. It is impossible to fix or decide byinner or outer evidence the precise order of production, much less ofcomposition, which critics of the present or the past may have set theirwits to verify in vain; but it is quite possible to show that the work ofShakespeare is naturally divisible into classes which may serve us todistinguish and determine as by landmarks the several stages or periodsof his mind and art. Of these the three chief periods or stages are so unmistakably indicatedby the mere text itself, and so easily recognisable by the veriest tiroin the school of Shakespeare, that even were I as certain of being thefirst to point them out as I am conscious of having long since discoveredand verified them without assistance or suggestion from any butShakespeare himself, I should be disposed to claim but little credit fora discovery which must in all likelihood have been forestalled by thecommon insight of some hundred or more students in time past. Thedifficulty begins with the really debatable question of subdivisions. There are certain plays which may be said to hang on the borderlandbetween one period and the next, with one foot lingering and oneadvanced; and these must be classed according to the dominant note oftheir style, the greater or lesser proportion of qualities proper to theearlier or the later stage of thought and writing. At one time I wasinclined to think the whole catalogue more accurately divisible into fourclasses; but the line of demarcation between the third and fourth wouldhave been so much fainter than those which mark off the first period fromthe second, and the second from the third, that it seemed on the whole amore correct and adequate arrangement to assume that the last periodmight be subdivided if necessary into a first and second stage. Thissomewhat precise and pedantic scheme of study I have adopted from no loveof rigid or formal system, but simply to make the method of my criticalprocess as clear as the design. That design is to examine by internalevidence alone the growth and the expression of spirit and of speech, theebb and flow of thought and style, discernible in the successive periodsof Shakespeare's work; to study the phases of mind, the changes of tone, the passage or progress from an old manner to a new, the reversion orrelapse from a later to an earlier habit, which may assuredly be tracedin the modulations of his varying verse, but can only be traced by earand not by finger. I have busied myself with no baseless speculations asto the possible or probable date of the first appearance of this play orof that on the stage; and it is not unlikely that the order of successionhere adopted or suggested may not always coincide with the chronologicalorder of production; nor will the principle or theory by which I haveundertaken to class the successive plays of each period be affected orimpaired though it should chance that a play ranked by me as belonging toa later stage of work should actually have been produced earlier thanothers which in my lists are assigned to a subsequent date. It is not, so to speak, the literal but the spiritual order which I have studied toobserve and to indicate: the periods which I seek to define belong not tochronology but to art. No student need be reminded how common a thing itis to recognise in the later work of a great artist some partialreappearance of his early tone or manner, some passing return to hisearly lines of work and to habits of style since modified or abandoned. Such work, in part at least, may properly be said to belong rather to theearlier stage whose manner it resumes than to the later stage at which itwas actually produced, and in which it stands out as a marked exceptionamong the works of the same period. A famous and a most singularlybeautiful example of this reflorescence as in a Saint Martin's summer ofundecaying genius is the exquisite and crowning love-scene in the operaor "ballet-tragedy" of _Psyche_, written in his sixty-fifth year by theaugust Roman hand of Pierre Corneille; a lyric symphony of spirit and ofsong fulfilled with all the colour and all the music that autumn couldsteal from spring if October had leave to go a Maying in some Olympianmasquerade of melody and sunlight. And it is not easier, easy as it is, to discern and to define the three main stages of Shakespeare's work andprogress, than to classify under their several heads the representativeplays belonging to each period by the law of their nature, if not by theaccident of their date. There are certain dominant qualities which do onthe whole distinguish not only the later from the earlier plays, but thesecond period from the first, the third period from the second; and it iswith these qualities alone that the higher criticism, be it aesthetic orscientific, has properly anything to do. A new method of solution has been applied to various difficulties whichhave been discovered or invented in the text by the care or theperversity of recent commentators, whose principle of explanation iseasier to abuse than to use with any likelihood of profit. It is atleast simple enough for the simplest of critics to apply or misapply:whenever they see or suspect an inequality or an incongruity which may bewholly imperceptible to eyes uninured to the use of their spectacles, they assume at once the presence of another workman, the intrusion of astranger's hand. This supposition of a double authorship is naturally asimpossible to refute as to establish by other than internal evidence andappeal to the private judgment or perception of the reader. But it is nobetter than the last resource of an empiric, the last refuge of asciolist; a refuge which the soundest of scholars will be slowest toseek, a resource which the most competent of critics will be least readyto adopt. Once admitted as a principle of general application, there areno lengths to which it may not carry, there are none to which it has notcarried, the audacious fatuity and the arrogant incompetence of tampererswith the authentic text. Recent editors who have taken on themselves thehigh office of guiding English youth in its first study of Shakespearehave proposed to excise or to obelise whole passages which the delightand wonder of youth and age alike, of the rawest as of the ripest amongstudents, have agreed to consecrate as examples of his genius at itshighest. In the last trumpet-notes of Macbeth's defiance and despair, inthe last rallying cry of the hero reawakened in the tyrant at his utmosthour of need, there have been men and scholars, Englishmen and editors, who have detected the alien voice of a pretender, the false ring of aforeign blast that was not blown by Shakespeare; words that for centuriespast have touched with fire the hearts of thousands in each age sincethey were first inspired--words with the whole sound in them of battle ora breaking sea, with the whole soul of pity and terror mingled and meltedinto each other in the fierce last speech of a spirit grown "aweary ofthe sun, " have been calmly transferred from the account of Shakespeare tothe score of Middleton. And this, forsooth, the student of the future isto accept on the authority of men who bring to the support of theirdecision the unanswerable plea of years spent in the collation andexamination of texts never hitherto explored and compared with suchenergy of learned labour. If this be the issue of learning and ofindustry, the most indolent and ignorant of readers who retains hisnatural capacity to be moved and mastered by the natural delight ofcontact with heavenly things is better off by far than the most studiousand strenuous of all scholiasts who ever claimed acquiescence orchallenged dissent on the strength of his lifelong labours andhard-earned knowledge of the letter of the text. Such an one is indeed"in a parlous state"; and any boy whose heart first begins to burn withinhim, who feels his blood kindle and his spirit dilate, his pulse leap andhis eyes lighten, over a first study of Shakespeare, may say to such ateacher with better reason than Touchstone said to Corin, "Truly, thouart damned; like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side. " Nor could charityitself hope much profit for him from the moving appeal and the piousprayer which temper that severity of sentence--"Wilt thou rest damned?God help thee, shallow man! God make incision in thee! Thou art raw. "And raw he is like to remain for all his learning, and for all incisionsthat can be made in the horny hide of a self-conceit to be pierced by thepuncture of no man's pen. It was bad enough while theorists of thisbreed confined themselves to the suggestion of a possible partnershipwith Fletcher, a possible interpolation by Jonson; but in the descentfrom these to the alleged adulteration of the text by Middleton andRowley we have surely sounded the very lowest depth of folly attainableby the utmost alacrity in sinking which may yet be possible to thebastard brood of Scriblerus. For my part, I shall not be surprisedthough the next discoverer should assure us that half at least of_Hamlet_ is evidently due to the collaboration of Heywood, while thegreater part of _Othello_ is as clearly assignable to the hand ofShirley. Akin to this form of folly, but less pernicious though not moreprofitable, is the fancy of inventing some share for Shakespeare in thecomposition of plays which the veriest insanity of conjecture or capricecould not venture to lay wholly to his charge. This fancy, comparativelyharmless as it is, requires no ground of proof to go upon, no prop oflikelihood to support it; without so much help as may be borrowed fromthe faintest and most fitful of traditions, it spins its own evidencespider-like out of its own inner conscience or conceit, and proffers itwith confident complacency for men's acceptance. Here again I cannot butsee a mere waste of fruitless learning and bootless ingenuity. ThatShakespeare began by retouching and recasting the work of elder andlesser men we all know; that he may afterwards have set his hand to thetask of adding or altering a line or a passage here and there in some fewof the plays brought out under his direction as manager or proprietor ofa theatre is of course possible, but can neither be affirmed nor deniedwith any profit in default of the least fragment of historic ortraditional evidence. Any attempt to verify the imaginary touch of hishand in plays of whose history we know no more than that they were actedon the boards of his theatre can be but a diversion for the restlessleisure of ingenious and ambitious scholars; it will give no clue bywhich the student who simply seeks to know what can be known withcertainty of the poet and his work may hope to be guided towards any safeissue or trustworthy result. Less pardonable and more presumptuous thanthis is the pretension of minor critics to dissect an authentic play ofShakespeare scene by scene, and assign different parts of the same poemto different dates by the same pedagogic rules of numeration andmensuration which they would apply to the general question of the orderand succession of his collective works. This vivisection of a singlepoem is not defensible as a freak of scholarship, an excursion beyond thebounds of bare proof, from which the wanderer may chance to bring back, if not such treasure as he went out to seek, yet some stray godsend orrare literary windfall which may serve to excuse his indulgence in theseemingly profitless pastime of a truant disposition. It is a pureimpertinence to affirm with oracular assurance what might perhaps beadmissible as a suggestion offered with the due diffidence of modest andgenuine scholarship; to assert on the strength of a private pedant'spersonal intuition that such must be the history or such the compositionof a great work whose history he alone could tell, whose composition healone could explain, who gave it to us as his genius had given it to him. From these several rocks and quicksands I trust at least to keep myhumbler course at a safe distance, and steer clear of all sandy shallowsof theory or sunken shoals of hypothesis on which no pilot can be certainof safe anchorage; avoiding all assumption, though never so plausible, for which no ground but that of fancy can be shown, all suggestion thoughnever so ingenious for which no proof but that of conjecture can beadvanced. For instance, I shall neither assume nor accept the theory ofa double authorship or of a double date by which the supposedinequalities may be accounted for, the supposed difficulties may be sweptaway, which for certain readers disturb the study of certain plays ofShakespeare. Only where universal tradition and the general concurrenceof all reasonable critics past and present combine to indicate anunmistakable difference of touch or an unmistakable diversity of datebetween this and that portion of the same play, or where the internalevidence of interpolation perceptible to the most careless and undeniableby the most perverse of readers is supported by the public judgment ofmen qualified to express and competent to defend an opinion, have Ithought it allowable to adopt this facile method of explanation. Noscholar, for example, believes in the single authorship of _Pericles_ or_Andronicus_; none, I suppose, would now question the part taken by somehireling or journeyman in the arrangement or completion for the stage of_Timon of Athens_; and few probably would refuse to admit a doubt of thetotal authenticity or uniform workmanship of the _Taming of the Shrew_. As few, I hope, are prepared to follow the fantastic and confidentsuggestions of every unquiet and arrogant innovator who may seek toappend his name to the long scroll of Shakespearean parasites by thedisplay of a brand-new hypothesis as to the uncertain date or authorshipof some passage or some play which has never before been subjected to thescientific scrutiny of such a pertinacious analyst. The more modestdesign of the present study has in part been already indicated, and willexplain as it proceeds if there be anything in it worth explanation. Itis no part of my ambition to loose the Gordian knots which others whofound them indissoluble have sought in vain to cut in sunder with blunterswords than the Macedonian; but after so many adventures and attemptsthere may perhaps yet be room for an attempt yet unessayed; for a studyby the ear alone of Shakespeare's metrical progress, and a study by lightof the knowledge thus obtained of the corresponsive progress within, which found expression and embodiment in these outward and visiblechanges. The one study will be then seen to be the natural complementand the inevitable consequence of the other; and the patient pursuit ofthe simpler and more apprehensible object of research will appear as theonly sure method by which a reasonable and faithful student may think toattain so much as the porch or entrance to that higher knowledge which nofaithful and reasonable study of Shakespeare can ever for a moment failto keep in sight as the haven of its final hope, the goal of its ultimatelabour. When Christopher Marlowe came up to London from Cambridge, a boy inyears, a man in genius, and a god in ambition, he found the stage whichhe was born to transfigure and re-create by the might and masterdom ofhis genius encumbered with a litter of rude rhyming farces and tragedieswhich the first wave of his imperial hand swept so utterly out of sightand hearing that hardly by piecing together such fragments of that buriedrubbish as it is now possible to unearth can we rebuild in imagination somuch of the rough and crumbling walls that fell before the trumpet-blastof _Tamburlaine_ as may give us some conception of the rabble dynasty ofrhymers whom he overthrew--of the citadel of dramatic barbarism which wasstormed and sacked at the first charge of the young conqueror who came tolead English audiences and to deliver English poetry From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay. When we speak of the drama that existed before the coming of Marlowe, andthat vanished at his advent, we think usually of the rhyming playswritten wholly or mainly in ballad verse of fourteen syllables--of the_Kings Darius_ and _Cambyses_, the _Promos and Cassandra_ of Whetstone, or the _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_ of George Peele. If we turn fromthese abortions of tragedy to the metrical farces which may fairly besaid to contain the germ or embryo of English comedy (a form of dramaticart which certainly owes nothing to the father of our tragic stage), wefind far more of hope and promise in the broad free stretches of theflagellant head-master of Eton and the bibulous Bishop of Bath and Wells;and must admit that hands used to wield the crosier or the birch provedthemselves more skilful at the lighter labours of the stage, moresuccessful even in the secular and bloodless business of a field neitherclerical nor scholastic, than any tragic rival of the opposite party tothat so jovially headed by Orbilius Udall and Silenus Still. These twinpillars of church and school and stage were strong enough to support onthe shoulders of their authority the first crude fabric or formless modelof our comic theatre, while the tragic boards were still creaking andcracking under the jingling canter of _Cambyses_ or the tuneless tramp of_Gorboduc_. This one play which the charity of Sidney excepts from hisgeneral anathema on the nascent stage of England has hitherto beenerroneously described as written in blank verse; an error which I canonly attribute to the prevalence of a groundless assumption that whateveris neither prose nor rhyme must of necessity be definable as blank verse. But the measure, I must repeat, which was adopted by the authors of_Gorboduc_ is by no means so definable. Blank it certainly is; but verseit assuredly is not. There can be no verse where there is no modulation, no rhythm where there is no music. Blank verse came into life in Englandat the birth of the shoemaker's son who had but to open his yet beardlesslips, and the high-born poem which had Sackville to father and Sidney tosponsor was silenced and eclipsed for ever among the poor plebeian crowdof rhyming shadows that waited in death on the noble nothingness of itspatrician shade. These, I suppose, are the first or the only plays whose names recur tothe memory of the general reader when he thinks of the English stagebefore Marlowe; but there was, I suspect, a whole class of plays thencurrent, and more or less supported by popular favour, of which hardly asample is now extant, and which cannot be classed with such as these. Thepoets or rhymesters who supplied them had already seen good to clip thecumbrous and bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run all to seedand weed, which jingled their thin bells at the tedious end of fourteenweary syllables; and for this curtailment of the shambling and sprawlinglines which had hitherto done duty as tragic metre some credit may be dueto these obscure purveyors of forgotten ware for the second epoch of ourstage: if indeed, as I presume, we may suppose that this reform, such asit was, had begun before the time of Marlowe; otherwise, no doubt, littlecredit would be due to men who with so high an example before them werecontent simply to snip away the tags and fringes, to patch the seams andtatters, of the ragged coat of rhyme which they might have exchanged forthat royal robe of heroic verse wherewith he had clothed the ungrownlimbs of limping and lisping tragedy. But if these also may be reckonedamong his precursors, the dismissal from stage service of the dolorousand drudging metre employed by the earliest school of theatricalrhymesters must be taken to mark a real step in advance; and in that casewe possess at least a single example of the rhyming tragedies which hadtheir hour between the last plays written wholly or partially in balladmetre and the first plays written in blank verse. The tragedy of_Selimus, Emperor of the Turks_, published in 1594, {30} may then serveto indicate this brief and obscure period of transition. Whole scenes ofthis singular play are written in rhyming iambics, some in the measure of_Don Juan_, some in the measure of _Venus and Adonis_. The couplets andquatrains so much affected and so reluctantly abandoned by Shakespeareafter the first stage of his dramatic progress are in no other play thatI know of diversified by this alternate variation of _sesta_ with _ottavarima_. This may have been an exceptional experiment due merely to thecaprice of one eccentric rhymester; but in any case we may assume it tomark the extreme limit, the ultimate development of rhyming tragedy afterthe ballad metre had been happily exploded. The play is on other groundsworth attention as a sign of the times, though on poetical grounds it isassuredly worth none. Part of it is written in blank verse, or at leastin rhymeless lines; so that after all it probably followed in the wake of_Tamburlaine_, half adopting and half rejecting the innovations of thatfiery reformer, who wrought on the old English stage no less a miraclethan _Hernani_ on the French stage in the days of our fathers. That_Selimus_ was published four years later than _Tamburlaine_, in the yearfollowing the death of Marlowe, proves of course nothing as to the dateof its production; and even if it was written and acted in the year ofits publication, it undoubtedly in the main represents the work of aprior era to the reformation of the stage by Marlowe. The levelregularity of its unrhymed scenes is just like that of the weakerportions of _Titus Andronicus_ and the _First Part of King Henry theSixth_--the opening scene, for example, of either play. With_Andronicus_ it has also in common the quality of exceptionalmonstrosity, a delight in the parade of mutilation as well as ofmassacre. It seems to me possible that the same hand may have been atwork on all three plays; for that Marlowe's is traceable in those partsof the two retouched by Shakespeare which bear no traces of his touch isa theory to the full as absurd as that which would impute to Shakespearethe charge of their entire composition. The revolution effected by Marlowe naturally raised the same cry againstits author as the revolution effected by Hugo. That Shakespeare shouldnot at once have enlisted under his banner is less inexplicable than itmay seem. He was naturally addicted to rhyme, though if we put aside theSonnets we must admit that in rhyme he never did anything worth Marlowe's_Hero and Leander_: he did not, like Marlowe, see at once that it must bereserved for less active forms of poetry than the tragic drama; and hewas personally, it seems, in opposition to Marlowe and his school ofacademic playwrights--the band of bards in which Oxford and Cambridgewere respectively and so respectably represented by Peele and Greene. Butin his very first plays, comic or tragic or historic, we can see thecollision and conflict of the two influences; his evil angel, rhyme, yielding step by step and note by note to the strong advance of thatbetter genius who came to lead him into the loftier path of Marlowe. There is not a single passage in _Titus Andronicus_ more Shakespeareanthan the magnificent quatrain of Tamora upon the eagle and the littlebirds; but the rest of the scene in which we come upon it, and the wholescene preceding, are in blank verse of more variety and vigour than wefind in the baser parts of the play; and these if any scenes we maysurely attribute to Shakespeare. Again, the last battle of Talbot seemsto me as undeniably the master's work as the scene in the Temple Gardensor the courtship of Margaret by Suffolk; this latter indeed, full as itis of natural and vivid grace, may perhaps not be beyond the highestreach of one or two among the rivals of his earliest years of work; whileas we are certain that he cannot have written the opening scene, that hewas at any stage of his career incapable of it, so may we believe as wellas hope that he is guiltless of any complicity in that detestable part ofthe play which attempts to defile the memory of the virgin saviour of hercountry. {33} In style it is not, I think, above the range of GeorgePeele at his best: and to have written even the last of those scenes canadd but little discredit to the memory of a man already disgraced as thedefamer of Eleanor of Castile; while it would be a relief to feel assuredthat there was but one English poet of any genius who could be capable ofeither villainy. In this play, then, more decisively than in _Titus Andronicus_, we findShakespeare at work (so to speak) with both hands--with his left hand ofrhyme, and his right hand of blank verse. The left is loth to forego thepractice of its peculiar music; yet, as the action of the right growsfreer and its touch grows stronger, it becomes more and more certain thatthe other must cease playing, under pain of producing mere discord anddisturbance in the scheme of tragic harmony. We imagine that the writermust himself have felt the scene of the roses to be pitched in a truerkey than the noble scene of parting between the old hero and his son onthe verge of desperate battle and certain death. This is the last andloftiest farewell note of rhyming tragedy; still, in _King Richard II_, and in _Romeo and Juliet_, it struggles for awhile to keep its footing, but now more visibly in vain. The rhymed scenes in these plays are tooplainly the survivals of a ruder and feebler stage of work; they cannothold their own in the new order with even such discordant effect ofincongruous excellence and inharmonious beauty as belongs to the death-scene of the Talbots when matched against the quarrelling scene ofSomerset and York. Yet the briefest glance over the plays of the firstepoch in the work of Shakespeare will suffice to show how protracted wasthe struggle and how gradual the defeat of rhyme. Setting aside theretouched plays, we find on the list one tragedy, two histories, and fourif not five comedies, which the least critical reader would attribute tothis first epoch of work. In three of these comedies rhyme can hardly besaid to be beaten; that is, the rhyming scenes are on the whole equal tothe unrhymed in power and beauty. In the single tragedy, and in one ofthe two histories, we may say that rhyme fights hard for life, but isundeniably worsted; that is, they contain as to quantity a largeproportion of rhymed verse, but as to quality the rhymed part bears noproportion whatever to the unrhymed. In two scenes we may say that thewhole heart or spirit of _Romeo and Juliet_ is summed up and distilledinto perfect and pure expression; and these two are written in blankverse of equable and blameless melody. Outside the garden scene in thesecond act and the balcony scene in the third, there is much that isfanciful and graceful, much of elegiac pathos and fervid if fantasticpassion; much also of superfluous rhetoric and (as it were) of wordymelody, which flows and foams hither and thither into something ofextravagance and excess; but in these two there is no flaw, no outbreak, no superflux, and no failure. Throughout certain scenes of the third andfourth acts I think it may be reasonably and reverently allowed that theriver of verse has broken its banks, not as yet through the force andweight of its gathering stream, but merely through the weakness of thebarriers or boundaries found insufficient to confine it. And here we maywith deference venture on a guess why Shakespeare was so long so loth toforego the restraint of rhyme. When he wrote, and even when he rewroteor at least retouched, his youngest tragedy he had not yet strength towalk straight in the steps of the mighty master, but two months olderthan himself by birth, whose foot never from the first faltered in thearduous path of severer tragic verse. The loveliest of love-plays isafter all a child of "his salad days, when he was green in judgment, "though assuredly not "cold in blood"--a physical condition as difficultto conceive of Shakespeare at any age as of Cleopatra. It is in thescenes of vehement passion, of ardour and of agony, that we feel thecomparative weakness of a yet ungrown hand, the tentative uncertain graspof a stripling giant. The two utterly beautiful scenes are not of thiskind; they deal with simple joy and with simple sorrow, with the gladnessof meeting and the sadness of parting love; but between and behind themcome scenes of more fierce emotion, full of surprise, of violence, ofunrest; and with these the poet is not yet (if I dare say so) quitestrong enough to deal. Apollo has not yet put on the sinews of Hercules. At a later date we may fancy or may find that when the Herculean muscleis full-grown the voice in him which was as the voice of Apollo is for apassing moment impaired. In _Measure for Measure_, where the adult andgigantic god has grappled with the greatest and most terrible of energiesand of passions, we miss the music of a younger note that rang through_Romeo and Juliet_; but before the end this too revives, as pure, assweet, as fresh, but richer now and deeper than its first clear notes ofthe morning, in the heavenly harmony of _Cymbeline_ and _The Tempest_. The same effusion or effervescence of words is perceptible in _KingRichard II_. As in the greater (and the less good) part of _Romeo andJuliet_; and not less perceptible is the perpetual inclination of thepoet to revert for help to rhyme, to hark back in search of supporttowards the half-forsaken habits of his poetic nonage. Feeling hisfoothold insecure on the hard and high ascent of the steeps of rhymelessverse, he stops and slips back ever and anon towards the smooth andmarshy meadow whence he has hardly begun to climb. Any student whoshould wish to examine the conditions of the struggle at its height maybe content to analyse the first act of this the first historical play ofShakespeare. As the tragedy moves onward, and the style gathers strengthwhile the action gathers speed, --as (to borrow the phrase so admirablyapplied by Coleridge to Dryden) the poet's chariot-wheels get hot bydriving fast, --the temptation of rhyme grows weaker, and the hand growsfirmer which before lacked strength to wave it off. The one thing whollyor greatly admirable in this play is the exposition of the somewhatpitiful but not unpitiable character of King Richard. Among the scenesdevoted to this exposition I of course include the whole of the death-scene of Gaunt, as well the part which precedes as the part which followsthe actual appearance of his nephew on the stage; and into these scenesthe intrusion of rhyme is rare and brief. They are written almost whollyin pure and fluent rather than vigorous or various blank verse; though Icannot discern in any of them an equality in power and passion to themagnificent scene of abdication in Marlowe's _Edward II_. This play, Ithink, must undoubtedly be regarded as the immediate model ofShakespeare's; and the comparison is one of inexhaustible interest to allstudents of dramatic poetry. To the highest height of the earlier masterI do not think that the mightier poet who was as yet in great measure hispupil has ever risen in this the first (as I take it) of his historicplays. Of composition and proportion he has perhaps already a somewhatbetter idea. But in grasp of character, always excepting the one centralfigure of the piece, we find his hand as yet the unsteadier of the two. Even after a lifelong study of this as of all other plays of Shakespeare, it is for me at least impossible to determine what I doubt if the poetcould himself have clearly defined--the main principle, the motive andthe meaning of such characters as York, Norfolk, and Aumerle. TheGaveston and the Mortimer of Marlowe are far more solid and definitefigures than these; yet none after that of Richard is more important tothe scheme of Shakespeare. They are fitful, shifting, vaporous: theiroutlines change, withdraw, dissolve, and "leave not a rack behind. " They, not Antony, are like the clouds of evening described in the most gloriousof so many glorious passages put long afterwards by Shakespeare into themouth of his latest Roman hero. They "cannot hold this visible shape" inwhich the poet at first presents them even long enough to leave adistinct image, a decisive impression for better or for worse, upon themind's eye of the most simple and open-hearted reader. They are ghosts, not men; _simulacra modis pallentia miris_. You cannot descry so much asthe original intention of the artist's hand which began to draw andrelaxed its hold of the brush before the first lines were fairly traced. And in the last, the worst and weakest scene of all, in which York pleadswith Bolingbroke for the death of the son whose mother pleads against herhusband for his life, there is a final relapse into rhyme and rhymingepigram, into the "jigging vein" dried up (we might have hoped) longsince by the very glance of Marlowe's Apollonian scorn. It would beeasy, agreeable, and irrational to ascribe without further evidence thanits badness this misconceived and misshapen scene to some other hand thanShakespeare's. It is below the weakest, the rudest, the hastiest sceneattributable to Marlowe; it is false, wrong, artificial beyond the worstof his bad and boyish work; but it has a certain likeness for the worseto the crudest work of Shakespeare. It is difficult to say to whatdepths of bad taste the writer of certain passages in _Venus and Adonis_could not fall before his genius or his judgment was full-grown. Toinvent an earlier play on the subject and imagine this scene a survivingfragment, a floating waif of that imaginary wreck, would in my opinion bean uncritical mode of evading the question at issue. It must be regardedas the last hysterical struggle of rhyme to maintain its place intragedy; and the explanation, I would fain say the excuse, of itsreappearance may perhaps be simply this; that the poet was not yetdramatist enough to feel for each of his characters an equal orproportionate regard; to divide and disperse his interest among thevarious crowd of figures which claim each in its place, and each afterits kind, fair and adequate share of their creator's attention andsympathy. His present interest was here wholly concentrated on thesingle figure of Richard; and when that for the time was absent, thesubordinate figures became to him but heavy and vexatious encumbrances, to be shifted on and off the stage with as much of haste and as little oflabour as might be possible to an impatient and uncertain hand. Now alltragic poets, I presume, from AEschylus the godlike father of them all tothe last aspirant who may struggle after the traces of his steps, havebeen poets before they were tragedians; their lips have had power to singbefore their feet had strength to tread the stage, before their hands hadskill to paint or carve figures from the life. With Shakespeare it wasso as certainly as with Shelley, as evidently as with Hugo. It is in thegreat comic poets, in Moliere and in Congreve, {42} our own lesserMoliere, so far inferior in breadth and depth, in tenderness andstrength, to the greatest writer of the "great age, " yet so near him inscience and in skill, so like him in brilliance and in force;--it is inthese that we find theatrical instinct twin-born with imaginativeimpulse, dramatic power with inventive perception. In the second historic play which can be wholly ascribed to Shakespearewe still find the poetic or rhetorical duality for the most part inexcess of the dramatic; but in _King Richard III_. The bonds of rhyme atleast are fairly broken. This only of all Shakespeare's plays belongsabsolutely to the school of Marlowe. The influence of the elder master, and that influence alone, is perceptible from end to end. Here at lastwe can see that Shakespeare has decidedly chosen his side. It is asfiery in passion, as single in purpose, as rhetorical often though neverso inflated in expression, as _Tamburlaine_ itself. It is doubtless abetter piece of work than Marlowe ever did; I dare not say, than Marloweever could have done. It is not for any man to measure, above all is itnot for any workman in the field of tragic poetry lightly to take onhimself the responsibility or the authority to pronounce, what it is thatChristopher Marlowe could not have done; but, dying as he did and when hedid, it is certain that he has not left us a work so generally and sovariously admirable as _King Richard III_. As certain is it that but forhim this play could never have been written. At a later date the subjectwould have been handled otherwise, had the poet chosen to handle it atall; and in his youth he could not have treated it as he has without theguidance and example of Marlowe. Not only are its highest qualities ofenergy, of exuberance, of pure and lofty style, of sonorous andsuccessive harmonies, the very qualities that never fail to distinguishthose first dramatic models which were fashioned by his ardent hand; thestrenuous and single-handed grasp of character, the motion and action ofcombining and contending powers, which here for the first time we findsustained with equal and unfaltering vigour throughout the length of awhole play, we perceive, though imperfectly, in the work of Marlowebefore we can trace them even as latent or infant forces in the work ofShakespeare. In the exquisite and delightful comedies of his earliest period we canhardly discern any sign, any promise of them at all. One only of these, the _Comedy of Errors_, has in it anything of dramatic composition andmovement; and what it has of these, I need hardly remind the most cursoryof students, is due by no means to Shakespeare. What is due to him, andto him alone, is the honour of having embroidered on the naked old canvasof comic action those flowers of elegiac beauty which vivify anddiversify the scene of Plautus as reproduced by the art of Shakespeare. In the next generation so noble a poet as Rotrou, whom perhaps it mightnot be inaccurate to call the French Marlowe, and who had (what Marlowehad not) the gift of comic as well as of tragic excellence, found nothingof this kind and little of any kind to add to the old poet's admirablebut arid sketch of farcical incident or accident. But in this light andlovely work of the youth of Shakespeare we find for the first time thatstrange and sweet admixture of farce with fancy, of lyric charm withcomic effect, which recurs so often in his later work, from the date of_As You Like It_ to the date of the _Winter's Tale_, and which no laterpoet had ventured to recombine in the same play till our own time hadgiven us, in the author of _Tragaldabas_, one who could alternate withoutconfusing the woodland courtship of Eliseo and Caprina with the tavernbraggardism of Grif and Minotoro. The sweetness and simplicity of lyricor elegiac loveliness which fill and inform the scenes where Adriana, hersister, and the Syracusan Antipholus exchange the expression of theirerrors and their loves, belong to Shakespeare alone; and may help us tounderstand how the young poet who at the outset of his divine career hadstruck into this fresh untrodden path of poetic comedy should have been, as we have seen that he was, loth to learn from another and an alienteacher the hard and necessary lesson that this flowery path would neverlead him towards the loftier land of tragic poetry. For as yet, even inthe nominally or intentionally tragic and historic work of the firstperiod, we descry always and everywhere and still preponderant the lyricelement, the fantastic element, or even the elegiac element. All thesequeens and heroines of history and tragedy have rather an Ovidian than aSophoclean grace of bearing and of speech. The example afforded by the _Comedy of Errors_ would suffice to show thatrhyme, however inadequate for tragic use, is by no means a bad instrumentfor romantic comedy. In another of Shakespeare's earliest works, whichmight almost be described as a lyrical farce, rhyme plays also a greatpart; but the finest passage, the real crown and flower of _Love'sLabour's Lost_, is the praise or apology of love spoken by Biron in blankverse. This is worthy of Marlowe for dignity and sweetness, but has alsothe grace of a light and radiant fancy enamoured of itself, begottenbetween thought and mirth, a child-god with grave lips and laughing eyes, whose inspiration is nothing akin to Marlowe's. In this as in theoverture of the play and in its closing scene, but especially in thenoble passage which winds up for a year the courtship of Biron andRosaline, the spirit which informs the speech of the poet is finer oftouch and deeper of tone than in the sweetest of the serious interludesof the _Comedy of Errors_. The play is in the main a yet lighter thing, and more wayward and capricious in build, more formless and fantastic inplot, more incomposite altogether than that first heir of Shakespeare'scomic invention, which on its own ground is perfect in its consistency, blameless in composition and coherence; while in _Love's Labour's Lost_the fancy for the most part runs wild as the wind, and the structure ofthe story is as that of a house of clouds which the wind builds andunbuilds at pleasure. Here we find a very riot of rhymes, wild andwanton in their half-grown grace as a troop of "young satyrs, tender-hoofed and ruddy-horned"; during certain scenes we seem almost tostand again by the cradle of new-born comedy, and hear the first lispingand laughing accents run over from her baby lips in bubbling rhyme; butwhen the note changes we recognise the speech of gods. For the firsttime in our literature the higher key of poetic or romantic comedy isfinely touched to a fine issue. The divine instrument fashioned byMarlowe for tragic purposes alone has found at once its new sweet use inthe hands of Shakespeare. The way is prepared for _As You Like It_ andthe _Tempest_; the language is discovered which will befit the lips ofRosalind and Miranda. What was highest as poetry in the _Comedy of Errors_ was mainly in rhyme;all indeed, we might say, between the prelude spoken by AEgeon and theappearance in the last scene of his wife: in _Love's Labour's Lost_ whatwas highest was couched wholly in blank verse; in the _Two Gentlemen ofVerona_ rhyme has fallen seemingly into abeyance, and there are nopassages of such elegiac beauty as in the former, of such exaltedeloquence as in the latter of these plays; there is an even sweetness, asimple equality of grace in thought and language which keeps the wholepoem in tune, written as it is in a subdued key of unambitious harmony. In perfect unity and keeping the composition of this beautiful sketch mayperhaps be said to mark a stage of advance, a new point of work attained, a faint but sensible change of manner, signalised by increased firmnessof hand and clearness of outline. Slight and swift in execution as itis, few and simple as are the chords here struck of character andemotion, every shade of drawing and every note of sound is at one withthe whole scheme of form and music. Here too is the first dawn of thathigher and more tender humour which was never given in such perfection toany man as ultimately to Shakespeare; one touch of the by-play of Launceand his immortal dog is worth all the bright fantastic interludes ofBoyet and Adriano, Costard and Holofernes; worth even half the sallies ofMercutio, and half the dancing doggrel or broad-witted prose of eitherDromio. But in the final poem which concludes and crowns the first epochof Shakespeare's work, the special graces and peculiar glories of eachthat went before are gathered together as in one garland "of every hueand every scent. " The young genius of the master of all our poets findsits consummation in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_. The blank verse is asfull, sweet, and strong as the best of Biron's or Romeo's; the rhymedverse as clear, pure, and true as the simplest and truest melody of_Venus and Adonis_ or the _Comedy of Errors_. But here each kind ofexcellence is equal throughout; there are here no purple patches on agown of serge, but one seamless and imperial robe of a single dye. Ofthe lyric or the prosaic part, the counterchange of loves and laughters, of fancy fine as air and imagination high as heaven, what need can therebe for any one to shame himself by the helpless attempt to say some wordnot utterly unworthy? Let it suffice us to accept this poem as thelandmark of our first stage, and pause to look back from it on what liesbehind us of partial or of perfect work. The highest point attained in this first period lies in the domain ofcomedy or romance, and belongs as much to lyric as to dramatic poetry;its sovereign quality is that of sweetness and springtide of fairy fancycrossed with light laughter and light trouble that end in perfect music. In history as in tragedy the master's hand has not yet come to its fullstrength and skill; its touch is not yet wholly assured, its work not yetwholly blameless. Besides the plays undoubtedly and entirely due to thestill growing genius of Shakespeare, we have taken note but of two amongthose which bear the partial imprint of his hand. The long-vexedquestion as to the authorship of the latter parts of _King Henry VI_. , intheir earlier or later form, has not been touched upon; nor do I designto reopen that perpetual source of debate unstanchable and inexhaustibledispute by any length of scrutiny or inquisition of detail. Two pointsmust of course be taken for granted: that Marlowe was more or lessconcerned in the production, and Shakespeare in the revision of theseplays; whether before or after his additions to the original _First Partof King Henry VI_. We cannot determine, though the absence of rhyme mightseem to indicate a later date for the recast of the _Contention_. But itis noticeable that the style of Marlowe appears more vividly anddistinctly in passages of the reformed than of the unreformed plays. Those famous lines, for example, which open the fourth act of the _SecondPart of King Henry VI_. Are not to be found in the corresponding scene ofthe first part of the _Contention_; yet, whether they belong to theoriginal sketch of the play, or were inserted as an afterthought into therevised and expanded copy, the authorship of these verses is surelyunmistakable:-- The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day Is crept into the bosom of the sea; And now loud howling wolves arouse the jades That drag the tragic melancholy night-- _Aut Christophorus Marlowe, aut diabolus_; it is inconceivable that anyimitator but one should have had the power so to catch the very trick ofhis hand, the very note of his voice, and incredible that the one whomight would have set himself to do so: for if this be not indeed thevoice and this the hand of Marlowe, then what we find in these verses isnot the fidelity of a follower, but the servility of a copyist. Noparasitic rhymester of past or present days who feeds his starvelingtalent on the shreds and orts, "the fragments, scraps, the bits andgreasy relics" of another man's board, ever uttered a more parrot-likenote of plagiary. The very exactitude of the repetition is a strongargument against the theory which attributes it to Shakespeare. That hehad much at starting to learn of Marlowe, and that he did learn much--thatin his earliest plays, and above all in his earliest historic plays, theinfluence of the elder poet, the echo of his style, the iteration of hismanner, may perpetually be traced--I have already shown that I should bethe last to question; but so exact an echo, so servile an iteration asthis, I believe we shall nowhere find in them. The sonorous accumulationof emphatic epithets--as in the magnificent first verse of thispassage--is indeed at least as much a note of the young Shakespeare'sstyle as of his master's; but even were this one verse less in the mannerof the elder than the younger poet--and this we can hardly say that itis--no single verse detached from its context can weigh a feather againstthe full and flawless evidence of the whole speech. And of all thisthere is nothing in the _Contention_; the scene there opens in bald andflat nakedness of prose, striking at once into the immediate matter ofstage business without the decoration of a passing epithet or a singletrope. From this sample it might seem that the main difficulty must be to detectanywhere the sign-manual of Shakespeare, even in the best passages of therevised play. On the other hand, it has not unreasonably been maintainedthat even in the next scene of this same act in its original form, and inall those following which treat of Cade's