A Study of Shakespeare (2024)

This ebook was prepared by Les Bowler.

PREFACE TO THIS EDITION

Begun in the winter of 1874, a first instalment of “A Studyof Shakespeare” appeared in the Fortnightly Review forMay 1875, and a second in the number for June 1876, but the completedwork was not issued in book form until June 1880. In a letterto me (January 31, 1875), Swinburne said:

“I am now at work on my long-designed essay orstudy on the metrical progress or development of Shakespeare, as traceableby ear and not by finger, and the general changes of tone andstages of mind expressed or involved in this change or progress of style.”

The book was produced at the moment when controversy with regardto the internal evidence of composition in the writings attributed toShakespeare was raging high, and the amusing appendices were added atthe last moment that they might infuriate the pedants of the New ShakespeareSociety. They amply fulfilled that amiable purpose.

EDMUNDGOSSE

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 everykind put forth in every sort of boat on a longer or a shorter voyageof research across the waters of that unsounded sea. From thepaltriest fishing-craft to such majestic galleys as were steered byColeridge and by Goethe, each division of the fleet has done or hasessayed its turn of work; some busied in dredging alongshore, some takingsurveys of this or that gulf or headland, some putting forth throughshine and shadow into the darkness of the great deep. Nor doesit seem as if there would sooner be an end to men’s labour onthis than on the other sea. But here a difference is perceptible.The material ocean has been so far mastered by the wisdom and the heroismof man that we may look for a time to come when the mystery shall bemanifest of its furthest north and south, and men resolve the secretof the uttermost parts of the sea: the poles also may find their Columbus.But the limits of that other ocean, the laws of its tides, the motiveof its forces, the mystery of its unity and the secret of its change,no seafarer of us all may ever think thoroughly to know. No wind-gaugewill help us to the science of its storms, no lead-line sound for usthe 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 quicksandson which many a seafarer has run his craft aground in time past, andothers of more special peril to adventurers of the present day.The chances of shipwreck vary in a certain degree with each new changeof vessel and each fresh muster of hands. At one time a main rockof offence on which the stoutest ships of discovery were wont to splitwas the narrow and slippery reef of verbal emendation; and upon thisour native pilots were too many of them prone to steer. Othersfell becalmed offshore in a German fog of philosophic theories, andwould not be persuaded that the house of words they had built in honourof Shakespeare was “dark as hell,” seeing “it hadbay-windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clear-stories towardsthe south-north were as lustrous as ebony.” These are notthe most besetting dangers of more modern steersmen: what we have toguard against now is neither a repetition of the pedantries of Steevensnor 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 ofsome importance has recently been proclaimed as with blare of vociferoustrumpets and flutter of triumphal flags; no less a discovery than this—thata singer must be tested by his song. Well, it is something thatcriticism should at length be awake to that wholly indisputable fact;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 picturesand a poet in his verse. To the common herd of students and loversof either art this may perhaps appear no great discovery; but that itshould at length have dawned even upon the race of commentators is asign which in itself might be taken as a presage of new light to comein an epoch of miracle yet to be. Unhappily it is as yet but apartial revelation that has been vouchsafed to them. To the recognitionof the apocalyptic fact that a workman can only be known by his work,and that without examination of his method and material that work canhardly be studied to much purpose, they have yet to add the knowledgeof a further truth no less recondite and abstruse than this; that asthe technical work of a painter appeals to the eye, so the technicalwork of a poet appeals to the ear. It follows that men who havenone are as likely to arrive at any profitable end by the applicationof metrical tests to the work of Shakespeare as a blind man by the applicationof his theory of colours to the work of Titian.

It is certainly no news to other than professional critics that nomeans of study can be more precious or more necessary to a student ofShakespeare than this of tracing the course of his work by the growthand development, through various modes and changes, of his metre.But the faculty of using such means of study is not to be had for theasking; it is not to be earned by the most assiduous toil, it is notto be secured by the learning of years, it is not to be attained bythe devotion of a life. No proficiency in grammar and arithmetic,no science of numeration and no scheme of prosody, will be here of theleast avail. Though the pedagogue were Briareus himself who wouldthus bring Shakespeare under the rule of his rod or Shelley within thelimit of his line, he would lack fingers on which to count the syllablesthat make up their music, the infinite varieties of measure that completethe changes and the chimes of perfect verse. It is but lost labourthat they rise up so early, and so late take rest; not a Scaliger orSalmasius of them all will sooner solve the riddle of the simplest thanof the subtlest melody. Least of all will the method of a scholiastbe likely to serve him as a clue to the hidden things of Shakespeare.For all the counting up of numbers and casting up of figures that awhole university—nay, a whole universe of pedants could accomplish,no teacher and no learner will ever be a whit the nearer to the havenwhere they would be. In spite of all tabulated statements andregulated summaries of research, the music which will not be dissectedor defined, the “spirit of sense” which is one and indivisiblefrom the body or the raiment of speech that clothes it, keeps safe thesecret of its sound. Yet it is no less a task than this that thescholiasts have girt themselves to achieve: they will pluck out theheart not of Hamlet’s but of Shakespeare’s mystery by themeans of a metrical test; and this test is to be applied by a purelyarithmetical process. It is useless to pretend or to protest thatthey work by any rule but the rule of thumb and finger: that they haveno ear to work by, whatever outward show they may make of unmistakableears, the very nature of their project gives full and damning proof.Properly understood, this that they call the metrical test is doubtless,as they say, the surest or the sole sure key to one side of the secretof Shakespeare; but they will never understand it properly who proposeto secure it by the ingenious device of numbering the syllables andtabulating the results of a computation which shall attest in exactsequence the quantity, order, and proportion of single and double endings,of rhyme and blank verse, of regular lines and irregular, to be tracedin each play by the horny eye and the callous finger of a pedant.“I am ill at these numbers”; those in which I have soughtto become an expert are numbers of another sort; but having, from wellnighthe first years I can remember, made of the study of Shakespeare thechief intellectual business and found in it the chief spiritual delightof my whole life, I can hardly think myself less qualified than anotherto offer an opinion on the metrical points at issue.

The progress and expansion of style and harmony in the successiveworks of Shakespeare must in some indefinite degree be perceptible tothe youngest as to the oldest, to the dullest as to the keenest of Shakespeareanstudents. But to trace and verify the various shades and gradationsof this progress, the ebb and flow of alternate influences, the delicateand infinite subtleties of change and growth discernible in the spiritand the speech of the greatest among poets, is a task not less beyondthe reach of a scholiast than beyond the faculties of a child.He who 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 separateæsthetic from scientific criticism by a strict line of demarcation,and to bring all critical work under one or the other head of this exhaustivedivision. Criticism without accurate science of the thing criticisedcan indeed have no other value than may belong to the genuine recordof a spontaneous impression; but it is not less certain that criticismwhich busies itself only with the outer husk or technical shell of agreat artist’s work, taking no account of the spirit or the thoughtwhich informs it, cannot have even so much value as this. Withoutstudy of his forms of metre or his scheme of colours we shall certainlyfail to appreciate or even to apprehend the gist or the worth of a painter’sor a poet’s design; but to note down the number of special wordsand cast up the sum of superfluous syllables used once or twice or twentytimes in the structure of a single poem will help us exactly as muchas a naked catalogue of the colours employed in a particular picture.A tabulated statement or summary of the precise number of blue or green,red or white draperies to be found in a precise number of paintingsby the same hand will not of itself afford much enlightenment to anybut the youngest of possible students; nor will a mere list of doubleor single, masculine or feminine terminations discoverable in a givenamount of verse from the same quarter prove of much use or benefit toan adult reader of common intelligence. What such an one requiresis the guidance which can be given by no metremonger or colour-grinder:the suggestion which may help him to discern at once the cause and theeffect of every choice or change of metre and of colour; which may showhim at one glance the reason and the result of every shade and of everytone which tends to compose and to complete the gradual scale of theirfinal harmonies. This method of study is generally accepted asthe only one applicable to the work of a great painter by any criticismworthy of the name: it should also be recognised as the sole methodby which the work of a great poet can be studied to any serious purpose.For the student it can be no less useful, for the expert it should beno less easy, to trace through its several stages of expansion and transfigurationthe genius of Chaucer or of Shakespeare, of Milton or of Shelley, thanthe genius of Titian or of Raffaelle, of Turner or of Rossetti.Some great artists there are of either kind in whom no such processof growth or transformation is perceptible: of these are Coleridge andBlake; from the sunrise to the sunset of their working day we can traceno demonstrable increase and no visible diminution of the divine capacitiesor the inborn defects of either man’s genius; but not of such,as a rule, are the greatest among artists of any sort.

Another rock on which modern steersmen of a more skilful hand thanthese are yet liable to run through too much confidence is the loveof their own conjectures as to the actual date or the secret historyof a particular play or passage. To err on this side requiresmore thought, more learning, and more ingenuity than we need think tofind in a whole tribe of finger-counters and figure-casters; but theoutcome of these good gifts, if strained or perverted to capricioususe, may prove no less barren of profit than the labours of a pedanton the letter of the text. It is a tempting exercise of intelligencefor a dexterous and keen-witted scholar to apply his solid learningand his vivid fancy to the detection or the interpretation of some newor obscure point in a great man’s life or work; but none the lessis it a perilous pastime to give the reins to a learned fancy, and letloose conjecture on the trail of any dubious crotchet or the scent ofany supposed allusion that may spring up in the way of its confidentand eager quest. To start a new solution of some crucial problem,to track some new undercurrent of concealed significance in a passagehitherto neglected or misconstrued, is to a critic of this higher classa delight as keen as that of scientific discovery to students of anothersort: the pity is that he can bring no such certain or immediate testto verify the value of his discovery as lies ready to the hand of theman of science. Whether he have lit upon a windfall or a mare’snest can be decided by no direct proof, but only by time and the generalacceptance of competent judges; and this cannot often be reasonablyexpected for theories which can appeal for support or confirmation tono positive evidence, but at best to a cloudy and shifting probability.What personal or political allusions may lurk under the text of Shakespearewe can never know, and should consequently forbear to hang upon a hypothesisof this floating and nebulous kind any serious opinion which might gravelyaffect our estimate of his work or his position in regard to other men,with whom some public or private interest may possibly have broughthim 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 and developmentof style, the outer and the inner changes of manner as of matter, ofmethod as of design, which may be discerned in the work of Shakespeare.The principle here adopted and the views here put forward have not beensuddenly discovered or lightly taken up out of any desire to make ashow of theoretical ingenuity. For years past I have held andmaintained, in private discussion with friends and fellow-students,the opinions which I now submit to more public judgment. How farthey may coincide with those advanced by others I cannot say, and havenot been careful to inquire. The mere fact of coincidence or ofdissent on such a question is of less importance than the principleaccepted by either student as the groundwork of his theory, the mainstayof his opinion. It is no part of my project or my hope to establishthe actual date of any among the various plays, or to determine pointby point the lineal order of their succession. I have examinedno table or catalogue of recent or of earlier date, from the time ofMalone onwards, with a view to confute by my reasoning the conclusionsof another, or by the assistance of his theories to corroborate my own.It is impossible to fix or decide by inner or outer evidence the preciseorder of production, much less of composition, which critics of thepresent or the past may have set their wits to verify in vain; but itis quite possible to show that the work of Shakespeare is naturallydivisible into classes which may serve us to distinguish and determineas by landmarks the several stages or periods of 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 but Shakespearehimself, I should be disposed to claim but little credit for a discoverywhich must in all likelihood have been forestalled by the common insightof some hundred or more students in time past. The difficultybegins with the really debatable question of subdivisions. Thereare certain plays which may be said to hang on the borderland betweenone period and the next, with one foot lingering and one advanced; andthese must be classed according to the dominant note of their style,the greater or lesser proportion of qualities proper to the earlieror the later stage of thought and writing. At one time I was inclinedto think the whole catalogue more accurately divisible into four classes;but the line of demarcation between the third and fourth would havebeen so much fainter than those which mark off the first period fromthe second, and the second from the third, that it seemed on the wholea more correct and adequate arrangement to assume that the last periodmight be subdivided if necessary into a first and second stage.This somewhat precise and pedantic scheme of study I have adopted fromno love of rigid or formal system, but simply to make the method ofmy critical process as clear as the design. That design is toexamine by internal evidence alone the growth and the expression ofspirit and of speech, the ebb and flow of thought and style, discerniblein the successive periods of Shakespeare’s work; to study thephases of mind, the changes of tone, the passage or progress from anold manner to a new, the reversion or relapse from a later to an earlierhabit, which may assuredly be traced in the modulations of his varyingverse, but can only be traced by ear and not by finger. I havebusied myself with no baseless speculations as to the possible or probabledate of the first appearance of this play or of that on the stage; andit is not unlikely that the order of succession here adopted or suggestedmay not always coincide with the chronological order of production;nor will the principle or theory by which I have undertaken to classthe successive plays of each period be affected or impaired though itshould chance that a play ranked by me as belonging to a later stageof work should actually have been produced earlier than others whichin my lists are assigned to a subsequent date. It is not, so tospeak, the literal but the spiritual order which I have studied to observeand to indicate: the periods which I seek to define belong not to chronologybut to art. No student need be reminded how common a thing itis to recognise in the later work of a great artist some partial reappearanceof his early tone or manner, some passing return to his early linesof work and to habits of style since modified or abandoned. Suchwork, in part at least, may properly be said to belong rather to theearlier stage whose manner it resumes than to the later stage at whichit was 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’ssummer of undecaying genius is the exquisite and crowning love-scenein the opera or “ballet-tragedy” of Psyche, writtenin his sixty-fifth year by the august Roman hand of Pierre Corneille;a lyric symphony of spirit and of song fulfilled with all the colourand all the music that autumn could steal from spring if October hadleave to go a Maying in some Olympian masquerade of melody and sunlight.And it is not easier, easy as it is, to discern and to define the threemain stages of Shakespeare’s work and progress, than to classifyunder their several heads the representative plays belonging to eachperiod by the law of their nature, if not by the accident of their date.There are certain dominant qualities which do on the whole distinguishnot only the later from the earlier plays, but the second period fromthe first, the third period from the second; and it is with these qualitiesalone that the higher criticism, be it æsthetic or scientific,has properly anything to do.

A new method of solution has been applied to various difficultieswhich have 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. Itis at least simple enough for the simplest of critics to apply or misapply:whenever they see or suspect an inequality or an incongruity which maybe wholly imperceptible to eyes uninured to the use of their spectacles,they assume at once the presence of another workman, the intrusion ofa stranger’s hand. This supposition of a double authorshipis naturally as impossible to refute as to establish by other than internalevidence and appeal to the private judgment or perception of the reader.But it is no better than the last resource of an empiric, the last refugeof a sciolist; a refuge which the soundest of scholars will be slowestto seek, a resource which the most competent of critics will be leastready to adopt. Once admitted as a principle of general application,there are no lengths to which it may not carry, there are none to whichit has not carried, the audacious fatuity and the arrogant incompetenceof tamperers with the authentic text. Recent editors who havetaken on themselves the high office of guiding English youth in itsfirst study of Shakespeare have proposed to excise or to obelise wholepassages which the delight and wonder of youth and age alike, of therawest as of the ripest among students, have agreed to consecrate asexamples of his genius at its highest. In the last trumpet-notesof Macbeth’s defiance and despair, in the last rallying cry ofthe hero reawakened in the tyrant at his utmost hour of need, therehave been men and scholars, Englishmen and editors, who have detectedthe alien voice of a pretender, the false ring of a foreign blast thatwas not blown by Shakespeare; words that for centuries past have touchedwith fire the hearts of thousands in each age since they were firstinspired—words with the whole sound in them of battle or a breakingsea, with the whole soul of pity and terror mingled and melted intoeach other in the fierce last speech of a spirit grown “awearyof the sun,” have been calmly transferred from the account ofShakespeare to the score of Middleton. And this, forsooth, thestudent of the future is to accept on the authority of men who bringto the support of their decision the unanswerable plea of years spentin the collation and examination of texts never hitherto explored andcompared with such energy of learned labour. If this be the issueof learning and of industry, the most indolent and ignorant of readerswho retains his natural capacity to be moved and mastered by the naturaldelight of contact with heavenly things is better off by far than themost studious and strenuous of all scholiasts who ever claimed acquiescenceor challenged dissent on the strength of his lifelong labours and hard-earnedknowledge of the letter of the text. Such an one is indeed “ina parlous state”; and any boy whose heart first begins to burnwithin him, who feels his blood kindle and his spirit dilate, his pulseleap and his eyes lighten, over a first study of Shakespeare, may sayto such a teacher with better reason than Touchstone said to Corin,“Truly, thou art damned; like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.”Nor could charity itself hope much profit for him from the moving appealand the pious prayer which temper that severity of sentence—“Wiltthou rest damned? God help thee, shallow man! God make incisionin thee! Thou art raw.” And raw he is like to remainfor all his learning, and for all incisions that can be made in thehorny hide of a self-conceit to be pierced by the puncture of no man’spen. It was bad enough while theorists of this breed confinedthemselves to the suggestion of a possible partnership with Fletcher,a possible interpolation by Jonson; but in the descent from these tothe alleged adulteration of the text by Middleton and Rowley we havesurely sounded the very lowest depth of folly attainable by the utmostalacrity in sinking which may yet be possible to the bastard brood ofScriblerus. For my part, I shall not be surprised though the nextdiscoverer should assure us that half at least of Hamlet is evidentlydue to the collaboration of Heywood, while the greater part of Othellois as clearly assignable to the hand of Shirley.

Akin to this form of folly, but less pernicious though not more profitable,is the fancy of inventing some share for Shakespeare in the compositionof plays which the veriest insanity of conjecture or caprice could notventure 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 proffersit with confident complacency for men’s acceptance. Hereagain I cannot but see a mere waste of fruitless learning and bootlessingenuity. That Shakespeare began by retouching and recastingthe work of elder and lesser men we all know; that he may afterwardshave set his hand to the task of adding or altering a line or a passagehere and there in some few of the plays brought out under his directionas manager or proprietor of a theatre is of course possible, but canneither be affirmed nor denied with any profit in default of the leastfragment of historic or traditional evidence. Any attempt to verifythe imaginary touch of his hand in plays of whose history we know nomore than that they were acted on the boards of his theatre can be buta diversion for the restless leisure of ingenious and ambitious scholars;it will give no clue by which the student who simply seeks to know whatcan be known with certainty of the poet and his work may hope to beguided towards any safe issue or trustworthy result. Less pardonableand more presumptuous than this is the pretension of minor critics todissect an authentic play of Shakespeare scene by scene, and assigndifferent parts of the same poem to different dates by the same pedagogicrules of numeration and mensuration which they would apply to the generalquestion of the order and succession of his collective works.This vivisection of a single poem is not defensible as a freak of scholarship,an excursion beyond the bounds of bare proof, from which the wanderermay chance to bring back, if not such treasure as he went out to seek,yet some stray godsend or rare literary windfall which may serve toexcuse his indulgence in the seemingly profitless pastime of a truantdisposition. It is a pure impertinence to affirm with oracularassurance what might perhaps be admissible as a suggestion offered withthe due diffidence of modest and genuine scholarship; to assert on thestrength of a private pedant’s personal intuition that such mustbe the history or such the composition of a great work whose historyhe alone could tell, whose composition he alone could explain, who gaveit to us as his genius had given it to him.