insurrection, there is evidenceof such qualities as can hardly be ascribed to any hand then known butShakespeare's. The forcible realism, the simple vigour and lifelikehumour of these scenes, cannot, it is urged, be due to any other so earlyat work in the field of comedy. A critic desirous to press this pointmight further insist on the likeness or identity of tone between theseand all later scenes in which Shakespeare has taken on him to paint theaction and passion of an insurgent populace. With him, it might tooplausibly be argued, the people once risen in revolt for any just orunjust cause is always the mob, the unwashed rabble, the swinishmultitude; full as he is of wise and gracious tenderness for individualcharacter, of swift and ardent pity for personal suffering, he has nodeeper or finer feeling than scorn for "the beast with many heads" thatfawn and butt at bidding as they are swayed by the vain and violentbreath of any worthless herdsman. For the drovers who guide and misguideat will the turbulent flocks of their mutinous cattle his store of bitterwords is inexhaustible; it is a treasure-house of obloquy which can neverbe drained dry. All this, or nearly all this, we must admit; but itbrings us no nearer to any but a floating and conjectural kind ofsolution. In the earliest form known to us of this play it should seemthat we have traces of Shakespeare's handiwork, in the latest that wefind evidence of Marlowe's. But it would be something too extravagantfor the veriest wind-sucker among commentators to start a theory that arevision was made of his original work by Marlowe after additions hadbeen made to it by Shakespeare; yet we have seen that the mostunmistakable signs of Marlowe's handiwork, the passages which show mostplainly the personal and present seal of his genius, belong to the playonly in its revised form; while there is no part of the whole compositionwhich can so confidently be assigned to Shakespeare as to the one manthen capable of such work, as can an entire and important episode of theplay in its unrevised state. Now the proposition that Shakespeare wasthe sole author of both plays in their earliest extant shape is refutedat once and equally from without and from within, by evidence oftradition and by evidence of style. There is therefore proofirresistible and unmistakable of at least a double authorship; and theone reasonable conclusion left to us would seem to be this; that thefirst edition we possess of these plays is a partial transcript of thetext as it stood after the first additions had been made by Shakespeareto the original work of Marlowe and others; for that this original wasthe work of more hands than one, and hands of notably unequal power, wehave again the united witness of traditional and internal evidence towarrant our belief: and that among the omissions of this imperfect textwere certain passages of the original work, which were ultimatelyrestored in the final revision of the entire poem as it now stands amongthe collected works of Shakespeare. No competent critic who has given due study to the genius of Marlowe willadmit that there is a single passage of tragic or poetic interest ineither form of the text, which is beyond the reach of the father ofEnglish tragedy: or, if there be one seeming exception in the expandedand transfigured version of Clifford's monologue over his father'scorpse, which is certainly more in Shakespeare's tragic manner than inMarlowe's, and in the style of a later period than that in which he wason the whole apparently content to reproduce or to emulate the tragicmanner of Marlowe, there is at least but this one exception to thegeneral and absolute truth of the rule; and even this great tragicpassage is rather out of the range of Marlowe's style than beyond thescope of his genius. In the later as in the earlier version of theseplays, the one manifest excellence of which we have no reason to supposehim capable is manifest in the comic or prosaic scenes alone. The firstgreat rapid sketch of the dying cardinal, afterwards so nobly enlargedand perfected on revision by the same or by a second artist, is asclearly within the capacity of Marlowe as of Shakespeare; and in eitheredition of the latter play, successively known as _The True Tragedy ofRichard Duke of York_, as the _Second Part of the Contention_, and as the_Third Part of King Henry VI_. , the dominant figure which darkens all theclose of the poem with presage of a direr day is drawn by the same stronghand in the same tragic outline. From the first to the last stage of thework there is no mark of change or progress here; the whole play indeedhas undergone less revision, as it certainly needed less, than thepreceding part of the _Contention_. Those great verses which resume thewhole spirit of Shakespeare's Richard--finer perhaps in themselves thanany passage of the play which bears his name--are wellnigh identical ineither form of the poem; but the reviser, with admirable judgment, hasstruck out, whether from his own text or that of another, the line whichprecedes them in the original sketch, where the passage runs thus:-- I had no father, I am like no father; I have no brothers, I am like no brother; (this reiteration is exactly in the first manner of our tragic drama;) And this word love, which greybeards term divine, etc. It would be an impertinence to transcribe the rest of a passage whichrings in the ear of every reader's memory; but it may be noted that theerasure by which its effect is so singularly heightened with the inbornskill of so divine an instinct is just such an alteration as would beequally likely to occur to the original writer on glancing over hisprinted text or to a poet of kindred power, who, while busied inretouching and filling out the sketch of his predecessor, might be struckby the opening for so great an improvement at so small a cost ofsuppression. My own conjecture would incline to the belief that we havehere a perfect example of the manner in which Shakespeare may bepresumed, when such a task was set before him, to have dealt with thetext of Marlowe. That at the outset of his career he was so employed, aswell as on the texts of lesser poets, we have on all hands as goodevidence of every kind as can be desired; proof on one side from the textof the revised plays, which are as certainly in part the work of his handas they are in part the work of another; and proof on the opposite sidefrom the open and clamorous charge of his rivals, whose imputations canbe made to bear no reasonable meaning but this by the most violentingenuity of perversion, and who presumably were not persons of suchfrank imbecility, such innocent and infantine malevolence, as to forgeagainst their most dangerous enemy the pointless and edgeless weapon of acharge which, if ungrounded, must have been easier to refute than todevise. Assuming then that in common with other young poets of his dayhe was thus engaged during the first years of his connection with thestage, we should naturally have expected to find him handling the text ofMarlowe with more of reverence and less of freedom than that of meanermen: ready, as in the _Contention_, to clear away with no timid handtheir weaker and more inefficient work, to cancel and supplant it byworthier matter of his own; but when occupied in recasting the verse ofMarlowe, not less ready to confine his labour to such slight and skilfulstrokes of art as that which has led us into this byway of speculation;to the correction of a false note, the addition of a finer touch, theperfection of a meaning half expressed or a tone of half-uttered music;to the invigoration of sense and metre by substitution of the right wordfor the wrong, of a fuller phrase for one feebler; to the excision ofsuch archaic and superfluous repetitions as are signs of a cruder stageof workmanship, relics of a ruder period of style, survivals of theearliest form or habit of dramatic poetry. Such work as this, howeverhumble in our present eyes, which look before and after, would assuredlyhave been worthy of the workman and his task; an office no less fruitfulof profit, and no more unbeseeming the pupil hand of the future master, than the subordinate handiwork of the young Raffaelle or Leonardo on thecanvas of Verrocchio or Perugino. Of the doubtful or spurious plays which have been with more or less showof reason ascribed to this first period of Shakespeare's art, I have hereno more to say than that I purpose in the proper place to take account ofthe only two among them which bear the slightest trace of any possibletouch of his hand. For these two there is not, as it happens, the leastwitness of tradition or outward likelihood which might warrant us inassigning them a place apart from the rest, and nearer the chance ofreception into the rank that has been claimed for them; while those playsin whose favour there is some apparent evidence from without, such as thefact of early or even original attribution to the master's hand, are, with one possible exception, utterly beyond the pale of humanconsideration as at any stage whatever the conceivable work ofShakespeare. Considering that his two attempts at narrative or rather semi-narrativeand semi-reflective poetry belong obviously to an early stage of hisearliest period, we may rather here than elsewhere take notice that thereare some curious points of coincidence for evil as for good between thefortunes of Shakespeare's plays and the fortunes of his poems. In eithercase we find that some part at least of his earlier and inferior work hasfared better at the blind hands of chance and the brutish hands ofprinters than some part at least of his riper and more precious products. His two early poems would seem to have had the good hap of his personalsupervision in their passage through the press. Upon them, at leastsince the time of Coleridge, who as usual has said on this subject thefirst and the last word that need be said, it seems to me that fullysufficient notice and fully adequate examination have been expended; andthat nothing at once new and true can now be profitably said in praise orin dispraise of them. Of _A Lover's Complaint_, marked as it isthroughout with every possible sign suggestive of a far later date and afar different inspiration, I have only space or need to remark that itcontains two of the most exquisitely Shakespearean verses ever vouchsafedto us by Shakespeare, and two of the most execrably euphuistic ordysphuistic lines ever inflicted on us by man. Upon the Sonnets such apreposterous pyramid of presumptuous commentary has long since beenreared by the Cimmerian speculation and Boeotian "brain-sweat" ofsciolists and scholiasts, that no modest man will hope and no wise manwill desire to add to the structure or subtract from it one single brickof proof or disproof, theorem or theory. As yet the one contemporarybook which has ever been supposed to throw any direct or indirect lighton the mystic matter remains as inaccessible and unhelpful to students asthough it had never been published fifteen years earlier than the date oftheir publication and four years before the book in which Meres noticesthe circulation of Shakespeare's "sugared sonnets among his privatefriends. " It would be a most noble and thankworthy addition to a list oflabours beyond praise and benefits beyond price, if my honoured friendDr. Grosart could find the means to put a crown upon the achievements ofhis learning and a seal upon the obligations of our gratitude by the oneinestimable boon long hoped for against hoping, and as yet but "a visionin a dream" to the most learned and most loving of true Shakespeareanstudents; by the issue or reissue in its full and perfect likeness, collated at last and complete, of _Willobie his Avisa_. {63} It was long since more than time that the worthless and impudentimposture called _The Passionate Pilgrim_ should be exposed and expelledfrom its station at the far end of Shakespeare's poems. What Coleridgesaid of Ben Jonson's epithet for "turtle-footed peace, " we may say of thelabel affixed to this rag-picker's bag of stolen goods: _The PassionatePilgrim_ is a pretty title, a very pretty title; pray what may it mean?In all the larcenous little bundle of verse there is neither a poem whichbears that name nor a poem by which that name would be bearable. Thepublisher of the booklet was like "one Ragozine, a most notoriouspirate"; and the method no less than the motive of his rascality in thepresent instance is palpable and simple enough. Fired by the immediateand instantly proverbial popularity of Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_, he hired, we may suppose, some ready hack of unclean hand to supply himwith three doggrel sonnets on the same subject, noticeable only for theirporcine quality of prurience: he procured by some means a rough copy oran incorrect transcript of two genuine and unpublished sonnets byShakespeare, which with the acute instinct of a felonious tradesman helaid atop of his worthless wares by way of gilding to their base metal:he stole from the two years published text of _Love's Labour's Lost_, andreproduced with more or less mutilation or corruption, the sonnet ofLongavile, the "canzonet" of Biron, and the far lovelier love-song ofDumaine. The rest of the ragman's gatherings, with three most notableexceptions, is little better for the most part than dry rubbish ordisgusting refuse; unless a plea may haply be put in for the prettycommonplaces of the lines on a "sweet rose, fair flower, " and so forth;for the couple of thin and pallid if tender and tolerable copies of verseon "Beauty" and "Good Night, " or the passably light and lively stray ofsong on "crabbed age and youth. " I need not say that those threeexceptions are the stolen and garbled work of Marlowe and of Barnfield, our elder Shelley and our first-born Keats; the singer of Cynthia inverse well worthy of Endymion, who would seem to have died as a poet inthe same fatal year of his age that Keats died as a man; the firstadequate English laureate of the nightingale, to be supplanted orequalled by none until the advent of his mightier brother. II. The second period is that of perfection in comic and historic style. Thefinal heights and depths of tragedy, with all its reach of thought andall its pulse of passion, are yet to be scaled and sounded; but to thisstage belongs the special quality of faultless, joyous, facile commandupon each faculty required of the presiding genius for service or forsport. It is in the middle period of his work that the language ofShakespeare is most limpid in its fullness, the style most pure, thethought most transparent through the close and luminous raiment ofperfect expression. The conceits and crudities of the first stage areoutgrown and cast aside; the harshness and obscurity which at times maystrike us as among the notes of his third manner have as yet no place inthe flawless work of this second stage. That which has to be said is notyet too great for perfection of utterance; passion has not yet grappledwith thought in so close and fierce an embrace as to strain and rend thegarment of words, though stronger and subtler than ever was woven ofhuman speech. Neither in his first nor in his last stage would the styleof Shakespeare, even were it possible by study to reproduce it, be ofitself a perfect and blameless model; but his middle style, that in whichthe typical plays of his second period are written, would be, if it werepossible to imitate, the most absolute pattern that could be set beforeman. I do not speak of mere copyist's work, the parasitic knack ofretailing cast phrases, tricks and turns of accent, cadences andcatchwords proper only to the natural manner of the man who first came byinstinct upon them, and by instinct put them to use; I speak of thatfaithful and fruitful discipleship of love with which the highest amongpoets and the most original among workmen have naturally been always thefirst to study and the most earnest to follow the footsteps of theirgreatest precursors in that kind. And this only high and profitable formof study and discipleship can set before itself, even in the work ofShakespeare, no pattern so perfect, no model so absolute, as is affordedby the style or manner of his second period. To this stage belong by spiritual right if not by material, by rule ofpoetic order if not by date of actual succession, the greatest of hisEnglish histories and four of his greatest and most perfect comedies; thefour greatest we might properly call them, reserving for another classthe last divine triad of romantic plays which it is alike inaccurate tonumber among tragedies or comedies proper: the _Winter's Tale_, _Cymbeline_, and the _Tempest_, which belong of course wholly to his lastmanner, or, if accuracy must be strained even to pedantry, to the secondmanner of his third or final stage. A single masterpiece which may beclassed either among histories or tragedies belongs to the middle period;and to this also we must refer, if not the ultimate form, yet assuredlythe first sketch at least of that which is commonly regarded as thetypical and supreme work of Shakespeare. Three lesser comedies, one ofthem in great part the recast or rather the transfiguration of an earlierpoet's work, complete the list of plays assignable to the second epoch ofhis genius. The ripest fruit of historic or national drama, the consummation and thecrown of Shakespeare's labours in that line, must of course be recognisedand saluted by all students in the supreme and sovereign trilogy of KingHenry IV. And King Henry V. On a lower degree only than this final andimperial work we find the two chronicle histories which remain to beclassed. In style as in structure they bear witness of a power lessperfect, a less impeccable hand. They have less of perceptible instinct, less of vivid and vigorous utterance; the breath of their inspiration isless continuous and less direct, the fashion of their eloquence is moredeliberate and more prepense; there is more of study and structureapparent in their speech, and less in their general scheme of action. Ofall Shakespeare's plays they are the most rhetorical; there is more talkthan song in them, less poetry than oratory; more finish than form, lessmovement than incident. Scene is laid upon scene, and event succeedsevent, as stone might be laid on stone and story might succeed story in abuilding reared by mere might of human handiwork; not as in a city ortemple whose walls had risen of themselves to the lyric breath and strokeof a greater than Amphion; moulded out of music by no rule or line ofmortal measure, with no sound of axe or anvil, but only of smittenstrings: built by harp and not by hand. The lordly structure of these poems is the work of a royal workman, fullof masterdom and might, sublime in the state and strength of its manymansions, but less perfect in proportion and less aerial in build thanthe very highest fabrics fashioned after their own great will by thesupreme architects of song. Of these plays, and of these alone among thematurer works of Shakespeare, it may be said that the best parts arediscernible from the rest, divisible by analysis and separable by memoryfrom the scenes which precede them or follow and the characters whichsurround them or succeed. Constance and Katherine rise up intoremembrance apart from their environment and above it, stand clear in ourminds of the crowded company with which the poet has begirt their centralfigures. In all other of his great tragic works, --even in _Hamlet_, ifwe have grace and sense to read it aright and not awry, --it is not of anysingle person or separate passage that we think when we speak of it; itis to the whole masterpiece that the mind turns at mention of its name. The one entire and perfect chrysolite of _Othello_ is neither Othello norDesdemona nor Iago, but each and all; the play of _Hamlet_ is more thanHamlet himself, the poem even here is too great to be resumed in theperson. But Constance is the jewel of _King John_, and Katherine is thecrowning blossom of _King Henry VIII_. --a funeral flower as of "marigoldson death-beds blowing, " an opal of as pure water as "tears of perfectmoan, " with fitful fire at its heart, ominous of evil and sorrow, set ina mourning band of jet on the forefront of the poem, that the brow socircled may, "like to a title-leaf, foretell the nature of a tragicvolume. " Not indeed that without these the ground would in either casebe barren; but that in either field our eye rests rather on these andother separate ears of wheat that overtop the ranks, than on the wavingwidth of the whole harvest at once. In the one play our memory turnsnext to the figures of Arthur and the Bastard, in the other to those ofWolsey and his king: the residue in either case is made up of outlinesmore lightly and slightly drawn. In two scenes the figure of King Johnrises indeed to the highest height even of Shakespearean tragedy; for therest of the play the lines of his character are cut no deeper, thefeatures of his personality stand out in no sharper relief, than those ofEleanor or the French king; but the scene in which he tempts Hubert tothe edge of the pit of hell sounds a deeper note and touches a subtlerstring in the tragic nature of man than had been struck by any poet saveDante alone, since the reign of the Greek tragedians. The cunning andprofound simplicity of the few last weighty words which drop like flakesof poison that blister where they fall from the deadly lips of the kingis a new quality in our tragic verse; there was no foretaste of such athing in the passionate imagination which clothed itself in the mightymusic of Marlowe's burning song. The elder master might indeed havewritten the magnificent speech which ushers in with gradual rhetoric andsplendid reticence the black suggestion of a deed without a name; hishand might have woven with no less imperial skill the elaborate raimentof words and images which wraps up in fold upon fold, as with swaddling-bands of purple and golden embroidery, the shapeless and miscreated birthof a murderous purpose that labours into light even while it loathes thelight and itself; but only Shakespeare could give us the first sample ofthat more secret and terrible knowledge which reveals itself in the briefheavy whispers that seal the commission and sign the warrant of the king. Webster alone of all our tragic poets has had strength to emulate in thisdarkest line of art the handiwork of his master. We find nowhere such anecho or reflection of the spirit of this scene as in the last tremendousdialogue of Bosola with Ferdinand in the house of murder and madness, while their spotted souls yet flutter between conscience and distraction, hovering for an hour as with broken wings on the confines of eitherprovince of hell. One pupil at least could put to this awful profit thestudy of so great a model; but with the single and sublime exception ofthat other design from the same great hand, which bares before us themortal anguish of Bracciano, no copy or imitation of the scene in whichJohn dies by poison has ever come near enough to evade the sentence itprovokes. The shrill tremulous agony of Fletcher's Valentinian is to thesullen and slow death-pangs of Shakespeare's tyrant as the babble of asuckling to the accents of a man. As far beyond the reach of any but hismaker's hand is the pattern of a perfect English warrior, set once forall before the eyes of all ages in the figure of the noble Bastard. Thenational side of Shakespeare's genius, the heroic vein of patriotism thatruns like a thread of living fire through the world-wide range of hisomnipresent spirit, has never, to my thinking, found vent or expressionto such glorious purpose as here. Not even in Hotspur or Prince Hal hashe mixed with more godlike sleight of hand all the lighter and gravergood qualities of the national character, or compounded of them all solovable a nature as this. In those others we admire and enjoy the samebright fiery temper of soul, the same buoyant and fearless mastery offate or fortune, the same gladness and glory of life made lovely with allthe labour and laughter of its full fresh days; but no quality of theirsbinds our hearts to them as they are bound to Philip--not by his loyalvalour, his keen young wit, his kindliness, constancy, readiness ofservice as swift and sure in the day of his master's bitterest shame andshamefullest trouble as in the blithest hour of battle and that firstgood fight which won back his father's spoils from his father's slayer;but more than all these, for that lightning of divine rage and pity, oftenderness that speaks in thunder and indignation that makes fire of itstears, in the horror of great compassion which falls on him, the tempestand storm of a beautiful and godlike anger which shakes his strength ofspirit and bows his high heart down at sight of Arthur dead. Being thus, as he is, the English masterwork of Shakespeare's hand, we may wellaccept him as the best man known to us that England ever made; the herothat Nelson must have been had he never come too near Naples. I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare's Arthur; there are one or twofigures in the world of his work of which there are no words that wouldbe fit or good to say. Another of these is Cordelia. The place theyhave in our lives and thoughts is not one for talk; the niche set apartfor them to inhabit in our secret hearts is not penetrable by the lightsand noises of common day. There are chapels in the cathedral of man'shighest art as in that of his inmost life, not made to be set open to theeyes and feet of the world. Love and death and memory keep charge for usin silence of some beloved names. It is the crowning glory of genius, the final miracle and transcendent gift of poetry, that it can add to thenumber of these, and engrave on the very heart of our remembrance freshnames and memories of its own creation. There is one younger child in this heavenly family of Shakespeare's whosits side by side with Arthur in the secret places of our thought; thereare but two or three that I remember among the children of other poetswho may be named in the same year with them: as Fletcher's Hengo, Webster's Giovanni, and Landor's Caesarion. Of this princely trinity ofboys the "bud of Britain" is as yet the most famous flower; yet even inthe broken words of childish heroism that falter on his dying lips thereis nothing of more poignant pathos, more "dearly sweet and bitter, " thanGiovanni's talk of his dead mother and all her sleepless nights now endedfor ever in a sleep beyond tears or dreams. Perhaps the most nearlyfaultless in finish and proportion of perfect nature among all the noblethree is Landor's portrait of the imperial and right Roman child of Caesarand Cleopatra. I know not but this may be found in the judgment of mento come wellnigh the most pathetic and heroic figure bequeathed us aftermore than eighty years of a glorious life by the indomitable genius ofour own last Roman and republican poet. We have come now to that point at the opening of the second stage in hiswork where the supreme genius of all time begins first to meddle with themysteries and varieties of human character, to handle its finer and moresubtle qualities, to harmonise its more untuned and jarring discords;giving here and thus the first proof of a power never shared in likemeasure by the mightiest among the sons of men, a sovereign and serenecapacity to fathom the else unfathomable depths of spiritual nature, tosolve its else insoluble riddles, to reconcile its else irreconcilablediscrepancies. In his first stage Shakespeare had dropped his plummet nodeeper into the sea of the spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded beforehim; and in the channel of simple emotion no poet could cast surer linewith steadier hand than he. Further down in the dark and fiery depths ofhuman pain and mortal passion no soul could search than his who firstrendered into speech the aspirations and the agonies of a ruined andrevolted spirit. And until Shakespeare found in himself the strength ofeyesight to read and the cunning of handiwork to render those widerdiversities of emotion and those further complexities of character whichlay outside the range of Marlowe, he certainly cannot be said to haveoutrun the winged feet, outstripped the fiery flight of his forerunner. In the heaven of our tragic song the first-born star on the forehead ofits herald god was not outshone till the full midsummer meridian of thatgreater godhead before whom he was sent to prepare a pathway for the sun. Through all the forenoon of our triumphant day, till the utterconsummation and ultimate ascension of dramatic poetry incarnate andtransfigured in the master-singer of the world, the quality of histragedy was as that of Marlowe's, broad, single, and intense; large ofhand, voluble of tongue, direct of purpose. With the dawn of its latterepoch a new power comes upon it, to find clothing and expression in newforms of speech and after a new style. The language has put off itsforeign decorations of lyric and elegiac ornament; it has found alreadyits infinite gain in the loss of those sweet superfluous graces whichencumbered the march and enchained the utterance of its childhood. Thefigures which it invests are now no more the types of a single passion, the incarnations of a single thought. They now demand a scrutiny whichtests the power of a mind and tries the value of a judgment; they appealto something more than the instant apprehension which sufficed to respondto the immediate claim of those that went before them. Romeo and Julietwere simply lovers, and their names bring back to us no further thoughtthan of their love and the lovely sorrow of its end; Antony and Cleopatrashall be before all things lovers, but the thought of their love and itstriumphant tragedy shall recall other things beyond number--all theforces and all the fortunes of mankind, all the chance and all theconsequence that waited on their imperial passion, all the infinitevariety of qualities and powers wrought together and welded into theframe and composition of that love which shook from end to end allnations and kingdoms of the earth. The same truth holds good in lighter matters; Biron and Rosaline incomedy are as simply lovers and no more as were their counterparts andcoevals in tragedy: there is more in Benedick and Beatrice than thissimple quality of love that clothes itself in the strife of wits; theinjury done her cousin, which by the repercussion of its shock andrefraction of its effect serves to transfigure with such adorableindignation and ardour of furious love and pity the whole bright lightnature of Beatrice, serves likewise by a fresh reflection andcounterchange of its consequence to exalt and enlarge the stature of herlover's spirit after a fashion beyond the reach of Shakespeare in hisfirst stage. Mercutio again, like Philip, is a good friend and gallantswordsman, quick-witted and hot-blooded, of a fiery and faithful temper, loyal and light and swift alike of speech and swordstroke; and this isall. But the character of the Bastard, clear and simple as broadsunlight though it be, has in it other features than this single andbeautiful likeness of frank young manhood; his love of country andloathing of the Church that would bring it into subjection are two sidesof the same national quality that has made and will always make everyEnglishman of his type such another as he was in belief and in unbelief, patriot and priest-hater; and no part of the design bears such witness tothe full-grown perfection of his creator's power and skill as the touchthat combines and fuses into absolute unity of concord the high andvarious elements of faith in England, loyalty to the wretched lord whohas made him knight and acknowledged him kinsman, contempt for hisabjection at the foul feet of the Church, abhorrence of his crime andconstancy to his cause for something better worth the proof of war thanhis miserable sake who hardly can be roused, even by such exhortation asmight put life and spirit into the dust of dead men's bones, to bid hisbetters stand and strike in defence of the country dishonoured by hisreign. It is this new element of variety in unity, this study of the complex anddiverse shades in a single nature, which requires from any criticismworth attention some inquisition of character as complement to theinvestigation of style. Analysis of any sort would be inapplicable tothe actors who bear their parts in the comic, the tragic or historicplays of the first period. There is nothing in them to analyse; theyare, as we have seen, like all the characters represented by Marlowe, theembodiments or the exponents of single qualities and simple forces. Thequestion of style also is therefore so far a simple question; but withthe change and advance in thought and all matter of spiritual study andspeculation this question also becomes complex, and inseparable, if wewould pursue it to any good end, from the analysis of character andsubject. In the debate on which we are now to enter, the question ofstyle and the question of character, or as we might say the questions ofmatter and of spirit, are more than ever indivisible from each other, more inextricably inwoven than elsewhere into the one most difficultquestion of authorship which has ever been disputed in the dense andnoisy school or fought out in the wide and windy field of Shakespeareancontroversy. There can be few serious students of Shakespeare who have not sometimesfelt that possibly the hardest problem involved in their study is thatwhich requires for its solution some reasonable and acceptable theory asto the play of _King Henry VIII_. None such has ever yet been offered;and I certainly cannot pretend to supply one. Perhaps however it may bepossible to do some service by an attempt to disprove what is untenable, even though it should not be possible to produce in its stead anypositive proof of what we may receive as matter of absolute faith. The veriest tiro in criticism who knows anything of the subject in handmust perceive, what is certainly not beyond a schoolboy's range ofvision, that the metre and the language of this play are in great part solike the language and the metre of Fletcher that the first and easiestinference would be to assume the partnership of that poet in the work. Informer days it was Jonson whom the critics and commentators of their timesaw good to select as the colleague or the editor of Shakespeare; but alater school of criticism has resigned the notion that the fifth act wasretouched and adjusted by the author of _Volpone_ to the taste of hispatron James. The later theory is more plausible than this; the primaryobjection to it is that it is too facile and superficial. It is waste oftime to point out with any intelligent and imaginative child with atolerable ear for metre who had read a little of the one and the otherpoet could see for himself--that much of the play is externally as likethe usual style of Fletcher as it is unlike the usual style ofShakespeare. The question is whether we can find one scene, one speech, one passage, which in spirit, in scope, in purpose, bears the same or anycomparable resemblance to the work of Fletcher. I doubt if any man morewarmly admires a poet whom few can have studied more thoroughly than I;and to whom, in spite of all sins of omission and commission, --and manyand grievous they are, beyond the plenary absolution of even the mostindulgent among critical confessors--I constantly return with a freshsense of attraction, which is constantly rewarded by a fresh sense ofgratitude and delight. It is assuredly from no wish to pluck a leaf fromhis laurel, which has no need of foreign grafts or stolen garlands fromthe loftier growth of Shakespeare's, that I venture to question hiscapacity for the work assigned to him by recent criticism. The speech ofBuckingham, for example, on his way to execution, is of course at firstsight very like the finest speeches of the kind in Fletcher; here is thesame smooth and fluent declamation, the same prolonged and persistentmelody, which if not monotonous is certainly not various; the same pure, lucid, perspicuous flow of simple rather than strong and elegant ratherthan exquisite English; and yet, if we set it against the best examplesof the kind which may be selected from such tragedies as _Bonduca_ or_The False One_, against the rebuke addressed by Caratach to his cousinor by Caesar to the murderers of Pompey--and no finer instances of tragicdeclamation can be chosen from the work of this great master ofrhetorical dignity and pathos--I cannot but think we shall perceive in ita comparative severity and elevation which will be missed when we turnback from it to the text of Fletcher. There is an aptness of phrase, anabstinence from excess, a "plentiful lack" of mere flowery andsuperfluous beauties, which we may rather wish than hope to find in themost famous of Shakespeare's successors. But if not his work, we may besure it was his model; a model which he often approached, which he oftenstudied, but which he never attained. It is never for absolute truth andfitness of expression, it is always for eloquence and sweetness, forfluency and fancy, that we find the tragic scenes of Fletcher mostpraiseworthy; and the motive or mainspring of interest is usuallyanything but natural or simple. Now the motive here is as simple, theemotion as natural as possible; the author is content to dispense withall the violent or far-fetched or fantastic excitement from whichFletcher could hardly ever bring himself completely to abstain. I am notspeaking here of those tragedies in which the hand of Beaumont istraceable; to these, I need hardly say, the charge is comparativelyinapplicable which may fairly be brought against the unassisted works ofhis elder colleague; but in any of the typical tragedies of Fletcher, in_Thierry and Theodoret_, in _Valentinian_, in _The Double Marriage_, thescenes which for power and beauty of style may reasonably be comparedwith this of the execution of Buckingham will be found more forced insituation, more fanciful in language than this. Many will be found morebeautiful, many more exciting; the famous interview of Thierry with theveiled Ordella, and the scene answering to this in the fifth act whereBrunhalt is confronted with her dying son, will be at once remembered byall dramatic students; and the parts of Lucina and Juliana may each bedescribed as a continuous arrangement of passionate and pathetic effects. But in which of these parts and in which of these plays shall we find ascene so simple, an effect so modest, a situation so unforced as here?where may we look for the same temperance of tone, the same control ofexcitement, the same steadiness of purpose? If indeed Fletcher couldhave written this scene, or the farewell of Wolsey to his greatness, orhis parting scene with Cromwell, he was perhaps not a greater poet, buthe certainly was a tragic writer capable of loftier self-control andseverer self-command, than he has ever shown himself elsewhere. And yet, if this were all, we might be content to believe that thedignity of the subject and the high example of his present associate hadfor once lifted the natural genius of Fletcher above itself. But thefine and subtle criticism of Mr. Spedding has in the main, I think, successfully and clearly indicated the lines of demarcation undeniablydiscernible in this play between the severer style of certain scenes orspeeches and the laxer and more fluid style of others; between thegraver, solider, more condensed parts of the apparently composite work, and those which are clearer, thinner, more diffused and diluted inexpression. If under the latter head we had to class such passages onlyas the dying speech of Buckingham and the christening speech of Cranmer, it might after all be almost impossible to resist the internal evidenceof Fletcher's handiwork. Certainly we hear the same soft continuous noteof easy eloquence, level and limpid as a stream of crystallinetransparence, in the plaintive adieu of the condemned statesman and thepanegyrical prophecy of the favoured prelate. If this, I say, were all, we might admit that there is nothing--I have already admitted it--ineither passage beyond the poetic reach of Fletcher. But on thehypothesis so ably maintained by the editor of Bacon there hangs no lessa consequence than this: that we must assign to the same hand thecrowning glory of the whole poem, the death-scene of Katherine. Now ifFletcher could have written that scene--a scene on which the onlycriticism ever passed, the only commendation ever bestowed, by theverdict of successive centuries, has been that of tears and silence--ifFletcher could have written a scene so far beyond our applause, so farabove our acclamation, then the memory of no great poet has ever been sogrossly wronged, so shamefully defrauded of its highest claim to honour. But, with all reverence for that memory, I must confess that I cannotbring myself to believe it. Any explanation appears to me more probablethan this. Considering with what care every relic of his work was onceand again collected by his posthumous editors--even to the attribution, not merely of plays in which he can have taken only the slightest part, but of plays in which we know that he had no share at all--I cannotbelieve that his friends would have let by far the brightest jewel in hiscrown rest unreclaimed in the then less popular treasure-house ofShakespeare. Belief or disbelief of this kind is however but a sandysoil for conjecture to build upon. Whether or not his friends would havereclaimed for him the credit of this scene, had they known it (as theymust have known it) to be his due, I must repeat that such a miraculousexample of a man's genius for once transcending itself and for evereclipsing all its other achievements appears to me beyond all critical, beyond all theological credulity. Pathos and concentration are surelynot among the dominant notes of Fletcher's style or the salient qualitiesof his intellect. Except perhaps in the beautiful and famous passagewhere Hengo dies in his uncle's arms, I doubt whether in any of thevariously and highly coloured scenes played out upon the wide andshifting stage of his fancy the genius of Fletcher has ever unlocked thesource of tears. Bellario and Aspatia were the children of his youngercolleague; at least, after the death of Beaumont we meet no such figureson the stage of Fletcher. In effect, though Beaumont had a gift of gravesardonic humour which found especial vent in burlesques of the heroicstyle and in the systematic extravagance of such characters as Bessus, {89} yet he was above all things a tragic poet; and though Fletcher hadgreat power of tragic eloquence and passionate effusion, yet his comicgenius was of a rarer and more precious quality; one _Spanish Curate_ isworth many a _Valentinian_; as, on the other hand, one _Philaster_ isworth many a _Scornful Lady_. Now there is no question here of Beaumont;and there is no question that the passage here debated has been taken tothe heart of the whole world and baptized in the tears of generations asno work of Fletcher's has ever been. That Beaumont could have written itI do not believe; but I am wellnigh assured that Fletcher could not. Ican scarcely imagine that the most fluid sympathy, the "hysteric passion"most easily distilled from the eyes of reader or spectator, can ever havewatered with its tears the scene or the page which sets forth, howevereloquently and effectively, the sorrows and heroisms of Ordella, Juliana, or Lucina. Every success but this I can well believe them, as theyassuredly deserve, to have attained. To this point then we have come, as to the crucial point at issue; andlooking back upon those passages of the play which first suggest thehandiwork of Fletcher, and which certainly do now and then seem almostidentical in style with his, I think we shall hardly find the differencebetween these and other parts of the same play so wide and so distinct asthe difference between the undoubted work of Fletcher and the undoubtedwork of Shakespeare. What that difference is we are fortunately able todetermine with exceptional certitude, and with no supplementary help fromconjecture of probabilities. In the play which is undoubtedly a jointwork of these poets the points of contact and the points of disunion areunmistakable by the youngest eye. In the very last scene of _The TwoNoble Kinsmen_, we can tell with absolute certainty what speeches wereappended or interpolated by Fletcher; we can pronounce with positiveconviction what passages were completed and what parts were leftunfinished by Shakespeare. Even on Mr. Spedding's theory it can hardlybe possible to do as much for _King Henry VIII_. The lines ofdemarcation, however visible or plausible, are fainter by far than these. It is certainly not much less strange to come upon such passages in thework of Shakespeare as the speeches of Buckingham and Cranmer than itwould be to encounter in the work of Sophocles a sample of the later andlaxer style of Euripides; to meet for instance in the _Antigone_ with apassage which might pass muster as an extract from the _Iphigenia inAulis_. In metrical effects the style of the lesser English poet is anexact counterpart of the style of the lesser Greek; there is the samecomparative tenuity and fluidity of verse, the same excess of shortunemphatic syllables, the same solution of the graver iambic into softoverflow of lighter and longer feet which relaxes and dilutes the solidharmony of tragic metre with notes of a more facile and feminine strain. But in _King Henry VIII_. It should be remarked that though we notunfrequently find the same preponderance as in Fletcher's work of verseswith a double ending--which in English verse at least are not inthemselves feminine, and need not be taken to constitute, as inFletcher's case they do, a note of comparative effeminacy or relaxationin tragic style--we do not find the perpetual predominance of thosetriple terminations so peculiarly and notably dear to that poet; {92} sothat even by the test of the metre-mongers who would reduce the wholequestion at issue to a point which might at once be solved by the simpleprocess of numeration the argument in favour of Fletcher can hardly beproved tenable; for the metre which evidently has one leading quality incommon with his is as evidently wanting in another at least as marked andas necessary to establish--if established it can be by any such testtaken singly and, apart from all other points of evidence--thecollaboration of Fletcher with Shakespeare in this instance. And if theproof by mere metrical similitude is thus imperfect, there is hereassuredly no other kind of test which may help to fortify the argument byany suggestion of weight even comparable to this. In those passageswhich would seem most plausibly to indicate the probable partnership ofFletcher, the unity and sustained force of the style keep it generallyabove the average level of his; there is less admixture or intrusion oflyric or elegiac quality; there is more of temperance and proportionalike in declamation and in debate. And throughout the whole play, andunder all the diversity of composite subject and conflicting interestwhich disturbs the unity of action, there is a singleness of spirit, ageneral unity or concord of inner tone, in marked contrast to the utterdiscord and discrepancy of the several sections of _The Two NobleKinsmen_. We admit, then, that this play offers us in some notunimportant passages the single instance of a style not elsewhereprecisely or altogether traceable in Shakespeare; that no exact parallelto it can be found among his other plays; and that if not the partialwork it may certainly be taken as the general model of Fletcher in histragic poetry. On the other hand, we contend that its exceptionalquality might perhaps be explicable as a tentative essay in a new line byone who tried so many styles before settling into his latest; and that, without far stronger, clearer, and completer proof than has yet been orcan ever be advanced, the question is not solved but merely evaded by theassumption of a double authorship. By far the ablest argument based upon a wider ground of reason or oflikelihood than this of mere metre that has yet been advanced in supportof the theory which would attribute a part of this play to some weakerhand than Shakespeare's is due to the study of a critic whosename--already by right of inheritance the most illustrious name of hisage and ours--is now for ever attached to that of Shakespeare himself byright of the highest service ever done and the noblest duty ever paid tohis memory. The untimely death which removed beyond reach of our thanksfor all he had done and our hopes for all he might do, the man who firsthad given to France the first among foreign poets--son of the greatestFrenchman and translator of the greatest Englishman--was only in this notuntimely, that it forbore him till the great and wonderful work was donewhich has bound two deathless names together by a closer than the commonlink that connects the names of all sovereign poets. Among all classictranslations of the classic works of the world, I know of none that forabsolute mastery and perfect triumph over all accumulation of obstacles, for supreme dominion over supreme difficulty, can be matched with thetranslation of Shakespeare by Francois-Victor Hugo; unless a claim ofcompanionship may perchance be put in for Urquhart's unfinished versionof Rabelais. For such success in the impossible as finally disproves theright of "that fool of a word" to existence--at least in the world ofletters--the two miracles of study and of sympathy which have givenShakespeare to the French and Rabelais to the English, and each in hishabit as he lived, may take rank together in glorious rivalry beyondeyeshot of all past or future competition. Among the essays appended to the version of Shakespeare which theycomplete and illustrate, that which deals with the play now in questiongives as ample proof as any other of the sound and subtle insight broughtto bear by the translator upon the object of his labour and his love. Hiskeen and studious intuition is here as always not less notable andadmirable than his large and solid knowledge, his full and lucidcomprehension at once of the text and of the history of Shakespeare'splays; and if his research into the inner details of that history mayseem ever to have erred from the straight path of firm and simplecertainty into some dubious byway of theory or conjecture, we may be sureat least that no lack of learning or devotion, of ardour or intelligence, but more probably some noble thought that was fathered by a noble wish todo honour to Shakespeare, has led him to attribute to his original somequality foreign to the text, or to question the authenticity of what forlove of his author he might not wish to find in it. Thus he would rejectthe main part of the fifth act as the work of a mere court laureate, anofficial hack or hireling employed to anoint the memory of an archbishopand lubricate the steps of a throne with the common oil of dramaticadulation; and finding it in either case a task alike unworthy ofShakespeare to glorify the name of Cranmer or to deify the names of thequeen then dead and the king yet living, it is but natural that he shouldbe induced by an unconscious bias or prepossession of the will todepreciate the worth of the verse sent on work fitter for ushers andembalmers and the general valetry or varletry of Church and State. Thatthis fifth act is unequal in point of interest to the better part of thepreceding acts with which it is connected by so light and loose a tie ofconvenience is as indisputable as that the style of the last scenesavours now and then, and for some space together, more strongly thanever of Fletcher's most especial and distinctive qualities, or that thewhole structure of the play if judged by any strict rule of pure art isincomposite and incongruous, wanting in unity, consistency, and coherenceof interest. The fact is that here even more than in _King John_ thepoet's hands were hampered by a difficulty inherent in the subject. Toan English and Protestant audience, fresh from the passions and perils ofreformation and reaction, he had to present an English king at war withthe papacy, in whom the assertion of national independence was incarnate;and to the sympathies of such an audience it was a matter of merenecessity for him to commend the representative champion of their causeby all means which he could compel into the service of his aim. Yet thisobject was in both instances all but incompatible with the natural andnecessary interest of the plot. It was inevitable that this interestshould in the main be concentrated upon the victims of the personal ornational policy of either king; upon Constance and Arthur, upon Katherineand Wolsey. Where these are not, either apparent in person on the stage, or felt in their influence upon the speech and action of the characterspresent, the pulse of the poem beats fainter and its forces begin toflag. In _King John_ this difficulty was met and mastered, these doubleclaims of the subject of the poem and the object of the poet weresatisfied and harmonised, by the effacement of John and the substitutionof Faulconbridge as the champion of the national cause and theprotagonist of the dramatic action. Considering this play in its doubleaspect of tragedy and history, we might say that the English hero becomesthe central figure of the poem as seen from its historic side, while Johnremains the central figure of the poem as seen from its tragic side; thepersonal interest that depends on personal crime and retribution isconcentrated on the agony of the king; the national interest which he, though the eponymous hero of the poem, was alike inadequate as a cravenand improper as a villain to sustain and represent in the eyes of thespectators was happily and easily transferred to the one person of theplay who could properly express within the compass of its closing act atonce the protest against papal pretension, the defiance of foreigninvasion, and the prophetic assurance of self-dependent life and self-sufficing strength inherent in the nation then fresh from a fiercer trialof its quality, which an audience of the days of Queen Elizabeth wouldjustly expect from the poet who undertook to set before them in actionthe history of the days of King John. That history had lately beenbrought upon the stage under the hottest and most glaring light thatcould be thrown on it by the fire of fanatical partisanship; _TheTroublesome Reign of King John_, weakest and most wooden of all wearisomechronicles that ever cumbered the boards, had in it for sole principle oflife its power of congenial appeal to the same blatant and vulgar spiritof Protestantism which inspired it. In all the flat interminable morassof its tedious and tuneless verse I can find no blade or leaf of livingpoetic growth, no touch but one of nature or of pathos, where Arthurdying would fain send a last thought in search of his mother. From thisplay Shakespeare can have got neither hint nor help towards the executionof his own; the crude rough sketch of the Bastard as he brawls andswaggers through the long length of its scenes is hardly so much as thecast husk or chrysalid of the noble creature which was to arise and takeshape for ever at the transfiguring touch of Shakespeare. In the case of_King Henry VIII_. He had not even such a blockish model as this to workfrom. The one preceding play known to me which deals professedly withthe same subject treats of quite other matters than are handled byShakespeare, and most notably with the scholastic adventures ormisadventures of Edward Prince of Wales and his whipping-boy Ned Browne. A fresh and wellnigh a plausible argument might be raised by the criticswho deny the unity of authorship in King Henry VIII. , on the ground thatif Shakespeare had completed the work himself he would surely not havelet slip the occasion to introduce one of the most famous and popular ofall court fools in the person of Will Summers, who might have given lifeand relief to the action of many scenes now unvaried and unbroken intheir gravity of emotion and event. Shakespeare, one would say, mightnaturally have been expected to take up and remodel the well-known figureof which his humble precursor could give but a rough thin outline, yetsufficient it should seem to attract the tastes to which it appealed; forthis or some other quality of seasonable attraction served to float thenow forgotten play of Samuel Rowley through several editions. Thecentral figure of the huge hot-headed king, with his gusts of stormy goodhumour and peals of burly oaths which might have suited "Garagantua'smouth" and satisfied the requirements of Hotspur, appeals in a ruderfashion to the survival of the same sympathies on which Shakespeare witha finer instinct as evidently relied; the popular estimate of the bluffand brawny tyrant "who broke the bonds of Rome" was not yet that of laterhistorians, though doubtless neither was it that of the writer or writerswho would champion him to the utterance. Perhaps the opposite verdictsgiven by the instinct of the people on "bluff King Hal" and "Bloody Mary"may be understood by reference to a famous verse of Juvenal. Thewretched queen was sparing of noble blood and lavish of poor men'slives--_cerdonibus timenda_; and the curses under which her memory wasburied were spared by the people to her father, _Lamiarum caede madenti_. In any case, the humblest not less than the highest of the poets whowrote under the reign of his daughter found it safe to present him in apopular light before an audience of whose general prepossession in hisfavour William Shakespeare was no slower to take advantage than SamuelRowley. The two plays we have just discussed have one quality of style in commonwhich has already been noted; that in them rhetoric is in excess ofaction or passion, and far in excess of poetry. They are not as yetperfect examples of his second manner, though far ahead of his firststage in performance as in promise. Compared with the full and livingfigure of Katherine or of Constance, the study of Margaret of Anjou isthe mere sketch of a poet still in his pupilage: John and Henry, Faulconbridge and Wolsey, are designs beyond reach of the hand which drewthe second and third Richard without much background or dramaticperspective. But the difficulties inherent in either subject are notsurmounted throughout with absolute equality of success; the very pointof appeal to the sympathy and excitement of the time may have beensomething of a disturbing force in the composition of the work--aloadstone rock indeed, of tempting attraction to the patriot as well asto the playwright, but possibly capable of proving in some measure a rockof offence to the poet whose ship was piloted towards it. His perfecttriumph in the field of patriotic drama, coincident with the perfectmaturity of his comic genius and his general style, has now to showitself. The great national trilogy which is at once the flower of Shakespeare'ssecond period and the crown of his achievements in historic drama--unlessindeed we so far depart from the established order and arrangement of hisworks as to include his three Roman plays in the same class with theseEnglish histories--offers perhaps the most singular example known to usof the variety in fortune which befell his works on their firstappearance in print. None of these had better luck in that line atstarting than _King Henry IV_. ; none had worse than _King Henry V_. With_Romeo and Juliet_, the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, and _Hamlet_, it sharesthe remarkable and undesirable honour of having been seized and boardedby pirates even before it had left the dockyard. The masterbuilder'shands had not yet put the craft into seaworthy condition when she wasoverhauled by these Kidds and Blackbeards of the press. Of those fourplays, the two tragedies at least were thoroughly recast, and rewrittenfrom end to end: the pirated editions giving us a transcript, more orless perfect or imperfect, accurate or corrupt, of the text as it firstcame from the poet's hand; a text to be afterwards indefinitely modifiedand incalculably improved. Not quite so much can be said of the comedy, which certainly stood in less need of revision, and probably would nothave borne it so well; nevertheless every little passing touch of thereviser's hand is here also a noticeable mark of invigoration andimprovement. But _King Henry V_. , we may fairly say, is hardly less thantransformed. Not that it has been recast after the fashion of _Hamlet_, or even rewritten after the fashion of _Romeo and Juliet_; but thecorruptions and imperfections of the pirated text are here more flagrantthan in any other instance; while the general revision of style by whichit is at once purified and fortified extends to every nook and corner ofthe restored and renovated building. Even had we, however, a perfect andtrustworthy transcript of Shakespeare's original sketch for this play, there can be little doubt that the rough draught would still prove almostas different from the final masterpiece as is the soiled and raggedcanvas now before us, on which we trace the outline of figures sostrangely disfigured, made subject to such rude extremities of defacementand defeature. There is indeed less difference between the two editionsin the comic than in the historic scenes; the pirates were probably morecareful to furnish their market with a fair sample of the lighter than ofthe graver ware supplied by their plunder of the poet; Fluellen andPistol lose less through their misusage than the king; and the kinghimself is less maltreated when he talks plain prose with his soldiersthan when he chops blank verse with his enemies or his lords. His roughand ready courtship of the French princess is a good deal expanded as tolength, but (if I dare say so) less improved and heightened in tone thanwe might well have wished and it might well have borne; in either textthe Hero's addresses savour rather of a ploughman than a prince, and hisfinest courtesies are clownish though not churlish. We may probably seein this rather a concession to the appetite of the groundlings than anevasion of the difficulties inherent in the subject-matter of the scene;too heavy as these might have been for another, we can conceive of nonetoo hard for the magnetic tact and intuitive delicacy of Shakespeare'sjudgment and instinct. But it must fairly and honestly be admitted thatin this scene we find as little of the charm and humour inseparable fromthe prince as of the courtesy and dignity to be expected from the king. It should on the other hand be noted that the finest touch in the comicscenes, if not the finest in the whole portrait of Falstaff, isapparently an afterthought, a touch added on revision of the originaldesign. In the first scene of the second act Mrs. Quickly's remark that"he'll yield the crow a pudding one of these days" is common to bothversions of the play; but the six words following are only to be found inthe revised edition; and these six words the very pirates could hardlyhave passed over or struck out. They are not such as can drop from thetext of a poet unperceived by the very dullest and horniest of humaneyes. "The king has killed his heart. " Here is the point in Falstaff'snature so strangely overlooked by the man of all men who we should havesaid must be the first to seize and to appreciate it. It is as grievousas it is inexplicable that the Shakespeare of France--the most infinitein compassion, in "conscience and tender heart, " of all great poets inall ages and all nations of the world--should have missed the deeptenderness of this supreme and subtlest touch in the work of the greatestamong his fellows. Again, with anything but "damnable" iteration, doesShakespeare revert to it before the close of this very scene. EvenPistol and Nym can see that what now ails their old master is no suchailment as in his prosperous days was but too liable to "play the roguewith his great toe. " "The king hath run bad humours on the knight": "hisheart is fracted, and corroborate. " And it is not thus merely throughthe eclipse of that brief mirage, that fair prospect "of Africa, andgolden joys, " in view of which he was ready to "take any man's horses. "This it is that distinguishes Falstaff from Panurge; that lifts him atleast to the moral level of Sancho Panza. I cannot but be reluctant toset the verdict of my own judgment against that of Victor Hugo's; I neednone to remind me what and who he is whose judgment I for once oppose, and what and who am I that I should oppose it; that he is he, and I ambut myself; yet against his classification of Falstaff, against hisdefinition of Shakespeare's unapproached and unapproachable masterpiecein the school of comic art and humouristic nature, I must and do with allmy soul and strength protest. The admirable phrase of "swine-centaur"(_centaure du porc_) is as inapplicable to Falstaff as it is appropriateto Panurge. Not the third person but the first in date of that divineand human trinity of humourists whose names make radiant for ever theCentury of their new-born glory--not Shakespeare but Rabelais isresponsible for the creation or the discovery of such a type as this. "_Suum cuique_ is our Roman justice"; the gradation from Panurge toFalstaff is not downward but upward; though it be Victor Hugo's very selfwho asserts the contrary. {108} Singular as may seem the collocation ofthe epithet "moral" with the name "Falstaff, " I venture to maintain mythesis; that in point of feeling, and therefore of possible moralelevation, Falstaff is as undeniably the superior of Sancho as Sancho isunquestionably the superior of Panurge. The natural affection of Panurgeis bounded by the self-same limits as the natural theology of Polyphemus;the love of the one, like the faith of the other, begins and ends alikeat one point; Myself, And this great belly, first of deities; (in which line, by the way, we may hear as it were a first faint preludeof the great proclamation to come--the hymn of praise and thanksgivingfor the coronation day of King Gaster; whose laureate, we know, was aslovingly familiar with the Polyphemus of Euripides as Shakespeare withhis own Pantagruel. ) In Sancho we come upon a creature capable oflove--but not of such love as kills or helps to kill, such love as mayend or even as may seem to end in anything like heartbreak. "And nowabideth Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, these three; but the greatestof these is Shakespeare. " I would fain score yet another point in the fat knight's favour; "I havemuch to say in the behalf of that Falstaff. " Rabelais, evangelist andprophet of the Resurrection of the Flesh (so long entombed, ignored, repudiated, misconstrued, vilified, by so many generations and ages ofGalilean preachers and Pharisaic schoolmen)--Rabelais was content topaint the flesh merely, in its honest human reality--human at least, ifalso bestial; in its frank and rude reaction against the half brainlessand wholly bloodless teachers whose doctrine he himself on the one hand, and Luther on the other, arose together to smite severally--to smite themhip and thigh, even till the going down of the sun; the mock sun ormarshy meteor that served only to deepen the darkness encompassing onevery side the doubly dark ages--the ages of monarchy and theocracy, theages of death and of faith. To Panurge, therefore, it was unnecessaryand it might have seemed inconsequent to attribute other gifts orfunctions than are proper to such intelligence as may accompany theappetites of an animal. That most irreverend father in God, Friar John, belongs to a higher class in the moral order of being; and he much ratherthan his fellow-voyager and penitent is properly comparable withFalstaff. It is impossible to connect the notion of rebuke with the sinsof Panurge. The actual lust and gluttony, the imaginary cowardice ofFalstaff, have been gravely and sharply rebuked by critical morality; wehave just noted a too recent and too eminent example of this; but whatmortal ever dreamed of casting these qualities in the teeth of hissupposed counterpart? The difference is as vast between Falstaff on thefield of battle and Panurge on the storm-tossed deck as between Falstaffand Hotspur, Panurge and Friar John. No man could show cooler andsteadier nerve than is displayed in either case--by the lay as well asthe clerical namesake of the fourth evangelist. If ever fruitless butendless care was shown to prevent misunderstanding, it was shown in thepains taken by Shakespeare to obviate the misconstruction which wouldimpute to Falstaff the quality of a Parolles or a Bobadil, a Bessus or aMoron. The delightful encounter between the jester and the bear in thecrowning interlude of _La Princesse d'Elide_ shows once more, I mayremark, that Moliere had sat at the feet of Rabelais as delightedly asShakespeare before him. Such rapturous inebriety or Olympianincontinence of humour only fires the blood of the graver and lessexuberant humourist when his lips are still warm and wet from the well-spring of the _Dive Bouteille_. It is needless to do over again the work which was done, and well done, ahundred years since, by the writer whose able essay in vindication andexposition of the genuine character of Falstaff elicited from Dr. Johnsonas good a jest and as bad a criticism as might have been expected. Hisargument is too thoroughly carried out at all points and fortified on allhands to require or even to admit of corroboration; and the attempt toappropriate any share of the lasting credit which is his due would benothing less than a disingenuous impertinence. I may here however noticethat in the very first scene of this trilogy which introduces us to theever dear and honoured presence of Sir John, his creator has put into themouth of a witness no friendlier or more candid than Ned Poins thedistinction between two as true-bred cowards as ever turned back and onewho will fight no longer than he sees reason. In this nutshell lies thewhole kernel of the matter; the sweet, sound, ripe, toothsome, wholesomekernel of Falstaff's character and humour. He will fight as well as hisprincely patron, and, like the prince, as long as he sees reason; butneither Hal nor Jack has ever felt any touch of desire to pluck that"mere scutcheon" honour "from the pale-faced moon. " Harry Percy is as itwere the true Sir Bedivere, the last of all Arthurian knights; Henry V. Is the first as certainly as he is the noblest of those equally daringand calculating statesmen-warriors whose two most terrible, most perfect, and most famous types are Louis XI. And Caesar Borgia. Gain, "commodity, " the principle of self-interest which never but in word andin jest could become the principle of action with Faulconbridge, --himselfalready far more "a man of this world" than a Launcelot or a Hotspur, --isas evidently the mainspring of Henry's enterprise and life as of thecontract between King Philip and King John. The supple and shamelessegotism of the churchmen on whose political sophistries he relies forexternal support is needed rather to varnish his project than to reassurehis conscience. Like Frederic the Great before his first Silesian war, the future conqueror of Agincourt has practically made up his mind beforehe seeks to find as good reason or as plausible excuse as were likewiseto suffice the future conqueror of Rosbach. In a word, Henry isdoubtless not the man, as old Auchindrane expresses it in the noble andstrangely neglected tragedy which bears solitary but sufficient witnessto the actual dramatic faculty of Sir Walter Scott's genius, to do thedevil's work without his wages; but neither is he, on the likeunprofitable terms, by any manner of means the man to do God's. Nocompleter incarnation could be shown us of the militantEnglishman--_Anglais pur sang_; but it is not only, as some have seemedto think, with the highest, the purest, the noblest quality of Englishcharacter that his just and far-seeing creator has endowed him. Thegodlike equity of Shakespeare's judgment, his implacable and impeccablerighteousness of instinct and of insight, was too deeply ingrained in thevery core of his genius to be perverted by any provincial orpseudo-patriotic prepossessions; his patriotism was too national to beprovincial. Assuredly no poet ever had more than he: not even the kingof men and poets who fought at Marathon and sang of Salamis: much lesshad any or has any one of our own, from Milton on to Campbell and fromCampbell even to Tennyson. In the mightiest chorus of _King Henry V_. Wehear the pealing ring of the same great English trumpet that was yet tosound over the battle of the Baltic, and again in our later day over asea-fight of Shakespeare's own, more splendid and heart-cheering in itscalamity than that other and all others in their triumph; a war-song anda sea-song divine and deep as death or as the sea, making thrice moreglorious at once the glorious three names of England, of Grenville, andof Tennyson for ever. From the affectation of cosmopolitan indifferencenot AEschylus, not Pindar, not Dante's very self was more alien or morefree than Shakespeare; but there was nothing of the dry Tyrtaean twang, the dull mechanic resonance as of wooden echoes from a platform, in thegreat historic chord of his lyre. "He is very English, too English, even, " says the Master on whom his enemies alone--assuredly not his mostloving, most reverent, and most thankful disciples--might possibly andplausibly retort that he was "very French, too French, even"; but hecertainly was not "too English" to see and cleave to the main fact, theradical and central truth, of personal or national character, of typicalhistory or tradition, without seeking to embellish, to degrade, in eitheror in any way to falsify it. From king to king, from cardinal tocardinal, from the earliest in date of subject to the latest of hishistories, we find the same thread running, the same link of honourableand righteous judgment, of equitable and careful equanimity, connectingand combining play with play in an unbroken and infrangible chain ofevidence to the singleness of the poet's eye, the identity of theworkman's hand, which could do justice and would do no more than justice, alike to Henry and to Wolsey, to Pandulph and to John. His typicalEnglish hero or historic protagonist is a man of their type who foundedand built up the empire of England in India; a hero after the futurepattern of Hastings and of Clive; not less daringly sagacious and notmore delicately scrupulous, not less indomitable or more impeccable thanthey. A type by no means immaculate, a creature not at all too brightand good for English nature's daily food in times of mercantile ormilitary enterprise; no whit more if no whit less excellent and radiantthan reality. _Amica Britannia, sed magis amica veritas_. The masterpoet of England--all Englishmen may reasonably and honourably be proud ofit--has not two weights and two measures for friend and foe. Thispalpable and patent fact, as his only and worthy French translator haswell remarked, would of itself suffice to exonerate his memory from theimputation of having perpetrated in its evil entirety _The First Part ofKing Henry VI_. There is, in my opinion, somewhat more of internal evidence than I haveever seen adduced in support of the tradition current from an early dateas to the origin of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_; a tradition whichassigns to Queen Elizabeth the same office of midwife with regard to thiscomedy as was discharged by Elwood with reference to _Paradise Regained_. Nothing could so naturally or satisfactorily explain its existence as theexpression of a desire to see "Falstaff in love, " which must have beennothing less than the equivalent of a command to produce him under thedisguise of such a transfiguration on the boards. The task of presentinghim so shorn of his beams, so much less than archangel (of comedy)ruined, and the excess of (humorous) glory obscured, would hardly, wecannot but think and feel, have spontaneously suggested itself toShakespeare as a natural or eligible aim for the fresh exercise of hiscomic genius. To exhibit Falstaff as throughout the whole course of fiveacts a credulous and baffled dupe, one "easier to be played on than apipe, " was not really to reproduce him at all. The genuine Falstaffcould no more have played such a part than the genuine Petruchio couldhave filled such an one as was assigned him by Fletcher in the lucklesshour when that misguided poet undertook to continue the subject and tocorrect the moral of the next comedy in our catalogue of Shakespeare's. _The Tamer Tamed_ is hardly less consistent or acceptable as a sequel tothe _Taming of the Shrew_ than the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ as asupplement to _King Henry IV_. : and no conceivable comparison could moreforcibly convey, how broad and deep is the gulf of incongruity whichdivides them. The plea for once suggested by the author in the way of excuse orextenuation for this incompatibility of Falstaff with Falstaff--for theviolation of character goes far beyond mere inconsistency or the naturalebb and flow of even the brightest wits and most vigorous intellects--willcommend itself more readily to the moralist than to the humanist; inother words, to the preacher rather than to the thinker, the sophistrather than the artist. Here only does Shakespeare show that he feelsthe necessity of condescending to such evasion or such apology as isimplied in the explanation of Falstaff's incredible credulity by areference to "the guiltiness of his mind" and the admission, sogratifying to all minds more moral than his own, that "wit may be made aJack-a-Lent, when 'tis upon ill employment. " It is the best excuse thatcan be made; but can we imagine the genuine, the pristine Falstaffreduced to the proffer of such an excuse in serious good earnest? In the original version of this comedy there was not a note of poetryfrom end to end; as it then appeared, it might be said to hold the sameplace on the roll of Shakespeare's plays as is occupied by _BartholomewFair_ on the roll of Ben Jonson's. From this point of view it is curiousto contrast the purely farcical masterpieces of the town-bred schoolboyand the country lad. There is a certain faint air of the fields, theriver, and the park, even in the rough sketch of Shakespeare'sfarce--wholly prosaic as it is, and in no point suggestive of anyunlikelihood in the report which represents it as the composition orrather as the improvisation of a fortnight. We know at once that he musthave stroked the fallow greyhound that was outrun on "Cotsall"; that hemust--and perhaps once or twice at least too often--have played truant(some readers, boys past or present, might wish for association's sake itcould actually have been Datchet-wards) from under the shadow of good SirHugh's probably not over formidable though "threatening twigs of birch, "at all risks of being "preeches" on his return, in fulfilment of thedireful menace held out to that young namesake of his over whoseinnocence Mrs. Quickly was so creditably vigilant. On the other hand, nostudent of Jonson will need to be reminded how closely and precociouslyfamiliar the big stalwart Westminster boy, Camden's favoured and gratefulpupil, must have made himself with the rankest haunts and most unsavouryrecesses of that ribald waterside and Smithfield life which he lived toreproduce on the stage with a sometimes insufferable fidelity to detailsfrom which Hogarth might have shrunk. Even his unrivalled proficiency inclassic learning can hardly have been the fruit of greater or morewilling diligence in school hours than he must have lavished on otherthan scholastic studies in the streets. The humour of his hugephotographic group of divers "humours" is undeniably and incomparablyricher, broader, fuller of invention and variety, than any thatShakespeare's lighter work can show; all the five acts of the lattercomedy can hardly serve as counterpoise, in weight and wealth of comiceffect, to the single scene in which Zeal-of-the-Land defines the moraland theological boundaries of action and intention which distinguish theinnocent if not laudable desire to eat pig from the venial though notmortal sin of longing to eat pig in the thick of the profane Fair, whichmay rather be termed a foul than a fair. Taken from that point of viewwhich looks only to force and freedom and range of humorous effect, Jonson's play is to his friend's as London is to Windsor; but in moresenses than one it is to Shakespeare's as the Thames at London Bridge isto the Thames at Eton: the atmosphere of Smithfield is not more differentfrom the atmosphere of the playing-fields; and some, too delicate of noseor squeamish of stomach, may prefer Cuckoo Weir to Shoreditch. Butundoubtedly the phantoms of Shallow and Mrs. Quickly which put in (so tospeak) a nominal reappearance in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ arecomparatively as poor and thin if set over against the full rich outlinesof Rabbi Busy and Dame Purecraft as these again are at all points alikeinferior to the real Shallow and the genuine Quickly of _King Henry IV_. It is true that Jonson's humour has sometimes less in common withShakespeare's than with the humour of Swift, Smollett, and Carlyle. Forall his admiration and even imitation of Rabelais, Shakespeare has hardlyonce or twice burnt but so much as a stray pinch of fugitive incense onthe altar of Cloacina; the only Venus acknowledged and adored by thosethree latter humourists. If not always constant with the constancy ofMilton to the service of Urania, he never turns into a dirtier byway orback alley than the beaten path trodden occasionally by most of his kindwhich leads them on a passing errand of no unnatural devotion to theshrine of Venus Pandemos. When, however, we turn from the raw rough sketch to the enriched andennobled version of the present play we find it in this its better shapemore properly comparable with another and a nobler work of Jonson's--withthat magnificent comedy, the first avowed and included among hiscollection by its author, which according to all tradition first owed itsappearance and success to the critical good sense and generous goodoffices of Shakespeare. Neither my duly unqualified love for the greaterpoet nor my duly qualified regard for the less can alter my sense thattheir mutual relations are in this one case inverted; that _Every Man inhis Humour_ is altogether a better comedy and a work of higher art thanthe _Merry Wives of Windsor_. Kitely is to Ford almost what Arnolphe isto Sganarelle. (As according to the learned Metaphraste "Filio nonpotest praeferri nisi filius, " even so can no one but Moliere bepreferred or likened to Moliere. ) Without actually touching likeArnolphe on the hidden springs of tragedy, the jealous husband inJonson's play is only kept from trenching on the higher and forbiddengrounds of passion by the potent will and the consummate self-command ofthe great master who called him up in perfect likeness to the life. Another or a deeper tone, another or a stronger touch, in the last twoadmirable scenes with his cashier and his wife, when his hot smoulderingsuspicion at length catches fire and breaks out in agony of anger, wouldhave removed him altogether beyond the legitimate pale of comedy. As itis, the self-control of the artist is as thorough as his grasp andmastery of his subject are triumphant and complete. It would seem as though on revision of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_Shakespeare had found himself unwilling or rather perhaps unable to leavea single work of his hand without one touch or breath on it of beauty orof poetry. The sole fitting element of harmonious relief or variety insuch a case could of course be found only in an interlude of pure fancy;any touch of graver or deeper emotion would simply have untuned andderanged the whole scheme of composition. A lesser poet might have beenpowerless to resist the temptation or suggestion of sentiment that heshould give to the little loves of Anne Page and Fenton a touch ofpathetic or emotional interest; but "opulent as Shakespeare was, and ofhis opulence prodigal" (to borrow a phrase from Coleridge), he knewbetter than to patch with purple or embroider with seed-pearl the hem ofthis homespun little piece of comic drugget. The match between cloth ofgold and cloth of frieze could hardly have borne any good issue in thisinstance. Instead therefore of following the lead of Terence's or thehint of Jonson's example, and exalting the accent of his comedy to thefull-mouthed pitch of a Chremes or a Kitely, he strikes out some fortyand odd lines of rather coarse and commonplace doggrel about brokers, proctors, lousy fox-eyed serjeants, blue and red noses, and so forth, tomake room for the bright light interlude of fairyland child's-play whichmight not unfittingly have found place even within the moon-charmedcircle of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. Even in that all heavenly poemthere are hardly to be found lines of more sweet and radiant simplicitythan here. The refined instinct, artistic judgment, and consummate taste ofShakespeare were perhaps never so wonderfully shown as in his recast ofanother man's work--a man of real if rough genius for comedy--which weget in the _Taming of the Shrew_. Only the collation of scene withscene, then of speech with speech, then of line with line, will show howmuch may be borrowed from a stranger's material and how much may be addedto it by the same stroke of a single hand. All the force and humouralike of character and situation belong to Shakespeare's eclipsed andforlorn precursor; he has added nothing; he has tempered and enrichedeverything. That the luckless author of the first sketch is like toremain a man as nameless as the deed of the witches in _Macbeth_, unlesssome chance or caprice of accident should suddenly flash favouring lighton his now impersonal and indiscoverable individuality, seems clearenough when we take into account the double and final disproof of hisimaginary identity with Marlowe, which Mr. Dyce has put forward with suchunanswerable certitude. He is a clumsy and coarse-fingered plagiaristfrom that poet, and his stolen jewels of expression look so grossly outof place in the homely setting of his usual style that they seemtransmuted from real to sham. On the other hand, he is of all the Pre-Shakespeareans known to us incomparably the truest, the richest, the mostpowerful and original humourist; one indeed without a second on thatground, for "the rest are nowhere. " Now Marlowe, it need scarcely beonce again reiterated, was as certainly one of the least and worst amongjesters as he was one of the best and greatest among poets. There cantherefore be no serious question of his partnership in a play wherein thecomic achievement is excellent and the poetic attempts are execrablethroughout. The recast of it in which a greater than Berni has deigned to play thepart of that poet towards a lesser than Bojardo shows tact and delicacyperhaps without a parallel in literature. No chance of improvement ismissed, while nothing of value is dropped or thrown away. {125} There isjust now and then a momentary return perceptible to the skipping metreand fantastic manner of the first period, which may have beenunconsciously suggested by the nature of the task in hand--a task ofitself implying or suggesting some new study of old models; but the mainstyle of the play in all its weightier parts is as distinctly proper tothe second period, as clear an evidence of inner and spiritual affinity(with actual tabulation of dates, were such a thing as feasible as it isimpossible, I must repeat that the argument would here be--what it isnow--in no wise concerned), as is the handling of character throughout;but most especially the subtle force, the impeccable and carefulinstinct, the masculine delicacy of touch, by which the somewhatruffianly temperament of the original Ferando is at once refined andinvigorated through its transmutation into the hearty and humorousmanliness of Petruchio's. It is observable that those few and faint traces which we have noticed inthis play of a faded archaic style trying as it were to resume a mockeryof revirescence are not wholly even if mainly confined to the underplotwhich a suggestion or surmise of Mr. Collier's long since assigned toHaughton, author of _Englishmen for my Money, or A Woman will have herWill_: a spirited, vigorous, and remarkably regular comedy of intrigue, full of rough and ready incident, bright boisterous humour, honest livelyprovinciality and gay high-handed Philistinism. To take no account ofthis attribution would be to show myself as shamelessly as shamefullydeficient in that respect and gratitude which all genuine and thankfulstudents will always be as ready to offer as all thankless and insolentsciolists can ever be to disclaim, to the venerable scholar who since Iwas first engaged on these notes has added yet another obligation to themany under which he had already laid all younger and lesser labourers inthe same field of study, by the issue in a form fitly ennobled andenriched of his great historical work on our early stage. It might seemsomething of an unintended impertinence to add that such recognition ofhis theory no more implies a blind acceptance of it--whatever suchacceptance on my part might be worth--than the expression of suchgratitude and respect could reasonably be supposed to imply an equallyblind confidence in the authority or the value of that version ofShakespeare's text which has been the means of exposing a name so longand so justly honoured, not merely to the natural and rationalinquisition of rival students, but to the rancorous and ribald obloquy ofthankless and frontless pretenders. Here perhaps as well as anywhere else I may find a proper place tointercalate the little word I have to say in partial redemption of mypledge to take in due time some notice at more or less length, of theonly two among the plays doubtfully ascribed to Shakespeare which in myeyes seem to bear any credible or conceivable traces of his touch. Ofthese two I must give the lesser amount of space and attention to thatone which in itself is incomparably the more worthy of discussion, admiration, and regard. The reason of this lies in the very excellencewhich has attracted to it the notice of such competent judges and thesuffrage of such eminent names as would make the task of elaboratecommentary and analytic examination something more than superfluous on mypart; whereas the other has never been and will never be assigned toShakespeare by any critical student whose verdict is worth a minute'sconsideration or the marketable value of a straw. Nevertheless it is onother grounds worth notice; and such notice, to be itself of any value, must of necessity be elaborate and minute. The critical analysis of_King Edward III_. I have therefore relegated to its proper place in anappendix; while I reserve a corner of my text, at once out of admirationfor the play itself and out of reverence for the names and authority ofsome who have given their verdict in its behalf, for a rough and rapidword or two on _Arden of Feversham_. It is with equally inexpressible surprise that I find Mr. Collieraccepting as Shakespeare's any part of _A Warning for Fair Women_, andrejecting without compromise or hesitation the belief or theory whichwould assign to the youth of Shakespeare the incomparably nobler tragicpoem in question. {129} His first ascription to Shakespeare of _AWarning for Fair Women_ is couched in terms far more dubious anddiffident than such as he afterwards adopts. It "might, " he says, "begiven to Shakespeare on grounds far more plausible" (on what, exceptpossibly those of date, I cannot imagine) "than those applicable to_Arden of Feversham_. " He then proceeds to cite some detached lines andpassages of undeniable beauty and vigour, containing equally undeniablecoincidences of language, illustration, and expression with "passages inShakespeare's undisputed plays. " From these he passes on to indicate a"resemblance" which "is not merely verbal, " and to extract whole speecheswhich "are Shakespearean in a much better sense"; adding in a surely tootrenchant fashion, "Here we say, _aut Shakespeare aut diabolus_. " I mustconfess, with all esteem for the critic and all admiration for the briefscene cited, that I cannot say, Shakespeare. There are spirits of another sort from whom we naturally expect suchassumptions and inferences as start from the vantage ground of a fewseparate or separable passages, and clear at a flying leap the emptyspace intervening which divides them from the goal of evidence as toauthorship. Such a spirit was that of the late Mr. Simpson, to whosewealth of misused learning and fertility of misapplied conjecture I havealready paid all due tribute; but who must have had beyond all other sanemen--most assuredly, beyond all other fairly competent critics--the giftbestowed on him by a malignant fairy of mistaking assumption for argumentand possibility for proof. He was the very Columbus of mare's nests; tothe discovery of them, though they lay far beyond the pillars ofHercules, he would apply all shifts and all resources possible to anultra-Baconian process of unphilosophical induction. On the devoted headof Shakespeare--who is also called Shakspere and Chaxpur--he would havepiled a load of rubbish, among which the crude and vigorous old tragedyunder discussion shines out like a veritable diamond of the desert. His"School of Shakspere, " though not an academy to be often of necessityperambulated by the most peripatetic student of Shakespeare, will remainas a monument of critical or uncritical industry, a storehouse of curiousif not of precious relics, and a warning for other than fair women--orfair scholars--to remember where "it is written that the shoemaker shouldmeddle with his yard and the tailor with his last, the fisher with hispencil and the painter with his nets. " To me the difference appears immeasurable between the reasons foradmitting the possibility of Shakespeare's authorship in the case of_Arden of Feversham_, and the pretexts for imagining the probability ofhis partnership in _A Warning for Fair Women_. There is a practicallyinfinite distinction between the evidence suggested by verbal or evenmore than verbal resemblance of detached line to line or selected passageto passage, and the proof supplied by the general harmony and spiritualsimilarity of a whole poem, on comparison of it as a whole with the knownworks of the hypothetical author. This proof, at all events, we surelydo not get from consideration in this light of the plea put forward inbehalf of _A Warning for Fair Women_. This proof, I cannot but think, weare very much nearer getting from contemplation under the same light ofthe claim producible for _Arden of Feversham_. _A Warning for Fair Women_ is unquestionably in its way a noticeable andvaluable "piece of work, " as Sly might have defined it. It is perhapsthe best example anywhere extant of a merely realistic tragedy--ofrealism pure and simple applied to the service of the highest of thearts. Very rarely does it rise for a very brief interval to the heightof tragic or poetic style, however simple and homely. The epilogueaffixed to _Arden of Feversham_ asks pardon of the "gentlemen" composingits audience for "this naked tragedy, " on the plea that "simple truth isgracious enough" without needless ornament or bedizenment of "glozingstuff. " Far more appropriate would such an apology have been as in thiscase was at least superfluous, if appended by way of epilogue to _AWarning for Fair Women_. That is indeed a naked tragedy; nine-tenths ofit are in no wise beyond the reach of an able, industrious, and practisedreporter, commissioned by the proprietors of the journal on whose staffhe might be engaged to throw into the force of scenic dialogue histranscript of the evidence in a popular and exciting case of adultery andmurder. The one figure on the stage of this author which stands outsharply defined in our recollection against a background ofundistinguished shadows is the figure of the adulterer and murderer. Thismost discreditable of Browns has a distinct and brawny outline of hisown, a gait and accent as of a genuine and recognisable man, who mighthave put to some better profit his shifty spirit of enterprise, hisgenuine capacity of affection, his burly ingenuity and hardihood. Hisminor confidants and accomplices, Mrs. Drury and her Trusty Roger, aremere commonplace profiles of malefactors: but it is in the contrastbetween the portraits of their two criminal heroines that the vast gulfof difference between the capacities of the two poets yawns patent to thesense of all readers. Anne Sanders and Alice Arden stand as far