From these several rocks and quicksands I trust at least to keepmy humbler 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 thetheory of a double authorship or of a double date by which the supposedinequalities may be accounted for, the supposed difficulties may beswept away, which for certain readers disturb the study of certain playsof Shakespeare. Only where universal tradition and the generalconcurrence of all reasonable critics past and present combine to indicatean unmistakable difference of touch or an unmistakable diversity ofdate between 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 judgmentof men qualified to express and competent to defend an opinion, haveI thought it allowable to adopt this facile method of explanation.No scholar, for example, believes in the single authorship of Periclesor Andronicus; none, I suppose, would now question the part takenby some hireling or journeyman in the arrangement or completion forthe stage of Timon of Athens; and few probably would refuse toadmit a doubt of the total authenticity or uniform workmanship of theTaming of the Shrew. As few, I hope, are prepared to followthe fantastic and confident suggestions of every unquiet and arrogantinnovator who may seek to append his name to the long scroll of Shakespeareanparasites by the display of a brand-new hypothesis as to the uncertaindate or authorship of some passage or some play which has never beforebeen subjected to the scientific scrutiny of such a pertinacious analyst.The more modest design of the present study has in part been alreadyindicated, and will explain as it proceeds if there be anything in itworth explanation. It is no part of my ambition to loose the Gordianknots which others who found them indissoluble have sought in vain tocut in sunder with blunter swords than the Macedonian; but after somany adventures and attempts there may perhaps yet be room for an attemptyet unessayed; for a study by the ear alone of Shakespeare’s metricalprogress, and a study by light of the knowledge thus obtained of thecorresponsive progress within, which found expression and embodimentin these outward and visible changes. The one study will be thenseen to be the natural complement and the inevitable consequence ofthe other; and the patient pursuit of the simpler and more apprehensibleobject of research will appear as the only sure method by which a reasonableand faithful student may think to attain so much as the porch or entranceto that higher knowledge which no faithful and reasonable study of Shakespearecan ever for a moment fail to keep in sight as the haven of its finalhope, the goal of its ultimate labour.

When Christopher Marlowe came up to London from Cambridge, a boyin years, a man in genius, and a god in ambition, he found the stagewhich he was born to transfigure and re-create by the might and masterdomof his 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 imaginationso much of the rough and crumbling walls that fell before the trumpet-blastof Tamburlaine as may give us some conception of the rabble dynastyof rhymers whom he overthrew—of the citadel of dramatic barbarismwhich was stormed and sacked at the first charge of the young conquerorwho came to lead 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,and that vanished at his advent, we think usually of the rhyming playswritten wholly or mainly in ballad verse of fourteen syllables—ofthe Kings Darius and Cambyses, the Promos and Cassandraof Whetstone, or the Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes of George Peele.If we turn from these abortions of tragedy to the metrical farces whichmay fairly be said to contain the germ or embryo of English comedy (aform of dramatic art which certainly owes nothing to the father of ourtragic stage), we find far more of hope and promise in the broad freestretches of the flagellant head-master of Eton and the bibulous Bishopof Bath and Wells; and must admit that hands used to wield the crosieror the birch proved themselves more skilful at the lighter labours ofthe stage, more successful even in the secular and bloodless businessof a field neither clerical nor scholastic, than any tragic rival ofthe opposite party to that so jovially headed by Orbilius Udall andSilenus Still. These twin pillars of church and school and stagewere strong enough to support on the shoulders of their authority thefirst crude fabric or formless model of our comic theatre, while thetragic boards were still creaking and cracking under the jingling canterof Cambyses or the tuneless tramp of Gorboduc. Thisone play which the charity of Sidney excepts from his general anathemaon the nascent stage of England has hitherto been erroneously describedas written in blank verse; an error which I can only attribute to theprevalence of a groundless assumption that whatever is neither prosenor rhyme must of necessity be definable as blank verse. But themeasure, I must repeat, which was adopted by the authors of Gorboducis 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 lifein England at the birth of the shoemaker’s son who had but toopen his yet beardless lips, and the high-born poem which had Sackvilleto father and Sidney to sponsor was silenced and eclipsed for ever amongthe poor plebeian crowd of rhyming shadows that waited in death on thenoble nothingness of its patrician shade.

These, I suppose, are the first or the only plays whose names recurto the 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 hardlya sample is now extant, and which cannot be classed with such as these.The poets or rhymesters who supplied them had already seen good to clipthe cumbrous and bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run all toseed and weed, which jingled their thin bells at the tedious end offourteen weary syllables; and for this curtailment of the shamblingand sprawling lines which had hitherto done duty as tragic metre somecredit may be due to these obscure purveyors of forgotten ware for thesecond epoch of our stage: if indeed, as I presume, we may suppose thatthis reform, such as it was, had begun before the time of Marlowe; otherwise,no doubt, little credit would be due to men who with so high an examplebefore them were content simply to snip away the tags and fringes, topatch the seams and tatters, of the ragged coat of rhyme which theymight have exchanged for that royal robe of heroic verse wherewith hehad clothed the ungrown limbs of limping and lisping tragedy.But if these also may be reckoned among his precursors, the dismissalfrom stage service of the dolorous and drudging metre employed by theearliest school of theatrical rhymesters must be taken to mark a realstep in advance; and in that case we possess at least a single exampleof the rhyming tragedies which had their hour between the last playswritten wholly or partially in ballad metre and the first plays writtenin blank verse. The tragedy of Selimus, Emperor of the Turks,published in 1594, {30}may then serve to indicate this brief and obscure period of transition.Whole scenes of this singular play are written in rhyming iambics, somein the measure of Don Juan, some in the measure of Venus andAdonis. The couplets and quatrains so much affected and soreluctantly abandoned by Shakespeare after the first stage of his dramaticprogress are in no other play that I know of diversified by this alternatevariation of sesta with ottava rima. This may havebeen an exceptional experiment due merely to the caprice of one eccentricrhymester; but in any case we may assume it to mark the extreme limit,the ultimate development of rhyming tragedy after the ballad metre hadbeen happily exploded. The play is on other grounds worth attentionas a sign of the times, though on poetical grounds it is assuredly worthnone. Part of it is written in blank verse, or at least in rhymelesslines; so that after all it probably followed in the wake of Tamburlaine,half adopting and half rejecting the innovations of that fiery reformer,who wrought on the old English stage no less a miracle than Hernanion the French stage in the days of our fathers. That Selimuswas 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 yearof its publication, it undoubtedly in the main represents the work ofa prior era to the reformation of the stage by Marlowe. The levelregularity of its unrhymed scenes is just like that of the weaker portionsof Titus Andronicus and the First Part of King Henry the Sixth—theopening scene, for example, of either play. With Andronicusit has also in common the quality of exceptional monstrosity, a delightin the parade of mutilation as well as of massacre. It seems tome possible that the same hand may have been at work on all three plays;for that Marlowe’s is traceable in those parts of the two retouchedby Shakespeare which bear no traces of his touch is a theory to thefull as absurd as that which would impute to Shakespeare the chargeof their entire composition.

The revolution effected by Marlowe naturally raised the same cryagainst its author as the revolution effected by Hugo. That Shakespeareshould not at once have enlisted under his banner is less inexplicablethan it may seem. He was naturally addicted to rhyme, though ifwe put aside the Sonnets we must admit that in rhyme he never did anythingworth Marlowe’s Hero and Leander: he did not, like Marlowe,see at once that it must be reserved for less active forms of poetrythan the tragic drama; and he was personally, it seems, in oppositionto Marlowe and his school of academic playwrights—the band ofbards in which Oxford and Cambridge were respectively and so respectablyrepresented by Peele and Greene. But in his very first plays,comic or tragic or historic, we can see the collision and conflict ofthe two influences; his evil angel, rhyme, yielding step by step andnote by note to the strong advance of that better genius who came tolead him into the loftier path of Marlowe. There is not a singlepassage in Titus Andronicus more Shakespearean than the magnificentquatrain of Tamora upon the eagle and the little birds; but the restof the scene in which we come upon it, and the whole scene preceding,are in blank verse of more variety and vigour than we find in the baserparts of the play; and these if any scenes we may surely attribute toShakespeare. Again, the last battle of Talbot seems to me as undeniablythe master’s work as the scene in the Temple Gardens or the courtshipof Margaret by Suffolk; this latter indeed, full as it is of naturaland vivid grace, may perhaps not be beyond the highest reach of oneor two among the rivals of his earliest years of work; while as we arecertain that he cannot have written the opening scene, that he was atany stage of his career incapable of it, so may we believe as well ashope that he is guiltless of any complicity in that detestable partof the play which attempts to defile the memory of the virgin saviourof her country. {33}In style it is not, I think, above the range of George Peele at hisbest: and to have written even the last of those scenes can add butlittle discredit to the memory of a man already disgraced as the defamerof Eleanor of Castile; while it would be a relief to feel assured thatthere 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 find Shakespeare at work (so to speak) with both hands—withhis left hand of rhyme, and his right hand of blank verse. Theleft is loth to forego the practice of its peculiar music; yet, as theaction of the right grows freer and its touch grows stronger, it becomesmore and more certain that the other must cease playing, under painof producing mere discord and disturbance in the scheme of tragic harmony.We imagine that the writer must himself have felt the scene of the rosesto be pitched in a truer key than the noble scene of parting betweenthe old hero and his son on the verge of desperate battle and certaindeath. This is the last and loftiest farewell note of rhymingtragedy; still, in King Richard II, and in Romeo and Juliet,it struggles for awhile to keep its footing, but now more visibly invain. The rhymed scenes in these plays are too plainly the survivalsof a ruder and feebler stage of work; they cannot hold their own inthe new order with even such discordant effect of incongruous excellenceand inharmonious beauty as belongs to the death-scene of the Talbotswhen matched against the quarrelling scene of Somerset and York.Yet the briefest glance over the plays of the first epoch in the workof Shakespeare will suffice to show how protracted was the struggleand how gradual the defeat of rhyme. Setting aside the retouchedplays, we find on the list one tragedy, two histories, and four if notfive comedies, which the least critical reader would attribute to thisfirst epoch of work. In three of these comedies rhyme can hardlybe said to be beaten; that is, the rhyming scenes are on the whole equalto the unrhymed in power and beauty. In the single tragedy, andin one of the two histories, we may say that rhyme fights hard for life,but is undeniably worsted; that is, they contain as to quantity a largeproportion of rhymed verse, but as to quality the rhymed part bearsno proportion whatever to the unrhymed. In two scenes we may saythat the whole heart or spirit of Romeo and Juliet is summedup and distilled into perfect and pure expression; and these two arewritten in blank verse of equable and blameless melody. Outsidethe garden scene in the second act and the balcony scene in the third,there is much that is fanciful and graceful, much of elegiac pathosand fervid if fantastic passion; much also of superfluous rhetoric and(as it were) of wordy melody, which flows and foams hither and thitherinto something of extravagance and excess; but in these two there isno flaw, no outbreak, no superflux, and no failure. Throughoutcertain scenes of the third and fourth acts I think it may be reasonablyand reverently allowed that the river of verse has broken its banks,not as yet through the force and weight of its gathering stream, butmerely through the weakness of the barriers or boundaries found insufficientto confine it. And here we may with deference venture on a guesswhy Shakespeare was so long so loth to forego the restraint of rhyme.When he wrote, and even when he rewrote or at least retouched, his youngesttragedy he had not yet strength to walk straight in the steps of themighty master, but two months older than himself by birth, whose footnever from the first faltered in the arduous path of severer tragicverse. The loveliest of love-plays is after all a child of “hissalad 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 inthe scenes of vehement passion, of ardour and of agony, that we feelthe comparative weakness of a yet ungrown hand, the tentative uncertaingrasp of a stripling giant. The two utterly beautiful scenes arenot of this kind; they deal with simple joy and with simple sorrow,with the gladness of meeting and the sadness of parting love; but betweenand behind them come scenes of more fierce emotion, full of surprise,of violence, of unrest; and with these the poet is not yet (if I daresay so) quite strong enough to deal. Apollo has not yet put onthe sinews of Hercules. At a later date we may fancy or may findthat when the Herculean muscle is full-grown the voice in him whichwas as the voice of Apollo is for a passing moment impaired. InMeasure for Measure, where the adult and gigantic god has grappledwith the greatest and most terrible of energies and of passions, wemiss the music of a younger note that rang through Romeo and Juliet;but before the end this too revives, as pure, as sweet, as fresh, butricher now and deeper than its first clear notes of the morning, inthe 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 Romeoand Juliet; and not less perceptible is the perpetual inclinationof the poet to revert for help to rhyme, to hark back in search of supporttowards the half-forsaken habits of his poetic nonage. Feelinghis foothold 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 studentwho should wish to examine the conditions of the struggle at its heightmay be content to analyse the first act of this the first historicalplay of Shakespeare. As the tragedy moves onward, and the stylegathers strength while the action gathers speed,—as (to borrowthe phrase so admirably applied by Coleridge to Dryden) the poet’schariot-wheels get hot by driving fast,—the temptation of rhymegrows weaker, and the hand grows firmer which before lacked strengthto wave it off. The one thing wholly or greatly admirable in thisplay is the exposition of the somewhat pitiful but not unpitiable characterof King Richard. Among the scenes devoted to this exposition Iof course include the whole of the death-scene of Gaunt, as well thepart which precedes as the part which follows the actual appearanceof his nephew on the stage; and into these scenes the intrusion of rhymeis rare and brief. They are written almost wholly in pure andfluent rather than vigorous or various blank verse; though I cannotdiscern in any of them an equality in power and passion to the magnificentscene of abdication in Marlowe’s Edward II. Thisplay, I think, must undoubtedly be regarded as the immediate model ofShakespeare’s; and the comparison is one of inexhaustible interestto all students of dramatic poetry. To the highest height of theearlier master I do not think that the mightier poet who was as yetin great measure his pupil has ever risen in this the first (as I takeit) of his historic plays. Of composition and proportion he hasperhaps already a somewhat better idea. But in grasp of character,always excepting the one central figure of the piece, we find his handas yet the unsteadier of the two. Even after a lifelong studyof this as of all other plays of Shakespeare, it is for me at leastimpossible to determine what I doubt if the poet could himself haveclearly defined—the main principle, the motive and the meaningof such characters as York, Norfolk, and Aumerle. The Gavestonand the Mortimer of Marlowe are far more solid and definite figuresthan these; yet none after that of Richard is more important to thescheme 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 mostglorious of so many glorious passages put long afterwards by Shakespeareinto the mouth of his latest Roman hero. They “cannot holdthis visible shape” in which the poet at first presents them evenlong enough to leave a distinct image, a decisive impression for betteror for worse, upon the mind’s eye of the most simple and open-heartedreader. They are ghosts, not men; simulacra modis pallentiamiris. You cannot descry so much as the original intentionof the artist’s hand which began to draw and relaxed its holdof the brush before the first lines were fairly traced. And inthe last, the worst and weakest scene of all, in which York pleads withBolingbroke 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 havehoped) long since by the very glance of Marlowe’s Apollonian scorn.It would be easy, agreeable, and irrational to ascribe without furtherevidence than its badness this misconceived and misshapen scene to someother hand than Shakespeare’s. It is below the weakest,the rudest, the hastiest scene attributable to Marlowe; it is false,wrong, artificial beyond the worst of his bad and boyish work; but ithas a certain likeness for the worse to the crudest work of Shakespeare.It is difficult to say to what depths of bad taste the writer of certainpassages in Venus and Adonis could not fall before his geniusor his judgment was full-grown. To invent an earlier play on thesubject and imagine this scene a surviving fragment, a floating waifof that imaginary wreck, would in my opinion be an uncritical mode ofevading the question at issue. It must be regarded as the lasthysterical struggle of rhyme to maintain its place in tragedy; and theexplanation, I would fain say the excuse, of its reappearance may perhapsbe simply this; that the poet was not yet dramatist enough to feel foreach of his characters an equal or proportionate regard; to divide anddisperse his interest among the various crowd of figures which claimeach in its place, and each after its kind, fair and adequate shareof their creator’s attention and sympathy. His present interestwas here wholly concentrated on the single figure of Richard; and whenthat for the time was absent, the subordinate figures became to himbut heavy and vexatious encumbrances, to be shifted on and off the stagewith as much of haste and as little of labour as might be possible toan impatient and uncertain hand. Now all tragic poets, I presume,from Æschylus the godlike father of them all to the last aspirantwho may struggle after the traces of his steps, have been poets beforethey were tragedians; their lips have had power to sing before theirfeet had strength to tread the stage, before their hands had skill topaint or carve figures from the life. With Shakespeare it wasso as certainly as with Shelley, as evidently as with Hugo. Itis in the great comic poets, in Molière and in Congreve, {42}our own lesser Molière, so far inferior in breadth and depth,in tenderness and strength, to the greatest writer of the “greatage,” yet so near him in science and in skill, so like him inbrilliance and in force;—it is in these that we find theatricalinstinct twin-born with imaginative impulse, dramatic power with inventiveperception.

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 ofrhyme at least are fairly broken. This only of all Shakespeare’splays belongs absolutely to the school of Marlowe. The influenceof the elder master, and that influence alone, is perceptible from endto end. Here at last we can see that Shakespeare has decidedlychosen his side. It is as fiery in passion, as single in purpose,as rhetorical often though never so inflated in expression, as Tamburlaineitself. It is doubtless a better piece of work than Marlowe everdid; I dare not say, than Marlowe ever could have done. It isnot for any man to measure, above all is it not for any workman in thefield of tragic poetry lightly to take on himself the responsibilityor the authority to pronounce, what it is that Christopher Marlowe couldnot have done; but, dying as he did and when he did, it is certain thathe has not left us a work so generally and so variously admirable asKing Richard III. As certain is it that but for him thisplay could never have been written. At a later date the subjectwould have been handled otherwise, had the poet chosen to handle itat all; and in his youth he could not have treated it as he has withoutthe guidance and example of Marlowe. Not only are its highestqualities of energy, of exuberance, of pure and lofty style, of sonorousand successive harmonies, the very qualities that never fail to distinguishthose first dramatic models which were fashioned by his ardent hand;the strenuous and single-handed grasp of character, the motion and actionof combining and contending powers, which here for the first time wefind sustained with equal and unfaltering vigour throughout the lengthof a whole play, we perceive, though imperfectly, in the work of Marlowebefore we can trace them even as latent or infant forces in the workof Shakespeare.