beyondcomparison apart as might a portrait by any average academician and aportrait by Watts or Millais. Once only, in the simple and noble scenecited by the over-generous partiality of Mr. Collier, does the widow andmurderess of Sanders rise to the tragic height of the situation and thedramatic level of the part so unfalteringly sustained from first to lastby the wife and the murderess of Arden. There is the self-same relative difference between the two subordinategroups of innocent or guilty characters. That is an excellent andeffective touch of realism, where Brown comes across his victim's littleboy playing truant in the street with a small schoolfellow; but in _Ardenof Feversham_ the number of touches as telling and as striking as thisone is practically numberless. They also show a far stronger and keenerfaculty of poetic if not of dramatic imagination. The casual encounterof little Sanders with the yet red-handed murderer of his father is notcomparable for depth and subtlety of effect with the scene in whichArden's friend Franklin, riding with him to Raynham Down, breaks off his"pretty tale" of a perjured wife, overpowered by a "fighting at hisheart, " at the moment when they come close upon the ambushed assassins inAlice Arden's pay. But the internal evidence in this case, as I havealready intimated, does not hinge upon the proof or the suggestionoffered by any single passage or by any number of single passages. Thefirst and last evidence of real and demonstrable weight is the evidenceof character. A good deal might be said on the score of style in favourof its attribution to a poet of the first order, writing at a time whenthere were but two such poets writing for the stage; but even this ishere a point of merely secondary importance. It need only be noted inpassing that if the problem be reduced to a question between theauthorship of Shakespeare and the authorship of Marlowe there is no needand no room for further argument. The whole style of treatment from endto end is about as like the method of Marlowe as the method of Balzac islike the method of Dumas. There could be no alternative in that case; sothat the actual alternative before us is simple enough: Either this playis the young Shakespeare's first tragic masterpiece, or there was awriter unknown to us then alive and at work for the stage who excelledhim as a tragic dramatist not less--to say the very least--than he wasexcelled by Marlowe as a narrative and tragic poet. If we accept, as I have been told that Goethe accepted (a point which Iregret my inability to verify), the former of these alternatives--or ifat least we assume it for argument's sake in passing--we may easilystrengthen our position by adducing as further evidence in its favour theauthor's thoroughly Shakespearean fidelity to the details of the prosenarrative on which his tragedy is founded. But, it may be objected, wefind the same fidelity to a similar text in the case of _A Warning forFair Women_. And here again starts up the primal and radical differencebetween the two works: it starts up and will not be overlooked. Equalfidelity to the narrative text we do undoubtedly find in either case; thesame fidelity we assuredly do not find. The one is a typical example ofprosaic realism, the other of poetic reality. Light from darkness ortruth from falsehood is not more infallibly discernible. The fidelity inthe one case is exactly, as I have already indicated, the fidelity of areporter to his notes. The fidelity in the other case is exactly thefidelity of Shakespeare in his Roman plays to the text of Plutarch. Itis a fidelity which admits--I had almost written, which requires--thefullest play of the highest imagination. No more than the most realisticof reporters will it omit or falsify any necessary or even admissibledetail; but the indefinable quality which it adds to the lowest as to thehighest of these is (as Lamb says of passion) "the all in all in poetry. "Turning again for illustration to one of the highest names in imaginativeliterature--a name sometimes most improperly and absurdly inscribed onthe register of the realistic school, {137} we may say that thedifference on this point is not the difference between Balzac and Dumas, but the distinction between Balzac and M. Zola. Let us take by way ofexample the character next in importance to that of the heroine--thecharacter of her paramour. A viler figure was never sketched by Balzac;a viler figure was seldom drawn by Thackeray. But as with Balzac, sowith the author of this play, the masterful will combining with themasterly art of the creator who fashions out of the worst kind of humanclay the breathing likeness of a creature so hatefully pitiful and sopitifully hateful overcomes, absorbs, annihilates all sense of suchabhorrence and repulsion as would prove the work which excited them nohigh or even true work of art. Even the wonderful touch of dastardlybrutality and pitiful self-pity with which Mosbie at once receives andrepels the condolence of his mistress on his wound-- _Alice_. --Sweet Mosbie, hide thine arm, it kills my heart. _Mosbie_. --_Ay, Mistress Arden, this is your favour_. -- even this does not make unendurable the scenic representation of what inactual life would be unendurable for any man to witness. Such anexhibition of currish cowardice and sullen bullying spite increasesrather our wondering pity for its victim than our wondering sense of herdegradation. And this is a kind of triumph which only such an artist asShakespeare in poetry or as Balzac in prose can achieve. Alice Arden, if she be indeed a daughter of Shakespeare's, is the eldestborn of that group to which Lady Macbeth and Dionyza belong by right ofweird sisterhood. The wives of the thane of Glamis and the governor ofTharsus, it need hardly be said, are both of them creations of a muchlater date--if not of the very latest discernible or definable stage inthe art of Shakespeare. Deeply dyed as she is in bloodguiltiness, thewife of Arden is much less of a born criminal than these. To her, atonce the agent and the patient of her crime, the victim and theinstrument of sacrifice and blood-offering to Venus Libitina, goddess oflove and death, --to her, even in the deepest pit of her deliberatewickedness, remorse is natural and redemption conceivable. Like thePhaedra of Racine, and herein so nobly unlike the Phaedra of Euripides, she is capable of the deepest and bitterest penitence, --incapable ofdying with a hideous and homicidal falsehood on her long polluted lips. Her latest breath is not a lie but a prayer. Considering, then, in conclusion, the various and marvellous giftsdisplayed for the first time on our stage by the great poet, the greatdramatist, the strong and subtle searcher of hearts, the just andmerciful judge and painter of human passions, who gave this tragedy tothe new-born literature of our drama; taking into account the reallywonderful skill, the absoluteness of intuition and inspiration, withwhich every stroke is put in that touches off character or tones downeffect, even in the sketching and grouping of such minor figures as theruffianly hireling Black Will, the passionate artist without pity orconscience, {141} and above all the "unimitated, inimitable" study ofMichael, in whom even physical fear becomes tragic, and cowardice itselfno ludicrous infirmity but rather a terrible passion; I cannot butfinally take heart to say, even in the absence of all external ortraditional testimony, that it seems to me not pardonable merely norpermissible, but simply logical and reasonable, to set down this poem, ayoung man's work on the face of it, as the possible work of no man'syouthful hand but Shakespeare's. No similar question is raised, no parallel problem stated, in the case ofany one other among the plays now or ever ascribed on grounds more orless dubious to that same indubitable hand. This hand I do not recogniseeven in the _Yorkshire Tragedy_, full as it is to overflowing of fierceanimal power, and hot as with the furious breath of some caged wildbeast. Heywood, who as the most realistic and in some sense prosaicdramatist of his time has been credited (though but in a modestlytentative and suggestive fashion) with its authorship, was as incapableof writing it as Chapman of writing the Shakespearean parts of _The TwoNoble Kinsmen_ or Fletcher of writing the scenes of Wolsey's fall andKatherine's death in _King Henry VIII_. To the only editor ofShakespeare responsible for the two earlier of the three suggestions hereset aside, they may be forgiven on the score of insufficient scholarshipand want of critical training; but on what ground the third suggestioncan be excused in the case of men who should have a better right thanmost others to speak with some show of authority on a point of highercriticism, I must confess myself utterly at a loss to imagine. In the_Yorkshire Tragedy_ the submissive devotion of its miserable heroine toher maddened husband is merely doglike, --though not even, in theexquisitely true and tender phrase of our sovereign poetess, "mostpassionately patient. " There is no likeness in this poor trampled figureto "one of Shakespeare's women": Griselda was no ideal of his. To findits parallel in the dramatic literature of the great age, we must look tolesser great men than Shakespeare. Ben Jonson, a too exclusivelymasculine poet, will give us a couple of companion figures for her--orone such figure at least; for the wife of Fitzdottrel, submissive as sheis even to the verge of undignified if not indecorous absurdity, is lessof a human spaniel than the wife of Corvino. Another such is RobertDavenport's Abstemia, so warmly admired by Washington Irving; another isthe heroine of that singularly powerful and humorous tragi-comedy, labelled to _How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad_, which in its centralsituation anticipates that of Leigh Hunt's beautiful _Legend ofFlorence_; while Decker has revived, in one of our sweetest and mostgraceful examples of dramatic romance, the original incarnation of thatsomewhat pitiful ideal which even in a ruder and more Russian century ofpainful European progress out of night and winter could only be madecredible, acceptable, or endurable, by the yet unequalled genius ofChaucer and Boccaccio. For concentrated might and overwhelming weight of realism, this luridlittle play beats _A Warning for Fair Women_ fairly out of the field. Itis and must always be (I had nearly said, thank heaven) unsurpassable forpure potency of horror; and the breathless heat of the action, its ragingrate of speed, leaves actually no breathing-time for disgust; it consumesour very sense of repulsion as with fire. But such power as this, thougha rare and a great gift, is not the right quality for a dramatist; it isnot the fit property of a poet. Ford and Webster, even Tourneur andMarston, who have all been more or less wrongfully though more or lessplausibly attacked on the score of excess in horror, have none of themleft us anything so nakedly terrible, so terribly naked as this. Passionis here not merely stripped to the skin but stripped to the bones. Icannot tell who could and I cannot guess who would have written it. "'Tisa very excellent piece of work"; may we never exactly look upon its likeagain! I thought it at one time far from impossible, if not very nearlyprobable, that the author of _Arden of Feversham_ might be one with theauthor of the famous additional scenes to _The Spanish Tragedy_, and thateither both of these "pieces of work" or neither must be Shakespeare's. Istill adhere to Coleridge's verdict, which indeed must be that of alljudges capable of passing any sentence worthier of record than are Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle For girls of nine: to the effect that those magnificent passages, wellnigh overcharged atevery point with passion and subtlety, sincerity and instinct of pathetictruth, are no less like Shakespeare's work than unlike Jonson's: thoughhardly perhaps more unlike the typical manner of his adult and maturedstyle than is the general tone of _The Case is Altered_, his onesurviving comedy of that earlier period in which we know from Henslowethat the stout-hearted and long struggling young playwright went throughso much theatrical hackwork and piecework in the same rough harness withother now more or less notable workmen then drudging under the manager'sdull narrow sidelong eye for bare bread and bare shelter. But thisunlikeness, great as it is and serious and singular, between his formerand his latter style in high comedy, gives no warrant for us to believehim capable of so immeasurable a transformation in tragic style and soindescribable a decadence in tragic power as would be implied in adescent from the "fine madness" of "old Jeronymo" to the flat sanity andsmoke-dried sobriety of _Catiline_ and _Sejanus_. --I cannot but think, too, that Lamb's first hypothetical ascription of these wonderful scenesto Webster, so much the most Shakespearean in gait and port and accent ofall Shakespeare's liege men-at-arms, was due to a far happier and moretrustworthy instinct than led him in later years to liken them rather to"the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus. " We have wandered it may be somewhat out of the right time into a farother province of poetry than the golden land of Shakespeare's ripestharvest-fields of humour. And now, before we may enter the "flowerysquare" made by the summer growth of his four greatest works in pure andperfect comedy "beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind" of all happiestand most fragrant imagination, we have but one field to cross, one brookto ford, that hardly can be thought to keep us out of Paradise. In thegarden-plot on whose wicket is inscribed _All's Well that Ends Well_, weare hardly distant from Eden itself About a young dove's flutter from a wood. The ninth story of the third day of the Decameron is one of the fewsubjects chosen by Shakespeare--as so many were taken by Fletcher--whichare less fit, we may venture to think, for dramatic than for narrativetreatment. He has here again shown all possible delicacy of instinct inhandling a matter which unluckily it was not possible to handle on thestage with absolute and positive delicacy of feeling or expression. Dr. Johnson--in my humble opinion, with some justice; though his verdict hasbeen disputed on the score of undeserved austerity--"could not reconcilehis heart to Bertram"; and I, unworthy as I may be to second or supporton the score of morality the finding of so great a moralist, cannotreconcile my instincts to Helena. Parolles is even better than Bobadil, as Bobadil is even better than Bessus; and Lafeu is one of the very bestold men in all the range of comic art. But the whole charm and beauty ofthe play, the quality which raises it to the rank of its fellows bymaking it loveable as well as admirable, we find only in the "sweet, serene, skylike" sanctity and attraction of adorable old age, made morethan ever near and dear to us in the incomparable figure of the oldCountess of Roussillon. At the close of the play, Fletcher wouldinevitably have married her to Lafeu--or rather possibly, to the King. At the entrance of the heavenly quadrilateral, or under the rising dawnof the four fixed stars which compose our Northern Cross among theconstellations of dramatic romance hung high in the highest air ofpoetry, we may well pause for very dread of our own delight, lestunawares we break into mere babble of childish rapture and infantilethanksgiving for such light vouchsafed even to our "settentrional vedovosito" that even at their first dawn out of the depths Goder pareva il ciel di lor fiammelle. Beyond these again we see a second group arising, the supreme starrytrinity of the _Winter's Tale_, the _Tempest_, and _Cymbeline_: andbeyond these the divine darkness of everlasting and all-maternal night. These seven lamps of the romantic drama have in them--if I may strain thesimilitude a little further yet--more of lyric light than could fitly belent to feed the fire or the sunshine of the worlds of pure tragedy orcomedy. There is more play, more vibration as it were, in the splendoursof their spheres. Only in the heaven of Shakespeare's making can we passand repass at pleasure from the sunny to the stormy lights, from theglory of _Cymbeline_ to the glory of _Othello_. In this first group of four--wholly differing on that point from thelater constellation of three--there is but very seldom, not more thanonce or twice at most, a shooting or passing gleam of anything more luridor less lovely than "a light of laughing flowers. " There is but justenough of evil or even of passion admitted into their sweet spheres oflife to proclaim them living: and all that does find entrance is sotempered by the radiance of the rest that we retain but softened andlightened recollections even of Shylock and Don John when we think of the_Merchant of Venice_ and _Much Ado about Nothing_; we hardly feel in _AsYou Like It_ the presence or the existence of Oliver and Duke Frederick;and in _Twelfth Night_, for all its name of the midwinter, we findnothing to remember that might jar with the loveliness of love and thesummer light of life. No astronomer can ever tell which if any one among these four may be tothe others as a sun; for in this special tract of heaven "one stardiffereth" not "from another star in glory. " From each and all of them, even "while this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close [us] in, " wecannot _but_ hear the harmony of a single immortal soul Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins. The coincidence of the divine passage in which I have for once permittedmyself the freedom of altering for quotation's sake one little word, witha noble excerpt given by Hallam from the Latin prose writings ofCampanella, may recall to us with a doubly appropriate sense ofharmonious fitness the subtly beautiful image of Lord Tennyson;-- Star to star vibrates light: may soul to soul Strike thro' a finer element of her own? Surely, if ever she may, such a clash might we fancy to have passed fromthe spirit of the most glorious martyr and poet to the spirit of the mostglorious poet and artist upon the face of the earth together. Even toShakespeare any association of his name with Campanella's, as even toCampanella any association of his name with Shakespeare's, cannot but bean additional ray of honour: and how high is the claim of the divinephilosopher to share with the godlike dramatist their common and crowningname of poet, all Englishmen at least may now perceive by study ofCampanella's sonnets in the noble and exquisite version of Mr. Symonds;to whom among other kindred debts we owe no higher obligation than is dueto him as the giver of these poems to the inmost heart of all among hiscountrymen whose hearts are worthy to hold and to hoard up such treasure. Where nothing at once new and true can be said, it is always best to saynothing; as it is in this case to refrain from all reiteration ofrhapsody which must have been somewhat "mouldy ere" any living man's"grandsires had nails on their toes, " if not at that yet remoter date"when King Pepin of France was a little boy" and "Queen Guinever ofBritain was a little wench. " In the _Merchant of Venice_, at all events, there is hardly a single character from Portia to old Gobbo, a singleincident from the exaction of Shylock's bond to the computation of hairsin Launcelot's beard and Dobbin's tail, which has not been moreplentifully beprosed than ever Rosalind was berhymed. Much wordy windhas also been wasted on comparison of Shakespeare's Jew with Marlowe's;that is, of a living subject for terror and pity with a mere mouthpiecefor the utterance of poetry as magnificent as any but the best ofShakespeare's. Nor can it well be worth any man's while to say or to hear for thethousandth time that _As You Like It_ would be one of those works whichprove, as Landor said long since, the falsehood of the stale axiom thatno work of man's can be perfect, were it not for that one unlucky slip ofthe brush which has left so ugly a little smear in one corner of thecanvas as the betrothal of Oliver to Celia; though, with all reverencefor a great name and a noble memory, I can hardly think that matters weremuch mended in George Sand's adaptation of the play by the transferenceof her hand to Jaques. Once elsewhere, or twice only at the most, is anysuch other sacrifice of moral beauty or spiritual harmony to thenecessities and traditions of the stage discernible in all the world-widework of Shakespeare. In the one case it is unhappily undeniable; no mansconscience, no conceivable sense of right and wrong, but must more orless feel as did Coleridge's the double violence done it in the upshot of_Measure for Measure_. Even in the much more nearly spotless work whichwe have next to glance at, some readers have perhaps not unreasonablyfound a similar objection to the final good fortune of such a pitifulfellow as Count Claudio. It will be observed that in each case thesacrifice is made to comedy. The actual or hypothetical necessity ofpairing off all the couples after such a fashion as to secure a nominallyhappy and undeniably matrimonial ending is the theatrical idol whosetyranny exacts this holocaust of higher and better feelings than the mereliquorish desire to leave the board of fancy with a palatable morsel ofcheap sugar on the tongue. If it is proverbially impossible to determine by selection the greatestwork of Shakespeare, it is easy enough to decide on the date and the nameof his most perfect comic masterpiece. For absolute power ofcomposition, for faultless balance and blameless rectitude of design, there is unquestionably no creation of his hand that will bear comparisonwith _Much Ado About Nothing_. The ultimate marriage of Hero andClaudio, on which I have already remarked as in itself a doubtfullydesirable consummation, makes no flaw in the dramatic perfection of apiece which could not otherwise have been wound up at all. This was itsone inevitable conclusion, if the action were not to come to a tragicend; and a tragic end would here have been as painfully and as grosslyout of place as is any but a tragic end to the action of _Measure forMeasure_. As for Beatrice, she is as perfect a lady, though of a fardifferent age and breeding, as Celimene or Millamant; and a decidedlymore perfect woman than could properly or permissibly have trod the stageof Congreve or Moliere. She would have disarranged all the dramaticproprieties and harmonies of the one great school of pure comedy. Thegood fierce outbreak of her high true heart in two swift words--"KillClaudio" {154}--would have fluttered the dovecotes of fashionable dramato some purpose. But Alceste would have taken her to his own. No quainter and apter example was ever given of many men's absoluteinability to see the plainest aims, to learn the simplest rudiments, toappreciate the most practical requisites of art, whether applied totheatrical action or to any other as evident as exalted aim, than theinstance afforded by that criticism of time past which sagaciouslyremarked that "any less amusingly absurd" constables than Dogberry andVerges would have filled their parts in the action of the play equallywell. Our own day has doubtless brought forth critics and students ofelse unparalleled capacity for the task of laying wind-eggs in mare'snests, and wasting all the warmth of their brains and tongues in thehopeful endeavour to hatch them: but so fine a specimen was never droppedyet as this of the plumed or plumeless biped who discovered that ifDogberry had not been Dogberry and Verges had not been Verges they wouldhave been equally unsuccessful in their honest attempt to warn Leonatobetimes of the plot against his daughter's honour. The only explanationof the mistake is this; and it is one of which the force will beintelligible only to those who are acquainted with the very singularphysiology of that remarkably prolific animal known to critical scienceas the Shakespearean scholiast: that if Dogberry had been other thanDogberry, or if Verges had been other than Verges, the action andcatastrophe of the whole play could never have taken place at all. All true Pantagruelians will always, or at least as long as may bepermitted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, cherish with anespecial regard the comedy in which Shakespeare also has shown himself assurely the loving as he would surely have been the beloved disciple ofthat insuppressible divine, the immortal and most reverend vicar ofMeudon. Two only among the mighty men who lived and wrote and diedwithin the century which gave birth to Shakespeare were found worthy ofso great an honour at his hands as the double homage of citation andimitation: and these two, naturally and properly enough, were FrancoisRabelais and Christopher Marlowe. We cannot but recognise on what fartravels in what good company "Feste the jester" had but lately been, onthat night of "very gracious fooling" when he was pleased to enlightenthe unforgetful mind of Sir Andrew as to the history of Pigrogromitus, and of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus. At what precisedegree of latitude and longitude between the blessed islands of Medamothyand Papimania this equinoctial may intersect the Sporades of the outerocean, is a problem on the solution of which the energy of those manymodern sons of Aguecheek who have undertaken the task of writing aboutand about the text and the history of Shakespeare might be expended withan unusually reasonable hope and expectation of arriving at anexceptionally profitable end. Even apart from their sunny identity of spirit and bright sweetbrotherhood of style, the two comedies of _Twelfth Night_ and _As YouLike It_ would stand forth confessed as the common offspring of the samespiritual period by force and by right of the trace or badge they proudlyand professedly bear in common, as of a recent touch from the ripe andrich and radiant influence of Rabelais. No better and no fullervindication of his happy memory could be afforded than by the evidentfact that the two comedies which bear the imprint of his sign-manual areamong all Shakespeare's works as signally remarkable for the cleanlinessas for the richness of their humour. Here is the right royal seal ofPantagruel, clean-cut and clearly stamped, and unincrusted with any flakeof dirt from the dubious finger of Panurge. In the comic parts of thoseplays in which the humour is rank and flagrant that exhales from the lipsof Lucio, of Boult, or of Thersites, there is no trace or glimpse ofRabelais. From him Shakespeare has learnt nothing and borrowed nothingthat was not wise and good and sweet and clean and pure. All the morehonour, undoubtedly, to Shakespeare, that he would borrow nothing else:but assuredly, also, all the more honour to Rabelais, that he had enoughof this to lend. It is less creditable to England than honourable to France that aFrenchman should have been the first of Shakespearean students todiscover and to prove that the great triad of his Roman plays is not aconsecutive work of the same epoch. Until the appearance of Francois-Victor Hugo's incomparable translation, with its elaborate and admirablecommentary, it seems to have been the universal and certainly a mostnatural habit of English criticism to take the three as they usuallyappear together, in the order of historical chronology, and by tacitimplication to assume that they were composed in such order. I shouldtake some shame to myself but that I feel more of grateful pride than ofnatural shame in the avowal that I at all events owe the first revelationof the truth now so clear and apparent in this matter, to the son of thecommon lord and master of all poets born in his age--be they liegesubjects as loyal as myself or as contumacious as I grieve to find one atleast of my elders and betters, whenever I perceive--as too often Icannot choose but perceive--that the voice is the voice of Arnold, butthe hand is the hand of Sainte-Beuve. To the honoured and lamented son of our beloved and glorious Master, whomneither I nor any better man can ever praise and thank and glorifyenough, belongs all the credit of discerning for himself and discoveringfor us all the truth that _Julius Caesar_ is at all points equally likethe greatest works of Shakespeare's middle period and unlike the works ofhis last. It is in the main a play belonging to the same order as _KingHenry IV_. ; but it differs from our English Henriade--as remarkablyunlike Voltaire's as _Zaire_ is unlike _Othello_--not more by the absenceof Falstaff than by the presence of Brutus. Here at least Shakespearehas made full amends, if not to all modern democrats, yet assuredly toall historical republicans, for any possible or apparent preference ofroyal to popular traditions. Whatever manner of man may have been theactual Roman, our Shakespearean Brutus is undoubtedly the very noblestfigure of a typical and ideal republican in all the literature of theworld. "A democracy such as yours in America is my abhorrence, " wroteLandor once to an impudent and foul-mouthed Yankee pseudosopher, who hadintruded himself on that great man's privacy in order to have theprivilege of afterwards informing the readers of a pitiful pamphlet onEngland that Landor had "pestered him with Southey"; an impertinence, Imay add, which Mr. Landor at once rebuked with the sharpest contempt andchastised with the haughtiest courtesy. But, the old friend and lifelongchampion of Kossuth went on to say, his feelings were far differenttowards a republic; and if on the one point, then not less certainly onthe other, we may be assured that his convictions and his prepossessionswould have been shared by the author of _Coriolanus_ and _Julius Caesar_. Having now come perforce to the inevitable verge of _Hamlet_, I hasten todeclare that I can advance no pretension to compete with the claim ofthat "literary man" who became immortal by dint of one dinner with abishop, and in right of that last glass poured out for him in sign ofamity by "Sylvester Blougram, styled _in partibus Episcopus_, _necnon_the deuce knows what. " I do not propose to prove my perception of anypoint in the character of Hamlet "unseized by the Germans yet. " I canonly determine, as the Church Catechism was long since wont to bid me, "to keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue" not only"from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering"--though this itself is a formof abstinence not universally or even commonly practised among therampant rout of rival commentators--but also, now as ever throughout thisstudy, from all conscious repetition of what others have said before me. In _Hamlet_, as it seems to me, we set foot as it were on the bridgebetween the middle and the final period of Shakespeare. That pricelesswaif of piratical salvage which we owe to the happy rapacity of a hungrypublisher is of course more accurately definable as the first play of_Hamlet_ than as the first edition of the play. And this first _Hamlet_, on the whole, belongs altogether to the middle period. The deepercomplexities of the subject are merely indicated. Simple and trenchantoutlines of character are yet to be supplanted by features of subtlersuggestion and infinite interfusion. Hamlet himself is almost more of asatirist than a philosopher: Asper and Macilente, Felice and Malevole, the grim studies after Hamlet unconsciously or consciously taken byJonson and Marston, may pass as wellnigh passable imitations, with aninevitable streak of caricature in them, of the first Hamlet; they wouldhave been at once puerile and ghastly travesties of the second. TheQueen, whose finished figure is now something of a riddle, stands outsimply enough in the first sketch as confidant of Horatio if not asaccomplice of Hamlet. There is not more difference between the sweetquiet flow of those plain verses which open the original play within theplay and the stiff sonorous tramp of their substitutes, full-charged withheavy classic artillery of Phoebus and Neptune and Tellus and Hymen, thanthere is between the straightforward agents of their own destiny whom wemeet in the first _Hamlet_ and the obliquely moving patients who veersideways to their doom in the second. This minor transformation of style in the inner play, made solely withthe evident view of marking the distinction between its duly artificialforms of speech and the duly natural forms of speech passing between thespectators, is but one among innumerable indications which only apurblind perversity of prepossession can overlook of the especial storeset by Shakespeare himself on this favourite work, and the exceptionalpains taken by him to preserve it for aftertime in such fullness offinished form as might make it worthiest of profound and perpetual studyby the light of far other lamps than illuminate the stage. Of all vulgarerrors the most wanton, the most wilful, and the most resolutelytenacious of life, is that belief bequeathed from the days of Pope, inwhich it was pardonable, to the days of Mr. Carlyle, in which it is notexcusable, to the effect that Shakespeare threw off _Hamlet_ as an eaglemay moult a feather or a fool may break a jest; that he dropped his workas a bird may drop an egg or a sophist a fallacy; that he wrote "forgain, not glory, " or that having written _Hamlet_ he thought it nothingvery wonderful to have written. For himself to have written, hepossibly, nay probably, did not think it anything miraculous; but that hewas in the fullest degree conscious of its wonderful positive worth toall men for all time, we have the best evidence possible--his own; andthat not by mere word of mouth but by actual stroke of hand. Ben Jonsonmight shout aloud over his own work on a public stage, "By God 'tisgood, " and so for all its real goodness and his real greatness make surethat both the workman and his work should be less unnaturally thanunreasonably laughed at; Shakespeare knew a better way of showingconfidence in himself, but he showed not a whit less confidence. Sceneby scene, line for line, stroke upon stroke and touch after touch, hewent over all the old laboured ground again; and not to ensure success inhis own day and fill his pockets with contemporary pence, but merely andwholly with a purpose to make it worthy of himself and his futurestudents. Pence and praise enough it had evidently brought him in fromthe first. No more palpable proof of this can be desired than theinstantaneous attacks on it, the jeers, howls, hoots and hisses of whicha careful ear may catch some far faint echo even yet; the fearful andfurtive yelp from beneath of the masked and writhing poeticule, theshrill reverberation all around it of plagiarism and parody. Not onesingle alteration in the whole play can possibly have been made with aview to stage effect or to present popularity and profit; or we mustsuppose that Shakespeare, however great as a man, was naturally evengreater as a fool. There is a class of mortals to whom this inference isalways grateful--to whom the fond belief that every great man must needsbe a great fool would seem always to afford real comfort and support:happy, in Prior's phrase, could their inverted rule prove every greatfool to be a great man. Every change in the text of _Hamlet_ hasimpaired its fitness for the stage and increased its value for the closetin exact and perfect proportion. Now, this is not a matter of opinion--ofMr. Pope's opinion or Mr. Carlyle's; it is a matter of fact and evidence. Even in Shakespeare's time the actors threw out his additions; they throwout these very same additions in our own. The one especial speech, ifany one such especial speech there be, in which the personal genius ofShakespeare soars up to the very highest of its height and strikes downto the very deepest of its depth, is passed over by modern actors; it wascut away by Hemings and Condell. We may almost assume it as certain thatno boards have ever echoed--at least, more than once or twice--to thesupreme soliloquy of Hamlet. Those words which combine the noblestpleading ever proffered for the rights of human reason with the loftiestvindication ever uttered of those rights, no mortal ear within ourknowledge has ever heard spoken on the stage. A convocation even of allpriests could not have been more unhesitatingly unanimous in itsrejection than seems to have been the hereditary verdict of all actors. It could hardly have been found worthier of theological than it has beenfound of theatrical condemnation. Yet, beyond all question, magnificentas is that monologue on suicide and doubt which has passed from a proverbinto a byword, it is actually eclipsed and distanced at once onphilosophic and on poetical grounds by the later soliloquy on reason andresolution. That Shakespeare was in the genuine sense--that is, in the best andhighest and widest meaning of the term--a free thinker, this otherwisepractically and avowedly superfluous effusion of all inmost thoughtappears to me to supply full and sufficient evidence for the convictionof every candid and rational man. To that loftiest and most righteoustitle which any just and reasoning soul can ever deserve to claim, thegreatest save one of all poetic thinkers has thus made good his right forever. I trust it will be taken as no breach of my past pledge to abstain fromall intrusion on the sacred ground of Gigadibs and the Germans, if Iventure to indicate a touch inserted by Shakespeare for no otherperceptible or conceivable purpose than to obviate by anticipation theindomitable and ineradicable fallacy of criticism which would find thekeynote of Hamlet's character in the quality of irresolution. I mayobserve at once that the misconception involved in such a reading of theriddle ought to have been evident even without this episodical stroke ofillustration. In any case it should be plain to any reader that thesignal characteristic of Hamlet's inmost nature is by no meansirresolution or hesitation or any form of weakness, but rather the strongconflux of contending forces. That during four whole acts Hamlet cannotor does not make up his mind to any direct and deliberate action againsthis uncle is true enough; true, also, we may say, that Hamlet hadsomewhat more of mind than another man to make up, and might properlywant somewhat more time than might another man to do it in; but not, Iventure to say in spite of Goethe, through innate inadequacy to his taskand unconquerable weakness of the will; not, I venture to think in spiteof Hugo, through immedicable scepticism of the spirit and irremediablepropensity to nebulous intellectual refinement. One practical point inthe action of the play precludes us from accepting so ready a solution ofthe riddle as is suggested either by the simple theory ofhalf-heartedness or by the simple hypothesis of doubt. There isabsolutely no other reason, we might say there was no other excuse, forthe introduction or intrusion of an else superfluous episode into a playwhich was already, and which remains even after all possible excisions, one of the longest plays on record. The compulsory expedition of Hamletto England, his discovery by the way of the plot laid against his life, his interception of the King's letter and his forgery of a substitute forit against the lives of the King's agents, the ensuing adventure of thesea-fight, with Hamlet's daring act of hot-headed personal intrepidity, his capture and subsequent release on terms giving no less patent proofof his cool-headed and ready-witted courage and resource than the attackhad afforded of his physically impulsive and even impetuous hardihood--allthis serves no purpose whatever but that of exhibiting the instant andalmost unscrupulous resolution of Hamlet's character in time of practicalneed. But for all that he or Hamlet has got by it, Shakespeare might tooevidently have spared his pains; and for all this voice as of one cryingin a wilderness, Hamlet will too surely remain to the majority ofstudents, not less than to all actors and all editors and all critics, the standing type and embodied emblem of irresolution, half-heartedness, and doubt. That Hamlet should seem at times to accept for himself, and even toenforce by reiteration of argument upon his conscience and his reason, some such conviction or suspicion as to his own character, tells muchrather in disfavour than in favour of its truth. A man whose naturaltemptation was to swerve, whose inborn inclination was to shrink andskulk aside from duty and from action, would hardly be the first and lastperson to suspect his own weakness, the one only unbiassed judge andwitness of sufficiently sharp-sighted candour and accuracy to estimatearight his poverty of nature and the malformation of his mind. But thehigh-hearted and tender-conscienced Hamlet, with his native bias towardsintrospection intensified and inflamed and directed and dilated at onceby one imperative pressure and oppression of unavoidable and unalterablecircumstance, was assuredly and exactly the one only man to be troubledby any momentary fear that such might indeed be the solution of hisriddle, and to feel or to fancy for the moment some kind of ease andrelief in the sense of that very trouble. A born doubter would havedoubted even of Horatio; hardly can all positive and almost palpableevidence of underhand instigation and inspired good intentions induceHamlet for some time to doubt even of Ophelia. III. The entrance to the third period of Shakespeare is like the entrance tothat lost and lesser Paradise of old, With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms. Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony, Timon, these are names indeedof something more than tragic purport. Only in the sunnier distancebeyond, where the sunset of Shakespeare's imagination seems to melt orflow back into the sunrise, do we discern Prospero beside Miranda, Florizel by Perdita, Palamon with Arcite, the same knightly and kindlyDuke Theseus as of old; and above them all, and all others of his divineand human children, the crowning and final and ineffable figure ofImogen. Of all Shakespeare's plays, _King Lear_ is unquestionably that in whichhe has come nearest to the height and to the likeness of the one tragicpoet on any side greater than himself whom the world in all its ages hasever seen born of time. It is by far the most AEschylean of his works;the most elemental and primaeval, the most oceanic and Titanic inconception. He deals here with no subtleties as in _Hamlet_, with noconventions as in _Othello_: there is no question of "a divided duty" ora problem half insoluble, a matter of country and connection, of familyor of race; we look upward and downward, and in vain, into the deepestthings of nature, into the highest things of providence; to the roots oflife, and to the stars; from the roots that no God waters to the starswhich give no man light; over a world full of death and life withoutresting-place or guidance. But in one main point it differs radically from the work and the spiritof AEschylus. Its fatalism is of a darker and harder nature. ToPrometheus the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind were bitter; uponOrestes the hand of heaven was laid too heavily to bear; yet in the notutterly infinite or everlasting distance we see beyond them the promiseof the morning on which mystery and justice shall be made one; whenrighteousness and omnipotence at last shall kiss each other. But on thehorizon of Shakespeare's tragic fatalism we see no such twilight ofatonement, such pledge of reconciliation as this. Requital, redemption, amends, equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words without a meaninghere. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport. Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of Night everlasting; for hereis very Night herself. The words just cited are not casual or episodical; they strike thekeynote of the whole poem, lay the keystone of the whole arch of thought. There is no contest of conflicting forces, no judgment so much as bycasting of lots: far less is there any light of heavenly harmony or ofheavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above. We have heard much andoften from theologians of the light of revelation: and some such thingindeed we find in AEschylus: but the darkness of revelation is here. For in this the most terrible work of human genius it is with the verysprings and sources of nature that her student has set himself to deal. The veil of the temple of our humanity is rent in twain. Nature herself, we might say, is revealed--and revealed as unnatural. In face of such aworld as this a man might be forgiven who should pray that chaos mightcome again. Nowhere else in Shakespeare's work or in the universe ofjarring lives are the lines of character and event so broadly drawn or sosharply cut. Only the supreme self-command of this one poet could somould and handle such types as to restrain and prevent their passing fromthe abnormal into the monstrous: yet even as much as this, at least inall cases but one, it surely has accomplished. In Regan alone would itbe, I think, impossible to find a touch or trace of anything less vilethan it was devilish. Even Goneril has her one splendid hour, her fire-flaught of hellish glory; when she treads under foot the half-heartedgoodness, the wordy and windy though sincere abhorrence, which is allthat the mild and impotent revolt of Albany can bring to bear against herimperious and dauntless devilhood; when she flaunts before the eyes ofher "milk-livered" and "moral fool" the coming banners of France aboutthe "plumed helm" of his slayer. On the other side, Kent is the exception which answers to Regan on this. Cordelia, the brotherless Antigone of our stage, has one passing touch ofintolerance for what her sister was afterwards to brand as indiscretionand dotage in their father, which redeems her from the charge ofperfection. Like Imogen, she is not too inhumanly divine for the senseof divine irritation. Godlike though they be, their very godhead ishuman and feminine; and only therefore credible, and only thereforeadorable. Cloten and Regan, Goneril and Iachimo, have power to stir andembitter the sweetness of their blood. But for the contrast and even thecontact of antagonists as abominable as these, the gold of their spiritwould be too refined, the lily of their holiness too radiant, the violetof their virtue too sweet. As it is, Shakespeare has gone down perforceamong the blackest and the basest things of nature to find anything soequally exceptional in evil as properly to counterbalance and makebearable the excellence and extremity of their goodness. No otherwisecould either angel have escaped the blame implied in the very attributeand epithet of blameless. But where the possible depth of human hell isso foul and unfathomable as it appears in the spirits which serve asfoils to these, we may endure that in them the inner height of heavenshould be no less immaculate and immeasurable. It should be a truism wellnigh as musty as Hamlet's half cited proverb, to enlarge upon the evidence given in _King Lear_ of a sympathy with themass of social misery more wide and deep and direct and bitter and tenderthan Shakespeare has shown elsewhere. But as even to this day and evenin respectable quarters the murmur is not quite duly extinct which wouldcharge on Shakespeare a certain share of divine indifference tosuffering, of godlike satisfaction and a less than compassionate content, it is not yet perhaps utterly superfluous to insist on the utter fallacyand falsity of their creed who whether in praise or in blame would rankhim to his credit or discredit among such poets as on this side at leastmay be classed rather with Goethe than with Shelley and with Gautier thanwith Hugo. A poet of revolution he is not, as none of his country inthat generation could have been: but as surely as the author of _JuliusCaesar_ has approved himself in the best and highest sense of the word atleast potentially a republican, so surely has the author of _King Lear_avowed himself in the only good and rational sense of the words aspiritual if not a political democrat and socialist. It is only, I think, in this most tragic of tragedies that the sovereignlord and incarnate god of pity and terror can be said to have struck withall his strength a chord of which the resonance could excite such angryagony and heartbreak of wrath as that of the brother kings when theysmote their staffs against the ground in fierce imperious anguish ofagonised and rebellious compassion, at the oracular cry of Calchas forthe innocent blood of Iphigenia. The doom even of Desdemona seems asmuch less morally intolerable as it is more logically inevitable than thedoom of Cordelia. But doubtless the fatalism of _Othello_ is as muchdarker and harder than that of any third among the plays of Shakespeare, as it is less dark and hard than the fatalism of _King Lear_. For uponthe head of the very noblest man whom even omnipotence or Shakespearecould ever call to life he has laid a burden in one sense yet heavierthan the burden of Lear, insomuch as the sufferer can with somewhat lessconfidence of universal appeal proclaim himself a man more sinned againstthan sinning. And yet, if ever man after Lear might lift up his voice in that protest, it would assuredly be none other than Othello. He is in all theprosperous days of his labour and his triumph so utterly and whollynobler than the self-centred and wayward king, that the capture of hissoul and body in the unimaginable snare of Iago seems a yet blinder andmore unrighteous blow Struck by the envious wrath of man or God than ever fell on the old white head of that child-changed father. Butat least he is destroyed by the stroke of a mightier hand than theirs whostruck down Lear. As surely as Othello is the noblest man of man'smaking, Iago is the most perfect evildoer, the most potent demi-devil. Itis of course the merest commonplace to say as much, and would be no lessa waste of speech to add the half comfortable reflection that it is inany case no shame to fall by such a hand. But this subtlest andstrangest work of Shakespeare's admits and requires some closer thancommon scrutiny. Coleridge has admirably described the first greatsoliloquy which opens to us the pit of hell within as "the motive-huntingof a motiveless malignity. " But subtle and profound and just as is thisdefinitive appreciation, there is more in the matter yet than even this. It is not only that Iago, so to speak, half tries to make himself halfbelieve that Othello has wronged him, and that the thought of it gnawshim inly like a poisonous mineral: though this also be true, it is nothalf the truth--nor half that half again. Malignant as he is, the verysubtlest and strongest component of his complex nature is not evenmalignity. It is the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call aninarticulate poet. In his immortal study on the affair of the diamondnecklace, the most profound and potent humourist of his country in hiscentury has unwittingly touched on the mainspring of Iago'scharacter--"the very pulse of the machine. " He describes his Circe de laMothe-Valois as a practical dramatic poet or playwright at least in lieuof play-writer: while indicating how and wherefore, with all herconstructive skill and rhythmic art in action, such genius as hers sodiffers from the genius of Shakespeare that she undeniably could not havewritten a _Hamlet_. Neither could Iago have written an _Othello_. (Fromthis theorem, by the way, a reasoner or a casuist benighted enough toprefer articulate poets to inarticulate, Shakespeare to Cromwell, a fairVittoria Colonna to a "foul Circe-Megaera, " and even such a strategist asHomer to such a strategist as Frederic-William, would not illogicallydraw such conclusions or infer such corollaries as might result inopinions hardly consonant with the Teutonic-Titanic evangel of thepreacher who supplied him with his thesis. ) "But what he can do, that hewill": and if it be better to make a tragedy than to write one, to act apoem than to sing it, we must allow to Iago a station in the hierarchy ofpoets very far in advance of his creator's. None of the greatinarticulate may more justly claim place and precedence. With all hispoetic gift, he has no poetic weakness. Almost any creator but his wouldhave given him some grain of spite or some spark of lust after Desdemona. To Shakespeare's Iago she is no more than is a rhyme to another andarticulate poet. {179} His stanza must at any rate and at all costs bepolished: to borrow the metaphor used by Mr. Carlyle in apologeticillustration of a royal hero's peculiar system of levying recruits forhis colossal brigade. He has within him a sense or conscience of powerincomparable: and this power shall not be left, in Hamlet's phrase, "tofust in him unused. " A genuine and thorough capacity for human lust orhate would diminish and degrade the supremacy of his evil. He is almostas far above or beyond vice as he is beneath or beyond virtue. And thisit is that makes him impregnable and invulnerable. When once he has saidit, we know as well as he that thenceforth he never will speak word. Wecould smile almost as we can see him to have smiled at Gratiano's mostignorant and empty threat, being well assured that torments will in nowise ope his lips: that as surely and as truthfully as ever did thetortured philosopher before him, he might have told his tormentors thatthey did but bruise the coating, batter the crust, or break the shell ofIago. Could we imagine a far other lost spirit than Farinata degliUberti's endowed with Farinata's might of will, and transferred from thesepulchres of fire to the dykes of Malebolge, we might conceive somethingof Iago's attitude in hell--of his unalterable and indomitable posturefor all eternity. As though it were possible and necessary that in someone point the extremities of all conceivable good and of all imaginableevil should meet and mix together in a new "marriage of heaven and hell, "the action in passion of the most devilish among all the human damnedcould hardly be other than that of the most godlike among all divinesaviours--the figure of Iago than a reflection by hell-fire of the figureof Prometheus. Between Iago and Othello the position of Desdemona is precisely thatdefined with such quaint sublimity of fancy in the old Englishbyword--"between the devil and the deep sea. " Deep and pure and strongand adorable always and terrible and pitiless on occasion as the sea isthe great soul of the glorious hero to whom she has given herself; andwhat likeness of man's enemy from Satan down to Mephistopheles could bematched for danger and for dread against the good bluff soldierlytrustworthy figure of honest Iago? The rough license of his tongue atonce takes warrant from his good soldiership and again gives warrant forhis honesty: so that in a double sense it does him yeoman's service, andthat twice told. It is pitifully ludicrous to see him staged to the showlike a member--and a very inefficient member--of the secret police. Butit would seem impossible for actors to understand that he is not a would-be detective, an aspirant for the honours of a Vidocq, a candidate forthe laurels of a Vautrin: that he is no less than Lepidus, or thanAntony's horse, "a tried and valiant soldier. " It is perhaps naturalthat the two deepest and subtlest of all Shakespeare's intellectualstudies in good and evil should be the two most painfully misused andmisunderstood alike by his commentators and his fellows of the stage: itis certainly undeniable that no third figure of his creation has everbeen on both sides as persistently misconceived and misrepresented withsuch desperate pertinacity as Hamlet and Iago. And it is only when Iago is justly appreciated that we can justlyappreciate either Othello or Desdemona. This again should surely be nomore than the truism that it sounds; but practically it would seem to beno less than an adventurous and audacious paradox. Remove or deform ordiminish or modify the dominant features of the destroyer, and we havebut the eternal and vulgar figures of jealousy and innocence, newlyvamped and veneered and padded and patched up for the stalest purposes ofpuppetry. As it is, when Coleridge asks "which do we pity the most" atthe fall of the curtain, we can surely answer, Othello. Noble as are the"most blessed conditions" of "the gentle Desdemona, " he is yet the noblerof the two; and has suffered more in one single pang than she couldsuffer in life or in death. But if _Othello_ be the most pathetic, _King Lear_ the most terrible, _Hamlet_ the subtlest and deepest work of Shakespeare, the highest inabrupt and steep simplicity of epic tragedy is _Macbeth_. There needs noghost come from the grave, any reader may too probably remark, to tell usthis. But in the present generation such novelties have been unearthedregarding Shakespeare that the reassertion of an old truth may seem tohave upon it some glittering reflection from the brazen brightness of abrand-new lie. Have not certain wise men of the east ofEngland--Cantabrigian Magi, led by the star of their goddess Mathesis("mad Mathesis, " as a daring poet was once ill-advised enough to dub herdoubtful deity in defiance of scansion rather than of truth)--have theynot detected in the very heart of this tragedy the "paddling palms andpinching fingers" of Thomas Middleton? To the simpler eyes of less learned Thebans than these--Thebes, by theway, was Dryden's irreverent name for Cambridge, the nursing mother of"his green unknowing youth, " when that "renegade" was recreant enough tocompliment Oxford at her expense as the chosen Athens of "his riperage"--the likelihood is only too evident that the sole text we possess of_Macbeth_ has not been interpolated but mutilated. In their version of_Othello_, remarkably enough, the "player-editors, " contrary to theirwont, have added to the treasure-house of their text one of the mostprecious jewels that ever the prodigal afterthought of a great poetbestowed upon the rapture of his readers. Some of these, by way ofthanksgiving, have complained with a touch of petulance that it was outof place and superfluous in the setting: nay, that it was incongruouswith all the circumstances--out of tone and out of harmony and out ofkeeping with character and tune and time. In other lips indeed thanOthello's, at the crowning minute of culminant agony, the rush ofimaginative reminiscence which brings back upon his eyes and ears thelightning foam and tideless thunder of the Pontic sea might seem a thingless natural than sublime. But Othello has the passion of a poet closedin as it were and shut up behind the passion of a hero. For all hispractical readiness of martial eye and ruling hand in action, he is alsoin his season "of imagination all compact. " Therefore it is that in theface and teeth of all devils akin to Iago that hell could send forth tohiss at her election, we feel and recognise the spotless exaltation, thesublime and sun-bright purity, of Desdemona's inevitable and invulnerablelove. When once we likewise have seen Othello's visage in his mind, wesee too how much more of greatness is in this mind than in anotherhero's. For such an one, even a boy may well think how thankfully andjoyfully he would lay down his life. Other friends we have ofShakespeare's giving whom we love deeply and well, if hardly with suchlove as could weep for him all the tears of the body and all the blood ofthe heart: but there is none we love like Othello. I must part from his presence again for a season, and return to my topicin the text of _Macbeth_. That it is piteously rent and ragged andclipped and garbled in some of its earlier scenes, the rough constructionand the poltfoot metre, lame sense and limping verse, each maimed andmangled subject of players' and printers' most treasonable tyranny, contending as it were to seem harsher than the other, combine in thiscontention to bear indisputable and intolerable witness. Only where thewitches are, and one more potent and more terrible than all witches andall devils at their beck, can we be sure that such traitors have notrobbed us of one touch from Shakespeare's hand. The second scene of theplay at least bears marks of such handling as the brutal ShakespeareanHector's of the "mangled Myrmidons"; it is too visibly "noseless, handless, hacked and chipped" as it comes to us, crying on Hemings andCondell. And it is in this unlucky scene that unkindly criticism has notunsuccessfully sought for the gravest faults of language and manner to befound in Shakespeare. For certainly it cannot be cleared from the chargeof a style stiffened and swollen with clumsy braid and crabbed bombast. But against the weird sisters, and her who sits above them and apart, more awful than Hecate's very self, no mangling hand has been stretchedforth; no blight of mistranslation by perversion has fallen upon thewords which interpret and expound the hidden things of their evil will. To one tragedy as to one comedy of Shakespeare's, the casual or thenatural union of especial popularity with especial simplicity inselection and in treatment of character makes it as superfluous as itwould be difficult to attempt any application of analytical criticism. There is nothing in them of a nature so compound or so complex as to callfor solution or resolution into its primal elements. Here there is somegenuine ground for the generally baseless and delusive opinion of self-complacent sciolism that he who runs may read Shakespeare. These twoplays it is hardly worth while to point out by name: all probable readerswill know them at once for _Macbeth_ and _As You Like It_. There canhardly be a single point of incident or of character on which theyoungest reader will not find himself at one with the oldest, the dullestwith the brightest among the scholars of Shakespeare. It would be anequal waste of working hours or of playtime if any of these should devoteany part of either a whole-schoolday or a holiday to remark or torhapsody on the character of Macbeth or of Orlando, of Rosalind or ofLady Macbeth. He that runs, let him read: and he that has ears, let himhear. I cannot but think that enough at least of time has been spent if notwasted by able and even by eminent men on examination of _Coriolanus_with regard to its political aspect or bearing upon social questions. Itis from first to last, for all its turmoil of battle and clamour ofcontentious factions, rather a private and domestic than a public orhistorical tragedy. As in _Julius Caesar_ the family had been so whollysubordinated to the state, and all personal interests so utterlydominated by the preponderance of national duties, that even the sweetand sublime figure of Portia passing in her "awful loveliness" was but asa profile half caught in the background of an episode, so here on thecontrary the whole force of the final impression is not that of aconflict between patrician and plebeian, but solely that of a match ofpassions played out for life and death between a mother and a son. Thepartisans of oligarchic or democratic systems may wrangle at their willover the supposed evidences of Shakespeare's prejudice against this creedand prepossession in favour of that: a third bystander may rejoice in theproof thus established of his impartial indifference towards either: itis all nothing to the real point in hand. The subject of the whole playis not the exile's revolt, the rebel's repentance, or the traitor'sreward, but above all it is the son's tragedy. The inscription on theplinth of this tragic statue is simply to Volumnia Victrix. A loftier or a more perfect piece of man's work was never done in all theworld than this tragedy of _Coriolanus_: the one fit and crowning epithetfor its companion or successor is that bestowed by Coleridge--"the mostwonderful. " It would seem a sign or birthmark of only the greatest amongpoets that they should be sure to rise instantly for awhile above thevery highest of their native height at the touch of a thought ofCleopatra. So was it, as we all know, with William Shakespeare: so isit, as we all see, with Victor Hugo. As we feel in the marvellous andmatchless verses of _Zim-Zizimi_ all the splendour and fragrance andmiracle of her mere bodily presence, so from her first imperial dawn onthe stage of Shakespeare to the setting of that eastern star behind apall of undissolving cloud we feel the charm and the terror and themystery of her absolute and royal soul. Byron wrote once to Moore, withhow much truth or sincerity those may guess who would care to know, thathis friend's first "confounded book" of thin prurient jingle ("we call ita mellisonant tingle-tangle, " as Randolph's mock Oberon says of a stolensheep-bell) had been the first cause of all his erratic or eroticfrailties: it is not impossible that spirits of another sort may rememberthat to their own innocent infantine perceptions the first obscureelectric revelation of what Blake calls "the Eternal Female" was giventhrough a blind wondering thrill of childish rapture by a lightning onthe baby dawn of their senses and their soul from the sunrise ofShakespeare's Cleopatra. Never has he given such proof of his incomparable instinct for abstinencefrom the wrong thing as well as achievement of the right. He has utterlyrejected and disdained all occasion of setting her off by means of anylesser foil than all the glory of the world with all its empires. And weneed not Antony's example to show us that these are less than straws inthe balance. Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient a la fois Il hesita, lachant le monde dans son choix. Even as that Roman grasp relaxed and let fall the world, so hasShakespeare's self let go for awhile his greater world of imagination, with all its all but infinite variety of life and thought and action, forlove of that more infinite variety which custom could not stale. Himselfa second and a yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid a world, and a world more wonderful than ever, at her feet. He has put aside forher sake all other forms and figures of womanhood; he, father or creatorof Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona, and of Imogen, he too, like thesun-god and sender of all song, has anchored his eyes on her whom"Phoebus' amorous pinches" could not leave "black, " nor "wrinkled deep intime"; on that incarnate and imperishable "spirit of sense, " to whom atthe very last The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, That hurts, and is desired. To him, as to the dying husband of Octavia, this creature of his own handmight have boasted herself that the loveliest and purest among all hersisters of his begetting, with her modest eyes And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour, Demurring upon me. To sum up, Shakespeare has elsewhere given us in ideal incarnation theperfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfectmistress, or the perfect maiden: here only once for all he has given usthe perfect and the everlasting woman. And what a world of great men and great things, "high actions and highpassions, " is this that he has spread under her for a footcloth or hungbehind her for a curtain! The descendant of that other his ancestralAlcides, late offshoot of the god whom he loved and who so long was lothto leave him, is here as in history the visible one man revealed whocould grapple for a second with very Rome and seem to throw it, morelightly than he could cope with Cleopatra. And not the Roman Landorhimself could see or make us see more clearly than has his fellowprovincial of Warwickshire that first imperial nephew of her great firstparamour, who was to his actual uncle even such a foil and counterfeitand perverse and prosperous parody as the son of Hortense Beauharnais ofSaint-Leu to the son of Letizia Buonaparte of Ajaccio. For Shakespearetoo, like Landor, had watched his "sweet Octavius" smilingly andfrowningly "draw under nose the knuckle of forefinger" as he looked outupon the trail of innocent blood after the bright receding figure of hisbrave young kinsman. The fair-faced false "present God" of his poeticparasites, the smooth triumphant patron and preserver with the heart ofice and iron, smiles before us to the very life. It is of no account nowto remember that he at Philippi kept His sword even like a dancer: for the sword of Antony that struck for him is in the renegade hand ofDercetas. I have said nothing of Enobarbus or of Eros, the fugitive once ruined byhis flight and again redeemed by the death-agony of his dark and doomedrepentance, or the freedman transfigured by a death more fair thanfreedom through the glory of the greatness of his faith: for who canspeak of all things or of half that are in Shakespeare? And who canspeak worthily of any? I am come now to that strange part of a task too high for me, where Imust needs speak not only (as may indeed well be) unworthily, but also(as may well seem) unlovingly, of some certain portions in the mature andauthentic work of Shakespeare. "Though it be honest, it is never good"to do so: yet here I cannot choose but speak plainly after my own poorconscience, and risk all chances of chastisement as fearful as any oncethreatened for her too faithful messenger by the heart-stricken wrath ofCleopatra. In the greater part of this third period, taking a swift and general viewof it for contrast or comparison of qualities with the second, weconstantly find beauty and melody, transfigured into harmony andsublimity; an exchange unquestionably for the better: but in certainstages, or only perhaps in a single stage of it, we frequently findhumour and reality supplanted by realism and obscenity; an exchangeundeniably for the worse. The note of his earliest comic style was oftena boyish or a birdlike wantonness, very capable of such liberties andlevities as those of Lesbia's sparrow with the lip or bosom of hismistress; as notably in the parts of Boyet and Mercutio: and indeed thereis a bright vein of mere wordy wilfulness running throughout the goldenyouth of the two plays which connects _Love's Labour's Lost_ with _Romeoand Juliet_ as by a thread of floss silk not always "most excellentlyravelled, " nor often unspotted or unentangled. In the second period thisgaiety was replaced by the utmost frankness and fullness of humour, as aboy's merry madness by the witty wisdom of a man: but now for a time itwould seem as if the good comic qualities of either period were displacedand ousted by mere coarseness and crudity like that of a hard harshphotograph. This ultra-Circean transformation of spirit andbrutification of speech we do not find in the lighter interludes of greatand perfect tragedy: for the porter in _Macbeth_ makes hardly anexception worth naming. It is when we come upon the singular littlegroup of two or three plays not accurately definable at all but roughlydescribable as tragi-comedies, or more properly in two cases at least astragedies docked of their natural end, curtailed of the duecatastrophe--it is then that we find for the swift sad bright lightningsof laughter from the lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timelessdisappearance from the stage of _King Lear_ seems for once a sure sign ofinexplicable weariness or forgetfulness on Shakespeare's part, sonauseous and so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid ribaldryof Pandarus and Thersites. I must have leave to say that the coincidenceof these two in the scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bearable bymen who object to too strong a savour of those too truly "EternalCesspools" over which the first of living humourists holds as it were forever an everlasting nose--or rather, in one sense, does not hold butexpand it for the fuller inhalation of their too congenial fumes with anapparent relish which will always seem the most deplorable to those whothe most gratefully and reasonably admire that high heroic genius, forlove of which the wiser sort of men must finally forgive all the noisyaberrations of his misanthropy and philobulgary, anti-Gallican andRussolatrous insanities of perverse and morbid eloquence. The three detached or misclassified plays of Shakespeare in which alone areverent and reasonable critic might perhaps find something rationallyand really exceptionable have also this far other quality in common, thatin them as in his topmost tragedies of the same period either theexaltation of his eloquence touches the very highest point of expressiblepoetry, or his power of speculation alternately sounds the gulfs andscales the summits of all imaginable thought. In all three of them thepower of passionate and imaginative eloquence is not only equal in spiritor essence but identical in figure or in form: in those two of them whichdeal almost as much with speculative intelligence as with poetic actionand passion, the tones and methods, types and objects of thought, arealso not equal only but identical. An all but absolute brotherhood inthought and style and tone and feeling unites the quasi-tragedy of_Troilus and Cressida_ with what in the lamentable default of as apt aphrase in English I must call by its proper designation in French the_tragedie manquee_ of _Measure for Measure_. In the simply romanticfragment of the Shakespearean _Pericles_, where there was no call and noplace for the poetry of speculative or philosophic intelligence, there isthe same positive and unmistakable identity of imaginative and passionatestyle. I cannot but conjecture that the habitual students of Shakespeare'sprinted plays must have felt startled as by something of a shock when thesame year exposed for the expenditure of their sixpences two reasonablycorrect editions of a play unknown to the boards in the likeness of_Troilus and Cressida_, side by side or cheek by jowl with a mostunreasonably and unconscionably incorrect issue of a much older stagefavourite, now newly beautified and fortified, in _Pericles Prince ofTyre_. Hitherto, ever since the appearance of his first poem, and itsinstant acceptance by all classes from courtiers to courtesans under asomewhat dubious and two-headed form of popular success, --'vrai succes descandale s'il en fut'--even the potent influence and unequivocal exampleof Rabelais had never once even in passing or in seeming affected orinfected the progressive and triumphal genius of Shakespeare with a taintor touch of anything offensive to healthier and cleanlier organs ofperception than such as may belong to a genuine or a pretending Puritan. But on taking in his hand that one of these two new dramatic pamphletswhich might first attract him either by its double novelty as a neveracted play or by a title of yet more poetic and romantic associationsthan its fellow's, such a purchaser as I have supposed, with his mindfull of the sweet rich fresh humour which he would feel a right to expectfrom Shakespeare, could hardly have undergone less than a qualm or a pangof strong disrelish and distaste on finding one of the two leading comicfigures of the play break in upon it at his entrance not even with "afool-born jest, " but with full-mouthed and foul-mouthed effusion of suchrank and rancorous personalities as might properly pollute the lips evenof some emulous descendant or antiquarian reincarnation of Thersites, onapplication or even apprehension of a whip cracked in passing over theassembled heads of a pseudocritical and mock-historic society. In eithercase we moderns at least might haply desire the intervention of abeadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty as ever the son ofLaertes applied to the shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe ofThersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon--I am speaking ofShakespeare's Thersites--has no touch of humour in all his currishcomposition: Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare for suchdirty dogs as those of his kind or generation. There is not even whatColeridge with such exquisite happiness defined as being thequintessential property of Swift--"_anima Rabelaesii habitans insicco_--the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. " It is the fallensoul of Swift himself at its lowest, dwelling in a place yet drier: thefamiliar spirit or less than Socratic daemon of the Dean informing thegenius of Shakespeare. And thus for awhile infected and possessed, thedivine genius had not power to re-inform and re-create the daemonicspirit by virtue of its own clear essence. This wonderful play, one ofthe most admirable among all the works of Shakespeare's immeasurable andunfathomable intelligence, as it must always hold its natural high placeamong the most admired, will always in all probability be also, and asnaturally, the least beloved of all. It would be as easy and asprofitable a problem to solve the Rabelaisian riddle of the bombinatingchimaera with its potential or hypothetical faculty of derivingsustenance from a course of diet on second intentions, as to read theriddle of Shakespeare's design in the procreation of this yet moremysterious and magnificent monster of a play. That on its production inprint it was formally announced as "a new play never staled with thestage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar, " we know; mustwe infer or may we suppose that therefore it was not originally writtenfor the stage? Not all plays were which even at that date appeared inprint: yet it would seem something more than strange that one such play, written simply for the study, should have been the extra-professionalwork of Shakespeare: and yet again it would seem stranger that he shouldhave designed this prodigious nondescript or portent of supreme geniusfor the public stage: and strangest of all, if so, that he should have sodesigned it in vain. Perhaps after all a better than any German orGermanising commentary on the subject would be the simple and summaryejaculation of Celia--"O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderfulwonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping!"The perplexities of the whole matter seem literally to crowd and thickenupon us at every step. What ailed the man or any man to write such amanner of dramatic poem at all? and having written, to keep it beside himor let it out of his hands into stranger and more slippery keeping, unacted and unprinted? A German will rush in with an answer where anEnglishman (_non angelus sed Anglus_) will naturally fear to tread. Alike in its most palpable perplexities and in its most patentsplendours, this political and philosophic and poetic problem, thishybrid and hundred-faced and hydra-headed prodigy, at once defies andderides all definitive comment. This however we may surely andconfidently say of it, that of all Shakespeare's offspring it is the onewhose best things lose least by extraction and separation from theircontext. That some cynic had lately bitten him by the brain--andpossibly a cynic himself in a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia--wemight conclude as reasonably from consideration of the whole as fromexamination of the parts more especially and virulently affected: yet howmuch is here also of hyper-Platonic subtlety and sublimity, of golden andHyblaean eloquence above the reach and beyond the snap of any cynic'stooth! Shakespeare, as under the guidance at once for good and for evilof his alternately Socratic and Swiftian familiar, has set himself as ifprepensely and on purpose to brutalise the type of Achilles andspiritualise the type of Ulysses. The former is an enterprise never tobe utterly forgiven by any one who ever loved from the very birth of hisboyhood the very name of the son of the sea-goddess in the glorious wordsof Mr. Browning's young first-born poem, Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed, And bound [his] forehead with Proserpine's hair. It is true, if that be any little compensation, that Hector andAndromache fare here hardly better than he: while of the momentarypresentation of Helen on the dirtier boards of a stage more miry than thetub of Diogenes I would not if I could and I must not though I would sayso much as one single proper word. The hysterics of the eponymous heroand the harlotries of the eponymous heroine remove both alike beyond theouter pale of all rational and manly sympathy; though Shakespeare's selfmay never have exceeded or equalled for subtle and accurate and bitterfidelity the study here given of an utterly light woman, shallow andloose and dissolute in the most literal sense, rather than perverse orunkindly or unclean; and though Keats alone in his most perfect mood oflyric passion and burning vision as full of fragrance as of flame couldhave matched and all but overmatched those passages in which the raptureof Troilus makes pale and humble by comparison the keenest raptures ofRomeo. The relative disfavour in which the play of _Measure for Measure_ hasdoubtless been at all times generally held is not in my opinion simplyexplicable on the theory which of late years has been so powerfully andplausibly advanced and advocated on the highest poetic or judicialauthority in France or in the world, that in the land of many-colouredcant and many-coated hypocrisy the type of Angelo is something too much aprototype or an autotype of the huge national vice of England. Thiscomment is in itself as surely just and true as it is incisive anddirect: but it will not cover by any manner of means the whole question. The strong and radical objection distinctly brought forward against thisplay, and strenuously supported by the wisest and the warmest devoteeamong all the worshippers of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, that thePuritan Angelo is exposed: it is that the Puritan Angelo is unpunished. In the very words of Coleridge, it is that by his pardon and his marriage"the strong indignant claim of justice" is "baffled. " The expression isabsolutely correct and apt: justice is not merely evaded or ignored oreven defied: she is both in the older and the newer sense of the worddirectly and deliberately baffled; buffeted, outraged, insulted, struckin the face. We are left hungry and thirsty after having been made tothirst and hunger for some wholesome single grain at least of righteousand too long retarded retribution: we are tricked out of our dole, defeated of our due, lured and led on to look for some equitable andsatisfying upshot, defrauded and derided and sent empty away. That this play is in its very inmost essence a tragedy, and that nosleight of hand or force of hand could give it even a tolerable show ofcoherence or consistency when clipped and docked of its proper andrightful end, the mere tone of style prevalent throughout all its betterparts to the absolute exclusion of any other would of itself most amplysuffice to show. Almost all that is here worthy of Shakespeare at anytime is worthy of Shakespeare at his highest: and of this every touch, every line, every incident, every syllable, belongs to pure and simpletragedy. The evasion of a tragic end by the invention and intromissionof Mariana has deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity butingenious evasion of a natural and proper end is usually the distinctivequality which denotes a workman of a very much lower school than theschool of Shakespeare. In short and in fact, the whole elaboratemachinery by which the complete and completely unsatisfactory result ofthe whole plot is attained is so thoroughly worthy of such a contriver as"the old fantastical duke of dark corners" as to be in a moral sense, ifI dare say what I think, very far from thoroughly worthy of the wisestand mightiest mind that ever was informed with the spirit or genius ofcreative poetry. I have one more note to add in passing which touches simply on a musicalpoint in lyric verse; and from which I would therefore give any biped whobelieves that ears "should be long to measure Shakespeare" all timelywarning to avert the length of his own. A very singular question, andone to me unaccountable except by a supposition which on charitablegrounds I should be loth to entertain for a moment--namely, that suchears are commoner than I would fain believe on heads externally orostensibly human, --has been raised with regard to the first immortal songof Mariana in the moated grange. This question is whether the secondverse appended by Fletcher to that divine Shakespearean fragment may nothaply have been written by the author of the first. The visible andaudible evidence that it cannot is of a kind which must at once leap intosight of all human eyes and conviction of all human ears. The metre ofShakespeare's verse, as written by Shakespeare, is not the metre ofFletcher's. It can only seem the same to those who hear by finger andnot by ear: a class now at all events but too evidently numerous enoughto refute Sir Hugh's antiquated objection to the once apparentlytautologous phrase of Pistol. {205} It is of course inexplicable, but it is equally of course undeniable, that the mention of Shakespeare's _Pericles_ would seem immediately andinvariably to recall to a virtuous critical public of nice and nasty mindthe prose portions of the fourth act, the whole of the prose portions ofthe fourth act, and nothing but the prose portions of the fourth act. Toreaders and writers of books who readily admit their ineligibility asmembers of a Society for the Suppression of Shakespeare or Rabelais, ofHomer or the Bible, it will seem that the third and fifth acts of thisill-fated and ill-famed play, and with them the poetical parts of thefourth act, are composed of metal incomparably more attractive. But thevirtuous critic, after the alleged nature of the vulturine kind, wouldappear to have eyes and ears and nose for nothing else. It is true thatsomewhat more of humour, touched once and again with subtler hints ofdeeper truth, is woven into the too realistic weft of these too lifelikescenes than into any of the corresponding parts in _Measure for Measure_or in _Troilus and Cressida_; true also that in the hands of imitators, in hands so much weaker than Shakespeare's as were Heywood's orDavenport's (who transplanted this unlovely episode from _Pericles_ intoa play of his own), these very scenes or such as they reappear unredeemedby any such relief in all the rank and rampant ugliness of their rawrepulsive realism: true, again, that Fletcher has once equalled them inaudacity, while stripping off the nakedness of his subject the lastragged and rude pretence at a moral purpose, and investing it insteadwith his very brightest robe of gay parti-coloured humour: but after allit remains equally true that to senses less susceptible of attraction bycarrion than belong to the vultures of critical and professional virtuethey must always remain as they have always been, something veryconsiderably more than unattractive. I at least for one must confessmyself insufficiently virtuous to have ever at any time for any momentfelt towards them the very slightest touch of any feeling more attractivethan repulsion. And herewith I hasten to wash my hands of the onlyunattractive matter in the only three of Shakespeare's plays which offerany such matter to the perceptions of any healthy-minded and reasonablehuman creature. But what now shall I say that may not be too pitifully unworthy of theglories and the beauties, the unsurpassable pathos and sublimity inwovenwith the imperial texture of this very play? the blood-red Tyrian purpleof tragic maternal jealousy which might seem to array it in a worthyattire of its Tyrian name; the flower-soft loveliness of maidenlamentation over the flower-strewn seaside grave of Marina's oldsea-tossed nurse, where I am unvirtuous enough (as virtue goes amongmoralists) to feel more at home and better at ease than in the atmosphereof her later lodging in Mitylene? What, above all, shall be said of thatstorm above all storms ever raised in poetry, which ushered into a worldof such wonders and strange chances the daughter of the wave-worn andworld-wandering prince of Tyre? Nothing but this perhaps, that itstands--or rather let me say that it blows and sounds and shines andrings and thunders and lightens as far ahead of all others as theburlesque sea-storm of Rabelais beyond all possible storms of comedy. Therecent compiler of a most admirably skilful and most delicatelyinvaluable compendium of Pantagruel or manual by way of guidebook toRabelais has but too justly taken note of the irrefragable evidence theregiven that the one prose humourist who is to Aristophanes as the humantwin-star Castor to Pollux the divine can never have practicallyweathered an actual gale; but if I may speak from a single experience ofone which a witness long inured to Indian storm as well as Indian battlehad never seen matched out of the tropics if ever overmatched withinthem, I should venture to say, were the poet in question any other mortalman than Shakespeare, to whom all things were better known by instinctthan ever they can be to others by experience, that the painter of thestorm in _Pericles_ must have shared the adventure and relished therapture of such an hour. None other most assuredly than himself alonecould have mingled with the material passion of the elements such humanpassion of pathos as thrills in such tenderly sublime undertone of anagony so nobly subdued through the lament of Pericles over Thaisa. As inhis opening speech of this scene we heard all the clangour and resonanceof warring wind and sea, so now we hear a sound of sacred and spiritualmusic as solemn as the central monochord of the inner main itself. That the three last acts of _Pericles_, with the possible if not overprobable exception of the so-called Chorus, {210} are wholly the work ofShakespeare in the ripest fullness of his latter genius, is a positionwhich needs exactly as much proof as does his single-handed authorship of_Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth_, and _Othello_. In the fifth act is a remarkableinstance of a thing remarkably rare with him; the recast or repetition inan improved and reinvigorated form of a beautiful image or passageoccurring in a previous play. The now only too famous metaphor of"patience on a monument smiling at grief"--too famous we might call itfor its own fame--is transfigured as from human beauty to divine, in itstransformation to the comparison of Marina's look with that of "Patiencegazing on kings' graves, and smiling Extremity out of act. " A preciselysimilar parallel is one to which I have referred elsewhere; that betweenthe two passages respectively setting forth the reciprocal love of Helenaand Hermia, of Emilia and Flavina. The change of style and spirit ineither case of reiteration is the change from a simpler to a sublimerform of beauty. In the two first acts of _Pericles_ there are faint and rare but evidentand positive traces of a passing touch from the hasty hand ofShakespeare: even here too we may say after Dido:-- Nec tam aversus equos Tyria sol jungit ab urbe. It has been said that those most unmistakable verses on "the blind mole"are not such as any man could insert into another man's work, or slip inbetween the lines of an inferior poet: and that they occur naturallyenough in a speech of no particular excellence. I take leave decisivelyto question the former assertion, and flatly to contradict the latter. The pathetic and magnificent lines in dispute do not occur naturallyenough, or at all naturally, among the very poor, flat, creeping versesbetween which they have been thrust with such over freehandedrecklessness. No purple patch was ever more pitifully out of place. There is indeed no second example of such wanton and wayward liberality;but the generally lean and barren style of these opening acts does notcrawl throughout on exactly the same low level. The last of the only three plays with which I venture to find any faulton the score of moral taste is the first on my list of the only threeplays belonging to this last period on which, as they now stand, I tracethe indisputable track of another touch than Shakespeare's. But in thetwo cases remaining our general task of distinction should on the wholebe simple and easy enough for the veriest babes and sucklings in thelower school of Shakespeare. That the two great posthumous fragments we possess of Shakespeare'suncompleted work are incomplete simply because the labour spent on eitherwas cut short by his timeless death is the first natural assumption ofany student with an eye quick enough to catch the point where the tracesof his hand break off; but I should now be inclined to guess rather thaton reconsideration of the subjects chosen he had rejected or dismissedthem for a time at least as unfit for dramatic handling. It could haveneeded no great expenditure of reasoning or reflection to convince a manof lesser mind and less experience than Shakespeare's that no subjectcould possibly be more unmanageable, more indomitably improper for such apurpose, than he had selected in _Timon of Athens_. How he came ever tofall across such a subject, to hit upon such a choice, we can spend noprofitable time or pains in trying to conjecture. It is clear, however, that at all events there was a season when the inexplicable attraction ofit was too strong for him to resist the singular temptation to embody inpalpable form, to array in dramatic raiment, to invest with imaginativemagnificence, the godless ascetic passion of misanthropy, the martyrdomof an atheistic Stylites. Timon is doubtless a man of far nobler typethan any monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius: but his immeasurablesuperiority in spiritual rank to the hermit fathers of the desert servesmerely to make him a thought madder and a grain more miserable than thewhole Thebaid of Christomaniacs rolled into one. Foolish and fruitlessas it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets onthe false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a darkdream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine bywaysof life and visionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blindassumption to accept the plain evidence in both so patent before us, thathe too like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of inner life, andlike other poets found them or made them fruitful as well as bitter, though it might be but of bitter fruit. And of such there is here enoughto glut the gorge of all the monks in monkery, or strengthen for a fortydays' fast any brutallest unwashed theomaniac of the Thebaid. The mostunconscionably unclean of all foul-minded fanatics might have beensatisfied with the application to all women from his mother upwards ofthe monstrous and magnificent obloquy found by Timon as insufficient tooverwhelm as his gold was inadequate to satisfy one insatiable andindomitable "brace of harlots. " In _Troilus and Cressida_ we found toomuch that Swift might have written when half inspired by the genius ofShakespeare; in the great and terrible fourth act of _Timon_ we find suchtragedy as Juvenal might have written when half deified by the spirit ofAEschylus. There is a noticeable difference between the case of _Timon_ and the twoother cases (diverse enough between themselves) of late or mature workbut partially assignable to the hand of Shakespeare. In _Pericles_ wemay know exactly how much was added by Shakespeare to the work of we knownot whom; in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ we can tell sometimes to a hair'sbreadth in a hemistich by whom how much was added to the posthumous textof Shakespeare; in _Timon_ we cannot assert with the same confidence inthe same accuracy that just so many scenes and no more, just so manyspeeches and none other, were the work of Shakespeare's or of some otherhand. Throughout the first act his presence lightens on us by flashes, as his voice peals out by fits, from behind or above the too meanlydecorated altar of tragic or satiric song: in the second it is moresensibly continuous; in the third it is all but utterly eclipsed; in thefourth it is but very rarely intercepted for a very brief interval in thedark divine service of a darker Commination Day: in the fifth itpredominates generally over the sullen and brooding atmosphere with thefierce imperious glare of a "bloody sun" like that which the wastingshipmen watched at noon "in a hot and copper sky. " There is here no moreto say of a poem inspired at once by the triune Furies of Ezekiel, ofJuvenal, and of Dante. I can imagine no reason but that already suggested why Shakespeare shouldin a double sense have taken Chaucer for his model or example in leavinghalf told a story which he had borrowed from the father and master of ournarrative poetry. Among all competent scholars and all rational studentsof Shakespeare there can have been, except possibly with regard to threeof the shorter scenes, no room for doubt or perplexity on any detail ofthe subject since the perfect summary and the masterly decision of Mr. Dyce. These three scenes, as no such