In the exquisite and delightful comedies of his earliest period wecan hardly discern any sign, any promise of them at all. One onlyof these, the Comedy of Errors, has in it anything of dramaticcomposition and movement; and what it has of these, I need hardly remindthe most cursory of students, is due by no means to Shakespeare.What is due to him, and to him alone, is the honour of having embroideredon the naked old canvas of comic action those flowers of elegiac beautywhich vivify and diversify the scene of Plautus as reproduced by theart of Shakespeare. In the next generation so noble a poet asRotrou, whom perhaps it might not be inaccurate to call the French Marlowe,and who had (what Marlowe had not) the gift of comic as well as of tragicexcellence, found nothing of this kind and little of any kind to addto the old poet’s admirable but arid sketch of farcical incidentor accident. But in this light and lovely work of the youth ofShakespeare we find for the first time that strange and sweet admixtureof farce with fancy, of lyric charm with comic effect, which recursso often in his later work, from the date of As You Like It tothe date of the Winter’s Tale, and which no later poethad ventured to recombine in the same play till our own time had givenus, 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 simplicityof lyric or elegiac loveliness which fill and inform the scenes whereAdriana, her sister, and the Syracusan Antipholus exchange the expressionof their errors and their loves, belong to Shakespeare alone; and mayhelp us to understand how the young poet who at the outset of his divinecareer had struck into this fresh untrodden path of poetic comedy shouldhave been, as we have seen that he was, loth to learn from another andan alien teacher the hard and necessary lesson that this flowery pathwould never lead him towards the loftier land of tragic poetry.For as yet, even in the nominally or intentionally tragic and historicwork of the first period, we descry always and everywhere and stillpreponderant the lyric element, the fantastic element, or even the elegiacelement. All these queens and heroines of history and tragedyhave rather an Ovidian than a Sophoclean grace of bearing and of speech.

The example afforded by the Comedy of Errors would sufficeto show that rhyme, however inadequate for tragic use, is by no meansa bad instrument for romantic comedy. In another of Shakespeare’searliest works, which might almost be described as a lyrical farce,rhyme plays also a great part; but the finest passage, the real crownand flower of Love’s Labour’s Lost, is the praiseor apology of love spoken by Biron in blank verse. This is worthyof Marlowe for dignity and sweetness, but has also the grace of a lightand radiant fancy enamoured of itself, begotten between thought andmirth, a child-god with grave lips and laughing eyes, whose inspirationis nothing akin to Marlowe’s. In this as in the overtureof the play and in its closing scene, but especially in the noble passagewhich winds up for a year the courtship of Biron and Rosaline, the spiritwhich informs the speech of the poet is finer of touch and deeper oftone than in the sweetest of the serious interludes of the Comedyof Errors. The play is in the main a yet lighter thing, andmore 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’sLost the fancy for the most part runs wild as the wind, and thestructure of the story is as that of a house of clouds which the windbuilds and unbuilds at pleasure. Here we find a very riot of rhymes,wild and wanton in their half-grown grace as a troop of “youngsatyrs, tender-hoofed and ruddy-horned”; during certain sceneswe seem almost to stand again by the cradle of new-born comedy, andhear the first lisping and laughing accents run over from her baby lipsin bubbling rhyme; but when the note changes we recognise the speechof gods. For the first time in our literature the higher key ofpoetic or romantic comedy is finely touched to a fine issue. Thedivine instrument fashioned by Marlowe for tragic purposes alone hasfound at once its new sweet use in the hands of Shakespeare. Theway is prepared for As You Like It and the Tempest; thelanguage is discovered which will befit the lips of Rosalind and Miranda.

What was highest as poetry in the Comedy of Errors was mainlyin rhyme; all indeed, we might say, between the prelude spoken by Ægeonand the appearance in the last scene of his wife: in Love’sLabour’s Lost what was highest was couched wholly in blankverse; in the Two Gentlemen of Verona rhyme has fallen seeminglyinto abeyance, and there are no passages of such elegiac beauty as inthe former, of such exalted eloquence as in the latter of these plays;there is an even sweetness, a simple equality of grace in thought andlanguage which keeps the whole poem in tune, written as it is in a subduedkey of unambitious harmony. In perfect unity and keeping the compositionof this beautiful sketch may perhaps be said to mark a stage of advance,a new point of work attained, a faint but sensible change of manner,signalised by increased firmness of hand and clearness of outline.Slight and swift in execution as it is, few and simple as are the chordshere struck of character and emotion, every shade of drawing and everynote of sound is at one with the whole scheme of form and music.Here too is the first dawn of that higher and more tender humour whichwas never given in such perfection to any man as ultimately to Shakespeare;one touch of the by-play of Launce and his immortal dog is worth allthe bright fantastic interludes of Boyet and Adriano, Costard and Holofernes;worth even half the sallies of Mercutio, and half the dancing doggrelor broad-witted prose of either Dromio. But in the final poemwhich concludes and crowns the first epoch of Shakespeare’s work,the special graces and peculiar glories of each that went before aregathered together as in one garland “of every hue and every scent.”The young genius of the master of all our poets finds its consummationin the Midsummer Night’s Dream. The blank verse isas full, sweet, and strong as the best of Biron’s or Romeo’s;the rhymed verse as clear, pure, and true as the simplest and truestmelody of Venus and Adonis or the Comedy of Errors.But here each kind of excellence is equal throughout; there are hereno purple patches on a gown of serge, but one seamless and imperialrobe of a single dye. Of the lyric or the prosaic part, the counterchangeof loves and laughters, of fancy fine as air and imagination high asheaven, what need can there be for any one to shame himself by the helplessattempt to say some word not utterly unworthy? Let it sufficeus to accept this poem as the landmark of our first stage, and pauseto look back from it on what lies behind us of partial or of perfectwork.

The highest point attained in this first period lies in the domainof comedy 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 toits full strength and skill; its touch is not yet wholly assured, itswork not yet wholly blameless. Besides the plays undoubtedly andentirely due to the still growing genius of Shakespeare, we have takennote but of two among those which bear the partial imprint of his hand.The long-vexed question as to the authorship of the latter parts ofKing Henry VI., in their earlier or later form, has not beentouched upon; nor do I design to reopen that perpetual source of debateunstanchable and inexhaustible dispute by any length of scrutiny orinquisition of detail. Two points must of course be taken forgranted: that Marlowe was more or less concerned in the production,and Shakespeare in the revision of these plays; whether before or afterhis additions to the original First Part of King Henry VI. wecannot determine, though the absence of rhyme might seem to indicatea later date for the recast of the Contention. But it isnoticeable that the style of Marlowe appears more vividly and distinctlyin passages of the reformed than of the unreformed plays. Thosefamous lines, for example, which open the fourth act of the SecondPart of King Henry VI. are not to be found in the correspondingscene of the first part of the Contention; yet, whether theybelong to the original sketch of the play, or were inserted as an afterthoughtinto the revised and expanded copy, the authorship of these verses issurely unmistakable:—

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 inconceivablethat any imitator but one should have had the power so to catch thevery trick of his hand, the very note of his voice, and incredible thatthe one who might would have set himself to do so: for if this be notindeed the voice and this the hand of Marlowe, then what we find inthese verses is not the fidelity of a follower, but the servility ofa copyist. No parasitic rhymester of past or present days whofeeds his starveling talent on the shreds and orts, “the fragments,scraps, the bits and greasy relics” of another man’s board,ever uttered a more parrot-like note of plagiary. The very exactitudeof the repetition is a strong argument against the theory which attributesit to Shakespeare. That he had much at starting to learn of Marlowe,and that he did learn much—that in his earliest plays, and aboveall in his earliest historic plays, the influence of the elder poet,the echo of his style, the iteration of his manner, may perpetuallybe traced—I have already shown that I should be the last to question;but so exact an echo, so servile an iteration as this, I believe weshall nowhere find in them. The sonorous accumulation of emphaticepithets—as in the magnificent first verse of this passage—isindeed at least as much a note of the young Shakespeare’s styleas 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 saythat it is—no single verse detached from its context can weigha feather against the full and flawless evidence of the whole speech.And of all this there is nothing in the Contention; the scenethere opens in bald and flat nakedness of prose, striking at once intothe immediate matter of stage business without the decoration of a passingepithet or a single trope.

From this sample it might seem that the main difficulty must be todetect anywhere the sign-manual of Shakespeare, even in the best passagesof the revised play. On the other hand, it has not unreasonablybeen maintained that even in the next scene of this same act in itsoriginal form, and in all those following which treat of Cade’sinsurrection, there is evidence of such qualities as can hardly be ascribedto any hand then known but Shakespeare’s. The forcible realism,the simple vigour and lifelike humour of these scenes, cannot, it isurged, be due to any other so early at work in the field of comedy.A critic desirous to press this point might further insist on the likenessor identity of tone between these and all later scenes in which Shakespearehas taken on him to paint the action and passion of an insurgent populace.With him, it might too plausibly be argued, the people once risen inrevolt for any just or unjust cause is always the mob, the unwashedrabble, the swinish multitude; full as he is of wise and gracious tendernessfor individual character, of swift and ardent pity for personal suffering,he has no deeper or finer feeling than scorn for “the beast withmany heads” that fawn and butt at bidding as they are swayed bythe vain and violent breath of any worthless herdsman. For thedrovers who guide and misguide at will the turbulent flocks of theirmutinous cattle his store of bitter words is inexhaustible; it is atreasure-house of obloquy which can never be drained dry. Allthis, or nearly all this, we must admit; but it brings us no nearerto any but a floating and conjectural kind of solution. In theearliest form known to us of this play it should seem that we have tracesof Shakespeare’s handiwork, in the latest that we find evidenceof Marlowe’s. But it would be something too extravagantfor the veriest wind-sucker among commentators to start a theory thata revision was made of his original work by Marlowe after additionshad been made to it by Shakespeare; yet we have seen that the most unmistakablesigns of Marlowe’s handiwork, the passages which show most plainlythe personal and present seal of his genius, belong to the play onlyin 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 ofthe play in its unrevised state. Now the proposition that Shakespearewas the sole author of both plays in their earliest extant shape isrefuted at once and equally from without and from within, by evidenceof tradition 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,we have again the united witness of traditional and internal evidenceto warrant our belief: and that among the omissions of this imperfecttext were 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 Marlowewill admit that there is a single passage of tragic or poetic interestin either form of the text, which is beyond the reach of the fatherof English 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 mannerthan in Marlowe’s, and in the style of a later period than thatin which he was on the whole apparently content to reproduce or to emulatethe tragic manner of Marlowe, there is at least but this one exceptionto the general and absolute truth of the rule; and even this great tragicpassage is rather out of the range of Marlowe’s style than beyondthe scope of his genius. In the later as in the earlier versionof these plays, the one manifest excellence of which we have no reasonto suppose him capable is manifest in the comic or prosaic scenes alone.The first great rapid sketch of the dying cardinal, afterwards so noblyenlarged and perfected on revision by the same or by a second artist,is as clearly within the capacity of Marlowe as of Shakespeare; andin either edition of the latter play, successively known as The TrueTragedy of Richard Duke of York, as the Second Part of the Contention,and as the Third Part of King Henry VI., the dominant figurewhich darkens all the close of the poem with presage of a direr dayis drawn by the same strong hand in the same tragic outline. Fromthe first to the last stage of the work there is no mark of change orprogress here; the whole play indeed has undergone less revision, asit certainly needed less, than the preceding part of the Contention.Those great verses which resume the whole spirit of Shakespeare’sRichard—finer perhaps in themselves than any passage of the playwhich bears his name—are wellnigh identical in either form ofthe poem; but the reviser, with admirable judgment, has struck out,whether from his own text or that of another, the line which precedesthem 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 notedthat the erasure by which its effect is so singularly heightened withthe inborn skill of so divine an instinct is just such an alterationas would be equally likely to occur to the original writer on glancingover his printed text or to a poet of kindred power, who, while busiedin retouching and filling out the sketch of his predecessor, might bestruck by the opening for so great an improvement at so small a costof suppression. My own conjecture would incline to the beliefthat we have here a perfect example of the manner in which Shakespearemay be presumed, when such a task was set before him, to have dealtwith the text of Marlowe. That at the outset of his career hewas so employed, as well as on the texts of lesser poets, we have onall hands as good evidence of every kind as can be desired; proof onone side from the text of the revised plays, which are as certainlyin part the work of his hand as they are in part the work of another;and proof on the opposite side from the open and clamorous charge ofhis rivals, whose imputations can be made to bear no reasonable meaningbut this by the most violent ingenuity of perversion, and who presumablywere not persons of such frank imbecility, such innocent and infantinemalevolence, as to forge against their most dangerous enemy the pointlessand edgeless weapon of a charge which, if ungrounded, must have beeneasier to refute than to devise. Assuming then that in commonwith other young poets of his day he was thus engaged during the firstyears of his connection with the stage, we should naturally have expectedto find him handling the text of Marlowe with more of reverence andless of freedom than that of meaner men: ready, as in the Contention,to clear away with no timid hand their weaker and more inefficient work,to cancel and supplant it by worthier matter of his own; but when occupiedin recasting the verse of Marlowe, not less ready to confine his labourto such slight and skilful strokes of art as that which has led us intothis byway of speculation; to the correction of a false note, the additionof a finer touch, the perfection of a meaning half expressed or a toneof half-uttered music; to the invigoration of sense and metre by substitutionof the right word for the wrong, of a fuller phrase for one feebler;to the excision of such archaic and superfluous repetitions as are signsof a cruder stage of workmanship, relics of a ruder period of style,survivals of the earliest form or habit of dramatic poetry. Suchwork as this, however humble in our present eyes, which look beforeand after, would assuredly have been worthy of the workman and his task;an office no less fruitful of profit, and no more unbeseeming the pupilhand of the future master, than the subordinate handiwork of the youngRaffaelle or Leonardo on the canvas of Verrocchio or Perugino.

Of the doubtful or spurious plays which have been with more or lessshow of reason ascribed to this first period of Shakespeare’sart, I have here no more to say than that I purpose in the proper placeto take account of the only two among them which bear the slightesttrace of any possible touch of his hand. For these two there isnot, as it happens, the least witness of tradition or outward likelihoodwhich might warrant us in assigning them a place apart from the rest,and nearer the chance of reception into the rank that has been claimedfor them; while those plays in whose favour there is some apparent evidencefrom without, such as the fact of early or even original attributionto the master’s hand, are, with one possible exception, utterlybeyond the pale of human consideration as at any stage whatever theconceivable work of Shakespeare.

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 thatthere are some curious points of coincidence for evil as for good betweenthe fortunes of Shakespeare’s plays and the fortunes of his poems.In either case we find that some part at least of his earlier and inferiorwork has fared better at the blind hands of chance and the brutish handsof printers 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, atleast since the time of Coleridge, who as usual has said on this subjectthe first and the last word that need be said, it seems to me that fullysufficient notice and fully adequate examination have been expended;and that nothing at once new and true can now be profitably said inpraise or in dispraise of them. Of A Lover’s Complaint,marked as it is throughout with every possible sign suggestive of afar later date and a far different inspiration, I have only space orneed to remark that it contains two of the most exquisitely Shakespeareanverses ever vouchsafed to us by Shakespeare, and two of the most execrablyeuphuistic or dysphuistic lines ever inflicted on us by man. Uponthe Sonnets such a preposterous pyramid of presumptuous commentary haslong since been reared by the Cimmerian speculation and Bœotian“brain-sweat” of sciolists and scholiasts, that no modestman will hope and no wise man will desire to add to the structure orsubtract from it one single brick of proof or disproof, theorem or theory.As yet the one contemporary book which has ever been supposed to throwany direct or indirect light on the mystic matter remains as inaccessibleand unhelpful to students as though it had never been published fifteenyears earlier than the date of their publication and four years beforethe book in which Meres notices the circulation of Shakespeare’s“sugared sonnets among his private friends.” It wouldbe a most noble and thankworthy addition to a list of labours beyondpraise and benefits beyond price, if my honoured friend Dr. Grosartcould find the means to put a crown upon the achievements of his learningand a seal upon the obligations of our gratitude by the one inestimableboon long hoped for against hoping, and as yet but “a vision ina 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 andexpelled from its station at the far end of Shakespeare’s poems.What Coleridge said of Ben Jonson’s epithet for “turtle-footedpeace,” we may say of the label affixed to this rag-picker’sbag of stolen goods: The Passionate Pilgrim is a pretty title,a very pretty title; pray what may it mean? In all the larcenouslittle bundle of verse there is neither a poem which bears that namenor a poem by which that name would be bearable. The publisherof the booklet was like “one Ragozine, a most notorious pirate”;and the method no less than the motive of his rascality in the presentinstance is palpable and simple enough. Fired by the immediateand instantly proverbial popularity of Shakespeare’s Venusand Adonis, he hired, we may suppose, some ready hack of uncleanhand to supply him with three doggrel sonnets on the same subject, noticeableonly for their porcine quality of prurience: he procured by some meansa rough copy or an incorrect transcript of two genuine and unpublishedsonnets by Shakespeare, which with the acute instinct of a felonioustradesman he laid atop of his worthless wares by way of gilding to theirbase metal: he stole from the two years published text of Love’sLabour’s Lost, and reproduced with more or less mutilationor corruption, the sonnet of Longavile, the “canzonet” ofBiron, and the far lovelier love-song of Dumaine. The rest ofthe ragman’s gatherings, with three most notable exceptions, islittle better for the most part than dry rubbish or disgusting refuse;unless a plea may haply be put in for the pretty commonplaces of thelines on a “sweet rose, fair flower,” and so forth; forthe couple of thin and pallid if tender and tolerable copies of verseon “Beauty” and “Good Night,” or the passablylight and lively stray of song on “crabbed age and youth.”I need not say that those three exceptions are the stolen and garbledwork of Marlowe and of Barnfield, our elder Shelley and our first-bornKeats; the singer of Cynthia in verse well worthy of Endymion, who wouldseem to have died as a poet in the same fatal year of his age that Keatsdied as a man; the first adequate English laureate of the nightingale,to be supplanted or equalled by none until the advent of his mightierbrother.

II.

The second period is that of perfection in comic and historic style.The final heights and depths of tragedy, with all its reach of thoughtand all its pulse of passion, are yet to be scaled and sounded; butto this stage belongs the special quality of faultless, joyous, facilecommand upon each faculty required of the presiding genius for serviceor for sport. It is in the middle period of his work that thelanguage of Shakespeare is most limpid in its fullness, the style mostpure, the thought most transparent through the close and luminous raimentof perfect expression. The conceits and crudities of the firststage are outgrown and cast aside; the harshness and obscurity whichat times may strike us as among the notes of his third manner have asyet no place in the flawless work of this second stage. That whichhas to be said is not yet too great for perfection of utterance; passionhas not yet grappled with thought in so close and fierce an embraceas to strain and rend the garment of words, though stronger and subtlerthan ever was woven of human speech. Neither in his first norin his last stage would the style of Shakespeare, even were it possibleby study to reproduce it, be of itself a perfect and blameless model;but his middle style, that in which the typical plays of his secondperiod are written, would be, if it were possible to imitate, the mostabsolute pattern that could be set before man. I do not speakof mere copyist’s work, the parasitic knack of retailing castphrases, tricks and turns of accent, cadences and catchwords properonly to the natural manner of the man who first came by instinct uponthem, and by instinct put them to use; I speak of that faithful andfruitful discipleship of love with which the highest among poets andthe most original among workmen have naturally been always the firstto study and the most earnest to follow the footsteps of their greatestprecursors 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 ruleof poetic order if not by date of actual succession, the greatest ofhis English histories and four of his greatest and most perfect comedies;the four greatest we might properly call them, reserving for anotherclass the last divine triad of romantic plays which it is alike inaccurateto number among tragedies or comedies proper: the Winter’sTale, Cymbeline, and the Tempest, which belong ofcourse wholly to his last manner, or, if accuracy must be strained evento pedantry, to the second manner of his third or final stage.A single masterpiece which may be classed either among histories ortragedies belongs to the middle period; and to this also we must refer,if not the ultimate form, yet assuredly the first sketch at least ofthat which is commonly regarded as the typical and supreme work of Shakespeare.Three lesser comedies, one of them in great part the recast or ratherthe transfiguration of an earlier poet’s work, complete the listof plays assignable to the second epoch of his genius.

The ripest fruit of historic or national drama, the consummationand the crown of Shakespeare’s labours in that line, must of coursebe recognised and saluted by all students in the supreme and sovereigntrilogy of King Henry IV. and King Henry V. On a lower degreeonly than this final and imperial work we find the two chronicle historieswhich remain to be classed. In style as in structure they bearwitness of a power less perfect, a less impeccable hand. Theyhave less of perceptible instinct, less of vivid and vigorous utterance;the breath of their inspiration is less continuous and less direct,the fashion of their eloquence is more deliberate and more prepense;there is more of study and structure apparent in their speech, and lessin their general scheme of action. Of all Shakespeare’splays they are the most rhetorical; there is more talk than song inthem, less poetry than oratory; more finish than form, less movementthan incident. Scene is laid upon scene, and event succeeds event,as stone might be laid on stone and story might succeed story in a buildingreared by mere might of human handiwork; not as in a city or templewhose walls had risen of themselves to the lyric breath and stroke ofa greater than Amphion; moulded out of music by no rule or line of mortalmeasure, with no sound of axe or anvil, but only of smitten strings:built by harp and not by hand.

The lordly structure of these poems is the work of a royal workman,full of masterdom and might, sublime in the state and strength of itsmany mansions, but less perfect in proportion and less aërial inbuild than the very highest fabrics fashioned after their own greatwill by the supreme architects of song. Of these plays, and ofthese alone among the maturer works of Shakespeare, it may be said thatthe best parts are discernible from the rest, divisible by analysisand separable by memory from the scenes which precede them or followand the characters which surround them or succeed. Constance andKatherine rise up into remembrance apart from their environment andabove it, stand clear in our minds of the crowded company with whichthe poet has begirt their central figures. In all other of hisgreat tragic works,—even in Hamlet, if we have grace andsense to read it aright and not awry,—it is not of any singleperson or separate passage that we think when we speak of it; it isto the whole masterpiece that the mind turns at mention of its name.The one entire and perfect chrysolite of Othello is neither Othellonor Desdemona nor Iago, but each and all; the play of Hamletis more than Hamlet himself, the poem even here is too great to be resumedin the person. But Constance is the jewel of King John,and Katherine is the crowning blossom of King Henry VIII.—afuneral flower as of “marigolds on death-beds blowing,”an opal of as pure water as “tears of perfect moan,” withfitful fire at its heart, ominous of evil and sorrow, set in a mourningband of jet on the forefront of the poem, that the brow so circled may,“like to a title-leaf, foretell the nature of a tragic volume.”Not indeed that without these the ground would in either case be barren;but that in either field our eye rests rather on these and other separateears of wheat that overtop the ranks, than on the waving width of thewhole harvest at once. In the one play our memory turns next tothe figures of Arthur and the Bastard, in the other to those of Wolseyand his king: the residue in either case is made up of outlines morelightly and slightly drawn. In two scenes the figure of King Johnrises indeed to the highest height even of Shakespearean tragedy; forthe rest of the play the lines of his character are cut no deeper, thefeatures of his personality stand out in no sharper relief, than thoseof Eleanor or the French king; but the scene in which he tempts Hubertto the 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 poetsave Dante alone, since the reign of the Greek tragedians. Thecunning and profound simplicity of the few last weighty words whichdrop like flakes of poison that blister where they fall from the deadlylips of the king is a new quality in our tragic verse; there was noforetaste of such a thing in the passionate imagination which clotheditself in the mighty music of Marlowe’s burning song. Theelder master might indeed have written the magnificent speech whichushers in with gradual rhetoric and splendid reticence the black suggestionof a deed without a name; his hand might have woven with no less imperialskill the elaborate raiment of words and images which wraps up in foldupon fold, as with swaddling-bands of purple and golden embroidery,the shapeless and miscreated birth of a murderous purpose that laboursinto light even while it loathes the light and itself; but only Shakespearecould give us the first sample of that more secret and terrible knowledgewhich reveals itself in the brief heavy whispers that seal the commissionand sign the warrant of the king. Webster alone of all our tragicpoets has had strength to emulate in this darkest line of art the handiworkof his master. We find nowhere such an echo or reflection of thespirit of this scene as in the last tremendous dialogue of Bosola withFerdinand in the house of murder and madness, while their spotted soulsyet flutter between conscience and distraction, hovering for an houras with broken wings on the confines of either province of hell.One pupil at least could put to this awful profit the study of so greata model; but with the single and sublime exception of that other designfrom the same great hand, which bares before us the mortal anguish ofBracciano, no copy or imitation of the scene in which John dies by poisonhas ever come near enough to evade the sentence it provokes. Theshrill tremulous agony of Fletcher’s Valentinian is to the sullenand slow death-pangs of Shakespeare’s tyrant as the babble ofa suckling to the accents of a man. As far beyond the reach ofany but his maker’s hand is the pattern of a perfect English warrior,set once for all before the eyes of all ages in the figure of the nobleBastard. The national side of Shakespeare’s genius, theheroic vein of patriotism that runs like a thread of living fire throughthe world-wide range of his omnipresent spirit, has never, to my thinking,found vent or expression to such glorious purpose as here. Noteven in Hotspur or Prince Hal has he mixed with more godlike sleightof hand all the lighter and graver good qualities of the national character,or compounded of them all so lovable a nature as this. In thoseothers we admire and enjoy the same bright fiery temper of soul, thesame buoyant and fearless mastery of fate or fortune, the same gladnessand glory of life made lovely with all the labour and laughter of itsfull fresh days; but no quality of theirs binds our hearts to them asthey are bound to Philip—not by his loyal valour, his keen youngwit, his kindliness, constancy, readiness of service as swift and surein the day of his master’s bitterest shame and shamefullest troubleas in the blithest hour of battle and that first good fight which wonback his father’s spoils from his father’s slayer; but morethan all these, for that lightning of divine rage and pity, of tendernessthat speaks in thunder and indignation that makes fire of its tears,in the horror of great compassion which falls on him, the tempest andstorm of a beautiful and godlike anger which shakes his strength ofspirit and bows his high heart down at sight of Arthur dead. Beingthus, as he is, the English masterwork of Shakespeare’s hand,we may well accept him as the best man known to us that England evermade; the hero that Nelson must have been had he never come too nearNaples.

I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare’s Arthur; thereare one or two figures in the world of his work of which there are nowords that would be fit or good to say. Another of these is Cordelia.The place they have in our lives and thoughts is not one for talk; theniche set apart for them to inhabit in our secret hearts is not penetrableby the lights and noises of common day. There are chapels in thecathedral of man’s highest art as in that of his inmost life,not made to be set open to the eyes and feet of the world. Loveand death and memory keep charge for us in silence of some beloved names.It is the crowning glory of genius, the final miracle and transcendentgift of poetry, that it can add to the number of these, and engraveon the very heart of our remembrance fresh names and memories of itsown creation.

There is one younger child in this heavenly family of Shakespeare’swho sits side by side with Arthur in the secret places of our thought;there are but two or three that I remember among the children of otherpoets who may be named in the same year with them: as Fletcher’sHengo, Webster’s Giovanni, and Landor’s Cæsarion.Of this princely trinity of boys the “bud of Britain” isas yet the most famous flower; yet even in the broken words of childishheroism that falter on his dying lips there is nothing of more poignantpathos, more “dearly sweet and bitter,” than Giovanni’stalk of his dead mother and all her sleepless nights now ended for everin a sleep beyond tears or dreams. Perhaps the most nearly faultlessin finish and proportion of perfect nature among all the noble threeis Landor’s portrait of the imperial and right Roman child ofCæsar and Cleopatra. I know not but this may be found inthe judgment of men to come wellnigh the most pathetic and heroic figurebequeathed us after more than eighty years of a glorious life by theindomitable genius of our own last Roman and republican poet.

We have come now to that point at the opening of the second stagein his work where the supreme genius of all time begins first to meddlewith the mysteries and varieties of human character, to handle its finerand more subtle qualities, to harmonise its more untuned and jarringdiscords; giving here and thus the first proof of a power never sharedin like measure by the mightiest among the sons of men, a sovereignand serene capacity to fathom the else unfathomable depths of spiritualnature, to solve its else insoluble riddles, to reconcile its else irreconcilablediscrepancies. In his first stage Shakespeare had dropped hisplummet no deeper into the sea of the spirit of man than Marlowe hadsounded before him; and in the channel of simple emotion no poet couldcast surer line with steadier hand than he. Further down in thedark and fiery depths of human pain and mortal passion no soul couldsearch than his who first rendered into speech the aspirations and theagonies of a ruined and revolted spirit. And until Shakespearefound in himself the strength of eyesight to read and the cunning ofhandiwork to render those wider diversities of emotion and those furthercomplexities of character which lay outside the range of Marlowe, hecertainly cannot be said to have outrun the winged feet, outstrippedthe fiery flight of his forerunner. In the heaven of our tragicsong the first-born star on the forehead of its herald god was not outshonetill the full midsummer meridian of that greater godhead before whomhe was sent to prepare a pathway for the sun. Through all theforenoon of our triumphant day, till the utter consummation and ultimateascension of dramatic poetry incarnate and transfigured in the master-singerof the world, the quality of his tragedy was as that of Marlowe’s,broad, single, and intense; large of hand, voluble of tongue, directof purpose. With the dawn of its latter epoch a new power comesupon it, to find clothing and expression in new forms of speech andafter a new style. The language has put off its foreign decorationsof lyric and elegiac ornament; it has found already its infinite gainin the loss of those sweet superfluous graces which encumbered the marchand enchained the utterance of its childhood. The figures whichit invests are now no more the types of a single passion, the incarnationsof a single thought. They now demand a scrutiny which tests thepower of a mind and tries the value of a judgment; they appeal to somethingmore than the instant apprehension which sufficed to respond to theimmediate 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 andits triumphant tragedy shall recall other things beyond number—allthe forces 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 all nationsand kingdoms of the earth.

The same truth holds good in lighter matters; Biron and Rosalinein comedy are as simply lovers and no more as were their counterpartsand coevals in tragedy: there is more in Benedick and Beatrice thanthis simple quality of love that clothes itself in the strife of wits;the injury done her cousin, which by the repercussion of its shock andrefraction of its effect serves to transfigure with such adorable indignationand ardour of furious love and pity the whole bright light nature ofBeatrice, serves likewise by a fresh reflection and counterchange ofits consequence to exalt and enlarge the stature of her lover’sspirit after a fashion beyond the reach of Shakespeare in his firststage. 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 thisis all. But the character of the Bastard, clear and simple asbroad sunlight though it be, has in it other features than this singleand beautiful 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 witnessto the full-grown perfection of his creator’s power and skillas the touch that combines and fuses into absolute unity of concordthe high and various elements of faith in England, loyalty to the wretchedlord who has made him knight and acknowledged him kinsman, contemptfor his abjection at the foul feet of the Church, abhorrence of hiscrime and constancy to his cause for something better worth the proofof war than his miserable sake who hardly can be roused, even by suchexhortation as might put life and spirit into the dust of dead men’sbones, to bid his betters stand and strike in defence of the countrydishonoured by his reign.

It is this new element of variety in unity, this study of the complexand diverse shades in a single nature, which requires from any criticismworth attention some inquisition of character as complement to the investigationof style. Analysis of any sort would be inapplicable to the actorswho bear their parts in the comic, the tragic or historic plays of thefirst period. There is nothing in them to analyse; they are, aswe have seen, like all the characters represented by Marlowe, the embodimentsor the exponents of single qualities and simple forces. The questionof style also is therefore so far a simple question; but with the changeand advance in thought and all matter of spiritual study and speculationthis question also becomes complex, and inseparable, if we would pursueit to any good end, from the analysis of character and subject.In the debate on which we are now to enter, the question of style andthe question of character, or as we might say the questions of matterand of spirit, are more than ever indivisible from each other, moreinextricably inwoven than elsewhere into the one most difficult questionof authorship which has ever been disputed in the dense and noisy schoolor fought out in the wide and windy field of Shakespearean controversy.

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 theoryas to the play of King Henry VIII. None such has ever yetbeen offered; and I certainly cannot pretend to supply one. Perhapshowever it may be possible to do some service by an attempt to disprovewhat is untenable, even though it should not be possible to producein its stead any positive proof of what we may receive as matter ofabsolute faith.

The veriest tiro in criticism who knows anything of the subject inhand must perceive, what is certainly not beyond a schoolboy’srange of vision, that the metre and the language of this play are ingreat part so like the language and the metre of Fletcher that the firstand easiest inference would be to assume the partnership of that poetin the work. In former days it was Jonson whom the critics andcommentators of their time saw good to select as the colleague or theeditor of Shakespeare; but a later school of criticism has resignedthe notion that the fifth act was retouched and adjusted by the authorof Volpone to the taste of his patron James. The latertheory is more plausible than this; the primary objection to it is thatit is too facile and superficial. It is waste of time to pointout with any intelligent and imaginative child with a tolerable earfor metre who had read a little of the one and the other poet couldsee for himself—that much of the play is externally as like theusual style of Fletcher as it is unlike the usual style of Shakespeare.The question is whether we can find one scene, one speech, one passage,which in spirit, in scope, in purpose, bears the same or any comparableresemblance to the work of Fletcher. I doubt if any man more warmlyadmires a poet whom few can have studied more thoroughly than I; andto whom, in spite of all sins of omission and commission,—andmany and grievous they are, beyond the plenary absolution of even themost indulgent among critical confessors—I constantly return witha fresh sense of attraction, which is constantly rewarded by a freshsense of gratitude and delight. It is assuredly from no wish topluck a leaf from his laurel, which has no need of foreign grafts orstolen garlands from the loftier growth of Shakespeare’s, thatI venture to question his capacity for the work assigned to him by recentcriticism. The speech of Buckingham, for example, on his way toexecution, is of course at first sight very like the finest speechesof the kind in Fletcher; here is the same smooth and fluent declamation,the same prolonged and persistent melody, which if not monotonous iscertainly not various; the same pure, lucid, perspicuous flow of simplerather than strong and elegant rather than exquisite English; and yet,if we set it against the best examples of the kind which may be selectedfrom such tragedies as Bonduca or The False One, againstthe rebuke addressed by Caratach to his cousin or by Cæsar tothe murderers of Pompey—and no finer instances of tragic declamationcan be chosen from the work of this great master of rhetorical dignityand pathos—I cannot but think we shall perceive in it a comparativeseverity and elevation which will be missed when we turn back from itto the text of Fletcher. There is an aptness of phrase, an abstinencefrom excess, a “plentiful lack” of mere flowery and superfluousbeauties, which we may rather wish than hope to find in the most famousof Shakespeare’s successors. But if not his work, we maybe sure it was his model; a model which he often approached, which heoften studied, but which he never attained. It is never for absolutetruth and fitness of expression, it is always for eloquence and sweetness,for fluency and fancy, that we find the tragic scenes of Fletcher mostpraiseworthy; and the motive or mainspring of interest is usually anythingbut natural or simple. Now the motive here is as simple, the emotionas natural as possible; the author is content to dispense with all theviolent or far-fetched or fantastic excitement from which Fletcher couldhardly ever bring himself completely to abstain. I am not speakinghere of those tragedies in which the hand of Beaumont is traceable;to these, I need hardly say, the charge is comparatively inapplicablewhich may fairly be brought against the unassisted works of his eldercolleague; but in any of the typical tragedies of Fletcher, in Thierryand Theodoret, in Valentinian, in The Double Marriage,the scenes 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 foundmore beautiful, many more exciting; the famous interview of Thierrywith the veiled Ordella, and the scene answering to this in the fifthact where Brunhalt is confronted with her dying son, will be at onceremembered by all dramatic students; and the parts of Lucina and Julianamay each be described as a continuous arrangement of passionate andpathetic effects. But in which of these parts and in which ofthese plays shall we find a scene so simple, an effect so modest, asituation so unforced as here? where may we look for the same temperanceof tone, the same control of excitement, the same steadiness of purpose?If indeed Fletcher could have written this scene, or the farewell ofWolsey to his greatness, or his parting scene with Cromwell, he wasperhaps not a greater poet, but he certainly was a tragic writer capableof loftier self-control and severer self-command, than he has ever shownhimself 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 associatehad for once lifted the natural genius of Fletcher above itself.But the fine and subtle criticism of Mr. Spedding has in the main, Ithink, successfully and clearly indicated the lines of demarcation undeniablydiscernible in this play between the severer style of certain scenesor speeches 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 in expression.If under the latter head we had to class such passages only as the dyingspeech of Buckingham and the christening speech of Cranmer, it mightafter all be almost impossible to resist the internal evidence of Fletcher’shandiwork. Certainly we hear the same soft continuous note ofeasy eloquence, level and limpid as a stream of crystalline transparence,in the plaintive adieu of the condemned statesman and the panegyricalprophecy of the favoured prelate. If this, I say, were all, wemight 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 noless a consequence than this: that we must assign to the same hand thecrowning glory of the whole poem, the death-scene of Katherine.Now if Fletcher could have written that scene—a scene on whichthe only criticism ever passed, the only commendation ever bestowed,by the verdict 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 beenso grossly wronged, so shamefully defrauded of its highest claim tohonour. But, with all reverence for that memory, I must confessthat I cannot bring myself to believe it. Any explanation appearsto me more probable than this. Considering with what care everyrelic of his work was once and again collected by his posthumous editors—evento the attribution, not merely of plays in which he can have taken onlythe slightest part, but of plays in which we know that he had no shareat all—I cannot believe that his friends would have let by farthe brightest jewel in his crown rest unreclaimed in the then less populartreasure-house of Shakespeare. Belief or disbelief of this kindis however but a sandy soil for conjecture to build upon. Whetheror not his friends would have reclaimed for him the credit of this scene,had they known it (as they must have known it) to be his due, I mustrepeat that such a miraculous example of a man’s genius for oncetranscending itself and for ever eclipsing all its other achievementsappears to me beyond all critical, beyond all theological credulity.Pathos and concentration are surely not among the dominant notes ofFletcher’s style or the salient qualities of his intellect.Except perhaps in the beautiful and famous passage where Hengo diesin his uncle’s arms, I doubt whether in any of the variously andhighly coloured scenes played out upon the wide and shifting stage ofhis fancy the genius of Fletcher has ever unlocked the source of tears.Bellario and Aspatia were the children of his younger colleague; atleast, after the death of Beaumont we meet no such figures on the stageof Fletcher. In effect, though Beaumont had a gift of grave sardonichumour which found especial vent in burlesques of the heroic style andin the systematic extravagance of such characters as Bessus, {89}yet he was above all things a tragic poet; and though Fletcher had greatpower of tragic eloquence and passionate effusion, yet his comic geniuswas of a rarer and more precious quality; one Spanish Curateis worth many a Valentinian; as, on the other hand, one Philasteris worth many a Scornful Lady. Now there is no questionhere of Beaumont; and there is no question that the passage here debatedhas been taken to the heart of the whole world and baptized in the tearsof generations as no work of Fletcher’s has ever been. ThatBeaumont could have written it I do not believe; but I am wellnigh assuredthat Fletcher could not. I can scarcely imagine that the mostfluid sympathy, the “hysteric passion” most easily distilledfrom the eyes of reader or spectator, can ever have watered with itstears the scene or the page which sets forth, however eloquently andeffectively, the sorrows and heroisms of Ordella, Juliana, or Lucina.Every success but this I can well believe them, as they assuredly deserve,to have attained.