reader will need to be told orreminded, are the two first soliloquies of the Gaoler's Daughter afterthe release of Palamon, and the scene of the portraits, as we may in adouble sense call it, in which Emilia, after weighing against each otherin solitude the likenesses of the cousins, receives from her own kinsfolka full and laboured description of their leading champions on eitherside. Even setting apart for once and for a moment the sovereignevidence of mere style, we must recognise in this last instance abeautiful and significant example of that loyal and loving fidelity tothe minor passing suggestions of Chaucer's text which on all possibleoccasions of such comparison so markedly and vividly distinguishes thework of Shakespeare's from the work of Fletcher's hand. Of the pestilentabuse and perversion to which Fletcher has put the perhaps alreadysuperfluous hints or sketches by Shakespeare for an episodical underplot, in his transmutation of Palamon's love-stricken and luckless delivererinto the disgusting burlesque of a mock Ophelia, I have happily no needas I should certainly have no patience to speak. {217} After the always immitigable gloom of _Timon_ and the sometimesmalodorous exhalations of the three preceding plays, it is nothing lessthan "very heaven" to find and feel ourselves again in the midmostParadise, the central Eden, of Shakespeare's divine discovery--of hislast sweet living invention. Here again is air as pure blowing overfields as fragrant as where Dante saw Matilda or Milton saw Proserpinegathering each as deathless flowers. We still have here to disentwine ordisentangle his own from the weeds of glorious and of other than gloriousfeature with which Fletcher has thought fit to interweave them; even inthe close of the last scene of all we can say to a line, to a letter, where Shakespeare ends and Fletcher begins. That scene is opened byShakespeare in his most majestic vein of meditative or moral verse, pointed and coloured as usual with him alone by direct and absoluteaptitude to the immediate sentiment and situation of the speaker and ofno man else: then either Fletcher strikes in for a moment with a touch ofsomewhat more Shakespearean tone than usual, or possibly we have asurvival of some lines' length, not unretouched by Fletcher, fromShakespeare's first sketch for a conclusion of the somewhat calamitousand cumbrous underplot, which in any case was ultimately left forFletcher to expand into such a shape and bring by such means to such anend as we may safely swear that Shakespeare would never have admitted:then with the entrance and ensuing narrative of Pirithous we have nonebut Shakespeare before us again, though it be Shakespeare undoubtedly inthe rough, and not as he might have chosen to present himself after duerevision, with rejection (we may well suppose) of this point andreadjustment of that: then upon the arrival of the dying Arcite with hisescort there follows a grievous little gap, a flaw but pitifully patchedby Fletcher, whom we recognise at wellnigh his worst and weakest inPalamon's appeal to his kinsman for a last word, "if his heart, _hisworthy, manly heart_" (an exact and typical example of Fletcher'stragically prosaic and prosaically tragic dash of incurable commonplace), "be yet unbroken, " and in the flaccid and futile answer which fails sosignally to supply the place of the most famous and pathetic passage inall the masterpiece of Chaucer; a passage to which even Shakespeare couldhave added but some depth and grandeur of his own giving, since neitherhe nor Dante's very self nor any other among the divinest of men couldhave done more or better than match it for tender and pure simplicity ofwords more "dearly sweet and bitter" than the bitterest or the sweetestof men's tears. Then, after the duly and properly conventionalengagement on the parts of Palamon and Emilia respectively to devote theanniversary "to tears" and "to honour, " the deeper note returns for onegrand last time, grave at once and sudden and sweet as the full choralopening of an anthem: the note which none could ever catch ofShakespeare's very voice gives out the peculiar cadence that it alone cangive in the modulated instinct of a solemn change or shifting of themetrical emphasis or _ictus_ from one to the other of two repeatedwords:-- That nought could buy Dear love; but loss of dear love! That is a touch beyond the ear or the hand of Fletcher: a chord soundedfrom Apollo's own harp after a somewhat hoarse and reedy wheeze from thescrannel-pipe of a lesser player than Pan. Last of all, in words worthyto be the latest left of Shakespeare's, his great and gentle Theseuswinds up the heavenly harmonies of his last beloved great poem. And now, coming at length within the very circle of Shakespeare'sculminant and crowning constellation, bathing my whole soul and spiritfor the last and (if I live long enough) as surely for the first of manythousand times in the splendours of the planet whose glory is the lightof his very love itself, standing even as Dante in the clear Amorous silence of the Swooning-sphere, what shall I say of thanksgiving before the final feast of Shakespeare? The grace must surely be short enough if it would at all be gracious. Even were Shakespeare's self alive again, or he now but fifteen yearssince gone home to Shakespeare, {220} of whom Charles Lamb said well thatnone could have written his book about Shakespeare but either himselfalone or else he of whom the book was written, yet could we not hope thateither would have any new thing to tell us of the _Tempest_, the_Winter's Tale_, and _Cymbeline_. And for ourselves, what else could wedo but only ring changes on the word beautiful as Celia on the wordwonderful in her laughing litany of love? or what better or what more canwe do than in the deepest and most heartfelt sense of an old conventionalphrase, thank God and Shakespeare? for how to praise either for such agift of gifts we know not, knowing only and surely that none will knowfor ever. True or false, and it would now seem something less than likely to betrue, the fancy which assumed the last lines spoken by Prospero to belikewise the last words of the last completed work of Shakespeare wasequally in either case at once natural and graceful. There is but onefigure sweeter than Miranda's and sublimer than Prospero's in all therange of heaven on which the passion of our eyes could rest at parting. And from one point of view there is even a more heavenly qualityperceptible in the light of this than of its two twin stars. In no nookor corner of the island as we leave it is any savour left or any memorylingering of any inexpiable evil. Alonzo is absolved; even Antonio andSebastian have made no such ineffaceable mark on it by the presence oftheir pardoned crimes as is made by those which cost the life ofMamillius and the labours of Imogen. Poor Caliban is left in suchcomfort as may be allowed him by divine grace in the favourable aspect ofSetebos; and his comrades go by us "reeling ripe" and "gilded" not by"grand liquor" only but also by the summer lightning of men's laughter:blown softly out of our sight, with a sound and a gust of music, by thebreath of the song of Ariel. The wild wind of the _Winter's Tale_ at its opening would seem to blow usback into a wintrier world indeed. And to the very end I must confessthat I have in me so much of the spirit of Rachel weeping in Ramah aswill not be comforted because Mamillius is not. It is well for thosewhose hearts are light enough, to take perfect comfort even in thesubstitution of his sister Perdita for the boy who died of "thoughts highfor one so tender. " Even the beautiful suggestion that Shakespeare as hewrote had in mind his own dead little son still fresh and living at hisheart can hardly add more than a touch of additional tenderness to ourperfect and piteous delight in him. And even in her daughter's embraceit seems hard if his mother should have utterly forgotten the littlevoice that had only time to tell her just eight words of that ghost storywhich neither she nor we were ever to hear ended. Any one butShakespeare would have sought to make pathetic profit out of the child bythe easy means of showing him if but once again as changed and strickento the death for want of his mother and fear for her and hunger andthirst at his little high heart for the sight and touch of her:Shakespeare only could find a better way, a subtler and a deeper chord tostrike, by giving us our last glimpse of him as he laughed and chatteredwith her "past enduring, " to the shameful neglect of those ladies in thenatural blueness of whose eyebrows as well as their noses he so stoutlydeclined to believe. And at the very end (as aforesaid) it may be thatwe remember him all the better because the father whose jealousy killedhim and the mother for love of whom he died would seem to have forgottenthe little brave sweet spirit with all its truth of love and tender senseof shame as perfectly and unpardonably as Shakespeare himself at theclose of _King Lear_ would seem to have forgotten one who never hadforgotten Cordelia. But yet--and here for once the phrase abhorred by Cleopatra does not"allay the good" but only the bad "precedence"--if ever amends could bemade for such unnatural show of seeming forgetfulness ("out on theseeming! I will write against it"--or would, had I not written enoughalready), the poet most assuredly has made such amends here. At thesunrise of Perdita beside Florizel it seems as if the snows of sixteenwinters had melted all together into the splendour of one unutterablespring. They "smell April and May" in a sweeter sense than it could besaid of "young Master Fenton": "nay, which is more, " as his friend andchampion Mistress Quickly might have added to mine host's commendatoryremark, they speak all April and May; because April is in him asnaturally as May in her, by just so many years' difference before theMayday of her birth as went to make up her dead brother's little lot ofliving breath, which in Beaumont's most lovely and Shakespeare-worthyphrase "was not a life; was but a piece of childhood thrown away. " Norcan I be content to find no word of old affection for Autolycus, wholived, as we may not doubt, though but a hint or promise be vouchsafed usfor all assurance that he lived by favour of his "good masters" once moreto serve Prince Florizel and wear three-pile for as much of his time asit might please him to put on "robes" like theirs that were "gentlemenborn, " and had "been so any time these four hours. " And yet another anda graver word must be given with all reverence to the "grave and goodPaulina, " whose glorious fire of godlike indignation was as warmth andcordial to the innermost heart while yet bruised and wrung for the yetfresh loss of Mamillius. The time is wellnigh come now for me to consecrate in this book my goodwill if not good work to the threefold and thrice happy memory of thethree who have written of Shakespeare as never man wrote, nor ever manmay write again; to the everlasting praise and honour and glory ofCharles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter Savage Landor;"wishing, " I hardly dare to say, "what I write may be read by theirlight. " The play of plays, which is _Cymbeline_, remains alone toreceive the last salute of all my love. I think, as far as I can tell, I may say I have always loved this onebeyond all other children of Shakespeare. The too literal egoism of thisprofession will not be attributed by any candid or even commonly honestreader to the violence of vanity so much more than comical as to make mesuppose that such a record or assurance could in itself be matter ofinterest to any man: but simply to the real and simple reason, that Iwish to show cause for my choice of this work to wind up with, beyond themere chance of its position at the close of the chaotically inconsequentcatalogue of contents affixed to the first edition. In this casualty--forno good thing can reasonably be ascribed to design on the part of thefirst editors--there would seem to be something more than usual of whatwe may call, if it so please us, a happy providence. It is certain thatno studious arrangement could possibly have brought the book to a happierend. Here is depth enough with height enough of tragic beauty andpassion, terror and love and pity, to approve the presence of the mosttragic Master's hand; subtlety enough of sweet and bitter truth to attestthe passage of the mightiest and wisest scholar or teacher in the schoolof the human spirit; beauty with delight enough and glory of life andgrace of nature to proclaim the advent of the one omnipotent Maker amongall who bear that name. Here above all is the most heavenly triad ofhuman figures that ever even Shakespeare brought together; a divinerthree, as it were a living god-garland of the noblest earth-born brothersand loveworthiest heaven-born sister, than the very givers of all graceand happiness to their Grecian worshippers of old time over long before. The passion of Posthumus is noble, and potent the poison of Iachimo;Cymbeline has enough for Shakespeare's present purpose of "theking-becoming graces"; but we think first and last of her who was "truestspeaker" and those who "called her brother, when she was but theirsister; she them brothers, when they were so indeed. " The very crown andflower of all her father's daughters, --I do not speak here of her humanfather, but her divine--the woman above all Shakespeare's women isImogen. As in Cleopatra we found the incarnate sex, the womaneverlasting, so in Imogen we find half glorified already the immortalgodhead of womanhood. I would fain have some honey in my words atparting--with Shakespeare never, but for ever with these notes onShakespeare; and I am therefore something more than fain to close my bookupon the name of the woman best beloved in all the world of song and allthe tide of time; upon the name of Shakespeare's Imogen. APPENDIX. NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLAY OF KING EDWARD III. 1879. The epitaph of German criticism on Shakespeare was long since written bythe unconscious hand which penned the following sentence; an inscriptionworthy of perpetual record on the registers of Gotham or in the daybookof the yet unstranded Ship of Fools. "_Thomas Lord Cromwell:--Sir John Oldcastle:--A Yorkshire Tragedy_. --Thethree last pieces are not only unquestionably Shakespeare's, but in myopinion they deserve to be classed among his best and maturest works. " This memorable opinion is the verdict of the modest and judicious Herrvon Schlegel: who had likewise in his day the condescension to inform ourignorance of the melancholy fact so strangely overlooked by thecontemporaries of Christopher Marlowe, that "his verses are flowing, butwithout energy. " Strange, but true; too strange, we may reasonablyinfer, not to be true. Only to German eyes has the treasure-house ofEnglish poetry ever disclosed a secret of this kind: to German ears alonehas such discord or default been ever perceptible in its harmonies. Now the facts with regard to this triad of plays are briefly these. _Thomas Lord Cromwell_ is a piece of such utterly shapeless, spiritless, bodiless, soulless, senseless, helpless, worthless rubbish, that there isno known writer of Shakespeare's age to whom it could be ascribed withoutthe infliction of an unwarrantable insult on that writer's memory. _SirJohn Oldcastle_ is the compound piecework of four minor playwrights, oneof them afterwards and otherwise eminent as a poet--Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathaway: a thin sample of poetic patchery cobbled up andstitched together so as to serve its hour for a season without falling topieces at the first touch. The _Yorkshire Tragedy_ is a coarse, crude, and vigorous impromptu, in which we possibly might almost think itpossible that Shakespeare had a hand (or at least a finger), if we hadany reason to suppose that during the last ten or twelve years of hislife {232} he was likely to have taken part in any such dramaticimprovisation. The example and the exposure of Schlegel's misadventures in this linehave not sufficed to warn off minor blunderers from treading with emulousconfidence "through forthrights and meanders" in the very muddiest oftheir precursor's traces. We may notice, for one example, the revival--orat least the discussion as of something worth serious notice--of awellnigh still-born theory, first dropped in a modest corner of thecritical world exactly a hundred and seventeen years ago. Its parent, notwithstanding this perhaps venial indiscretion, was apparently anhonest and modest gentleman; and the play itself, which this ingenuoustheorist was fain, with all diffidence, to try whether haply he might bepermitted to foist on the apocryphal fatherhood of Shakespeare, is notwithout such minor merits as may excuse us for wasting a few minutes onexamination of the theory which seeks to confer on it the factitious andartificial attraction of a spurious and adventitious interest. "The Raigne of King Edward the third: As it hath bin sundrie times plaiedabout the Citie of London, " was published in 1596, and ran through two orthree anonymous editions before the date of the generation was out whichfirst produced it. Having thus run to the end of its natural tether, itfell as naturally into the oblivion which has devoured, and has not againdisgorged, so many a more precious production of its period. In 1760 itwas reprinted in the "Prolusions" of Edward Capell, whose text is nowbefore me. This editor was the first mortal to suggest that his newlyunearthed treasure might possibly be a windfall from the topless tree ofShakespeare. Being, as I have said, a duly modest and an evidentlyhonest man, he admits "with candour" that there is no jot or tittle of"external evidence" whatsoever to be alleged in support of thisgratuitous attribution: but he submits, with some fair show of reason, that there is a certain "resemblance between the style of" Shakespeare's"earlier performances and of the work in question"; and without theslightest show of any reason whatever he appends to this humble andplausible plea the unspeakably unhappy assertion that at the time of itsappearance "there was no known writer equal to such a play"; whereas at amoderate computation there were, I should say, on the authority ofHenslowe's Diary, at least a dozen--and not improbably a score. In anycase there was one then newly dead, too long before his time, whosememory stands even higher above the possible ascription of such a workthan that of the adolescent Shakespeare's very self. Of one point we may be sure, even where so much is unsure as we find ithere: in the curt atheological phrase of the Persian Lucretius, "onething is certain, and the rest is lies. " The author of _King EdwardIII_. Was a devout student and a humble follower of Christopher Marlowe, not yet wholly disengaged by that august and beneficent influence fromall attraction towards the "jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits"; andfitter on the whole to follow this easier and earlier vein of writing, half lyrical in manner and half elegiac, than to brace upon his punierlimbs the young giant's newly fashioned buskin of blank verse. The signsof this growing struggle, the traces of this incomplete emancipation, areperceptible throughout in the alternate prevalence of two conflicting andirreconcilable styles; which yet affords no evidence or suggestion of adouble authorship. For the intelligence which moulds and informs thewhole work, the spirit which pervades and imbues the general design, isof a piece, so to speak, throughout; a point imperceptible to the eye, atouchstone intangible by the finger, alike of a scholiast and a dunce. Another test, no less unmistakable by the student and no lessindiscernible to the sciolist, is this: that whatever may be the demeritsof this play, they are due to no voluntary or involuntary carelessness orhaste. Here is not the swift impatient journeywork of a rough and readyhand; here is no sign of such compulsory hurry in the discharge of a tasksomething less than welcome, if not of an imposition something less thantolerable, as we may rationally believe ourselves able to trace in greatpart of Marlowe's work: in the latter half of _The Jew of Malta_, in theburlesque interludes of _Doctor Faustus_, and wellnigh throughout thewhole scheme and course of _The Massacre at Paris_. Whatever in _KingEdward III_. Is mediocre or worse is evidently such as it is through nopassionate or slovenly precipitation of handiwork, but through pureincompetence to do better. The blame of the failure, the shame of theshortcoming, cannot be laid to the account of any momentary excess ordefault in emotion, of passing exhaustion or excitement, of intermittentimpulse and reaction; it is an indication of lifelong and irremediableimpotence. And it is further to be noted that by far the leastunsuccessful parts of the play are also by far the most unimportant. Thecapacity of the author seems to shrink and swell alternately, to erectits plumes and deject them, to contract and to dilate the range and orbitof its flight in a steadily inverse degree to the proportionate interestof the subject or worth of the topic in hand. There could be no surerproof that it is neither the early nor the hasty work of a great or evena remarkable poet. It is the best that could be done at any time by aconscientious and studious workman of technically insufficient cultureand of naturally limited means. I would not, however, be supposed to undervalue the genuine and gracefulability of execution displayed by the author at his best. He could writeat times very much after the earliest fashion of the adolescentShakespeare; in other words, after the fashion of the day or hour, towhich in some degree the greatest writer of that hour or that day cannotchoose but conform at starting, and the smallest writer must needsconform for ever. By the rule which would attribute to Shakespeare everyline written in his first manner which appeared during the first years ofhis poetic progress, it is hard to say what amount of bad verse orbetter, current during the rise and the reign of their severalinfluences, --for this kind of echo or of copywork, consciously orunconsciously repercussive and reflective, begins with the very firstaudible sound of a man's voice in song, with the very first noticeablestroke of his hand in painting--it is hard to say what amount oftolerable or intolerable work might not or may not be assignable byscholiasts of the future to Byron or to Shelley, to Mr. Tennyson or toMr. Browning. A time by this rule might come--but I am fain to thinkbetter of the Fates--when by comparison of detached words and collationof dismembered phrases the memory of Mr. Tennyson would be weighted anddegraded by the ascription of whole volumes of pilfered and diluted versenow current--if not yet submerged--under the name or the pseudonym of thepresent {237} Viceroy--or Vice-empress is it?--of India. But the obvioustruth is this: the voice of Shakespeare's adolescence had as usual anecho in it of other men's notes: I can remember the name of but one poetwhose voice from the beginning had none; who started with a style of hisown, though he may have chosen to annex--"annex the wise it call";_convey_ is obsolete--to annex whole phrases or whole verses at need, forthe use or the ease of an idle minute; and this name of course isMarlowe's. So starting, Shakespeare had yet (like all other and lesserpoets born) some perceptible notes in his yet half boyish voice that werenot borrowed; and these were at once caught up and re-echoed by suchfellow-pupils with Shakespeare of the young Master of them all--suchhumbler and feebler disciples, or simpler sheep (shall we call them?) ofthe great "dead shepherd"--as the now indistinguishable author of _KingEdward III_. In the first scene of the first act the impotent imitation of Marlowe ispitifully patent. Possibly there may also be an imitation of the stillimitative style of Shakespeare, and the style may be more accuratelydefinable as a copy of a copy--a study after the manner of Marlowe, notat second hand, but at third. In any case, being obviously too flat andfeeble to show a touch of either godlike hand, this scene may be setaside at once to make way for the second. The second scene is more animated, but low in style till we come to theoutbreak of rhyme. In other words, the energetic or active part is atbest passable--fluent and decent commonplace: but where the style turnsundramatic and runs into mere elegiacs, a likeness becomes perceptible tothe first elegiac style of Shakespeare. Witness these lines spoken bythe King in contemplation of the Countess of Salisbury's beauty, whileyet struggling against the nascent motions of a base love:-- Now in the sun alone it doth not lie With light to take light from a mortal eye: For here two day-stars that mine eyes would see More than the sun steal mine own light from me. Contemplative desire! desire to be In contemplation that may master thee! _Decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile_: if Shakespeare ever saw or heardthese pretty lines, he should have felt the unconscious rebuke implied insuch close and facile imitation of his own early elegiacs. As a seriousmimicry of his first manner, a critical parody summing up in little spacethe sweet faults of his poetic nonage, with its barren overgrowth ofunprofitable flowers, --bright point, soft metaphor, and sweet elaborateantithesis--this is as good of its kind as anything between Aristophanesand Horace Smith. Indeed, it may remind us of that parody on the soft, superfluous, flowery and frothy style of Agathon, which at the opening ofthe _Thesmophoriazusae_ cannot but make the youngest and most ignorantreader laugh, though the oldest and most learned has never set eyes on aline of the original verses which supplied the incarnate god of comicsong with matter for such exquisite burlesque. To the speech above cited the reply of the Countess is even gracefuller, and closer to the same general model of fanciful elegiac dialogue:-- Let not thy presence, like the April sun, Flatter our earth, and suddenly be done: More happy do not make our outward wall Than thou wilt grace our inward house withal. Our house, my liege, is like a country swain, Whose habit rude, and manners blunt and plain. Presageth naught; yet inly beautified With bounty's riches, and fair hidden pride; For where the golden ore doth buried lie, The ground, undecked with nature's tapestry, Seems barren, sere, unfertile, fruitless, dry; And where the upper turf of earth doth boast His pride, perfumes, {239} and particoloured cost, Delve there, and find this issue and their pride To spring from ordure and corruption's side. But, to make up my all too long compare, These ragged walls no testimony are What is within; but, like a cloak, doth hide From weather's waste the under garnished pride. More gracious than my terms can let thee be, Entreat thyself to stay awhile with me. Not only the exquisite grace of this charming last couplet, but thesmooth sound strength, the fluency and clarity of the whole passage, mayserve to show that the original suggestion of Capell, if (as I think)untenable, was not (we must admit) unpardonable. The very oversightperceptible to any eye and painful to any ear not sealed up by stepdamenature from all perception of pleasure or of pain derivable from goodverse or bad--the reckless reiteration of the same rhyme with but onepoor couplet intervening--suggests rather the oversight of an unfledgedpoet than the obtuseness of a full-grown poeticule or poetaster. But of how many among the servile or semi-servile throng of imitators inevery generation may not as much as this be said by tolerant or kindlyjudges! Among the herd of such diminutives as swarm after the heel orfawn upon the hand of Mr. Tennyson, more than one, more than two orthree, have come as close as his poor little viceregal or vice-imperialparasite to the very touch and action of the master's hand which feedsthem unawares from his platter as they fawn; as close as this namelessand short-winded satellite to the gesture and the stroke ofShakespeare's. For this also must be noted; that the resemblance here isbut of stray words, of single lines, of separable passages. The wholetone of the text, the whole build of the play, the whole scheme of thepoem, is far enough from any such resemblance. The structure, thecomposition, is feeble, incongruous, inadequate, effete. Any studentwill remark at a first glance what a short-breathed runner, what a broken-winded athlete in the lists of tragic verse, is the indiscoverable authorof this play. There is another point which the Neo-Shakespearean synagogue will by noman be expected to appreciate; for to apprehend it requires someknowledge and some understanding of the poetry of the Shakespeareanage--so surely we now should call it, rather than Elizabethan orJacobean, for the sake of verbal convenience, if not for the sake ofliterary decency; and such knowledge or understanding no sane man willexpect to find in any such quarter. Even in the broad coarse comedy ofthe period we find here and there the same sweet and simple echoes of thevery cradle-song (so to call it) of our drama: so like Shakespeare, theymight say who knew nothing of Shakespeare's fellows, that we cannotchoose but recognise his hand. Here as always first in the field--thegenuine and golden harvest-field of Shakespearean criticism, Charles Lambhas cited a passage from _Green's Tu Quoque_--a comedy miserablymisreprinted in Dodsley's Old Plays--on which he observes that "this isso like Shakespeare, that we seem to remember it, " being as it is agirl's gentle lamentation over the selfish, exacting, suspicious andtrustless love of man, as contrasted with the swift simple surrender of awoman's love at the first heartfelt appeal to her pity--"we seem toremember it, " says Lamb, as a speech of Desdemona uttered on a firstperception or suspicion of jealousy or alienation in Othello. Thislovely passage, if I dare say so in contravention to the authority ofLamb, is indeed as like the manner of Shakespeare as it can be--to eyesignorant of what his fellows can do; but it is not like the manner of theShakespeare who wrote _Othello_. This, however, is beside the question. It is very like the Shakespeare who wrote the _Comedy of Errors--Love'sLabour's Lost--Romeo and Juliet_. It is so like that had we fallen uponit in any of these plays it would long since have been a household wordin all men's mouths for sweetness, truth, simplicity, perfect andinstinctive accuracy of touch. It is very much liker the first manner ofShakespeare than any passage in _King Edward III_. And no ShamShakespearean critic that I know of has yet assigned to the haplessobject of his howling homage the authorship of _Green's Tu Quoque_. Returning to our text, we find in the short speech of the King with whichthe first act is wound up yet another couplet which has the very ring init of Shakespeare's early notes--the catch at words rather than play onwords which his tripping tongue in youth could never resist: Countess, albeit my business urgeth me, It shall attend while I attend on thee. And with this pretty little instance of courtly and courteous euphuism wepass from the first to the second and most important act in the play. Any reader well versed in the text of Shakespeare, and ill versed in thework of his early rivals and his later pupils, might surely be forgivenif on a first reading of the speech with which this act opens he shouldcry out with Capell that here at least was the unformed hand of theMaster perceptible and verifiable indeed. The writer, he might say, hasthe very glance of his eye, the very trick of his gait, the very note ofhis accent. But on getting a little more knowledge, such a reader willfind the use of it in the perception to which he will have attained thatin his early plays, as in his two early poems, the style of Shakespearewas not for the most part distinctively his own. It was that of a crew, a knot of young writers, among whom he found at once both leaders andfollowers to be guided and to guide. A mere glance into the rich lyricliterature of the period will suffice to show the dullest eye and teachthe densest ear how nearly innumerable were the Englishmen of Elizabeth'stime who could sing in the courtly or pastoral key of the season, eachman of them a few notes of his own, simple or fantastic, but all sweet, clear, genuine of their kind:-- Facies non omnibus una, Nec diversa tamen: and yet so close is the generic likeness between flower and flower of thesame lyrical garden that the first half of the quotation seems but halfapplicable here. In Bird's, Morley's, Dowland's collections of musicwith the words appended--in such jewelled volumes as _England's Helicon_and _Davison's Poetical Rhapsody_--their name is Legion, their numbersare numberless. You cannot call them imitators, this man of that, or allof any; they were all of one school, but it was a school without a masteror a head. And even so it was with the earliest sect or gathering ofdramatic writers in England. Marlowe alone stood apart and above themall--the young Shakespeare among the rest; but among these we cannotcount, we cannot guess, how many were wellnigh as competent as he tocontinue the fluent rhyme, to prolong the facile echo, of Greene andPeele, their first and most famous leaders. No more docile or capable pupil could have been desired by any master inany art than the author of _David and Bethsabe_ has found in the writerof this second act. He has indeed surpassed his model, if not in graceand sweetness, yet in taste or tact of expression, in continuity andequality of style. Vigour is not the principal note of his manner, butcompared with the soft effusive ebullience of his master's we may fairlycall it vigorous and condensed. But all this merit or demerit is matterof mere language only. The poet--a very pretty poet in his way, anddoubtless capable of gracious work enough in the idyllic or elegiac lineof business--shows about as much capacity to grasp and handle the fineintimacies of character and the large issues of circumstance to anytragic or dramatic purpose, as might be expected from an idyllic orelegiac poet who should suddenly assume the buskin of tragedy. Let ussuppose that Moschus, for example, on the strength of having written asweeter elegy than ever before was chanted over the untimely grave of afriend and fellow-singer, had said within himself, "Go to, I will beSophocles"; can we imagine that the tragic result would have been otherthan tragical indeed for the credit of his gentle name, and comicalindeed for all who might have envied the mild and modest excellence whichfashion or hypocrisy might for years have induced them to besprinkle withthe froth and slaver of their promiscuous and pointless adulation? As the play is not more generally known than it deserves to be, --orperhaps we may say it is somewhat less known, though its claim to generalnotice is faint indeed compared with that of many a poem of its agefamiliar only to special students in our own--I will transcribe a fewpassages to show how far the writer could reach at his best; leaving forothers to indicate how far short of that not inaccessible point he is toogenerally content to fall and to remain. The opening speech is spoken by one Lodowick, a parasite of the King's;who would appear, like Francois Villon under the roof of his Fat Madge, to have succeeded in reconciling the professional duties--may I not say, the generally discordant and discrepant offices?--of a poet and a pimp. I might perceive his eye in her eye lost, His ear to drink her sweet tongue's utterance; And changing passion, like inconstant clouds, That, rackt upon the carriage of the winds, Increase, and die, in his disturbed cheeks. Lo, when she blushed, even then did he look pale; As if her cheeks by some enchanted power Attracted had the cherry blood from his: {245a} Anon, with reverent fear when she grew pale, His cheeks put on their scarlet ornaments; But no more like her oriental red Than brick to coral, or live things to dead. {245b} Why did he then thus counterfeit her looks? If she did blush, 'twas tender modest shame, Being in the sacred presence of a king; If he did blush, 'twas red immodest shame To vail his eyes amiss, being a king; If she looked pale, 'twas silly woman's fear To bear herself in presence of a king; If he looked pale, it was with guilty fear To dote amiss, being a mighty king. This is better than the insufferable style of _Locrine_, which is ingreat part made up of such rhymeless couplets, each tagged with an emptyverbal antithesis; but taken as a sample of dramatic writing, it is butjust better than what is utterly intolerable. Dogberry has defined itexactly; it is most tolerable--and not to be endured. The following speech of King Edward is in that better style of which theauthor's two chief models were not at their best incapable for awhileunder the influence and guidance (we may suppose) of their friendMarlowe. She is grown more fairer far since I came hither; Her voice more silver every word than other, Her wit more fluent. What a strange discourse Unfolded she of David and his Scots! _Even thus_, quoth she, _he spake_--and then spake broad, With epithets and accents of the Scot; But somewhat better than the Scot could speak: _And thus_, quoth she--and answered then herself; For who could speak like her? but she herself Breathes from the wall an angel's note from heaven Of sweet defiance to her barbarous foes. When she would talk of peace, methinks her tongue Commanded war to prison; {246} when of war, It wakened Caesar from his Roman grave To hear war beautified by her discourse. Wisdom is foolishness, but in her tongue; Beauty a slander, but in her fair face; There is no summer but in her cheerful looks, Nor frosty winter but in her disdain. I cannot blame the Scots that did besiege her, For she is all the treasure of our land; But call them cowards that they ran away, Having so rich and fair a cause to stay. But if for a moment we may fancy that here and there we have caught suchan echo of Marlowe as may have fallen from the lips of Shakespeare in hissalad days, in his period of poetic pupilage, we have but a very littleway to go forward before we come upon indisputable proof that the pupilwas one of feebler hand and fainter voice than Shakespeare. Let us takethe passage on poetry, beginning-- Now, Lodowick, invocate {247} some golden Muse To bring thee hither an enchanted pen; and so forth. No scholar in English poetry but will recognise at oncethe flat and futile imitation of Marlowe; not of his great general stylealone, but of one special and transcendant passage which can never be toooften quoted. If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, Their minds, and muses on admired themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit; If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest. {248} Infinite as is the distance between the long roll of these mighty linesand the thin tinkle of their feeble imitator's, yet we cannot choose butcatch the ineffectual note of a would-be echo in the speech of the Kingto his parasite-- For so much moving hath a poet's pen, etc. , etc. It is really not worth while to transcribe the poor meagre versicles atlength: but a glance at the text will show how much fitter was theirauthor to continue the tradition of Peele than to emulate the innovationsof Marlowe. In the speeches that follow there is much pretty verbiageafter the general manner of Elizabethan sonnetteers, touched here andthere with something of a higher tone; but the whole scene drags, flags, halts onward at such a languid rate, that to pick out all the prettiestlines by way of sample would give a favourable impression but too likelyto be reversed on further and fuller acquaintance. Forget not to set down, how passionate, How heart-sick, and how full of languishment, Her beauty makes me. . . . . . Write on, while I peruse her in my thoughts. Her voice to music, or the nightingale: To music every summer-leaping swain Compares his sunburnt lover when she speaks; And why should I speak of the nightingale? The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong; And that, compared, is too satirical: For sin, though sin, would not be so esteemed; But rather virtue sin, sin virtue deemed. Her hair, far softer than the silkworm's twist, Like as a flattering glass, doth make more fair The yellow amber:--_Like a flattering glass_ Comes in too soon; for, writing of her eyes, I'll say that like a glass they catch the sun, And thence the hot reflection doth rebound Against my breast, and burns the heart within. Ah, what a world of descant makes my soul Upon this voluntary ground of love! "Pretty enough, very pretty! but" exactly as like and as near the styleof Shakespeare's early plays as is the style of Constable's sonnets tothat of Shakespeare's. Unless we are to assign to the Master everyunaccredited song, sonnet, elegy, tragedy, comedy, and farce of hisperiod, which bears the same marks of the same date--a date, like ourown, of too prolific and imitative production--as we find inscribed onthe greater part of his own early work; unless we are to carry even asfar as this the audacity and arrogance of our sciolism, we must somewheremake a halt--and it must be on the near side of such an attribution asthat of _King Edward III_. To the hand of Shakespeare. With the disappearance of the poetic pimp and the entrance of theunsuspecting Countess, the style rises yet again--and really, this time, much to the author's credit. It would need a very fine touch from a verypowerful hand to improve on the delicacy and dexterity of the prelude oroverture to the King's avowal of adulterous love. But when all is said, though very delicate and very dexterous, it is not forcible work: I donot mean by forcible the same as violent, spasmodic, emphatic beyond themodesty of nature; a poet is of course only to be commended, and thatheartily, for keeping within this bound; but he is not to be commendedfor coming short of it. This whole scene is full of mild and temperatebeauty, of fanciful yet earnest simplicity; but the note of it, theexpression, the dominant key of the style, is less appropriate to theutterance of a deep and deadly passion than--at the utmost--of whatmodern tongues might call a strong and rather dangerous flirtation. Passion, so to speak, is quite out of this writer's call; the depths andheights of manly as of womanly emotion are alike beyond his reach. Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, He turns to favour and to prettiness. "To favour and to prettiness"; the definition of his utmost merit anddemerit, his final achievement and shortcoming, is here complete andexact. Witness the sweet quiet example of idyllic work which I extractfrom a scene beginning in the regular amoebaean style of ancientpastoral. _Edward_. Thou hear'st me say that I do dote on thee. _Countess_. If on my beauty, take it if thou canst; Though little, I do prize it ten times less: If on my virtue, take it if thou canst; For virtue's store by giving doth augment: Be it on what it will that I can give And thou canst take away, inherit it. _Edward_. It is thy beauty that I would enjoy. _Countess_. O, were it painted, I would wipe it off, And dispossess myself to give it thee: But, sovereign, it is soldered to my life; Take one and both; for like an humble shadow It haunts the sunshine of my summer's life. _Edward_. But thou mayst lend it me to sport withal. _Countess_. As easy may my intellectual soul Be lent away, and yet my body live, As lend my body, palace to my soul, Away from her, and yet retain my soul. My body is her bower, her court, her abbey, And she an angel, pure, divine, unspotted; If I should lend her house, my lord, to thee, I kill my poor soul, and my poor soul me. Once more, this last couplet is very much in the style of Shakespeare'ssonnets; nor is it wholly unlike even the dramatic style of Shakespearein his youth--and some dozen other poets or poeticules of the time. Butthroughout this part of the play the recurrence of a faint andintermittent resemblance to Shakespeare is more frequently noticeablethan elsewhere. {252} A student of imperfect memory but not of defectiveintuition might pardonably assign such couplets, on hearing them cited, to the master-hand itself; but such a student would be likelier to referthem to the sonnetteer than to the dramatist. And a casual likeness tothe style of Shakespeare's sonnets is not exactly sufficient evidence towarrant such an otherwise unwarrantable addition of appendage to the listof Shakespeare's plays. A little further on we come upon the first and last passage which doesactually recall by its wording a famous instance of the full and ripenedstyle of Shakespeare. He that doth clip or counterfeit your stamp Shall die, my lord: and will your sacred self Commit high treason 'gainst the King of heaven, To stamp his image in forbidden metal, Forgetting your allegiance and your oath? In violating marriage' sacred law You break a greater honour than yourself; To be a king is of a younger house Than to be married: your progenitor, Sole reigning Adam on the universe, By God was honoured for a married man, But not by him anointed for a king. Every possible reader, I suppose, will at once bethink himself of thefamous passage in _Measure for Measure_ which here may seem to be faintlyprefigured: It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stolen A man already made, as to remit Their saucy sweetness, that do coin heaven's image In stamps that are forbid: and the very difference of style is not wider than the gulf which gapesbetween the first style of Shakespeare and the last. But men ofShakespeare's stamp, I venture to think, do not thus repeat themselves. The echo of the passage in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, describing thegirlish friendship of Hermia and Helena, which we find in the first actof _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, describing the like girlish friendship ofEmilia and Flavina, is an echo of another sort. Both, I need hardly say, are unquestionably Shakespeare's; but the fashion in which the maturedpoet retouches and completes the sketch of his earlier years--composes anoil painting, as it were, from the hints and suggestions of awater-colour sketch long since designed and long since half forgotten--isessentially different from the mere verbal and literal trick ofrepetition which sciolists might think to detect in the present instance. Again we must needs fall back on the inevitable and indefinable test ofstyle; a test which could be of no avail if we were foolish enough toappeal to scholiasts and their attendant dunces, but which should be ofsome avail if we appeal to experts and their attentive scholars; and bythis test we can but remark that neither the passage in _A MidsummerNight's Dream_ nor the corresponsive passage in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_could have been written by any hand known to us but Shakespeare's;whereas the passage in _King Edward III_. Might as certainly have beenwritten by any one out of a dozen poets then living as the answeringpassage in _Measure for Measure_ could assuredly have been written byShakespeare alone. As on a first reading of the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides we feel that, forall the grace and freshness and lyric charm of its opening scenes, theclaim of the poem to our ultimate approval or disapproval must needsdepend on the success or failure of the first interview between Theseusand his calumniated son; and as on finding that scene to be feeble andfutile and prosaic and verbose we feel that the poet who had a woman'sspite against women has here effectually and finally shown himselfpowerless to handle the simplest elements of masculine passion, of manlycharacter and instinct; so in this less important case we feel that thewriter, having ventured on such a subject as the compulsory temptation ofa daughter by a father, who has been entrapped into so shameful anundertaking through the treacherous exaction of an equivocal promiseunwarily confirmed by an inconsiderate oath, must be judged by the resultof his own enterprise; must fail or stand as a poet by its failure orsuccess. And his failure is only not complete; he is but just redeemedfrom utter discomfiture by the fluency and simplicity of his equable butinadequate style. Here as before we find plentiful examples of thegracefully conventional tone current among the lesser writers of thehour. _Warwick_. How shall I enter on this graceless errand? I must not call her child; for where's the father That will in such a suit seduce his child? Then, _Wife of Salisbury_;--shall I so begin? No, he's my friend; and where is found the friend That will do friendship such endamagement?--{255} Neither my daughter, nor my dear friend's wife, I am not Warwick, as thou think'st I am, But an attorney from the court of hell; That thus have housed my spirit in his form To do a message to thee from the king. This beginning is fair enough, if not specially fruitful in promise; butthe verses following are of the flattest order of commonplace. Hay andgrass and the spear of Achilles--of which tradition the moral is, What mighty men misdo, they can amend-- these are the fresh and original types on which our little poet iscompelled to fall back for support and illustration to a scene so full ofterrible suggestion and pathetic possibility. The king will in his glory hide thy shame; And those that gaze on him to find out thee Will lose their eyesight, looking on the sun. What can one drop of poison harm the sea, Whose hugy vastures can digest the ill And make it lose its operation? And so forth, and so forth; _ad libitum_ if not _ad nauseam_. Let ustake but one or two more instances of the better sort. _Countess_. Unnatural besiege! Woe me unhappy, To have escaped the danger of my foes, And to be ten times worse invir'd by friends! (Here we come upon two more words unknown to Shakespeare; {256}_besiege_, as a noun substantive, and _invired_ for _environed_. ) Hath he no means to stain my honest blood But to corrupt the author of my blood To be his scandalous and vile soliciter? No marvel though the branches be infected, When poison hath encompassed the roots; No marvel though the leprous infant die, When the stern dam envenometh the dug. Why then, give sin a passport to offend, And youth the dangerous rein of liberty; Blot out the strict forbidding of the law; And cancel every canon that prescribes A shame for shame or penance for offence. No, let me die, if his too boisterous will Will have it so, before I will consent To be an actor in his graceless lust. _Warwick_. Why, now thou speak'st as I would have thee speak; And mark how I unsay my words again. An honourable grave is more esteemed Than the polluted closet of a king; The greater man, the greater is the thing, Be it good or bad, that he shall undertake; An unreputed mote, flying in the sun, Presents a greater substance than it is; The freshest summer's day doth soonest taint The loathed carrion that it seems to kiss; Deep are the blows made with a mighty axe; That sin doth ten times aggravate itself That is committed in a holy place; An evil deed, done by authority, Is sin, and subornation: Deck an ape In tissue, and the beauty of the robe Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast. (Here are four passably good lines, which vaguely remind the reader ofsomething better read elsewhere; a common case enough with the moretolerable work of small imitative poets. ) A spacious field of reasons could I urge Between his glory, daughter, and thy shame: That poison shows worst in a golden cup; Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash; _Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds_; And every glory that inclines to sin, The shame is treble by the opposite. So leave I, with my blessing in thy bosom; Which then convert to a most heavy curse, When thou convert'st from honour's golden name To the black faction of bed-blotting shame! [_Exit_. _Countess_. I'll follow thee:--And when my mind turns so, My body sink my soul in endless woe! [_Exit_. So much for the central and crowning scene, the test, the climax, thehinge on which the first part of this play turns; and seems to me, inturning, to emit but a feeble and rusty squeak. No probable reader willneed to be reminded that the line which I have perhaps unnecessarilyitalicised appears also as the last verse in the ninety-fourth of those"sugared sonnets" which we know were in circulation about the time ofthis play's first appearance among Shakespeare's "private friends"; inother words, which enjoyed such a kind of public privacy or privatepublicity as one or two among the most eminent English poets of our ownday have occasionally chosen for some part of their work, to screen itfor awhile as under the shelter and the shade of crepuscular laurels, till ripe for the sunshine or the storm of public judgment. In thepresent case, this debatable verse looks to me more like a loan or maybea theft from Shakespeare's private store of undramatic poetry than amisapplication by its own author to dramatic purposes of a line too aptand exquisite to endure without injury the transference from its originalsetting. The scene ensuing winds up the first part of this composite (or rather, in one sense of the word, incomposite) poem. It may, on the whole, beclassed as something more than passably good: it is elegant, lively, evenspirited in style; showing at all events a marked advance upon the scenewhich I have already stigmatised as a failure--that which attempts torender the interview between Warwick and the King. It is hardly, however, I should say, above the highest reach of Greene or Peele at thesmoothest and straightest of his flight. At its opening, indeed, we comeupon a line which inevitably recalls one of the finest touches in a muchlater and deservedly more popular historical drama. On being informed byDerby that The king is in his closet, malcontent, For what I know not, but he gave in charge, Till after dinner, none should interrupt him; The Countess Salisbury, and her father Warwick. Artois, and all, look underneath the brows; on receiving, I say, this ominous intimation, the prompt andstatesmanlike sagacity of Audley leads him at once as by intuition to theinference thus eloquently expressed in a strain of thrilling and exaltedpoetry; Undoubtedly, then something is amiss. Who can read this without a reminiscence of Sir Christopher Hatton'scharacteristically cautious conclusion at sight of the militarypreparations arrayed against the immediate advent of the Armada? I cannot but surmise--forgive, my friend, If the conjecture's rash--I cannot but Surmise the state some danger apprehends! With the entrance of the King the tone of this scene naturally rises--"ingood time, " as most readers will say. His brief interview with the twonobles has at least the merit of ease and animation. _Derby_. Befall my sovereign all my sovereign's wish! _Edward_. Ah, that thou wert a witch, to make it so! _Derby_. The emperor greeteth you. _Edward_. Would it were the countess! _Derby_. And hath accorded to your highness' suit. _Edward_. Thou liest, she hath not: But I would she had! _Audley_. All love and duty to my lord the king! Edward. _Well, all but one is none_:--What news with you? _Audley_. I have, my liege, levied those horse and foot, According to your charge, and brought them hither. _Edward_. Then let those foot trudge hence upon those horse According to their discharge, and begone. -- _Derby_. I'll look upon the countess' mind Anon. _Derby_. The countess' mind, my liege? _Edward_. I mean, the emperor:--Leave me alone. _Audley_. What's in his mind? _Derby_. Let's leave him to his humour. [_Exeunt_ DERBY and AUDLEY _Edward_. Thus from the heart's abundance speaks the tongue Countess for emperor: And indeed, why not? She is as _imperator_ over me; And I to her Am as a kneeling vassal, that observes The pleasure or displeasure of her eye. In this little scene there is perhaps on the whole more general likenessto Shakespeare's earliest manner than we can trace in any other passageof the play. But how much of Shakespeare's earliest manner may beaccounted the special and exclusive property of Shakespeare? After this dismissal of the two nobles, the pimping poeticule, Villonmanque or (whom shall we call him?) reussi, reappears with a message toCaesar (as the King is pleased to style himself) from "the more thanCleopatra's match" (as he designates the Countess), to intimate that "erenight she will resolve his majesty. " Hereupon an unseasonable "drumwithin" provokes Edward to the following remonstrance: What drum is this, that thunders forth this march, To start the tender Cupid in my bosom? Poor sheepskin, how it brawls with him that beateth it! Go, break the thundering parchment bottom out, And I will teach it to conduct sweet lines ("That's bad; _conduct sweet lines_ is bad. ") Unto the bosom of a heavenly nymph: For I will use it as my writing paper; And so reduce him, from a scolding drum, To be the herald, and dear counsel-bearer, Betwixt a goddess and a mighty king. Go, bid the drummer learn to touch the lute, Or hang him in the braces of his drum; For now we think it an uncivil thing To trouble heaven with such harsh resounds. Away! [_Exit_ Lodowick. The quarrel that I have requires no arms But these of mine; and these shall meet my foe In a deep march of penetrable groans; My eyes shall be my arrows; and my sighs Shall serve me as the vantage of the wind To whirl away my sweet'st {261} artillery: Ah, but, alas, she wins the sun of me, For that is she herself; and thence it comes That poets term the wanton warrior blind; But love hath eyes as judgment to his steps, Till too much loved glory dazzles them. Hereupon Lodowick introduces the Black Prince (that is to be), and"retires to the door. " The following scene opens well, with a tone offrank and direct simplicity. _Edward_. I see the boy. O, how his mother's face, Moulded in his, corrects my strayed desire, And rates my heart, and chides my thievish eye; Who, being rich enough in seeing her, Yet seeks elsewhere: and basest theft is that Which cannot check itself on poverty. -- Now, boy, what news? _Prince_. I have assembled, my dear lord and father, The choicest buds of all our English blood, For our affairs in France; and here we come To take direction from your majesty. _Edward_. Still do I see in him delineate His mother's visage; those his eyes are hers, Who, looking wistly {262a} on me, made me blush; For faults against themselves give evidence: Lust is a fire; and men, like lanterns, show Light lust within themselves even through themselves. Away, loose silks of wavering vanity! Shall the large limit of fair Brittany {262b} By me be overthrown? and shall I not Master this little mansion of myself? Give me an armour of eternal steel; I go to conquer kings. And shall I then Subdue myself, and be my enemy's friend? It must not be. --Come, boy, forward, advance! Let's with our colours sweep the air of France. Here Lodowick announces the approach of the Countess "with a smilingcheer. " _Edward_. Why, there it goes! that very smile of hers Hath ransomed captive France; and set the king, The dauphin, and the peers, at liberty. -- Go, leave me, Ned, and revel with thy friends. [_Exit_ PRINCE. Thy mother is but black; and thou, like her, Dost put into my mind how foul she is. Go, fetch the countess hither in thy hand, And let her chase away these winter clouds; For she gives beauty both to heaven and earth. [_Exit_ LODOWICK. The sin is more, to hack and hew poor men, Than to embrace in an unlawful bed The register of all rarieties {263a} Since leathern Adam till this youngest hour. _Re-enter_ LODOWICK _with the_ COUNTESS. Go, Lodowick, put thy hand into my purse, Play, spend, give, riot, waste; do what thou wilt, So thou wilt hence awhile, and leave me here. [_Exit_ LODOWICK. Having already, out of a desire and determination to do no possibleinjustice to the actual merits of this play in the eyes of any reader whomight never have gone over the text on which I had to comment, exceededin no small degree the limits I had intended to impose upon my task inthe way of citation, I shall not give so full a transcript from the nextand last scene between the Countess and the King. _Edward_. Now, my soul's playfellow! art thou come To speak the more than heavenly word of yea To my objection in thy beauteous love? (Again, this singular use of the word _objection_ in the sense of offeror proposal has no parallel in the plays of Shakespeare. ) _Countess_. My father on his blessing hath commanded-- _Edward_. That thou shalt yield to me. _Countess_. Ay, dear my liege, your due. _Edward_. And that, my dearest love, can be no less Than right for right, and render {263b} love for love. _Countess_. Than wrong for wrong, and endless hate for hate. But, sith I see your majesty so bent, That my unwillingness, my husband's love, Your high estate, nor no respect respected, Can be my help, but that your mightiness Will overbear and awe these dear regards, I bind my discontent to my content, And what I would not I'll compel I will; Provided that yourself remove those lets That stand between your highness' love and mine. _Edward_. Name them, fair countess, and by heaven I will. _Countess_. It is their lives that stand between our love That I would have choked up, my sovereign. _Edward_. Whose lives, my lady? _Countess_. My thrice loving liege, Your queen, and Salisbury my wedded husband; Who living have that title in our love That we can not bestow but by their death. _Edward_. Thy opposition {264a} is beyond our law. _Countess_. So is your desire: If the law {264b} Can hinder you to execute the one, Let it forbid you to attempt the other: I cannot think you love me as you say Unless you do make good what you have sworn. _Edward_. No more: thy husband and the queen shall die. Fairer thou art by far than Hero was; Beardless Leander not so strong as I: He swom an easy current for his love; But I will, through a helly spout of blood, {264c} Arrive that Sestos where my Hero lies. _Countess_. Nay, you'll do more; you'll make the river too With their heartbloods that keep our love asunder; Of which my husband and your wife are twain. _Edward_. Thy beauty makes them guilty of their death And gives in evidence that they shall die; Upon which verdict I their judge condemn them. _Countess_. O perjured beauty! more corrupted judge! When, to the great star-chamber o'er our heads, The universal sessions calls to count This packing evil, we both shall tremble for it. _Edward_. What says my fair love? is she resolute? _Countess_. Resolute to be dissolved: {266} and, therefore, this: Keep but thy word, great king, and I am thine. Stand where thou dost; I'll part a little from thee; And see how I will yield me to thy hands. Here by my side do hang my wedding knives; Take thou the one, and with it kill thy queen, And learn by me to find her where she lies; And with the other I'll despatch my love, Which now lies fast asleep within my heart: When they are gone, then I'll consent to love. Such genuinely good wine as this needs no bush. But from this pointonwards I can find nothing especially commendable in the remainder of thescene except its brevity. The King of course abjures his purpose, and ofcourse compares the Countess with Lucretia to the disadvantage of theRoman matron; summons his son, Warwick, and the attendant lords; appointseach man his post by sea or land; and starts for Flanders in a duly moraland military state of mind. Here ends the first part of the play; and with it all possibleindication, though never so shadowy, of the possible shadowy presence ofShakespeare. At the opening of the third act we are thrown among awholly new set of characters and events, all utterly out of all harmonyand keeping with all that has gone before. Edward alone survives asnominal protagonist; but this survival--assuredly not of the fittest--ismerely the survival of the shadow of a name. Anything more pitifullycrude and feeble, more helplessly inartistic and incomposite, than thisprocess or pretence of juncture where there is no juncture, thisinfantine shifting and shuffling of the scenes and figures, it isimpossible to find among the rudest and weakest attempts of the dawningor declining drama in its first or second childhood. It is the less necessary to analyse at any length the three remainingacts of this play, that the work has already been done to my hand, andwell done, by Charles Knight; who, though no professed critic or esotericexpert in Shakespearean letters, approved himself by dint of sheerhonesty and conscience not unworthy of a considerate hearing. To hisedition of Shakespeare I therefore refer all readers desirous of furtherexcerpts than I care to give. The first scene of the third act is a storehouse of contemporarycommonplace. Nothing fresher than such stale pot-pourri as the followingis to be gathered up in thin sprinklings from off the dry flat soil. Amessenger informs the French king that he has descried off shore The proud armado (_sic_) of King Edward's ships; Which at the first, far off when I did ken, Seemed as it were a grove of withered pines; But, drawing on, their glorious bright aspect, Their streaming ensigns wrought of coloured silk, Like to a meadow full of sundry flowers, Adorns the naked bosom of the earth; and so on after the exactest and therefore feeblest fashion of the Pre-Marlowites; with equal regard, as may be seen, for grammar and for sensein the construction of his periods. The narrative of a sea-fight ensuingon this is pitiable beyond pity and contemptibly beneath contempt. In the next scene we have a flying view of peasants in flight, with adescription of five cities on fire not undeserving of its place in theplay, immediately after the preceding sea-piece: but relieved by suchwealth of pleasantry as marks the following jest, in which the mostpurblind eye will be the quickest to discover a touch of the genuineShakespearean humour. _1st Frenchman_. What, is it quarter-day, that you remove, And carry bag and baggage too? _2nd Frenchman_. Quarter-day? ay, and quartering-day, I fear. _Euge_! The scene of debate before Cressy is equally flat and futile, vulgar andverbose; yet in this Sham Shakespearean scene of our present poeticule'sI have noted one genuine Shakespearean word, "solely singular for itssingleness. " So may thy temples with Bellona's hand Be still adorned with laurel victory! In this notably inelegant expression of goodwill we find the same use ofthe word "laurel" as an adjective and epithet of victory which thusconfronts us in the penultimate speech of the third scene in the firstact of _Antony and Cleopatra_. Upon your sword Sit laurel victory, and smooth success Be strewed before your feet! There is something more (as less there could not be) of spirit andmovement in the battle-scene where Edward refuses to send relief to hisson, wishing the prince to win his spurs unaided, and earn thefirst-fruits of his fame single-handed against the heaviest odds; but theforcible feebleness of a minor poet's fancy shows itself amusingly in themock stoicism and braggart philosophy of the King's reassuringreflection, "We have more sons than one. " In the first and third scenes of the fourth act we may concede someslight merit to the picture of a chivalrous emulation in magnanimitybetween the Duke of Burgundy and his former fellow-student, whose refusalto break his parole as a prisoner extorts from his friend the concessionrefused to his importunity as an envoy: but the execution is by no meansworthy of the subject. The limp loquacity of long-winded rhetoric, so natural to men andsoldiers in an hour of emergency, which distinguishes the dialoguebetween the Black Prince and Audley on the verge of battle, is relievedby this one last touch of quasi-Shakespearean thought or stylediscoverable in the play of which I must presently take a short--and along--farewell. Death's name is much more mighty than his deeds: Thy parcelling this power hath made it more. As many sands as these my hands can hold Are but my handful of so many sands; Then all the world--and call it but a power-- Easily ta'en up, and {269} quickly thrown away; But if I stand to count them sand by sand The number would confound my memory And make a thousand millions of a task Which briefly is no more indeed than one. These quartered squadrons and these regiments Before, behind us, and on either hand, Are but a power: When we name a man, His hand, his foot, his head, have several strengths; And being all but one self instant strength, Why, all this many, Audley, is but one, And we can call it all but one man's strength. He that hath far to go tells it by miles; If he should tell the steps, it kills his heart: The drops are infinite that make a flood, And yet, thou know'st, we call it but a rain. There is but one France, one king of France, {270} That France hath no more kings; and that same king Hath but the puissant legion of one king; And we have one: Then apprehend no odds; For one to one is fair equality. _Bien coupe, mal cousu_; such is the most favourable verdict I can passon this voluminous effusion of a spirit smacking rather of the schoolsthan of the field. The first six lines or so might pass muster as theearly handiwork of Shakespeare; the rest has as little of his manner ashis matter, his metre as his style. The poet can hardly be said to rise again after this calamitous collapse. We find in the rest of this scene nothing better worth remark than suchpoor catches at a word as this; And let those milkwhite messengers of time Show thy time's learning in this dangerous time; a villainous trick of verbiage which went nigh now and then to affect theadolescent style of Shakespeare, and which happens to find itself asadmirably as unconsciously burlesqued in two lines of this very scene: I will not give a penny for a life, Nor half a halfpenny to shun grim death. The verses intervening are smooth, simple, and passably well worded;indeed the force of elegant commonplace cannot well go further than insuch lines as these. Thyself art bruised and bent with many broils, And stratagems forepast with iron pens Are texed {271} in thine honourable face; Thou art a married man in this distress, But danger woos me as a blushing maid; Teach me an answer to this perilous time. _Audley_. To die is all as common as to live; The one in choice, the other holds in chase; For from the instant we begin to live We do pursue and hunt the time to die: First bud we, then we blow, and after seed; Then presently we fall; and as a shade Follows the body, so we follow death. If then we hunt for death, why do we fear it? If we fear it, why do we follow it? (Let me intimate a doubt in passing, whether Shakespeare would ever haveput by the mouth of any but a farcical mask a query so provocative ofresponse from an Irish echo--"Because we can't help. ") If we do fear, with fear we do but aid The thing we fear to seize on us the sooner; If we fear not, then no resolved proffer Can overthrow the limit of our fate: and so forth. Again the hastiest reader will have been reminded of apassage in the transcendant central scenes of _Measure for Measure_: Merely, thou art death's fool; For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun, And yet runn'st toward him still; and hence also some may infer that this pitiful penny-whistle was blownby the same breath which in time gained power to fill that archangelictrumpet. Credat Zoilus Shakespearomastix, non ego. The next scene is something better than passable, but demands no specialanalysis and affords no necessary extract. We may just observe asexamples of style the play on words between the flight of hovering ravensand the flight of routed soldiers, and the description of the sudden fog Which now hath hid the airy floor of heaven, And made at noon a night unnatural Upon the quaking and dismayed world. The interest rises again with the reappearance and release of Salisbury, and lifts the style for a moment to its own level. _A tout seigneur touthonneur_; the author deserves some dole of moderate approbation for histribute to the national chivalry of a Frenchman as here exemplified inthe person of Prince Charles. Of the two next scenes, in which the battle of Poitiers is soinadequately "staged to the show, " I can only say that if any readerbelieves them to be the possible work of the same hand which set beforeall men's eyes for all time the field of Agincourt, he will doubtless diein that belief, and go to his own place in the limbo of commentators. But a yet more flagrant effect of contrast is thrust upon our notice atthe opening of the fifth act. If in all the historical groundwork ofthis play there is one point of attraction which we might have thoughtcertain to stimulate the utmost enterprise and evoke the utmostcapacities of an aspiring dramatist, it must surely be sought in thecrowning scene of the story; in the scene of Queen Philippa'sintercession for the burgesses of Calais. We know how Shakespeare on thelike occasion was wont to transmute into golden verse the silver speechsupplied to him by North's version of Amyot's Plutarch. {273} With thetext of Lord Berners before him, the author of _King Edward III_. Hasgiven us for the gold of Froissart not even adulterated copper, butunadulterated lead. Incredible as it may seem to readers of thehistorian, the poeticule has actually contrived so far to transfigure bydint of disfiguring him that this most noble and pathetic scene in allthe annals of chivalry, when passed through the alembic of hisincompetence, appears in a garb of transforming verse under a guise atonce weak and wordy, coarse and unchivalrous. The whole scene is at allpoints alike in its unlikeness to the workmanship of Shakespeare. Here then I think we may finally draw bridle: for the rest of the courseis not worth running; there is nothing in the residue of this last actwhich deserves analysis or calls for commentary. We have now examinedthe whole main body of the work with somewhat more than necessary care;and our conclusion is simply this: that if any man of common reading, common modesty, common judgment, and common sense, can be found tomaintain the theory of Shakespeare's possible partnership in thecomposition of this play, such a man will assuredly admit that the onlydiscernible or imaginable touches of his hand are very slight, very few, and very early. For myself, I am and have always been perfectlysatisfied with one single and simple piece of evidence that Shakespearehad not a finger in the concoction of _King Edward III_. He was theauthor of _King Henry V_. NOTE. I was not surprised to hear that my essay on the historical play of KingEdward III. Had on its first appearance met in various quarters withassailants of various kinds. There are some forms of attack to which noanswer is possible for a man of any human self-respect but the lifelongsilence of contemptuous disgust. To such as these I will nevercondescend to advert or to allude further than by the remark now as itwere forced from me, that never once in my life have I had or will I haverecourse in self-defence either to the blackguard's loaded bludgeon ofpersonalities or to the dastard's sheathed dagger of disguise. I havereviled no man's person: I have outraged no man's privacy. When I havefound myself misled either by imperfection of knowledge or of memory, orby too much confidence in a generally trustworthy guide, I have silentlycorrected the misquotation or readily repaired the error. To thesuccessive and representative heroes of the undying Dunciad I have leftand will always leave the foul use of their own foul weapons. I havespoken freely and fearlessly, and so shall on all occasions continue tospeak, of what I find to be worthy of praise or dispraise, contempt orhonour, in the public works and actions of men. Here ends and here hasalways ended in literary matters the proper province of a gentleman;beyond it, though sometimes intruded on in time past by trespassers of anobler race, begins the proper province of a blackguard. REPORT ON THE PROCEEDINGS ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF THE NEWESTSHAKESPEARE SOCIETY. A paper was read by Mr. A. On the disputed authorship of _A MidsummerNight's Dream_. He was decidedly of opinion that this play was to beascribed to George Chapman. He based this opinion principally on theground of style. From its similarity of subject he had at first beendisposed to assign it to Cyril Tourneur, author of _The Revenger'sTragedy_; and he had drawn up in support of this theory a series ofparallel passages extracted from the speeches of Vindice in that dramaand of Oberon in the present play. He pointed out however that thecharacter of Puck could hardly have been the work of any English poet butthe author of _Bussy d'Ambois_. There was here likewise that gravity andcondensation of thought conveyed through the medium of the "full andheightened style" commended by Webster, and that preponderance ofphilosophic or political discourse over poetic interest and dramaticaction for which the author in question had been justly censured. Some of the audience appearing slightly startled by this remark (indeedit afterwards appeared that the Chairman had been on the point of askingthe learned member whether he was not thinking rather of _Love's Labour'sLost_?), Mr. A. Cited the well-known scene in which Oberon discourseswith Puck on matters concerning Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth, insteadof despatching him at once on his immediate errand. This was universallyaccepted as proof positive, and the reading concluded amid signs ofunanimous assent, when Mr. B. Had nothing to urge against the argument they had just heard, buthe must remind them that there was a more weighty kind of evidence thanthat adduced by Mr. A. ; and to this he doubted not they would all defer. He could prove by a tabulated statement that the words "to" and "from"occurred on an average from seven to nine times in every play of Chapman;whereas in the play under consideration the word "to" occurred exactlytwelve times and the word "from" precisely ten. He was therefore ofopinion that the authorship should in all probability be assigned toAnthony Munday. As nobody present could dispute this conclusion, Mr. C. Proceeded to readthe argument by which he proposed to establish the fact, hithertounaccountably overlooked by all preceding commentators, that thecharacter of Romeo was obviously designed as a satire on Lord Burghley. The first and perhaps the strongest evidence in favour of thisproposition was the extreme difficulty, he might almost say the utterimpossibility, of discovering a single point of likeness between the twocharacters. This would naturally be the first precaution taken by a poorplayer who designed to attack an all-powerful Minister. But more directlight was thrown upon the subject by a passage in which "that kind offruit that maids call medlars when they laugh alone" is mentioned inconnection with a wish of Romeo's regarding his mistress. This mustevidently be taken to refer to some recent occasion on which the policyof Lord Burghley (possibly in the matter of the Anjou marriage) had beenrebuked in private by the Maiden Queen, "his mistress, " as meddling, laughable, and fruitless. This discovery seemed to produce a great impression till the Chairmanreminded the Society that the play in question was now generally ascribedto George Peele, {278} who was notoriously the solicitor of LordBurghley's patronage and the recipient of his bounty. That this poet wasthe author of _Romeo and Juliet_ could no longer be a matter of doubt, ashe was confident they would all agree with him on hearing that a livingpoet of note had positively assured him of the fact; adding that he hadalways thought so when at school. The plaudits excited by thisannouncement had scarcely subsided, when the Chairman clenched the matterby observing that he rather thought the same opinion had ultimately beenentertained by his own grandmother. Mr. D. Then read a paper on the authorship and the hidden meaning of twocontemporary plays which, he must regretfully remark, were too obviouslycalculated to cast a most unfavourable and even sinister light on themoral character of the new Shakespeare; whose possibly suspiciousreadiness to attack the vices of others with a view to divertingattention from his own was signally exemplified in the well-known factthat, even while putting on a feint of respect and tenderness for hismemory, he had exposed the profligate haunts and habits of ChristopherMarlowe under the transparent pseudonym of Christopher Sly. To the firstof these plays attention had long since been drawn by a person of whom itwas only necessary to say that he had devoted a long life to the studyand illustration of Shakespeare and his age, and had actually presumed topublish a well-known edition of the poet at a date previous to theestablishment of the present Society. He (Mr. D. ) was confident that notanother syllable could be necessary to expose that person to the contemptof all present. He proceeded, however, with the kind encouragement ofthe Chairman, to indulge at that editor's expense in sundry personalitiesboth "loose and humorous, " which being totally unfit for publication hereare reserved for a private issue of "Loose and Humorous Papers" to beedited, with a running marginal commentary or illustrative andexplanatory version of the utmost possible fullness, {279} by the Founderand another member of the Society. To these it might possibly beundesirable for them to attract the notice of the outside world. Reverting therefore to his first subject from various references to thepresumed private character, habits, gait, appearance, and bearing of thegentleman in question, Mr. D. Observed that the ascription of a share inthe _Taming of the Shrew_ to William Haughton (hitherto supposed theauthor of a comedy called _Englishmen for my Money_) implied a doublydiscreditable blunder. The real fact, as he would immediately prove, wasnot that Haughton was joint author with Shakespeare of the _Taming of theShrew_, but that Shakespeare was joint author with Haughton of_Englishmen for my Money_. He would not enlarge on the obvious fact thatShakespeare, so notorious a plunderer of others, had actually beenreduced to steal from his own poor store an image transplanted from thelast scene of the third act of _Romeo and Juliet_ into the last scene ofthe third act of _Englishmen for my Money_; where the well-known andpitiful phrase--"Night's candles are burnt out"--reappears in all itspaltry vulgarity as follows;--"Night's candles burn obscure. " Ample aswas the proof here supplied, he would prefer to rely exclusively uponsuch further evidence as might be said to lie at once on the surface andin a nutshell. The second title of this play, by which the first title was in a fewyears totally superseded, ran thus: _A Woman will have her Will_. Noweven in an age of punning titles such as that of a well-known anddelightful treatise by Sir John Harrington, the peculiar fondness ofShakespeare for puns was notorious; but especially for puns on names, asin the proverbial case of Sir Thomas Lucy; and above all for puns on hisown Christian name, as in his 135th, 136th, and 143rd sonnets. It mustnow be but too evident to the meanest intelligence--to the meanestintelligence, he repeated; for to such only did he or would he then andthere or ever or anywhere address himself--(loud applause) that thegraceless author, more utterly lost to all sense of shame than any DonJuan or other typical libertine of fiction, had come forward to placardby way of self-advertisement on his own stage, and before the very eyesof a Maiden Queen, the scandalous confidence in his own powers offascination and seduction so cynically expressed in the too easilyintelligible vaunt--A Woman will have her Will [Shakespeare]. In thepenultimate line of the hundred and forty-third sonnet the very phrasemight be said to occur: So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will. Having thus established his case in the first instance to thesatisfaction, as he trusted, not only of the present Society, but of anyasylum for incurables in any part of the country, the learned member nowpassed on to the consideration of the allusions at once to Shakespeareand to a celebrated fellow-countryman, fellow-poet, and personal friendof his--Michael Drayton--contained in a play which had been doubtfullyattributed to Shakespeare himself by such absurd idiots as looked ratherto the poetical and dramatic quality of a poem or a play than to suchtests as those to which alone any member of that Society would ever dreamof appealing. What these were he need not specify; it was enough to sayin recommendation of them that they had rather less to do with anyquestion of dramatic or other poetry than with the differential calculusor the squaring of the circle. It followed that only the most perverselyignorant and aesthetically presumptuous of readers could imagine thepossibility of Shakespeare's concern or partnership in a play which hadno more Shakespearean quality about it than mere poetry, mere passion, mere pathos, mere beauty and vigour of thought and language, mere commandof dramatic effect, mere depth and subtlety of power to read, interpret, and reproduce the secrets of the heart and spirit. Could any furtherevidence be required of the unfitness and unworthiness to hold or toutter any opinion on the matter in hand which had consistently beendisplayed by the poor creatures to whom he had just referred, it would befound, as he felt sure the Founder and all worthy members of theirSociety would be the first to admit, in the despicable diffidence, thepitiful modesty, the contemptible deficiency in common assurance, withwhich the suggestion of Shakespeare's partnership in this play hadgenerally been put forward and backed up. The tragedy of _Arden ofFeversham_ was indeed connected with Shakespeare--and that, as he shouldproceed to show, only too intimately; but Shakespeare was not connectedwith it--that is, in the capacity of its author. In what capacity wouldbe but too evident when he mentioned the names of the two leadingruffians concerned in the murder of the principal character--Black Willand Shakebag. The single original of these two characters he needscarcely pause to point out. It would be observed that a doubleprecaution had been taken against any charge of libel or personal attackwhich might be brought against the author and supported by theall-powerful court influence of Shakespeare's two principal patrons, theEarls of Essex and Southampton. Two figures were substituted for one, and the unmistakable name of Will Shakebag was cut in half and dividedbetween them. Care had moreover been taken to disguise the person byaltering the complexion of the individual aimed at. That the actualShakespeare was a fair man they had the evidence of the coloured bust atStratford. Could any capable and fair-minded man--he would appeal totheir justly honoured Founder--require further evidence as to theoriginal of Black Will Shakebag? Another important character in the playwas Black Will's accomplice and Arden's servant--Michael, after whom theplay had also at one time been called _Murderous Michael_. The singlefact that Shakespeare and Drayton were both of them Warwickshire menwould suffice, he could not doubt, to carry conviction with it to themind of every member present, with regard to the original of thispersonage. It now only remained for him to produce the name of the realauthor of this play. He would do so at once--Ben Jonson. About the timeof its production Jonson was notoriously engaged in writing thoseadditions to the _Spanish Tragedy_ of which a preposterous attempt hadbeen made to deprive him on the paltry ground that the style (forsooth)of these additional scenes was very like the style of Shakespeare andutterly unlike the style of Jonson. To dispose for ever of this pitifulargument it would be sufficient to mention the names of its two first andprincipal supporters--Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hissesand laughter). Now, in these "adycions to Jeronymo" a painter wasintroduced complaining of the murder of his son. In the play before thema painter was introduced as an accomplice in the murder of Arden. It wasunnecessary to dwell upon so trivial a point of difference as thatbetween the stage employment or the moral character of the one artist andthe other. In either case they were as closely as possible connectedwith a murder. There was a painter in the _Spanish Tragedy_, and therewas also a painter in _Arden of Feversham_. He need not--he would notadd another word in confirmation of the now established fact, that BenJonson had in this play held up to perpetual infamy--whether deserved orundeserved he would not pretend to say--the names of two poets whoafterwards became his friends, but whom he had previously gibbeted or atleast pilloried in public as Black Will Shakespeare and Murderous MichaelDrayton. Mr. E. Then brought forward a subject of singular interest andimportance--"The lameness of Shakespeare--was it moral or physical?" Hewould not insult their intelligence by dwelling on the absurd andexploded hypothesis that this expression was allegorical, but would atonce assume that the infirmity in question was physical. Then arose thequestion--In which leg? He was prepared, on the evidence of an earlyplay, to prove to demonstration that the injured and interesting limb wasthe left. "This shoe is my father, " says Launce in the _Two Gentlemen ofVerona_; "no, this left shoe is my father; no, no, this left shoe is mymother; nay, that cannot be so neither; yes, it is so, it is so; _it haththe worser sole_. " This passage was not necessary either to the progressof the play or to the development of the character; he believed he wasjustified in asserting that it was not borrowed from the original novelon which the play was founded; the inference was obvious, that withoutsome personal allusion it must have been as unintelligib1e to theaudience as it had hitherto been to the commentators. His conjecture wasconfirmed, and the whole subject illustrated with a new light, by thewell-known line in one of the Sonnets, in which the poet describeshimself as "made lame by Fortune's dearest spite": a line of which theinner meaning and personal application had also by a remarkable chancebeen reserved for him (Mr. E. ) to discover. There could be no doubt thatwe had here a clue to the origin of the physical infirmity referred to;an accident which must have befallen Shakespeare in early life whileacting at the Fortune theatre, and consequently before his connectionwith a rival company; a fact of grave importance till now unverified. Theepithet "dearest, " like so much else in the Sonnets, was evidentlysusceptible of a double interpretation. The first and most naturalexplanation of the term would at once suggest itself; the playhouse wouldof necessity be dearest to the actor dependent on it for subsistence, asthe means of getting his bread; but he thought it not unreasonable toinfer from this unmistakable allusion that the entrance fee charged atthe Fortune may probably have been higher than the price of seats in anyother house. Whether or not this fact, taken in conjunction with theaccident already mentioned, should be assumed as the immediate cause ofShakespeare's subsequent change of service, he was not prepared topronounce with such positive confidence as they might naturally expectfrom a member of the Society; but he would take upon himself to affirmthat his main thesis was now and for ever established on the mostirrefragable evidence, and that no assailant could by any possibilitydislodge by so much as a hair's breadth the least fragment of a singlebrick in the impregnable structure of proof raised by the argument towhich they had just listened. This demonstration being thus satisfactorily concluded, Mr. F. Proceededto read his paper on the date of _Othello_, and on the various parts ofthat play respectively assignable to Samuel Rowley, to George Wilkins, and to Robert Daborne. It was evident that the story of Othello andDesdemona was originally quite distinct from that part of the play inwhich Iago was a leading figure. This he was prepared to show at somelength by means of the weak-ending test, the light-ending test, thedouble-ending test, the triple-ending test, the heavy-monosyllabic-eleventh-syllable-of-the-double-ending test, the run-on-line test, andthe central-pause test. Of the partnership of other poets in the playhe was able to adduce a simpler but not less cogent proof. A memberof their Committee said to an objector lately: "To me, there are thehandwritings of four different men, the thoughts and powers of fourdifferent men, in the play. If you can't see them now, you mustwait till, by study, you can. I can't give you eyes. " To this argumenthe (Mr. F. ) felt that it would be an insult to their understandings if heshould attempt to add another word. Still, for those who were willing totry and learn, and educate their ears and eyes, he had prepared sixtabulated statements-- (At this important point of a most interesting paper, our reporterunhappily became unconscious, and remained for some considerable periodin a state of deathlike stupor. On recovering from this total andunaccountable suspension of all his faculties, he found the speakerdrawing gradually near the end of his figures, and so far succeeded inshaking off the sense of coma as to be able to resume his notes. ) That the first and fourth scenes of the third act were not by the samehand as the third scene he should have no difficulty in proving to thesatisfaction of all capable and fair-minded men. In the first and fourthscenes the word "virtuous" was used as a dissyllable; in the third it wasused as a trisyllable. "Is, that she will to virtuous Desdemona. " iii. 1. "Where virtue is, these are more virtuous. " iii. 3. "That by your virtuous means I may again. " iii. 4. In the third scene he would also point out the great number of tripleendings which had originally led the able editor of Euclid's Elements ofGeometry to attribute the authorship of this scene to Shirley: _Cassio_(twice), _patience_, _Cassio_ (again), _discretion_, _Cassio_ (again), honesty, _Cassio_ (again), _jealousy, jealous_ (used as a trisyllable inthe verse of Shakespeare's time), company (two consecutive lines with thetriple ending), _Cassio_ (again), _conscience, petition, ability, importunity, conversation, marriage, dungeon, mandragora, passion, monstrous, conclusion, bounteous_. He could not imagine any man in hissenses questioning the weight of this evidence. Now, let them take therhymed speeches of the Duke and Brabantio in Act i. Sc. 3, and comparethem with the speech of Othello in Act iv. Sc. 2, Had it pleased heaven To try me with affliction. He appealed to any expert whether this was not in Shakespeare's easyfourth budding manner, with, too, various other points already touchedon. On the other hand, take the opening of Brabantio's speech-- So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile; We lose it not so long as we can smile. That, he said, was in Shakespeare's difficult second flowering manner--thestyle of the later part of the earlier stage of Shakespeare's rhetoricalfirst period but one. It was no more possible to move the one passage upto the date of the other than to invert the order of the alphabet. Here, then, putting aside for the moment the part of the play supplied byShakespeare's assistants in the last three acts--miserably weak some ofit was--they were able to disentangle the early love-play from the latterwork in which Iago was principally concerned. There was at least fifteenyears' growth between them, the steps of which could he traced in thepoet's intermediate plays by any one who chose to work carefully enoughat them. Set any of the speeches addressed in the Shakespeare part ofthe last act by Othello to Desdemona beside the consolatory address ofthe Duke to Brabantio, and see the difference of the rhetoric and stylein the two. If they turned to characters, Othello and Desdemona wereeven more clearly the companion pair to Biron and Rosaline of _Love'sLabour's Lost_ than were Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet the match-pair(_sic_) of Romeo and Juliet. In _Love's Labour's Lost_ the question ofcomplexion was identical, though the parts were reversed. He would citebut a few parallel passages in evidence of this relationship between thesubjects of the two plays. _Love's Labour's Lost_, iv. 3. _Othello_. 