To this point then we have come, as to the crucial point at issue;and looking back upon those passages of the play which first suggestthe handiwork of Fletcher, and which certainly do now and then seemalmost identical in style with his, I think we shall hardly find thedifference between these and other parts of the same play so wide andso distinct as the difference between the undoubted work of Fletcherand the undoubted work of Shakespeare. What that difference iswe are fortunately able to determine with exceptional certitude, andwith no supplementary help from conjecture of probabilities. Inthe play which is undoubtedly a joint work of these poets the pointsof contact and the points of disunion are unmistakable by the youngesteye. In the very last scene of The Two Noble Kinsmen, wecan tell with absolute certainty what speeches were appended or interpolatedby Fletcher; we can pronounce with positive conviction what passageswere completed and what parts were left unfinished by Shakespeare.Even on Mr. Spedding’s theory it can hardly be possible to doas much for King Henry VIII. The lines of demarcation,however visible or plausible, are fainter by far than these. Itis 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 laterand laxer style of Euripides; to meet for instance in the Antigonewith a passage which might pass muster as an extract from the Iphigeniain Aulis. In metrical effects the style of the lesser Englishpoet is an exact counterpart of the style of the lesser Greek; thereis the same comparative tenuity and fluidity of verse, the same excessof short unemphatic syllables, the same solution of the graver iambicinto soft overflow of lighter and longer feet which relaxes and dilutesthe solid harmony of tragic metre with notes of a more facile and femininestrain. But in King Henry VIII. it should be remarked thatthough we not unfrequently find the same preponderance as in Fletcher’swork of verses with a double ending—which in English verse atleast are not in themselves feminine, and need not be taken to constitute,as in Fletcher’s case they do, a note of comparative effeminacyor relaxation in tragic style—we do not find the perpetual predominanceof those triple terminations so peculiarly and notably dear to thatpoet; {92} so thateven by the test of the metre-mongers who would reduce the whole questionat issue to a point which might at once be solved by the simple processof numeration the argument in favour of Fletcher can hardly be provedtenable; for the metre which evidently has one leading quality in commonwith his is as evidently wanting in another at least as marked and asnecessary 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. Andif the proof by mere metrical similitude is thus imperfect, there ishere assuredly no other kind of test which may help to fortify the argumentby any suggestion of weight even comparable to this. In thosepassages which would seem most plausibly to indicate the probable partnershipof Fletcher, the unity and sustained force of the style keep it generallyabove the average level of his; there is less admixture or intrusionof lyric or elegiac quality; there is more of temperance and proportionalike in declamation and in debate. And throughout the whole play,and under all the diversity of composite subject and conflicting interestwhich disturbs the unity of action, there is a singleness of spirit,a general unity or concord of inner tone, in marked contrast to theutter discord and discrepancy of the several sections of The TwoNoble Kinsmen. We admit, then, that this play offers us insome not unimportant 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 lineby one who tried so many styles before settling into his latest; andthat, without far stronger, clearer, and completer proof than has yetbeen or can ever be advanced, the question is not solved but merelyevaded by the assumption of a double authorship.

By far the ablest argument based upon a wider ground of reason orof likelihood than this of mere metre that has yet been advanced insupport of the theory which would attribute a part of this play to someweaker hand than Shakespeare’s is due to the study of a criticwhose name—already by right of inheritance the most illustriousname of his age and ours—is now for ever attached to that of Shakespearehimself by right of the highest service ever done and the noblest dutyever paid to his memory. The untimely death which removed beyondreach of our thanks for all he had done and our hopes for all he mightdo, the man who first had given to France the first among foreign poets—sonof the greatest Frenchman and translator of the greatest Englishman—wasonly in this not untimely, that it forbore him till the great and wonderfulwork was done which has bound two deathless names together by a closerthan the common link that connects the names of all sovereign poets.Among all classic translations of the classic works of the world, Iknow of none that for absolute mastery and perfect triumph over allaccumulation of obstacles, for supreme dominion over supreme difficulty,can be matched with the translation of Shakespeare by François-VictorHugo; unless a claim of companionship may perchance be put in for Urquhart’sunfinished version of Rabelais. For such success in the impossibleas finally disproves the right of “that fool of a word”to existence—at least in the world of letters—the two miraclesof study and of sympathy which have given Shakespeare to the Frenchand Rabelais to the English, and each in his habit as he lived, maytake rank together in glorious rivalry beyond eyeshot of all past orfuture 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.His keen and studious intuition is here as always not less notable andadmirable than his large and solid knowledge, his full and lucid comprehensionat once of the text and of the history of Shakespeare’s plays;and if his research into the inner details of that history may seemever to have erred from the straight path of firm and simple certaintyinto some dubious byway of theory or conjecture, we may be sure at leastthat no lack of learning or devotion, of ardour or intelligence, butmore 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 whatfor love of his author he might not wish to find in it. Thus hewould reject the main part of the fifth act as the work of a mere courtlaureate, an official hack or hireling employed to anoint the memoryof an archbishop and lubricate the steps of a throne with the commonoil of dramatic adulation; and finding it in either case a task alikeunworthy of Shakespeare to glorify the name of Cranmer or to deify thenames of the queen then dead and the king yet living, it is but naturalthat he should be induced by an unconscious bias or prepossession ofthe will to depreciate the worth of the verse sent on work fitter forushers and embalmers and the general valetry or varletry of Church andState. That this fifth act is unequal in point of interest tothe better part of the preceding acts with which it is connected byso light and loose a tie of convenience is as indisputable as that thestyle of the last scene savours now and then, and for some space together,more strongly than ever of Fletcher’s most especial and distinctivequalities, or that the whole structure of the play if judged by anystrict rule of pure art is incomposite and incongruous, wanting in unity,consistency, and coherence of interest. The fact is that hereeven more than in King John the poet’s hands were hamperedby a difficulty inherent in the subject. To an English and Protestantaudience, fresh from the passions and perils of reformation and reaction,he had to present an English king at war with the papacy, in whom theassertion of national independence was incarnate; and to the sympathiesof such an audience it was a matter of mere necessity for him to commendthe representative champion of their cause by all means which he couldcompel into the service of his aim. Yet this object was in bothinstances all but incompatible with the natural and necessary interestof the plot. It was inevitable that this interest should in themain be concentrated upon the victims of the personal or national policyof either king; upon Constance and Arthur, upon Katherine and Wolsey.Where these are not, either apparent in person on the stage, or feltin their influence upon the speech and action of the characters present,the pulse of the poem beats fainter and its forces begin to flag.In King John this difficulty was met and mastered, these doubleclaims of the subject of the poem and the object of the poet were satisfiedand harmonised, by the effacement of John and the substitution of Faulconbridgeas the champion of the national cause and the protagonist of the dramaticaction. Considering this play in its double aspect of tragedyand history, we might say that the English hero becomes the centralfigure of the poem as seen from its historic side, while John remainsthe central figure of the poem as seen from its tragic side; the personalinterest that depends on personal crime and retribution is concentratedon the agony of the king; the national interest which he, though theeponymous hero of the poem, was alike inadequate as a craven and improperas a villain to sustain and represent in the eyes of the spectatorswas happily and easily transferred to the one person of the play whocould properly express within the compass of its closing act at oncethe protest against papal pretension, the defiance of foreign invasion,and the prophetic assurance of self-dependent life and self-sufficingstrength inherent in the nation then fresh from a fiercer trial of itsquality, which an audience of the days of Queen Elizabeth would justlyexpect from the poet who undertook to set before them in action thehistory 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 principleof life its power of congenial appeal to the same blatant and vulgarspirit of Protestantism which inspired it. In all the flat interminablemorass of its tedious and tuneless verse I can find no blade or leafof living poetic growth, no touch but one of nature or of pathos, whereArthur dying would fain send a last thought in search of his mother.From this play Shakespeare can have got neither hint nor help towardsthe execution of his own; the crude rough sketch of the Bastard as hebrawls and swaggers through the long length of its scenes is hardlyso much as the cast husk or chrysalid of the noble creature which wasto arise and take shape for ever at the transfiguring touch of Shakespeare.In the case of King Henry VIII. he had not even such a blockishmodel as this to work from. The one preceding play known to mewhich deals professedly with the same subject treats of quite othermatters than are handled by Shakespeare, and most notably with the scholasticadventures or misadventures of Edward Prince of Wales and his whipping-boyNed Browne. A fresh and wellnigh a plausible argument might beraised by the critics who deny the unity of authorship in King HenryVIII., on the ground that if Shakespeare had completed the work himselfhe would surely not have let slip the occasion to introduce one of themost famous and popular of all court fools in the person of Will Summers,who might have given life and relief to the action of many scenes nowunvaried and unbroken in their gravity of emotion and event. Shakespeare,one would say, might naturally have been expected to take up and remodelthe well-known figure of which his humble precursor could give but arough thin outline, yet sufficient it should seem to attract the tastesto which it appealed; for this or some other quality of seasonable attractionserved to float the now forgotten play of Samuel Rowley through severaleditions. The central figure of the huge hot-headed king, withhis gusts of stormy good humour and peals of burly oaths which mighthave suited “Garagantua’s mouth” and satisfied therequirements of Hotspur, appeals in a ruder fashion to the survivalof the same sympathies on which Shakespeare with a finer instinct asevidently relied; the popular estimate of the bluff and 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 oppositeverdicts given by the instinct of the people on “bluff King Hal”and “Bloody Mary” may be understood by reference to a famousverse of Juvenal. The wretched queen was sparing of noble bloodand lavish of poor men’s lives—cerdonibus timenda;and the curses under which her memory was buried were spared by thepeople to her father, Lamiarum cæde madenti. In anycase, the humblest not less than the highest of the poets who wroteunder the reign of his daughter found it safe to present him in a popularlight before an audience of whose general prepossession in his favourWilliam Shakespeare was no slower to take advantage than Samuel Rowley.

The two plays we have just discussed have one quality of style incommon which has already been noted; that in them rhetoric is in excessof action or passion, and far in excess of poetry. They are notas yet perfect examples of his second manner, though far ahead of hisfirst stage in performance as in promise. Compared with the fulland living figure of Katherine or of Constance, the study of Margaretof Anjou is the mere sketch of a poet still in his pupilage: John andHenry, Faulconbridge and Wolsey, are designs beyond reach of the handwhich drew the second and third Richard without much background or dramaticperspective. But the difficulties inherent in either subject arenot surmounted throughout with absolute equality of success; the verypoint of appeal to the sympathy and excitement of the time may havebeen something of a disturbing force in the composition of the work—aloadstone rock indeed, of tempting attraction to the patriot as wellas to the playwright, but possibly capable of proving in some measurea rock of offence to the poet whose ship was piloted towards it.His perfect triumph in the field of patriotic drama, coincident withthe perfect maturity of his comic genius and his general style, hasnow to show itself.

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 ofhis works as to include his three Roman plays in the same class withthese English histories—offers perhaps the most singular exampleknown to us of the variety in fortune which befell his works on theirfirst appearance in print. None of these had better luck in thatline at starting than King Henry IV.; none had worse than KingHenry V. With Romeo and Juliet, the Merry Wivesof Windsor, and Hamlet, it shares the remarkable and undesirablehonour of having been seized and boarded by pirates even before it hadleft the dockyard. The masterbuilder’s hands had not yetput the craft into seaworthy condition when she was overhauled by theseKidds and Blackbeards of the press. Of those four plays, the twotragedies at least were thoroughly recast, and rewritten from end toend: the pirated editions giving us a transcript, more or less perfector imperfect, accurate or corrupt, of the text as it first came fromthe poet’s hand; a text to be afterwards indefinitely modifiedand incalculably improved. Not quite so much can be said of thecomedy, which certainly stood in less need of revision, and probablywould not have borne it so well; nevertheless every little passing touchof the reviser’s hand is here also a noticeable mark of invigorationand improvement. But King Henry V., we may fairly say,is hardly less than transformed. Not that it has been recast afterthe fashion of Hamlet, or even rewritten after the fashion ofRomeo and Juliet; but the corruptions and imperfections of thepirated text are here more flagrant than in any other instance; whilethe general revision of style by which it is at once purified and fortifiedextends to every nook and corner of the restored and renovated building.Even had we, however, a perfect and trustworthy transcript of Shakespeare’soriginal sketch for this play, there can be little doubt that the roughdraught would still prove almost as different from the final masterpieceas is the soiled and ragged canvas now before us, on which we tracethe outline of figures so strangely disfigured, made subject to suchrude extremities of defacement and defeature. There is indeedless difference between the two editions in the comic than in the historicscenes; the pirates were probably more careful to furnish their marketwith a fair sample of the lighter than of the graver ware supplied bytheir plunder of the poet; Fluellen and Pistol lose less through theirmisusage than the king; and the king himself is less maltreated whenhe talks plain prose with his soldiers than when he chops blank versewith his enemies or his lords. His rough and ready courtship ofthe French princess is a good deal expanded as to length, but (if Idare say so) less improved and heightened in tone than we might wellhave wished and it might well have borne; in either text the Hero’saddresses savour rather of a ploughman than a prince, and his finestcourtesies are clownish though not churlish. We may probably seein this rather a concession to the appetite of the groundlings thanan evasion of the difficulties inherent in the subject-matter of thescene; too heavy as these might have been for another, we can conceiveof none too hard for the magnetic tact and intuitive delicacy of Shakespeare’sjudgment and instinct. But it must fairly and honestly be admittedthat in this scene we find as little of the charm and humour inseparablefrom the prince as of the courtesy and dignity to be expected from theking.

It should on the other hand be noted that the finest touch in thecomic scenes, 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’sremark that “he’ll yield the crow a pudding one of thesedays” is common to both versions of the play; but the six wordsfollowing are only to be found in the revised edition; and these sixwords the very pirates could hardly have passed over or struck out.They are not such as can drop from the text of a poet unperceived bythe very dullest and hornie*st of human eyes. “The king haskilled 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 asgrievous as it is inexplicable that the Shakespeare of France—themost infinite in compassion, in “conscience and tender heart,”of all great poets in all ages and all nations of the world—shouldhave missed the deep tenderness of this supreme and subtlest touch inthe work of the greatest among his fellows. Again, with anythingbut “damnable” iteration, does Shakespeare revert to itbefore the close of this very scene. Even Pistol and Nym can seethat what now ails their old master is no such ailment as in his prosperousdays was but too liable to “play the rogue with his great toe.”“The king hath run bad humours on the knight”: “hisheart is fracted, and corroborate.” And it is not thus merelythrough the eclipse of that brief mirage, that fair prospect “ofAfrica, and golden joys,” in view of which he was ready to “takeany man’s horses.” This it is that distinguishes Falstafffrom Panurge; that lifts him at least to the moral level of Sancho Panza.I cannot but be reluctant to set the verdict of my own judgment againstthat of Victor Hugo’s; I need none to remind me what and who heis whose judgment I for once oppose, and what and who am I that I shouldoppose it; that he is he, and I am but myself; yet against his classificationof Falstaff, against his definition of Shakespeare’s unapproachedand unapproachable masterpiece in the school of comic art and humouristicnature, I must and do with all my soul and strength protest. Theadmirable phrase of “swine-centaur” (centaure du porc)is as inapplicable to Falstaff as it is appropriate to Panurge.Not the third person but the first in date of that divine and humantrinity of humourists whose names make radiant for ever the Centuryof their new-born glory—not Shakespeare but Rabelais is responsiblefor the creation or the discovery of such a type as this. “Suumcuique is our Roman justice”; the gradation from Panurge toFalstaff is not downward but upward; though it be Victor Hugo’svery self who asserts the contrary. {108}Singular as may seem the collocation of the epithet “moral”with the name “Falstaff,” I venture to maintain my thesis;that in point of feeling, and therefore of possible moral elevation,Falstaff is as undeniably the superior of Sancho as Sancho is unquestionablythe superior of Panurge. The natural affection of Panurge is boundedby the self-same limits as the natural theology of Polyphemus; the loveof the one, like the faith of the other, begins and ends alike at onepoint;

Myself,
And this great belly, first of deities;

(in which line, by the way, we may hear as it were a first faintprelude of the great proclamation to come—the hymn of praise andthanksgiving for the coronation day of King Gaster; whose laureate,we know, was as lovingly familiar with the Polyphemus of Euripides asShakespeare with his own Pantagruel.) In Sancho we come upon acreature capable of love—but not of such love as kills or helpsto kill, such love as may end or even as may seem to end in anythinglike heartbreak. “And now abideth Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare,these three; but the greatest of these is Shakespeare.”

I would fain score yet another point in the fat knight’s favour;“I have much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff.”Rabelais, evangelist and prophet of the Resurrection of the Flesh (solong entombed, ignored, repudiated, misconstrued, vilified, by so manygenerations and ages of Galilean preachers and Pharisaic schoolmen)—Rabelaiswas content to paint the flesh merely, in its honest human reality—humanat least, if also bestial; in its frank and rude reaction against thehalf brainless and wholly bloodless teachers whose doctrine he himselfon the one hand, and Luther on the other, arose together to smite severally—tosmite them hip and thigh, even till the going down of the sun; the mocksun or marshy meteor that served only to deepen the darkness encompassingon every side the doubly dark ages—the ages of monarchy and theocracy,the ages of death and of faith. To Panurge, therefore, it wasunnecessary and it might have seemed inconsequent to attribute othergifts or functions than are proper to such intelligence as may accompanythe appetites of an animal. That most irreverend father in God,Friar John, belongs to a higher class in the moral order of being; andhe much rather than his fellow-voyager and penitent is properly comparablewith Falstaff. It is impossible to connect the notion of rebukewith the sins of Panurge. The actual lust and gluttony, the imaginarycowardice of Falstaff, have been gravely and sharply rebuked by criticalmorality; we have just noted a too recent and too eminent example ofthis; but what mortal ever dreamed of casting these qualities in theteeth of his supposed counterpart? The difference is as vast betweenFalstaff on the field of battle and Panurge on the storm-tossed deckas between Falstaff and Hotspur, Panurge and Friar John. No mancould show cooler and steadier nerve than is displayed in either case—bythe lay as well as the clerical namesake of the fourth evangelist.If ever fruitless but endless care was shown to prevent misunderstanding,it was shown in the pains taken by Shakespeare to obviate the misconstructionwhich would impute to Falstaff the quality of a Parolles or a Bobadil,a Bessus or a Moron. The delightful encounter between the jesterand the bear in the crowning interlude of La Princesse d’Élideshows once more, I may remark, that Molière had sat at the feetof Rabelais as delightedly as Shakespeare before him. Such rapturousinebriety or Olympian incontinence of humour only fires the blood ofthe graver and less exuberant humourist when his lips are still warmand wet from the well-spring of the Dive Bouteille.

It is needless to do over again the work which was done, and welldone, a hundred years since, by the writer whose able essay in vindicationand exposition of the genuine character of Falstaff elicited from Dr.Johnson as good a jest and as bad a criticism as might have been expected.His argument is too thoroughly carried out at all points and fortifiedon all hands to require or even to admit of corroboration; and the attemptto appropriate any share of the lasting credit which is his due wouldbe nothing less than a disingenuous impertinence. I may here howevernotice that in the very first scene of this trilogy which introducesus to the ever dear and honoured presence of Sir John, his creator hasput into the mouth of a witness no friendlier or more candid than NedPoins the distinction between two as true-bred cowards as ever turnedback and one who will fight no longer than he sees reason. Inthis nutshell lies the whole kernel of the matter; the sweet, sound,ripe, toothsome, wholesome kernel of Falstaff’s character andhumour. He will fight as well as his princely patron, and, likethe prince, as long as he sees reason; but neither Hal nor Jack hasever felt any touch of desire to pluck that “mere scutcheon”honour “from the pale-faced moon.” Harry Percy isas it were the true Sir Bedivere, the last of all Arthurian knights;Henry V. is the first as certainly as he is the noblest of those equallydaring and calculating statesmen-warriors whose two most terrible, mostperfect, and most famous types are Louis XI. and Cæsar Borgia.Gain, “commodity,” the principle of self-interest whichnever but in word and in jest could become the principle of action withFaulconbridge,—himself already far more “a man of this world”than a Launcelot or a Hotspur,—is as evidently the mainspringof Henry’s enterprise and life as of the contract between KingPhilip and King John. The supple and shameless egotism of thechurchmen on whose political sophistries he relies for external supportis needed rather to varnish his project than to reassure his conscience.Like Frederic the Great before his first Silesian war, the future conquerorof Agincourt has practically made up his mind before he seeks to findas good reason or as plausible excuse as were likewise to suffice thefuture conqueror of Rosbach. In a word, Henry is doubtless notthe man, as old Auchindrane expresses it in the noble and strangelyneglected tragedy which bears solitary but sufficient witness to theactual 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.No completer incarnation could be shown us of the militant Englishman—Anglaispur sang; but it is not only, as some have seemed to think, withthe highest, the purest, the noblest quality of English character thathis just and far-seeing creator has endowed him. The godlike equityof Shakespeare’s judgment, his implacable and impeccable righteousnessof instinct and of insight, was too deeply ingrained in the very coreof his genius to be perverted by any provincial or pseudo-patrioticprepossessions; his patriotism was too national to be provincial.Assuredly no poet ever had more than he: not even the king of men andpoets who fought at Marathon and sang of Salamis: much less had anyor has any one of our own, from Milton on to Campbell and from Campbelleven to Tennyson. In the mightiest chorus of King Henry V.we hear the pealing ring of the same great English trumpet that wasyet to sound over the battle of the Baltic, and again in our later dayover a sea-fight of Shakespeare’s own, more splendid and heart-cheeringin its calamity than that other and all others in their triumph; a war-songand a sea-song divine and deep as death or as the sea, making thricemore glorious at once the glorious three names of England, of Grenville,and of Tennyson for ever. From the affectation of cosmopolitanindifference not Æschylus, not Pindar, not Dante’s veryself was more alien or more free than Shakespeare; but there was nothingof the dry Tyrtæan twang, the dull mechanic resonance as of woodenechoes from a platform, in the great historic chord of his lyre.“He is very English, too English, even,” says the Masteron whom his enemies alone—assuredly not his most loving, mostreverent, and most thankful disciples—might possibly and plausiblyretort that he was “very French, too French, even”; buthe certainly was not “too English” to see and cleave tothe main fact, the radical and central truth, of personal or nationalcharacter, of typical history or tradition, without seeking to embellish,to degrade, in either or in any way to falsify it. From king toking, from cardinal to cardinal, from the earliest in date of subjectto the latest of his histories, we find the same thread running, thesame link of honourable and righteous judgment, of equitable and carefulequanimity, connecting and combining play with play in an unbroken andinfrangible chain of evidence to the singleness of the poet’seye, the identity of the workman’s hand, which could do justiceand would do no more than justice, alike to Henry and to Wolsey, toPandulph and to John. His typical English hero or historic protagonistis a man of their type who founded and built up the empire of Englandin India; a hero after the future pattern of Hastings and of Clive;not less daringly sagacious and not more delicately scrupulous, notless indomitable or more impeccable than they. A type by no meansimmaculate, a creature not at all too bright and good for English nature’sdaily food in times of mercantile or military enterprise; no whit moreif no whit less excellent and radiant than reality. Amica Britannia,sed magis amica veritas. The master poet of England—allEnglishmen may reasonably and honourably be proud of it—has nottwo weights and two measures for friend and foe. This palpableand patent fact, as his only and worthy French translator has well remarked,would of itself suffice to exonerate his memory from the imputationof having perpetrated in its evil entirety The First Part of KingHenry VI.

There is, in my opinion, somewhat more of internal evidence thanI have ever seen adduced in support of the tradition current from anearly date as to the origin of the Merry Wives of Windsor; atradition which assigns to Queen Elizabeth the same office of midwifewith regard to this comedy as was discharged by Elwood with referenceto Paradise Regained. Nothing could so naturally or satisfactorilyexplain its existence as the expression of a desire to see “Falstaffin love,” which must have been nothing less than the equivalentof a command to produce him under the disguise of such a transfigurationon the boards. The task of presenting him so shorn of his beams,so much less than archangel (of comedy) ruined, and the excess of (humorous)glory obscured, would hardly, we cannot but think and feel, have spontaneouslysuggested itself to Shakespeare as a natural or eligible aim for thefresh exercise of his comic genius. To exhibit Falstaff as throughoutthe whole course of five acts a credulous and baffled dupe, one “easierto be played on than a pipe,” was not really to reproduce himat all. The genuine Falstaff could no more have played such apart than the genuine Petruchio could have filled such an one as wasassigned him by Fletcher in the luckless hour when that misguided poetundertook to continue the subject and to correct the moral of the nextcomedy in our catalogue of Shakespeare’s. The Tamer Tamedis hardly less consistent or acceptable as a sequel to the Tamingof the Shrew than the Merry Wives of Windsor as a supplementto King Henry IV.: and no conceivable comparison could more forciblyconvey, how broad and deep is the gulf of incongruity which dividesthem.

The plea for once suggested by the author in the way of excuse orextenuation for this incompatibility of Falstaff with Falstaff—forthe violation of character goes far beyond mere inconsistency or thenatural ebb 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 hefeels the necessity of condescending to such evasion or such apologyas is implied in the explanation of Falstaff’s incredible credulityby a reference to “the guiltiness of his mind” and the admission,so gratifying to all minds more moral than his own, that “witmay be made a Jack-a-Lent, when ’tis upon ill employment.”It is the best excuse that can be made; but can we imagine the genuine,the pristine Falstaff reduced to the proffer of such an excuse in seriousgood 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 ofview it is curious to contrast the purely farcical masterpieces of thetown-bred schoolboy and the country lad. There is a certain faintair of the fields, the river, and the park, even in the rough sketchof Shakespeare’s farce—wholly prosaic as it is, and in nopoint suggestive of any unlikelihood in the report which representsit as the composition or rather as the improvisation of a fortnight.We know at once that he must have stroked the fallow greyhound thatwas outrun on “Cotsall”; that he must—and perhapsonce or twice at least too often—have played truant (some readers,boys past or present, might wish for association’s sake it couldactually have been Datchet-wards) from under the shadow of good SirHugh’s probably not over formidable though “threateningtwigs of birch,” at all risks of being “preeches”on his return, in fulfilment of the direful menace held out to thatyoung namesake of his over whose innocence Mrs. Quickly was so creditablyvigilant. On the other hand, no student of Jonson will need tobe reminded how closely and precociously familiar the big stalwart Westminsterboy, Camden’s favoured and grateful pupil, must have made himselfwith the rankest haunts and most unsavoury recesses of that ribald watersideand Smithfield life which he lived to reproduce on the stage with asometimes insufferable fidelity to details from which Hogarth mighthave shrunk. Even his unrivalled proficiency in classic learningcan hardly have been the fruit of greater or more willing diligencein school hours than he must have lavished on other than scholasticstudies in the streets. The humour of his huge photographic groupof divers “humours” is undeniably and incomparably richer,broader, fuller of invention and variety, than any that Shakespeare’slighter work can show; all the five acts of the latter comedy can hardlyserve as counterpoise, in weight and wealth of comic effect, to thesingle scene in which Zeal-of-the-Land defines the moral and theologicalboundaries of action and intention which distinguish the innocent ifnot laudable desire to eat pig from the venial though not mortal sinof longing to eat pig in the thick of the profane Fair, which may ratherbe termed a foul than a fair. Taken from that point of view whichlooks only to force and freedom and range of humorous effect, Jonson’splay is to his friend’s as London is to Windsor; but in more sensesthan one it is to Shakespeare’s as the Thames at London Bridgeis to the Thames at Eton: the atmosphere of Smithfield is not more differentfrom the atmosphere of the playing-fields; and some, too delicate ofnose or squeamish of stomach, may prefer Cuckoo Weir to Shoreditch.But undoubtedly the phantoms of Shallow and Mrs. Quickly which put in(so to speak) a nominal reappearance in the Merry Wives of Windsorare comparatively as poor and thin if set over against the full richoutlines of Rabbi Busy and Dame Purecraft as these again are at allpoints alike inferior to the real Shallow and the genuine Quickly ofKing Henry IV. It is true that Jonson’s humour hassometimes less in common with Shakespeare’s than with the humourof Swift, Smollett, and Carlyle. For all his admiration and evenimitation of Rabelais, Shakespeare has hardly once or twice burnt butso much as a stray pinch of fugitive incense on the altar of Cloacina;the only Venus acknowledged and adored by those three latter humourists.If not always constant with the constancy of Milton to the service ofUrania, he never turns into a dirtier byway or back alley than the beatenpath trodden occasionally by most of his kind which leads them on apassing errand of no unnatural devotion to the shrine of Venus Pandemos.

When, however, we turn from the raw rough sketch to the enrichedand ennobled version of the present play we find it in this its bettershape more properly comparable with another and a nobler work of Jonson’s—withthat magnificent comedy, the first avowed and included among his collectionby its author, which according to all tradition first owed its appearanceand success to the critical good sense and generous good offices ofShakespeare. 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 EveryMan in his Humour is altogether a better comedy and a work of higherart than the Merry Wives of Windsor. Kitely is to Fordalmost what Arnolphe is to Sganarelle. (As according to the learnedMétaphraste “Filio non potest præferri nisi filius,”even so can no one but Molière be preferred or likened to Molière.)Without actually touching like Arnolphe on the hidden springs of tragedy,the jealous husband in Jonson’s play is only kept from trenchingon the higher and forbidden grounds of passion by the potent will andthe consummate self-command of the great master who called him up inperfect likeness to the life. Another or a deeper tone, anotheror a stronger touch, in the last two admirable scenes with his cashierand his wife, when his hot smouldering suspicion at length catches fireand breaks out in agony of anger, would have removed him altogetherbeyond the legitimate pale of comedy. As it is, the self-controlof the artist is as thorough as his grasp and mastery of his subjectare triumphant and complete.

It would seem as though on revision of the Merry Wives of WindsorShakespeare had found himself unwilling or rather perhaps unable toleave a single work of his hand without one touch or breath on it ofbeauty or of poetry. The sole fitting element of harmonious reliefor variety in such a case could of course be found only in an interludeof pure fancy; any touch of graver or deeper emotion would simply haveuntuned and deranged the whole scheme of composition. A lesserpoet might have been powerless to resist the temptation or suggestionof sentiment that he should give to the little loves of Anne Page andFenton a touch of pathetic or emotional interest; but “opulentas Shakespeare was, and of his opulence prodigal” (to borrow aphrase from Coleridge), he knew better than to patch with purple orembroider with seed-pearl the hem of this homespun little piece of comicdrugget. The match between cloth of gold and cloth of frieze couldhardly have borne any good issue in this instance. Instead thereforeof following the lead of Terence’s or the hint of Jonson’sexample, and exalting the accent of his comedy to the full-mouthed pitchof a Chremes or a Kitely, he strikes out some forty and odd lines ofrather coarse and commonplace doggrel about brokers, proctors, lousyfox-eyed serjeants, blue and red noses, and so forth, to make room forthe bright light interlude of fairyland child’s-play which mightnot unfittingly have found place even within the moon-charmed circleof A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even in that all heavenlypoem there 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 recastof another man’s work—a man of real if rough genius forcomedy—which we get in the Taming of the Shrew. Onlythe collation of scene with scene, then of speech with speech, thenof line with line, will show how much may be borrowed from a stranger’smaterial and how much may be added to it by the same stroke of a singlehand. All the force and humour alike of character and situationbelong to Shakespeare’s eclipsed and forlorn precursor; he hasadded nothing; he has tempered and enriched everything. That theluckless author of the first sketch is like to remain a man as namelessas the deed of the witches in Macbeth, unless some chance orcaprice of accident should suddenly flash favouring light on his nowimpersonal and indiscoverable individuality, seems clear enough whenwe take into account the double and final disproof of his imaginaryidentity with Marlowe, which Mr. Dyce has put forward with such unanswerablecertitude. He is a clumsy and coarse-fingered plagiarist fromthat poet, and his stolen jewels of expression look so grossly out ofplace in the homely setting of his usual style that they seem transmutedfrom real to sham. On the other hand, he is of all the Pre-Shakespeareansknown to us incomparably the truest, the richest, the most powerfuland original humourist; one indeed without a second on that ground,for “the rest are nowhere.” Now Marlowe, it need scarcelybe once again reiterated, was as certainly one of the least and worstamong jesters as he was one of the best and greatest among poets.There can therefore be no serious question of his partnership in a playwherein the comic achievement is excellent and the poetic attempts areexecrable throughout.

The recast of it in which a greater than Berni has deigned to playthe part of that poet towards a lesser than Bojardo shows tact and delicacyperhaps without a parallel in literature. No chance of improvementis missed, while nothing of value is dropped or thrown away. {125}There is just now and then a momentary return perceptible to the skippingmetre and fantastic manner of the first period, which may have beenunconsciously suggested by the nature of the task in hand—a taskof itself implying or suggesting some new study of old models; but themain style of the play in all its weightier parts is as distinctly properto the second period, as clear an evidence of inner and spiritual affinity(with actual tabulation of dates, were such a thing as feasible as itis impossible, I must repeat that the argument would here be—whatit is now—in no wise concerned), as is the handling of characterthroughout; but most especially the subtle force, the impeccable andcareful instinct, 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 humorous manlinessof Petruchio’s.