1. "By heaven, thy love is black 1. "An old black ram. " i. 1. As ebony. "2. "No face is _fair_ that is not 2. "Your son-in-law is far more full so black. " _fair_ than black. " i. 3. 3. "O paradox! Black is the 3. "How if she be black and badge of hell. " witty?" ii. 1. 4. "O, _if_ in black my lady's 4. "_If_ she be black, and thereto brows be decked. " have a wit. " id. 5. "And therefore is she born 5. "A measure to the health of to make black fair. " black Othello. " ii. 3. 6. "Paints itself black to 6. "For I am black. " iii, 3. Imitate her brow. "7. "To look like her are 7. "_Begrimed_ and black. " id. _chimney-sweepers_ black. " Now, with these parallel passages before them, what man, woman, or childcould bring himself or herself to believe that the connection of theseplays was casual or the date of the first Othello removable from the dateof the early contemporary late-first-period-but-one play _Love's Labour'sLost_, or that anybody's opinion that they were so was worth one straw?When therefore by the introduction of the Iago episode Shakespeare in hislater days had with the assistance of three fellow-poets completed theunfinished work of his youth, the junction thus effected of the Brabantiopart of the play with this Iago underplot supplied them with an evidencewholly distinct from that of the metrical test which yet confirmed inevery point the conclusion independently arrived at and supported by theirresistible coincidence of all the tests. He defied anybody to accepthis principle of study or adopt his method of work, and arrive at adifferent conclusion from himself. The reading of Mr. G. 's paper on the authorship of the soliloquies in_Hamlet_ was unavoidably postponed till the next meeting, the learnedmember having only time on this occasion to give a brief summary of thepoints he was prepared to establish and the grounds on which he wasprepared to establish them. A year or two since, when he first thoughtof starting the present Society, he had never read a line of the play inquestion, having always understood it to be admittedly spurious: but onbeing assured of the contrary by one of the two foremost poets of theEnglish-speaking world, who was good enough to read out to him in proofof this assertion all that part of the play which could reasonably beassigned to Shakespeare, he had of course at once surrendered his ownformer opinion, well grounded as it had hitherto seemed to be on the mostsolid of all possible foundations. At their next meeting he would showcause for attributing to Ben Jonson not only the soliloquies usually butinconsiderately quoted as Shakespeare's, but the entire originalconception of the character of the Prince of Denmark. The resemblance ofthis character to that of Volpone in _The Fox_ and to that of Face in_The Alchemist_ could not possibly escape the notice of the most cursoryreader. The principle of disguise was the same in each case, whether theend in view were simply personal profit, or (as in the case of Hamlet)personal profit combined with revenge; and whether the disguise assumedwas that of madness, of sickness, or of a foreign personality, theassumption of character was in all three cases identical. As to style, he was only too anxious to meet (and, he doubted not, to beat) on his ownground any antagonist whose ear had begotten {291} the crude anduntenable theory that the Hamlet soliloquies were not distinctly withinthe range of the man who could produce those of Crites and of Macilentein _Cynthia's Revels_ and _Every Man out of his Humour_. The author ofthose soliloquies could, and did, in the parallel passages of _Hamlet_, rise near the height of the master he honoured and loved. The further discussion of this subject was reserved for the next meetingof the Society, as was also the reading of Mr. H. 's paper on thesubsequent quarrel between the two joint authors of Hamlet, which led toJonson's caricature of Shakespeare (then retired from London society to acountry life of solitude) under the name of Morose, and to Shakespeare'sretort on Jonson, who was no less evidently attacked under thedesignation of Ariel. The allusions to the subject of Shakespeare'ssonnets in the courtship and marriage of Epicoene by Morose were asobvious as the allusions in the part of Ariel to the repeatedincarceration of Jonson, first on a criminal and secondly on a politicalcharge, and to his probable release in the former case (during the reignof Elizabeth=Sycorax) at the intercession of Shakespeare, who was allowedon all hands to have represented himself in the character of Prospero("it was mine art that let thee out"). Mr. I. Would afterwards read apaper on the evidence for Shakespeare's whole or part authorship of adozen or so of the least known plays of his time, which, besides havingvarious words and phrases in common with his acknowledged works, wereobviously too bad to be attributed to any other known writer of theperiod. Eminent among these was the tragedy of _Andromana, or theMerchant's Wife_, long since rejected from the list of Shirley's works asunworthy of that poet's hand. Unquestionably it was so; not lessunworthy than _A Larum for London_ of Marlowe's. The consequentinference that it must needs be the work of the new Shakespeare's wassurely no less cogent in this than in the former case. The allusionoccurring in it to a play bearing date just twenty-six years after thedeath of Shakespeare, and written by a poet then unborn, was a strongpoint in favour of his theory. (This argument was received with generalmarks of adhesion. ) What, he would ask, could be more natural than thatShirley when engaged on the revision and arrangement for the stage ofthis posthumous work of the new Shakespeare's (a fact which could requireno further proof than he had already adduced), should have inserted thisreference in order to disguise the name of its real author, and protectit from the disfavour of an audience with whom that name was notoriouslyout of fashion? This reasoning, conclusive in itself, became even moreirresistible--or would become so, if that were anything less than anabsolute impossibility--on comparison of parallel passages, Though kings still hug suspicion in their bosoms, They hate the causer. (_Andromana_, Act i. Sc. 3. ) Compare this with the avowal put by Shakespeare into the mouth of a king. Though I did wish him dead I hate the murderer. (_King Richard II_. , Act v. Sc. 6. ) Again in the same scene: For then her husband comes home from the Rialto. Compare this with various passages (too familiar to quote) in the_Merchant of Venice_. The transference of the Rialto to Iberia was of apiece with the discovery of a sea-coast in Bohemia. In the same sceneAndromana says to her lover, finding him reluctant to take his leave, almost in the very words of Romeo to Juliet, Then let us stand and outface danger, Since you will have it so. It was obvious that only the author of the one passage could have thoughtit necessary to disguise his plagiarism in the other by an inversion ofsexes between the two speakers. In the same scene were three otherindisputable instances of repetition. Mariners might with far greater ease Hear whole shoals of sirens singing. Compare _Comedy of Errors_, Act iii. Scene 2. Sing, siren, for thyself. In this case identity of sex was as palpable an evidence for identity ofauthorship as diversity of sex had afforded in the preceding instance. Again: Have oaths no _more validity_ with princes? In _Romeo and Juliet_, Act iii. Scene 3, the very same words were coupledin the very same order: _More validity_, More honourable state, more courtship lies In carrion flies than Romeo. Again: It would have killed a salamander. Compare the _First Part of King Henry IV_, Act iii. Scene 3. I have maintained that salamander of yours with fire any time this two and thirty years. In Act ii. Scene 2 the hero, on being informed how heavy are the oddsagainst him in the field, answers, I am glad on't; the honour is the greater. To which his confidant rejoins: The danger is the greater. And in the sixth scene of the same act the messenger observes: I only heard the prince wish . . . . . . . He had fewer by a thousand men. Could any member doubt that we had here the same hand which gave us thelike debate between King Henry and Westmoreland on the eve of Agincourt?or could any member suppose that in the subsequent remark of the samemilitary confidant, "I smell a rat, sir, " there was merely a fortuitouscoincidence with Hamlet's reflection as he "whips out his rapier"--initself a martial proceeding--under similar circumstances to the sameeffect? In the very next scene a captain observes of his own troops Methinks such tattered rogues should never conquer: a touch that could only be due to the pencil which had drawn Falstaff'sragged regiment. In both cases, moreover, it was to be noted that thetattered rogues proved ultimately victorious. But he had--they mighthardly believe it, but so it was--even yet stronger and more convincingevidence to offer. It would be remembered that a play called _The DoubleFalsehood_, formerly attributed to Shakespeare on the authority ofTheobald, was now generally supposed to have been in its original formthe work of Shirley. What, then, he would ask, could be more natural ormore probable than that a play formerly ascribed to Shirley should proveto be the genuine work of Shakespeare? Common sense, common reason, common logic, all alike and all equally combined to enforce upon everycandid judgment this inevitable conclusion. This, however, was nothingin comparison to the final proof which he had yet to lay before them. Heneed not remind them that in the opinion of their illustrious Germanteachers, the first men to discover and reveal to his unworthy countrymenthe very existence of the new Shakespeare, the authenticity of any playascribed to the possibly too prolific pen of that poet was invariably tobe determined in the last resort by consideration of its demerits. NoEnglish critic, therefore, who felt himself worthy to have been born aGerman, would venture to question the postulate on which all soundprinciples of criticism with regard to this subject must infallibly befounded: that, given any play of unknown or doubtful authorship, theworse it was, the likelier was it to be Shakespeare's. (This propositionwas received with every sign of unanimous assent. ) Now, on this groundhe was prepared to maintain that the claims of _Andromana_ to their mostrespectful, their most cordial, their most unhesitating acceptance wereabsolutely beyond all possibility of parallel. Not _Mucedorus_ or _FairEm_, not _The Birth of Merlin_ or _Thomas Lord Cromwell_, couldreasonably or fairly be regarded as on the same level of worthlessnesswith this incomparable production. No mortal man who had survived itsperusal could for a moment hesitate to agree that it was the mostincredibly, ineffably, inconceivably, unmitigatedly, irredeemably, inexpressibly damnable piece of bad work ever perpetrated by human hand. No mortal critic of the genuine Anglo-German school could thereforehesitate for a moment to agree that in common consistency he was bound toaccept it as the possible work of no human hand but the hand of the NewShakespeare. The Chairman then proceeded to recapitulate the work done and thebenefits conferred by the Society during the twelve months which hadelapsed since its foundation on that day (April 1st) last year. They hadample reason to congratulate themselves and him on the result. They hadestablished an entirely new kind of criticism, working by entirely newmeans towards an entirely new end, in honour of an entirely new kind ofShakespeare. They had proved to demonstration and overwhelmed withobloquy the incompetence, the imbecility, the untrustworthiness, theblunders, the forgeries, the inaccuracies, the obliquities, the uttermoral and literary worthlessness, of previous students and societies. They had revealed to the world at large the generally prevalent ignoranceof Shakespeare and his works which so discreditably distinguished hiscountrymen. This they had been enabled to do by the simple process ofputting forward various theories, and still more various facts, but allof equally incontrovertible value and relevance, of which noEnglishman--he might say, no mortal--outside the Society had ever heardor dreamed till now. They had discovered the one trustworthy andindisputable method, so easy and so simple that it must now seemwonderful it should never have been discovered before, by which to pluckout the heart of the poet's mystery and detect the secret of his touch;the study of Shakespeare by rule of thumb. Every man, woman, and childborn with five fingers on each hand was henceforward better qualified asa critic than any poet or scholar of time past. But it was not, whateveroutsiders might pretend to think, exclusively on the verse-test, as ithad facetiously been called on account of its total incompatibility withany conceivable scheme of metre or principle of rhythm--it was notexclusively on this precious and unanswerable test that they relied. Within the Society as well as without, the pretensions of those who wouldacknowledge no other means of deciding on debated questions had beenrefuted and repelled. What were the other means of investigation andverification in which not less than in the metrical test they wereaccustomed to put their faith, and by which they doubted not to attain inthe future even more remarkable results than their researches had as yetachieved, the debate just concluded, in common with every other for whichthey ever had met or ever were likely to meet, would amply suffice toshow. By such processes as had been applied on this as on all occasionsto the text of Shakespeare's works and the traditions of his life, theytrusted in a very few years to subvert all theories which had hithertobeen held and extirpate all ideas which had hitherto been cherished onthe subject: and having thus cleared the ground for his advent, todiscover for the admiration of the world, as the name of their Societyimplied, a New Shakespeare. The first step towards this end must ofcourse be the demolition of the old one; and he would venture to say theyhad already made a good beginning in that direction. They had disprovedor they would disprove the claim of Shakespeare to the sole authorship of_Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Hamlet_, and _Othello_; they hadestablished or they would establish the fact of his partnership in_Locrine, Mucedorus, The Birth of Merlin, Dr. Dodipoll_, and _Sir GilesGoosecap_. They had with them the incomparable critics of Germany; menwhose knowledge and judgment on all questions of English literature wereas far beyond the reach of their English followers as the freedom andenlightenment enjoyed by the subjects of a military empire were beyondthe reach of the citizens of a democratic republic. They had establishedand affiliated to their own primitive body or church various branchsocieties or sects, in England and elsewhere, devoted to the pursuit ofthe same end by the same means and method of study as had just beenexemplified in the transactions of the present meeting. Still thereremained much to be done; in witness of which he proposed to lay beforethem at their next meeting, by way of inauguration under a happy omen oftheir new year's work, the complete body of evidence by means of which hewas prepared to demonstrate that some considerable portion, if not thegreater part, of the remaining plays hitherto assigned to Shakespeare wasdue to the collaboration of a contemporary actor and playwright, wellknown by name, but hitherto insufficiently appreciated; Robert Armin, theauthor of _A Nest of Ninnies_. ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS. The humble but hard-working journeyman of letters who was charged withthe honourable duty of reporting the transactions at the last meeting ofthe Newest Shakespeare Society on the auspicious occasion of its firstanniversary, April 1st, has received sundry more or less voluminouscommunications from various gentlemen whose papers were then read orannounced, pointing out with more or less acrimonious commentary thematters on which it seems to them severally that they have cause tocomplain of imperfection or inaccuracy in his conscientious andpainstaking report. Anxious above all things to secure for himself suchcredit as may be due to the modest merit of scrupulous fidelity, hedesires to lay before the public so much of the corrections conveyed intheir respective letters of reclamation as may be necessary to completeor to rectify the first draught of their propositions as conveyed in hisformer summary. On the present occasion, however, he must confinehimself to forwarding the rectifications supplied by two of the memberswho took a leading part in the debate of April 1st. The necessarily condensed report of Mr. A. 's paper on _A MidsummerNight's Dream_ may make the reasoning put forward by that gentlemanliable to the misconception of a hasty reader. The omission of variousqualifying phrases has left his argument without such explanation, hisstatements without such reservation, as he had been careful to supply. Hedid not say in so many words that he had been disposed to assign thisdrama to the author of _The Revenger's Tragedy_ simply on the score ofthe affinity discernible between the subjects of the two plays. He isnot prone to self-confidence or to indulgence in paradox. What he didsay was undeniable by any but those who trusted only to their ear, andrefused to correct the conclusions thus arrived at by the help of otherorgans which God had given them--their fingers, for example, and theirtoes; by means of which a critic of trained and competent scholarshipmight with the utmost confidence count up as far as twenty, to the greatprofit of all students who were willing to accept his guidance and bebound by his decision on matters of art and poetry. Only the mostpurblind could fail to observe, what only the most perverse couldhesitate to admit, that there was at first sight an obvious connectionbetween the poison-flower--"purple from love's wound"--squeezed by Oberoninto the eyes of the sleeping Titania and the poison rubbed by Vindiceupon the skull of the murdered Gloriana. No student of Ulrici'sinvaluable work would think this a far-fetched reference. That eminentcritic had verified the meaning and detected the allusion underlying manya passage of Shakespeare in which the connection of moral idea was moredifficult to establish than this. In the fifth act of either play therewas a masque or dramatic show of a sanguinary kind; in the one case thebloodshed was turned to merry-making, in the other the merry-making wasturned to bloodshed. Oberon's phrase, "till I torment thee for thisinjury, " might easily be mistaken for a quotation from the part ofVindice. This explanation, he trusted, would suffice to exonerate hisoriginal view from any charge of haste or rashness; especially as he hadnow completely given it up, and adopted one (if possible) moreimpregnably based on internal and external evidence. Mr. C. Was not unnaturally surprised and indignant to find his positionas to Romeo and Lord Burghley barely indicated, and the notice given ofthe arguments by which it was supported so docked and curtailed as toconvey a most inadequate conception of their force. Among the chiefpoints of his argument were these: that the forsaken Rosaline wasevidently intended for the late Queen Mary, during whose reign Cecil hadnotoriously conformed to the observances of her creed, though ready onthe accession of Elizabeth to throw it overboard at a day's notice; (itwas not to be overlooked that the friar on first hearing the announcementof this change of faith is made earnestly to remonstrate, prefacing hisreproaches with an invocation of two sacred names--an invocation peculiarto Catholics;) that the resemblance between old Capulet and Henry VIII. Is obvious to the most careless reader; his oath of "God's bread!"immediately followed by the avowal "it makes me mad" is an unmistakableallusion to the passions excited by the eucharistic controversy; hisviolence towards Juliet at the end of the third act at once suggests thealienation of her father's heart from the daughter of Anne Boleyn; theself-congratulation on her own "stainless" condition as a virginexpressed by Juliet in soliloquy (Act iii. Sc. 2) while in the act ofawaiting her bridegroom conveys a furtive stroke of satire at the similarvaunt of Elizabeth when likewise meditating marriage and preparing toreceive a suitor from the hostile house of Valois. It must beunnecessary to point out the resemblance or rather the identity betweenthe character and fortune of Paris and the character and fortune ofEssex, whose fate had been foreseen and whose end prefigured by the poetwith almost prophetic sagacity. To the far-reaching eye of Shakespeareit must have seemed natural and inevitable that Paris (Essex) should fallby the hand of Romeo (Burghley) immediately before the monument of theCapulets where their common mistress was interred alive--immediately, that is, before the termination of the Tudor dynasty in the person ofElizabeth, who towards the close of her reign may fitly have beenregarded as one already buried with her fathers, though yet living in astate of suspended animation under the influence of a deadly narcoticpotion administered by the friends of Romeo--by the partisans, that is, of the Cecilian policy. The Nurse was not less evidently designed torepresent the Established Church. Allusions to the marriage of theclergy are profusely scattered through her speeches. Her deceasedhusband was probably meant for Sir Thomas More--"a merry man" to the lastmoment of his existence--who might well be supposed by a slight poeticlicense to have foreseen in the infancy of Elizabeth her futurebacksliding and fall from the straight path "when she came to age. " Thepassing expression of tenderness with which the Nurse refers to hismemory--"God be with his soul!"--implies at once the respect in which thename of the martyr Chancellor was still generally held, and the lingeringremains of Catholic tradition which still made a prayer for the dead risenaturally to Anglican lips. On the other hand, the strife betweenAnglicans and Puritans, the struggle of episcopalian with Calvinisticreformers, was quite as plainly typified in the quarrel between the Nurseand Mercutio, in which the Martin Marprelate controversy was firstunmistakably represented on the stage. The "saucy merchant, that was sofull of his ropery, " with his ridicule of the "stale" practice of Lentenfasting and abstinence, his contempt for "a Lenten pie, " and hispreference for a flesh diet as "very good meat in Lent, " is clearly adisciple of Calvin; and the impotence of the Nurse, however scandalisedat the nakedness of his ribald profanity, to protect herself against itby appeal to reason or tradition, is dwelt upon with an emphasissufficient to indicate the secret tendency of the poet's own sympathiesand convictions. In Romeo's attempt at conciliation, and his poor excusefor Mercutio (which yet the Nurse, an emblem of the temporising andaccommodating pliancy of episcopalian Protestantism, shows herself onlytoo ready to accept as valid) as "one that God hath made, for himself tomar, "--the allusion here is evidently to the democratic and revolutionarytendencies of the doctrine of Knox and Calvin, with its ultimatedevelopments of individualism and private judgment--we recognise the noteof Burghley's lifelong policy and its endeavour to fuse the Protestant orPuritan party with the state Church of the Tudors as by law established. The distaste of Elizabeth's bishops for such advances, their flutter ofapprehension at the daring and their burst of indignation at theinsolence of the Calvinists, are significantly expressed in terms whichseem to hint at a possible return for help and protection to the shelterof the older faith and the support of its partisans. "An 'a speakanything against me, I'll take him down an 'a were lustier than he is, and twenty such Jacks;" (the allusion here is again obvious, to thebaptismal name of John Calvin and John Knox, if not also to the popularbyword of Jack Presbyter;) "and if I cannot, " (here the sense ofinsecurity and dependence on foreign help or secular power becomestransparent) "I'll find those that shall. " She disclaims communion withthe Protestant Churches of the continent, with Amsterdam or Geneva: "I amnone of his flirt-gills; I am none of his skains-mates. " Peter, whocarries her fan ("to hide her face: for her fan's the fairer face"; wemay take this to be a symbol of the form of episcopal consecration stillretained in the Anglican Church as a cover for its separation fromCatholicism), is undoubtedly meant for Whitgift, Archbishop ofCanterbury; the name Peter, as applied to a menial who will stand by andsuffer every knave to use the Church at his pleasure, but is ready todraw as soon as another man if only he may be sure of having the seculararm of the law on his side, implies a bitter sarcasm on the intrudingofficial of state then established by law as occupant of a see divorcedfrom its connection with that of the apostle. The sense of instabilitynatural to an institution which is compelled to rely for support onministers who are themselves dependent on the state whose pay they drawfor power to strike a blow in self-defence could hardly be betterexpressed than by the solemn and piteous, almost agonised asseveration;"Now, afore God, I am so vexed, that every part about me quivers. " ToShakespeare, it cannot be doubted, the impending dissolution ordislocation of the Anglican system in "every part" by civil war andreligious discord must even then have been but too ominously evident. If further confirmation could be needed of the underlying significance ofallusion traceable throughout this play, it might amply be supplied byfresh reference to the first scene in which the Nurse makes herappearance on the stage, and is checked by Lady Capulet in the full tideof affectionate regret for her lost husband. We can well imagine AnneBoleyn cutting short the regrets of some indiscreet courtier for SirThomas More in the very words of the text; Enough of this; I pray thee, hold thy peace. The "parlous knock" which left so big a lump upon the brow of the infantJuliet is evidently an allusion to the declaration of Elizabeth'sillegitimacy while yet in her cradle. The seal of bastardy set upon thebaby brow of Anne Boleyn's daughter may well be said to have "broken" it. The counsel of the Nurse to Juliet in Act iii. Scene 5 to forsake Romeofor Paris indicates the bias of the hierarchy in favour of Essex--"alovely gentleman"--rather than of the ultra-Protestant policy ofBurghley, who doubtless in the eyes of courtiers and churchmen was "adish-clout to him. " These were a few of the points, set down at random, which he had beenenabled to verify within the limits of a single play. They would sufficeto give an idea of the process by which, when applied in detail to everyone of Shakespeare's plays, he trusted to establish the secret historyand import of each, not less than the general sequence and significanceof all. Further instalments of this work would probably be issued in theforthcoming or future Transactions of the Newest Shakespeare Society; andit was confidently expected that the final monument of his research whenthoroughly completed and illustrated by copious appendices, would proveas worthy as any work of mere English scholarship could hope to be of aplace beside the inestimable commentaries of Gervinus, Ulrici, and thePolypseudocriticopantodapomorosophisticometricoglossematographicomaniacalCompany for the Confusion of Shakespeare and Diffusion of Verbiage(Unlimited). CHIMAERA BOMBINANS IN VACUO. NOTE. Mindful of the good old apologue regarding "the squeak of the real pig, "I think it here worth while to certify the reader of little faith, thatthe more incredibly impudent absurdities above cited are not so much orso often the freaks of parody or the fancies of burlesque as selectexcerpts and transcripts of printed and published utterances from the"pink soft litter" of a living brood--from the reports of an actualSociety, issued in an abridged and doubtless an emasculated form throughthe columns of a weekly newspaper. One final and unapproachableinstance, one transcendant and pyramidal example of classical taste andof critical scholarship, I did not venture to impair by transference fromthose columns and transplantation into these pages among humblerspecimens of minor monstrosity. Let it stand here once more on record as"a good jest for ever"--or rather as the best and therefore as the worst, as the worst and therefore as the best, of all possible bad jests ever tobe cracked between this and the crack of doom. Sophocles, said a learnedmember, was the proper parallel to Shakespeare among the ancienttragedians: AEschylus--hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth!--_AEschyluswas only a Marlowe_. The hand which here transcribes this most transcendant utterance haswritten before now many lines in verse and in prose to the honour andglory of Christopher Marlowe: it has never--be the humble avowal thusblushingly recorded--it has never set down as the writer's opinion thathe was only an AEschylus. In other words, it has never registered as mydeliberate and judicial verdict the finding that he was only the equal ofthe greatest among all tragic and all prophetic poets; of the man whocombined all the light of the Greeks with all the fire of the Hebrews;who varied at his will the revelation of the single gift of Isaiah withthe display of the mightiest among the manifold gifts of Shakespeare. Footnotes. {30} Reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his beautiful and valuable edition ofGreene's works. {33} One thing is certain: that damnable last scene at which the gorgerises even to remember it is in execution as unlike the crudest phase ofShakespeare's style as in conception it is unlike the idlest birth of hisspirit. Let us hope that so foul a thing could not have been done ineven tolerably good verse. {42} It is not the least of Lord Macaulay's offences against art that heshould have contributed the temporary weight of his influence as a criticto the support of so ignorant and absurd a tradition of criticism as thatwhich classes the great writer here mentioned with the brutal if "brawny"Wycherley--a classification almost to be paralleled with that which inthe days of our fathers saw fit to couple together the names of Balzacand of Sue. Any competent critic will always recognise in _The Way ofthe World_ one of the glories, in _The Country Wife_ one of thedisgraces, of dramatic and of English literature. The stains discernibleon the masterpiece of Congreve are trivial and conventional; the mereconception of the other man's work displays a mind so prurient andleprous, uncovers such an unfathomable and unimaginable beastliness ofimagination, that in the present age at least he would probably havefigured as a virtuous journalist and professional rebuker of poetic viceor artistic aberration. {63} Since this passage first went to press, I have received from Dr. Grosart the most happy news that he has procured a perfect copy of thisprecious volume, and will shortly add it to his occasional issues ofgolden waifs and strays forgotten by the ebb-tide of time. Not even thedisinterment of Robert Chester's "glorified" poem, with its appendedjewels of verse from Shakespeare's very hand and from others only lessgreat than Shakespeare's, all now at last reset in their strange originalframework, was a gift of greater price than this. {89} Compare with Beaumont's admirable farce of Bessus the wretchedimitation of it attempted after his death in the _Nice Valour_ ofFletcher; whose proper genius was neither for pure tragedy nor broadfarce, but for high comedy and heroic romance--a field of his owninvention; witness _Monsieur Thomas_ and _The Knight of Malta_: whileBeaumont has approved himself in tragedy all but the worthiest discipleof Shakespeare, in farce beyond all comparison the aptest pupil ofJonson. He could give us no _Fox_ or _Alchemist_; but the inventor ofBessus and Calianax was worthy of the esteem and affection returned tohim by the creator of Morose and Rabbi Busy. {92} A desperate attempt has been made to support the metrical argumentin favour of Fletcher's authorship by the production of a list in whichsuch words as _slavery, emperor, pitying, difference_, and even_Christians_, were actually registered as trisyllabic terminations. Tosuch unimaginable shifts are critics of the finger-counting or syllabicschool inevitably and fatally reduced in the effort to establish by ruleof thumb even so much as may seem verifiable by that rule in the provinceof poetical criticism. Prosody is at best no more than the skeleton ofverse, as verse is the body of poetry; while the gain of such painfullabourers in a field they know not how to till is not even a skeleton ofworthless or irrelevant fact, but the shadow of such a skeleton reflectedin water. It would seem that critics who hear only through their fingershave not even fingers to hear with. {108} "La dynastie du bon sens, inauguree dans Panurge, continuee dansSancho Panca, tourne a mal et avorte dans Falstaff. " (_WilliamShakespeare_, deuxieme partie, livre premier, ch. Ii, ) {125} Possibly some readers may agree with my second thoughts, inthinking that one exception may here be made and some surprise be hereexpressed at Shakespeare's rejection of Sly's memorable query--"When willthe fool come again, Sim?" It is true that he could well afford to spareit, as what could he not well afford to spare? but I will confess that itseems to me worthy of a place among his own Sly's most admirable andnotable sallies of humour. {129} _History of English Dramatic Poetry_, ed. 1879, vol. Ii. Pp. 437-447. In a later part of his noble and invaluable work (vol. Iii. P. 188)the author quotes a passage from "the induction to _A Warning for FairWomen_, 1599 (to which Shakespeare most assuredly contributed). " It willbe seen that I do not shrink from admitting the full weight of authoritywhich can be thrown into the scale against my own opinion. To such anassertion from the insolent organs of pretentious ignorance I should becontent with the simple rejoinder that Shakespeare most assuredly didnothing whatever of the sort; but to return such an answer in the presentcase would be to write myself down--and that in company to which I shouldmost emphatically object--as something very decidedly more--andworse--than an ass. {137} Not for the first and probably not for the last time I turn, withall confidence as with all reverence, for illustration and confirmationof my own words, to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured andlong lamented fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and finalestimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in theintellectual force of Honore de Balzac could only have been taken by theinevitable intuition and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of CharlesBaudelaire. Nothing could more aptly and perfectly illustrate thedistinction indicated in my text between unimaginative realism andimaginative reality. "I have many a time been astonished that to pass for an observer shouldbe Balzac's great popular title to fame. To me it had always seemed thatit was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. Allhis characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the highest ofthe aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in his _HumanComedy_ are keener after living, more active and cunning in theirstruggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous inenjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real worldshows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the veryscullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle withwill. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all the beings of the outerworld presented themselves to his mind's eye in strong relief and with atelling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures; hehas blackened their shadows and intensified their lights. Besides, hisprodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to seeeverything, to bring everything to sight, to guess everything, to makeothers guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly theprincipal lines, so as to preserve the perspective of the whole. Hereminds me sometimes of those etchers who are never satisfied with thebiting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines the mainscratches of the plate. From this astonishing natural disposition ofmind wonderful results have been produced. But this disposition isgenerally defined as Balzac's great fault. More properly speaking, it isexactly his great distinctive duality. But who can boast of being sohappily gifted, and of being able to apply a method which may permit himto invest--and that with a sure hand--what is purely trivial withsplendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing. " Nor was any very great thing done by the author of _A Warning for FairWomen_. {141} I do not know or remember in the whole radiant range ofElizabethan drama more than one parallel tribute to that paid in thisplay by an English poet to the yet foreign art of painting, through theeloquent mouth of this enthusiastic villain of genius, whom we mightregard as a more genuinely Titianic sort of Wainwright. The parallelpassage is that most lovely and fervid of all imaginative panegyrics onthis art, extracted by Lamb from the comedy of _Doctor Dodipoll_; whichsaw the light or twilight of publication just eight years later than_Arden of Feversham_. {154} I remember to have somewhere at some time fallen in with someremark by some commentator to some such effect as this: that it would besomewhat difficult to excuse the unwomanly violence of this demand. Doubtless it would. And doubtless it would be somewhat more thandifficult to extenuate the unmaidenly indelicacy of Jeanne Darc. {179} What would at least be partly lust in another man is all butpurely hatred in Iago. Now I do love her too: Not out of absolute lust, (though, peradventure, I stand accountant for as great a sin) But partly led to diet my revenge. For "partly" read "wholly, " and for "peradventure" read "assuredly, " andthe incarnate father of lies, made manifest in the flesh, here speaks allbut all the truth for once, to himself alone. {205} I add the proof in a footnote, so as to take up no more than asmall necessary space of my text with the establishment of a fact whichyet can seem insignificant to no mortal who has a human ear for lyricsong. Shakespeare's verse, as all the wide world knows, ends thus: But my kisses bring again, bring again, Seals of love, but sealed in vain, sealed in vain. The echo has been dropped by Fletcher, who has thus achieved theremarkable musical feat of turning a nightingale's note into a sparrow's. The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a jest compared tothe mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands of Fletcher: who therebyreduced the close of the first verse into agreement if not intoaccordance with the close of his own. This appended verse, as all theworld does not and need not know, ends thus: But first set my poor heart free, Bound in those icy chains by thee. Even an earless owner of fingers enough to count on may by their helpconvince himself of the difference in metre here. But not only does thelast line, with unsolicited and literally superfluous liberality, offerus a syllable over measure; the words are such as absolutely to defyantiphonal repetition or reverberation of the three last in either line. Let us therefore, like good scriptural scholars, according equally to theletter and the spirit of the text, render unto Fletcher the things whichbe Fletcher's, and unto Shakespeare the things which be Shakespeare's. {210} It is worth remark that in a still older sample of an older andruder form of play than can have been the very earliest mould in whichthe pristine or pre-Shakespearean model of _Pericles_ was cast, the partof Chorus here assigned to Gower was filled by a representative of hisfellow-poet Lydgate. {217} Except perhaps one little word of due praise for the prettyimitation or recollection of his dead friend Beaumont rather than ofShakespeare, in the description of the crazed girl whose "carelesstresses a wreath of bullrush rounded" where she sat playing with flowersfor emblems at a game of love and sorrow--but liker in all else toBellario by another fountain-side than to Ophelia by the brook of death. {220} On the 17th of September, 1864. {232} The once too celebrated crime which in this play was exhibited onthe public stage with the forcible fidelity of a wellnigh brutal realismtook actual place on the private stage of fact in the year 1604. Fouryears afterwards the play was published as Shakespeare's. Eight yearsmore, and Shakespeare was with AEschylus. {237} Written in 1879. {239} Capell has altered this to "proud perfumes"; marking the change ina note, with the scrupulous honesty which would seem to have usuallydistinguished him from more daring and more famous editors. {245a} The feeble archaic inversion in this line is one among many smallsigns which all together suffice, if not to throw back the date of thisplay to the years immediately preceding the advent of Marlowe or the fullinfluence of his genius and example, yet certainly to mark it as aninstance of survival from that period of incomposite and inadequateworkmanship in verse. {245b} Or than this play to a genuine work of Shakespeare's. "Brick tocoral"--these three words describe exactly the difference in tone andshade of literary colour. {246} Here for the first time we come upon a verse not unworthy ofMarlowe himself--a verse in spirit as in cadence recalling the deepoceanic reverberations of his "mighty line, " profound and just and simpleand single as a note of the music of the sea. But it would be hard if adevout and studious disciple were never to catch one passing tone of hismaster's habitual accent. --It may be worth while to observe that we findhere the same modulation of verse--common enough since then, but new tothe patient auditors of _Gorboduc_ and _Locrine_--which we find in thefinest passage of Marlowe's imperfect play of _Dido_, completed by Nashafter the young Master's untimely death. Why star'st thou in my face? If thou wilt stay, Leap in my arms: mine arms are open wide: If not--turn from me, and I'll turn from thee; For though thou hast the power to say farewell, I have not power to stay thee. But we may look long in vain for the like of this passage, taken from thecrudest and feeblest work of Marlowe, in the wide and wordy expanse of_King Edward III_. {247} A pre-Shakespearean word of single occurrence in a single play ofShakespeare's, and proper to the academic school of playwrights. {248} _The First Part of Tamburlaine the Great_, Act v. Sc. Ii. {252} It may be worth a remark that the word _power_ is constantly usedas a dissyllable; another note of archaic debility or insufficiency inmetre. {255} Yet another essentially non-Shakespearean word, though doubtlessonce used by Shakespeare; this time a most ungraceful Gallicism. {256} It may obviate any chance of mistake if I observe that here aselsewhere, when I mention the name that is above every name in Englishliterature, I refer to the old Shakespeare, and not to "the newShakspere"; a _novus homo_ with whom I have no acquaintance, and withwhom (if we may judge of a great--or a little--unknown after theappearance and the bearing of those who select him as a social sponsorfor themselves and their literary catechumens) I can most sincerelyassert that I desire to have none. {261} Surely, for _sweet'st_ we should read _swift'st_. {262a} This word occurs but once in Shakespeare's plays-- And speaking it, he wistly looked on me; (_King Richard II_. Act v. Sc. 4. ) and in such a case, as in the previous instances of the words _invocate_and _endamagement_, a mere [Greek text] can carry no weight of evidencewith it worth any student's consideration. {262b} This form is used four times by Shakespeare as the equivalent ofBretagne; once only, in one of his latest plays, as a synonym forBritain. {263a} Another word indiscoverable in any genuine verse ofShakespeare's, though not (I believe) unused on occasion by some amongthe poets contemporary with his earlier years. {263b} This word was perhaps unnecessarily altered by our good Capell to"tender. " {264a} Yet another and a singular misuse of a word never so used ormisused by Shakespeare. {264b} Qu. Why, so is your desire: If that the law, etc. ? {264c} _Sic_. I should once have thought it impossible that any mortalear could endure the shock of this unspeakable and incomparable verse, and find in the passage which contains it an echo or a trace of the"music, wit, and oracle" of Shakespeare. But in those days I had yet tolearn what manner of ears are pricked up to listen "when rank Thersitesopes his mastiff jaws" in criticism of Homer or of Shakespeare. In acorner of the preface to an edition of "Shakspere" which bears on itstitle-page the name (correctly spelt) of Queen Victoria's youngest sonprefixed to the name I have just transcribed, a small pellet of dry dirtwas flung upwards at me from behind by the "able editor" thus irritablyimpatient to figure in public as the volunteer valet or literary lackeyof Prince Leopold. Hence I gathered the edifying assurance that thisaspirant to the honours of literature in livery had been reminded of myhumbler attempts in literature without a livery by the congenial music ofcertain four-footed fellow-critics and fellow-lodgers of his own in theneighbourhood of Hampstead Heath. Especially and most naturally hadtheir native woodnotes wild recalled to the listening biped (whom partialnature had so far distinguished from the herd) the deep astonishment andthe due disgust with which he had discovered the unintelligible fact thatto men so ignorant of music or the laws of music in verse as mypresumptuous and pitiable self the test of metrical harmony lay not in anappeal to the fingers but only in an appeal to the ear--"the ear whichhe" (that is, which the present writer) "makes so much of--AND WHICHSHOULD BE LONG TO MEASURE SHAKSPERE. " Here then the great ShamShakespearean secret is out at last. Had I but known in time my lifelongerror in thinking that a capacity to estimate the refinements of word-music was not to be gauged by length of ear, by hairiness of ear, or bythickness of ear, but by delicacy of ear alone, I should as soon havethought of measuring my own poor human organs against those of thepatriarch or leader of the herd as of questioning his indisputable rightto lay down the law to all who agree with his great fundamentaltheorem--that the longest ear is the most competent to judge of metre. _Habemus confitentem asinum_. {266} A Latin pun, or rather a punning Latinism, not altogether out ofShakespeare's earliest line. But see the note preceding this one. {269} The simple substitution of the word "is" for the word "and" wouldrectify the grammar here--were that worth while. {270} Qu. So there is but one France, etc. ? {271} Non-Shakespearean. {273} I choose for a parallel Shakespeare's use of Plutarch in thecomposition of his Roman plays rather than his use of Hall and Holinshedin the composition of his English histories, because Froissart is a modelmore properly to be set against Plutarch than against Holinshed or Hall. {278} This brilliant idea has since been borrowed from the Chairman--andthat without acknowledgment--by one of those worthies whose mission it isto make manifest that no burlesque invention of mere man's device canimprove upon the inexhaustible capacities of Nature as shown in theproduction and perfection of the type irreverently described by Dryden as'God Almighty's fool. ' {279} This word was incomprehensibly misprinted in the first issue ofthe Society's Report, where it appeared as "foulness. " To preventmisapprehension, the whole staff of printers was at once discharged. {291} When the learned member made use of this remarkable phrase heprobably had in his mind the suggestive query of Agnes, _si les enfantsqu'on fait se faisaient pas l'oreille_? But the flower of rhetoric heregathered was beyond the reach of Arnolphe's innocent ward. Theprocreation in such a case is even more difficult for fancy to realisethan the conception.