It is observable that those few and faint traces which we have noticedin this play of a faded archaic style trying as it were to resume amockery of revirescence are not wholly even if mainly confined to theunderplot which a suggestion or surmise of Mr. Collier’s longsince assigned to Haughton, author of Englishmen for my Money, orA Woman will have her Will: a spirited, vigorous, and remarkablyregular comedy of intrigue, full of rough and ready incident, brightboisterous humour, honest lively provinciality and gay high-handed Philistinism.To take no account of this attribution would be to show myself as shamelesslyas shamefully deficient in that respect and gratitude which all genuineand thankful students will always be as ready to offer as all thanklessand insolent sciolists can ever be to disclaim, to the venerable scholarwho since I was first engaged on these notes has added yet another obligationto the many under which he had already laid all younger and lesser labourersin the same field of study, by the issue in a form fitly ennobled andenriched of his great historical work on our early stage. It mightseem something of an unintended impertinence to add that such recognitionof his theory no more implies a blind acceptance of it—whateversuch acceptance on my part might be worth—than the expressionof such gratitude and respect could reasonably be supposed to implyan equally blind confidence in the authority or the value of that versionof Shakespeare’s text which has been the means of exposing a nameso long and so justly honoured, not merely to the natural and rationalinquisition of rival students, but to the rancorous and ribald obloquyof thankless 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 inmy eyes seem to bear any credible or conceivable traces of his touch.Of these two I must give the lesser amount of space and attention tothat one 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 elaborate commentaryand analytic examination something more than superfluous on my part;whereas the other has never been and will never be assigned to Shakespeareby any critical student whose verdict is worth a minute’s considerationor the marketable value of a straw. Nevertheless it is on othergrounds worth notice; and such notice, to be itself of any value, mustof necessity be elaborate and minute. The critical analysis ofKing Edward III. I have therefore relegated to its proper placein an appendix; while I reserve a corner of my text, at once out ofadmiration for the play itself and out of reverence for the names andauthority of some who have given their verdict in its behalf, for arough and rapid word 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,and rejecting without compromise or hesitation the belief or theorywhich would assign to the youth of Shakespeare the incomparably noblertragic poem in question. {129}His first ascription to Shakespeare of A Warning for Fair Womenis couched in terms far more dubious and diffident than such as he afterwardsadopts. It “might,” he says, “be given to Shakespeareon grounds far more plausible” (on what, except possibly thoseof date, I cannot imagine) “than those applicable to Ardenof Feversham.” He then proceeds to cite some detachedlines and passages of undeniable beauty and vigour, containing equallyundeniable coincidences of language, illustration, and expression with“passages in Shakespeare’s undisputed plays.”From these he passes on to indicate a “resemblance” which“is not merely verbal,” and to extract whole speeches which“are Shakespearean in a much better sense”; adding in asurely too trenchant fashion, “Here we say, aut Shakespeareaut diabolus.” I must confess, with all esteem for thecritic and all admiration for the brief scene 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, towhose wealth of misused learning and fertility of misapplied conjectureI have already paid all due tribute; but who must have had beyond allother sane men—most assuredly, beyond all other fairly competentcritics—the gift bestowed on him by a malignant fairy of mistakingassumption for argument and possibility for proof. He was thevery Columbus of mare’s nests; to the discovery of them, thoughthey lay far beyond the pillars of Hercules, he would apply all shiftsand all resources possible to an ultra-Baconian process of unphilosophicalinduction. On the devoted head of Shakespeare—who is alsocalled Shakspere and Chaxpur—he would have piled a load of rubbish,among which the crude and vigorous old tragedy under discussion shinesout like a veritable diamond of the desert. His “Schoolof 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 theshoemaker should meddle with his yard and the tailor with his last,the fisher with his pencil and the painter with his nets.”

To me the difference appears immeasurable between the reasons foradmitting the possibility of Shakespeare’s authorship in the caseof Arden of Feversham, and the pretexts for imagining the probabilityof his partnership in A Warning for Fair Women. There isa practically infinite distinction between the evidence suggested byverbal or even more than verbal resemblance of detached line to lineor selected passage to passage, and the proof supplied by the generalharmony and spiritual similarity of a whole poem, on comparison of itas a whole with the known works of the hypothetical author. Thisproof, at all events, we surely do not get from consideration in thislight of the plea put forward in behalf of A Warning for Fair Women.This proof, I cannot but think, we are very much nearer getting fromcontemplation under the same light of the claim producible for Ardenof Feversham.

A Warning for Fair Women is unquestionably in its way a noticeableand valuable “piece of work,” as Sly might have definedit. It is perhaps the best example anywhere extant of a merelyrealistic tragedy—of realism pure and simple applied to the serviceof the highest of the arts. Very rarely does it rise for a verybrief interval to the height of tragic or poetic style, however simpleand homely. The epilogue affixed to Arden of Fevershamasks pardon of the “gentlemen” composing its audience for“this naked tragedy,” on the plea that “simple truthis gracious enough” without needless ornament or bedizenment of“glozing stuff.” Far more appropriate would such anapology have been as in this case was at least superfluous, if appendedby way of epilogue to A Warning for Fair Women. That isindeed a naked tragedy; nine-tenths of it are in no wise beyond thereach of an able, industrious, and practised reporter, commissionedby the proprietors of the journal on whose staff he might be engagedto throw into the force of scenic dialogue his transcript of the evidencein a popular and exciting case of adultery and murder. The onefigure on the stage of this author which stands out sharply definedin our recollection against a background of undistinguished shadowsis the figure of the adulterer and murderer. This most discreditableof Browns has a distinct and brawny outline of his own, a gait and accentas of a genuine and recognisable man, who might have put to some betterprofit his shifty spirit of enterprise, his genuine capacity of affection,his burly ingenuity and hardihood. His minor confidants and accomplices,Mrs. Drury and her Trusty Roger, are mere commonplace profiles of malefactors:but it is in the contrast between the portraits of their two criminalheroines that the vast gulf of difference between the capacities ofthe two poets yawns patent to the sense of all readers. Anne Sandersand Alice Arden stand as far beyond comparison apart as might a portraitby any average academician and a portrait by Watts or Millais.Once only, in the simple and noble scene cited by the over-generouspartiality of Mr. Collier, does the widow and murderess of Sanders riseto the tragic height of the situation and the dramatic level of thepart so unfalteringly sustained from first to last by the wife and themurderess of Arden.

There is the self-same relative difference between the two subordinategroups of innocent or guilty characters. That is an excellentand effective touch of realism, where Brown comes across his victim’slittle boy playing truant in the street with a small schoolfellow; butin Arden of Feversham the number of touches as telling and asstriking as this one is practically numberless. They also showa far stronger and keener faculty of poetic if not of dramatic imagination.The casual encounter of little Sanders with the yet red-handed murdererof his father is not comparable for depth and subtlety of effect withthe scene in which Arden’s friend Franklin, riding with him toRaynham Down, breaks off his “pretty tale” of a perjuredwife, overpowered by a “fighting at his heart,” at the momentwhen they come close upon the ambushed assassins in Alice Arden’spay. But the internal evidence in this case, as I have alreadyintimated, does not hinge upon the proof or the suggestion offered byany single passage or by any number of single passages. The firstand last evidence of real and demonstrable weight is the evidence ofcharacter. A good deal might be said on the score of style infavour of its attribution to a poet of the first order, writing at atime when there were but two such poets writing for the stage; but eventhis is here a point of merely secondary importance. It need onlybe noted in passing that if the problem be reduced to a question betweenthe authorship of Shakespeare and the authorship of Marlowe there isno need and no room for further argument. The whole style of treatmentfrom end to end is about as like the method of Marlowe as the methodof Balzac is like the method of Dumas. There could be no alternativein that case; so that the actual alternative before us is simple enough:Either this play is the young Shakespeare’s first tragic masterpiece,or there was a writer unknown to us then alive and at work for the stagewho excelled him as a tragic dramatist not less—to say the veryleast—than he was excelled by Marlowe as a narrative and tragicpoet.

If we accept, as I have been told that Goethe accepted (a point whichI regret my inability to verify), the former of these alternatives—orif at least we assume it for argument’s sake in passing—wemay easily strengthen our position by adducing as further evidence inits favour the author’s thoroughly Shakespearean fidelity to thedetails of the prose narrative on which his tragedy is founded.But, it may be objected, we find the same fidelity to a similar textin the case of A Warning for Fair Women. And here againstarts up the primal and radical difference between the two works: itstarts up and will not be overlooked. Equal fidelity to the narrativetext we do undoubtedly find in either case; the same fidelity we assuredlydo not find. The one is a typical example of prosaic realism,the other of poetic reality. Light from darkness or truth fromfalsehood is not more infallibly discernible. The fidelity inthe one case is exactly, as I have already indicated, the fidelity ofa reporter to his notes. The fidelity in the other case is exactlythe fidelity of Shakespeare in his Roman plays to the text of Plutarch.It is a fidelity which admits—I had almost written, which requires—thefullest play of the highest imagination. No more than the mostrealistic of reporters will it omit or falsify any necessary or evenadmissible detail; but the indefinable quality which it adds to thelowest as to the highest of these is (as Lamb says of passion) “theall in all in poetry.” Turning again for illustration toone of the highest names in imaginative literature—a name sometimesmost improperly and absurdly inscribed on the register of the realisticschool, {137} wemay say that the difference on this point is not the difference betweenBalzac and Dumas, but the distinction between Balzac and M. Zola.Let us take by way of example the character next in importance to thatof the heroine—the character of her paramour. A viler figurewas never sketched by Balzac; a viler figure was seldom drawn by Thackeray.But as with Balzac, so with the author of this play, the masterful willcombining with the masterly art of the creator who fashions out of theworst kind of human clay the breathing likeness of a creature so hatefullypitiful and so pitifully hateful overcomes, absorbs, annihilates allsense of such abhorrence and repulsion as would prove the work whichexcited them no high or even true work of art. Even the wonderfultouch of dastardly brutality and pitiful self-pity with which Mosbieat once receives and repels the condolence of his mistress on his wound—

Alice.—Sweet Mosbie, hide thine arm, itkills my heart.

Mosbie.—Ay, Mistress Arden, this is your favour.—

even this does not make unendurable the scenic representation ofwhat in actual life would be unendurable for any man to witness.Such an exhibition of currish cowardice and sullen bullying spite increasesrather our wondering pity for its victim than our wondering sense ofher degradation. And this is a kind of triumph which only suchan artist as Shakespeare in poetry or as Balzac in prose can achieve.

Alice Arden, if she be indeed a daughter of Shakespeare’s,is the eldest born of that group to which Lady Macbeth and Dionyza belongby right of weird sisterhood. The wives of the thane of Glamisand the governor of Tharsus, it need hardly be said, are both of themcreations of a much later date—if not of the very latest discernibleor definable stage in the art of Shakespeare. Deeply dyed as sheis in bloodguiltiness, the wife of Arden is much less of a born criminalthan these. To her, at once the agent and the patient of her crime,the victim and the instrument of sacrifice and blood-offering to VenusLibitina, goddess of love and death,—to her, even in the deepestpit of her deliberate wickedness, remorse is natural and redemptionconceivable. Like the Phædra of Racine, and herein so noblyunlike the Phædra of Euripides, she is capable of the deepestand bitterest penitence,—incapable of dying with a hideous andhomicidal falsehood on her long polluted lips. Her latest breathis 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 and mercifuljudge and painter of human passions, who gave this tragedy to the new-bornliterature of our drama; taking into account the really wonderful skill,the absoluteness of intuition and inspiration, with which every strokeis put in that touches off character or tones down effect, even in thesketching and grouping of such minor figures as the ruffianly hirelingBlack Will, the passionate artist without pity or conscience, {141}and above all the “unimitated, inimitable” study of Michael,in whom even physical fear becomes tragic, and cowardice itself no ludicrousinfirmity but rather a terrible passion; I cannot but finally take heartto say, even in the absence of all external or traditional testimony,that it seems to me not pardonable merely nor permissible, but simplylogical and reasonable, to set down this poem, a young man’s workon the face of it, as the possible work of no man’s youthful handbut Shakespeare’s.

No similar question is raised, no parallel problem stated, in thecase of any one other among the plays now or ever ascribed on groundsmore or less dubious to that same indubitable hand. This handI do not recognise even in the Yorkshire Tragedy, full as itis to overflowing of fierce animal power, and hot as with the furiousbreath of some caged wild beast. Heywood, who as the most realisticand in some sense prosaic dramatist of his time has been credited (thoughbut in a modestly tentative and suggestive fashion) with its authorship,was as incapable of writing it as Chapman of writing the Shakespeareanparts of The Two Noble Kinsmen or Fletcher of writing the scenesof Wolsey’s fall and Katherine’s death in King HenryVIII. To the only editor of Shakespeare responsible for thetwo earlier of the three suggestions here set aside, they may be forgivenon the score of insufficient scholarship and want of critical training;but on what ground the third suggestion can be excused in the case ofmen who should have a better right than most others to speak with someshow of authority on a point of higher criticism, I must confess myselfutterly at a loss to imagine. In the Yorkshire Tragedythe submissive devotion of its miserable heroine to her maddened husbandis merely doglike,—though not even, in the exquisitely true andtender phrase of our sovereign poetess, “most passionately patient.”There is no likeness in this poor trampled figure to “one of Shakespeare’swomen”: Griselda was no ideal of his. To find its parallelin the dramatic literature of the great age, we must look to lessergreat men than Shakespeare. Ben Jonson, a too exclusively masculinepoet, will give us a couple of companion figures for her—or onesuch figure at least; for the wife of Fitzdottrel, submissive as sheis even to the verge of undignified if not indecorous absurdity, isless of a human spaniel than the wife of Corvino. Another suchis Robert Davenport’s Abstemia, so warmly admired by WashingtonIrving; another is the heroine of that singularly powerful and humoroustragi-comedy, labelled to How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad,which in its central situation anticipates that of Leigh Hunt’sbeautiful Legend of Florence; while Decker has revived, in oneof our sweetest and most graceful examples of dramatic romance, theoriginal incarnation of that somewhat pitiful ideal which even in aruder and more Russian century of painful European progress out of nightand winter could only be made credible, acceptable, or endurable, bythe yet unequalled genius of Chaucer and Boccaccio.

For concentrated might and overwhelming weight of realism, this luridlittle play beats A Warning for Fair Women fairly out of thefield. It is and must always be (I had nearly said, thank heaven)unsurpassable for pure potency of horror; and the breathless heat ofthe action, its raging rate of speed, leaves actually no breathing-timefor disgust; it consumes our very sense of repulsion as with fire.But such power as this, though a rare and a great gift, is not the rightquality for a dramatist; it is not the fit property of a poet.Ford and Webster, even Tourneur and Marston, who have all been moreor less wrongfully though more or less plausibly attacked on the scoreof excess in horror, have none of them left us anything so nakedly terrible,so terribly naked as this. Passion is here not merely strippedto the skin but stripped to the bones. I cannot tell who couldand I cannot guess who would have written it. “’Tisa very excellent piece of work”; may we never exactly look uponits like again!

I thought it at one time far from impossible, if not very nearlyprobable, that the author of Arden of Feversham might be onewith the author of the famous additional scenes to The Spanish Tragedy,and that either both of these “pieces of work” or neithermust be Shakespeare’s. I still adhere to Coleridge’sverdict, which indeed must be that of all judges capable of passingany 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 overchargedat every point with passion and subtlety, sincerity and instinct ofpathetic truth, are no less like Shakespeare’s work than unlikeJonson’s: though hardly perhaps more unlike the typical mannerof his adult and matured style than is the general tone of The Caseis Altered, his one surviving comedy of that earlier period in whichwe know from Henslowe that the stout-hearted and long struggling youngplaywright went through so much theatrical hackwork and piecework inthe same rough harness with other now more or less notable workmen thendrudging under the manager’s dull narrow sidelong eye for barebread and bare shelter. But this unlikeness, great as it is andserious and singular, between his former and his latter style in highcomedy, gives no warrant for us to believe him capable of so immeasurablea transformation in tragic style and so indescribable a decadence intragic power as would be implied in a descent from the “fine madness”of “old Jeronymo” to the flat sanity and smoke-dried sobrietyof 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 accentof all Shakespeare’s liege men-at-arms, was due to a far happierand more trustworthy instinct than led him in later years to liken themrather to “the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of TitusAndronicus.”

We have wandered it may be somewhat out of the right time into afar other province of poetry than the golden land of Shakespeare’sripest harvest-fields of humour. And now, before we may enterthe “flowery square” made by the summer growth of his fourgreatest works in pure and perfect comedy “beneath a broad andequal-blowing wind” of all happiest and most fragrant imagination,we have but one field to cross, one brook to ford, that hardly can bethought to keep us out of Paradise. In the garden-plot on whosewicket is inscribed All’s Well that Ends Well, we are hardlydistant 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 instinctin handling a matter which unluckily it was not possible to handle onthe stage with absolute and positive delicacy of feeling or expression.Dr. Johnson—in my humble opinion, with some justice; though hisverdict has been disputed on the score of undeserved austerity—“couldnot reconcile his heart to Bertram”; and I, unworthy as I maybe to second or support on the score of morality the finding of so greata moralist, cannot reconcile my instincts to Helena. Parollesis even better than Bobadil, as Bobadil is even better than Bessus;and Lafeu is one of the very best old men in all the range of comicart. But the whole charm and beauty of the play, the quality whichraises it to the rank of its fellows by making it loveable as well asadmirable, we find only in the “sweet, serene, skylike”sanctity and attraction of adorable old age, made more than ever nearand dear to us in the incomparable figure of the old Countess of Roussillon.At the close of the play, Fletcher would inevitably have married herto Lafeu—or rather possibly, to the King.

At the entrance of the heavenly quadrilateral, or under the risingdawn of the four fixed stars which compose our Northern Cross amongthe constellations of dramatic romance hung high in the highest airof poetry, 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 “settentrionalvedovo sito” 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:and beyond these the divine darkness of everlasting and all-maternalnight. These seven lamps of the romantic drama have in them—ifI may strain the similitude a little further yet—more of lyriclight than could fitly be lent to feed the fire or the sunshine of theworlds of pure tragedy or comedy. There is more play, more vibrationas it were, in the splendours of their spheres. Only in the heavenof Shakespeare’s making can we pass and repass at pleasure fromthe sunny to the stormy lights, from the glory of Cymbeline tothe glory of Othello.

In this first group of four—wholly differing on that pointfrom the later constellation of three—there is but very seldom,not more than once or twice at most, a shooting or passing gleam ofanything more lurid or less lovely than “a light of laughing flowers.”There is but just enough of evil or even of passion admitted into theirsweet spheres of life to proclaim them living: and all that does findentrance is so tempered by the radiance of the rest that we retain butsoftened and lightened recollections even of Shylock and Don John whenwe think of the Merchant of Venice and Much Ado about Nothing;we hardly feel in As You Like It the presence or the existenceof Oliver and Duke Frederick; and in Twelfth Night, for all itsname of the midwinter, we find nothing to remember that might jar withthe loveliness of love and the summer light of life.

No astronomer can ever tell which if any one among these four maybe to the others as a sun; for in this special tract of heaven “onestar differeth” not “from another star in glory.”From each and all of them, even “while this muddy vesture of decaydoth grossly close [us] in,” we cannot but hear the harmonyof 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 littleword, with a noble excerpt given by Hallam from the Latin prose writingsof Campanella, may recall to us with a doubly appropriate sense of harmoniousfitness 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 passedfrom the spirit of the most glorious martyr and poet to the spirit ofthe most glorious poet and artist upon the face of the earth together.Even to Shakespeare any association of his name with Campanella’s,as even to Campanella any association of his name with Shakespeare’s,cannot but be an additional ray of honour: and how high is the claimof the divine philosopher to share with the godlike dramatist theircommon and crowning name of poet, all Englishmen at least may now perceiveby study of Campanella’s sonnets in the noble and exquisite versionof Mr. Symonds; to whom among other kindred debts we owe no higher obligationthan is due to him as the giver of these poems to the inmost heart ofall among his countrymen whose hearts are worthy to hold and to hoardup such treasure.

Where nothing at once new and true can be said, it is always bestto say nothing; as it is in this case to refrain from all reiterationof rhapsody which must have been somewhat “mouldy ere” anyliving man’s “grandsires had nails on their toes,”if not at that yet remoter date “when King Pepin of France wasa little boy” and “Queen Guinever of Britain was a littlewench.” 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 computationof hairs in Launcelot’s beard and Dobbin’s tail, which hasnot been more plentifully beprosed than ever Rosalind was berhymed.Much wordy wind has also been wasted on comparison of Shakespeare’sJew with Marlowe’s; that is, of a living subject for terror andpity with a mere mouthpiece for the utterance of poetry as magnificentas any but the best of Shakespeare’s.

Nor can it well be worth any man’s while to say or to hearfor the thousandth time that As You Like It would be one of thoseworks which prove, as Landor said long since, the falsehood of the staleaxiom that no work of man’s can be perfect, were it not for thatone unlucky slip of the brush which has left so ugly a little smearin one corner of the canvas as the betrothal of Oliver to Celia; though,with all reverence for a great name and a noble memory, I can hardlythink that matters were much mended in George Sand’s adaptationof the play by the transference of her hand to Jaques. Once elsewhere,or twice only at the most, is any such other sacrifice of moral beautyor spiritual harmony to the necessities and traditions of the stagediscernible in all the world-wide work of Shakespeare. In theone case it is unhappily undeniable; no mans conscience, no conceivablesense of right and wrong, but must more or less feel as did Coleridge’sthe double violence done it in the upshot of Measure for Measure.Even in the much more nearly spotless work which we have next to glanceat, some readers have perhaps not unreasonably found a similar objectionto the final good fortune of such a pitiful fellow as Count Claudio.It will be observed that in each case the sacrifice is made to comedy.The actual or hypothetical necessity of pairing off all the couplesafter such a fashion as to secure a nominally happy and undeniably matrimonialending is the theatrical idol whose tyranny exacts this holocaust ofhigher and better feelings than the mere liquorish desire to leave theboard of fancy with a palatable morsel of cheap 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 thename of his most perfect comic masterpiece. For absolute powerof composition, 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 Heroand Claudio, on which I have already remarked as in itself a doubtfullydesirable consummation, makes no flaw in the dramatic perfection ofa piece which could not otherwise have been wound up at all. Thiswas its one inevitable conclusion, if the action were not to come toa tragic end; and a tragic end would here have been as painfully andas grossly out of place as is any but a tragic end to the action ofMeasure for Measure. As for Beatrice, she is as perfecta lady, though of a far different age and breeding, as Célimèneor Millamant; and a decidedly more perfect woman than could properlyor permissibly have trod the stage of Congreve or Molière.She would have disarranged all the dramatic proprieties and harmoniesof the one great school of pure comedy. The good fierce outbreakof her high true heart in two swift words—“Kill Claudio”{154}—wouldhave fluttered the dovecotes of fashionable drama to some purpose.But Alceste would have taken her to his own.

No quainter and apter example was ever given of many men’sabsolute inability to see the plainest aims, to learn the simplest rudiments,to appreciate the most practical requisites of art, whether appliedto theatrical action or to any other as evident as exalted aim, thanthe instance afforded by that criticism of time past which sagaciouslyremarked that “any less amusingly absurd” constables thanDogberry and Verges would have filled their parts in the action of theplay equally well. Our own day has doubtless brought forth criticsand students of else unparalleled capacity for the task of laying wind-eggsin mare’s nests, and wasting all the warmth of their brains andtongues in the hopeful endeavour to hatch them: but so fine a specimenwas never dropped yet as this of the plumed or plumeless biped who discoveredthat if Dogberry had not been Dogberry and Verges had not been Vergesthey would have been equally unsuccessful in their honest attempt towarn Leonato betimes of the plot against his daughter’s honour.The only explanation of the mistake is this; and it is one of whichthe force will be intelligible only to those who are acquainted withthe very singular physiology of that remarkably prolific animal knownto critical science as the Shakespearean scholiast: that if Dogberryhad been other than Dogberry, or if Verges had been other than Verges,the action and catastrophe of the whole play could never have takenplace 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 himselfas surely the loving as he would surely have been the beloved discipleof that insuppressible divine, the immortal and most reverend vicarof Meudon. Two only among the mighty men who lived and wrote anddied within the century which gave birth to Shakespeare were found worthyof so great an honour at his hands as the double homage of citationand imitation: and these two, naturally and properly enough, were FrançoisRabelais and Christopher Marlowe. We cannot but recognise on whatfar travels in what good company “Feste the jester” hadbut lately been, on that night of “very gracious fooling”when he was pleased to enlighten the unforgetful mind of Sir Andrewas to the history of Pigrogromitus, and of the Vapians passing the equinoctialof Queubus. At what precise degree of latitude and longitude betweenthe blessed islands of Medamothy and Papimania this equinoctial mayintersect the Sporades of the outer ocean, is a problem on the solutionof which the energy of those many modern sons of Aguecheek who haveundertaken the task of writing about and about the text and the historyof Shakespeare might be expended with an unusually reasonable hope andexpectation of arriving at an exceptionally profitable end.

Even apart from their sunny identity of spirit and bright sweet brotherhoodof style, the two comedies of Twelfth Night and As You LikeIt 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-manualare among all Shakespeare’s works as signally remarkable for thecleanliness as for the richness of their humour. Here is the rightroyal seal of Pantagruel, clean-cut and clearly stamped, and unincrustedwith any flake of dirt from the dubious finger of Panurge. Inthe comic parts of those plays in which the humour is rank and flagrantthat exhales from the lips of Lucio, of Boult, or of Thersites, thereis no trace or glimpse of Rabelais. From him Shakespeare has learntnothing and borrowed nothing that was not wise and good and sweet andclean and pure. All the more honour, undoubtedly, to Shakespeare,that he would borrow nothing else: but assuredly, also, all the morehonour to Rabelais, that he had enough of this to lend.

It is less creditable to England than honourable to France that aFrenchman should have been the first of Shakespearean students to discoverand to prove that the great triad of his Roman plays is not a consecutivework of the same epoch. Until the appearance of François-VictorHugo’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. Ishould take some shame to myself but that I feel more of grateful pridethan of natural shame in the avowal that I at all events owe the firstrevelation of the truth now so clear and apparent in this matter, tothe son of the common lord and master of all poets born in his age—bethey liege subjects as loyal as myself or as contumacious as I grieveto find one at least of my elders and betters, whenever I perceive—astoo often I cannot choose but perceive—that the voice is the voiceof Arnold, but the hand is the hand of Sainte-Beuve.

To the honoured and lamented son of our beloved and glorious Master,whom neither 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 Cæsar is at all pointsequally like the greatest works of Shakespeare’s middle periodand unlike the works of his last. It is in the main a play belongingto the same order as King Henry IV.; but it differs from ourEnglish Henriade—as remarkably unlike Voltaire’s as Zaïreis unlike Othello—not more by the absence of Falstaff thanby the presence of Brutus. Here at least Shakespeare has madefull amends, if not to all modern democrats, yet assuredly to all historicalrepublicans, for any possible or apparent preference of royal to populartraditions. Whatever manner of man may have been the actual Roman,our Shakespearean Brutus is undoubtedly the very noblest figure of atypical and ideal republican in all the literature of the world.“A democracy such as yours in America is my abhorrence,”wrote Landor once to an impudent and foul-mouthed Yankee pseudosopher,who had intruded himself on that great man’s privacy in orderto have the privilege of afterwards informing the readers of a pitifulpamphlet on England that Landor had “pestered him with Southey”;an impertinence, I may add, which Mr. Landor at once rebuked with thesharpest contempt and chastised with the haughtiest courtesy.But, the old friend and lifelong champion of Kossuth went on to say,his feelings were far different towards a republic; and if on the onepoint, then not less certainly on the other, we may be assured thathis convictions and his prepossessions would have been shared by theauthor of Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar.

Having now come perforce to the inevitable verge of Hamlet,I hasten to declare that I can advance no pretension to compete withthe claim of that “literary man” who became immortal bydint of one dinner with a bishop, and in right of that last glass pouredout for him in sign of amity by “Sylvester Blougram, styled inpartibus Episcopus, necnon the deuce knows what.”I do not propose to prove my perception of any point in the characterof Hamlet “unseized by the Germans yet.” I can onlydetermine, as the Church Catechism was long since wont to bid me, “tokeep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue” not only“from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering”—thoughthis itself is a form of abstinence not universally or even commonlypractised among the rampant rout of rival commentators—but also,now as ever throughout this study, from all conscious repetition ofwhat others have said before me.

In Hamlet, as it seems to me, we set foot as it were on thebridge between the middle and the final period of Shakespeare.That priceless waif of piratical salvage which we owe to the happy rapacityof a hungry publisher is of course more accurately definable as thefirst play of Hamlet than as the first edition of the play.And this first Hamlet, on the whole, belongs altogether to themiddle period. The deeper complexities of the subject are merelyindicated. Simple and trenchant outlines of character are yetto be supplanted by features of subtler suggestion and infinite interfusion.Hamlet himself is almost more of a satirist than a philosopher: Asperand Macilente, Felice and Malevole, the grim studies after Hamlet unconsciouslyor consciously taken by Jonson and Marston, may pass as wellnigh passableimitations, with an inevitable streak of caricature in them, of thefirst Hamlet; they would have been at once puerile and ghastly travestiesof the second. The Queen, whose finished figure is now somethingof a riddle, stands out simply enough in the first sketch as confidantof Horatio if not as accomplice of Hamlet. There is not more differencebetween the sweet quiet flow of those plain verses which open the originalplay within the play and the stiff sonorous tramp of their substitutes,full-charged with heavy classic artillery of Phœbus and Neptuneand Tellus and Hymen, than there is between the straightforward agentsof their own destiny whom we meet in the first Hamlet and theobliquely moving patients who veer sideways to their doom in the second.

This minor transformation of style in the inner play, made solelywith the evident view of marking the distinction between its duly artificialforms of speech and the duly natural forms of speech passing betweenthe spectators, is but one among innumerable indications which onlya purblind perversity of prepossession can overlook of the especialstore set 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. Ofall vulgar errors the most wanton, the most wilful, and the most resolutelytenacious of life, is that belief bequeathed from the days of Pope,in which it was pardonable, to the days of Mr. Carlyle, in which itis not excusable, to the effect that Shakespeare threw off Hamletas an eagle may moult a feather or a fool may break a jest; that hedropped his work as a bird may drop an egg or a sophist a fallacy; thathe wrote “for gain, not glory,” or that having written Hamlethe thought it nothing very wonderful to have written. For himselfto have written, he possibly, nay probably, did not think it anythingmiraculous; but that he was in the fullest degree conscious of its wonderfulpositive worth to all men for all time, we have the best evidence possible—hisown; and that not by mere word of mouth but by actual stroke of hand.Ben Jonson might shout aloud over his own work on a public stage, “ByGod ’tis good,” and so for all its real goodness and hisreal greatness make sure that both the workman and his work should beless unnaturally than unreasonably laughed at; Shakespeare knew a betterway of showing confidence in himself, but he showed not a whit lessconfidence. Scene by scene, line for line, stroke upon strokeand touch after touch, he went over all the old laboured ground again;and not to ensure success in his own day and fill his pockets with contemporarypence, but merely and wholly with a purpose to make it worthy of himselfand his future students. Pence and praise enough it had evidentlybrought him in from the first. No more palpable proof of thiscan be desired than the instantaneous attacks on it, the jeers, howls,hoots and hisses of which a careful ear may catch some far faint echoeven yet; the fearful and furtive yelp from beneath of the masked andwrithing poeticule, the shrill reverberation all around it of plagiarismand parody. Not one single alteration in the whole play can possiblyhave been made with a view to stage effect or to present popularityand profit; or we must suppose that Shakespeare, however great as aman, was naturally even greater as a fool. There is a class ofmortals to whom this inference is always grateful—to whom thefond belief that every great man must needs be a great fool would seemalways to afford real comfort and support: happy, in Prior’s phrase,could their inverted rule prove every great fool to be a great man.Every change in the text of Hamlet has impaired its fitness forthe stage and increased its value for the closet in exact and perfectproportion. Now, this is not a matter of opinion—of Mr.Pope’s opinion or Mr. Carlyle’s; it is a matter of factand evidence. Even in Shakespeare’s time the actors threwout his additions; they throw out these very same additions in our own.The one especial speech, if any one such especial speech there be, inwhich the personal genius of Shakespeare soars up to the very highestof its height and strikes down to the very deepest of its depth, ispassed over by modern actors; it was cut away by Hemings and Condell.We may almost assume it as certain that no boards have ever echoed—atleast, more than once or twice—to the supreme soliloquy of Hamlet.Those words which combine the noblest pleading ever proffered for therights of human reason with the loftiest vindication ever uttered ofthose rights, no mortal ear within our knowledge has ever heard spokenon the stage. A convocation even of all priests could not havebeen more unhesitatingly unanimous in its rejection than seems to havebeen the hereditary verdict of all actors. It could hardly havebeen found worthier of theological than it has been found of theatricalcondemnation. Yet, beyond all question, magnificent as is thatmonologue on suicide and doubt which has passed from a proverb intoa byword, it is actually eclipsed and distanced at once on philosophicand on poetical grounds by the later soliloquy on reason and resolution.

That Shakespeare was in the genuine sense—that is, in the bestand highest and widest meaning of the term—a free thinker, thisotherwise practically and avowedly superfluous effusion of all inmostthought appears to me to supply full and sufficient evidence for theconviction of every candid and rational man. To that loftiestand most righteous title which any just and reasoning soul can everdeserve to claim, the greatest save one of all poetic thinkers has thusmade good his right for ever.

I trust it will be taken as no breach of my past pledge to abstainfrom all intrusion on the sacred ground of Gigadibs and the Germans,if I venture 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 may observe at once that the misconception involved in such a readingof the riddle ought to have been evident even without this episodicalstroke of illustration. In any case it should be plain to anyreader that the signal characteristic of Hamlet’s inmost natureis by no means irresolution or hesitation or any form of weakness, butrather the strong conflux of contending forces. That during fourwhole acts Hamlet cannot or does not make up his mind to any directand deliberate action against his uncle is true enough; true, also,we may say, that Hamlet had somewhat more of mind than another man tomake up, and might properly want somewhat more time than might anotherman to do it in; but not, I venture to say in spite of Goethe, throughinnate inadequacy to his task and unconquerable weakness of the will;not, I venture to think in spite of Hugo, through immedicable scepticismof the spirit and irremediable propensity to nebulous intellectual refinement.One practical point in the action of the play precludes us from acceptingso ready a solution of the riddle as is suggested either by the simpletheory of half-heartedness or by the simple hypothesis of doubt.There is absolutely no other reason, we might say there was no otherexcuse, for the introduction or intrusion of an else superfluous episodeinto a play which was already, and which remains even after all possibleexcisions, one of the longest plays on record. The compulsoryexpedition of Hamlet to England, his discovery by the way of the plotlaid against his life, his interception of the King’s letter andhis forgery of a substitute for it against the lives of the King’sagents, the ensuing adventure of the sea-fight, with Hamlet’sdaring act of hot-headed personal intrepidity, his capture and subsequentrelease on terms giving no less patent proof of his cool-headed andready-witted courage and resource than the attack had afforded of hisphysically impulsive and even impetuous hardihood—all this servesno purpose whatever but that of exhibiting the instant and almost unscrupulousresolution of Hamlet’s character in time of practical need.But for all that he or Hamlet has got by it, Shakespeare might too evidentlyhave spared his pains; and for all this voice as of one crying in awilderness, Hamlet will too surely remain to the majority of students,not less than to all actors and all editors and all critics, the standingtype and embodied emblem of irresolution, half-heartedness, and doubt.

That Hamlet should seem at times to accept for himself, and evento enforce 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 andlast person to suspect his own weakness, the one only unbiassed judgeand witness of sufficiently sharp-sighted candour and accuracy to estimatearight his poverty of nature and the malformation of his mind.But the high-hearted and tender-conscienced Hamlet, with his nativebias towards introspection intensified and inflamed and directed anddilated at once by one imperative pressure and oppression of unavoidableand unalterable circ*mstance, was assuredly and exactly the one onlyman to be troubled by any momentary fear that such might indeed be thesolution of his riddle, and to feel or to fancy for the moment somekind of ease and relief in the sense of that very trouble. A borndoubter would have doubted even of Horatio; hardly can all positiveand almost palpable evidence of underhand instigation and inspired goodintentions induce Hamlet for some time to doubt even of Ophelia.

III.

The entrance to the third period of Shakespeare is like the entranceto that lost and lesser Paradise of old,

With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms.

Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony, Timon, these are namesindeed of something more than tragic purport. Only in the sunnierdistance beyond, where the sunset of Shakespeare’s imaginationseems to melt or flow back into the sunrise, do we discern Prosperobeside Miranda, Florizel by Perdita, Palamon with Arcite, the same knightlyand kindly Duke Theseus as of old; and above them all, and all othersof his divine and human children, the crowning and final and ineffablefigure of Imogen.

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear is unquestionablythat in which he has come nearest to the height and to the likenessof the one tragic poet on any side greater than himself whom the worldin all its ages has ever seen born of time. It is by far the mostÆschylean of his works; the most elemental and primæval,the most oceanic and Titanic in conception. He deals here withno subtleties as in Hamlet, with no conventions as in Othello:there is no question of “a divided duty” or a problem halfinsoluble, a matter of country and connection, of family or of race;we look upward and downward, and in vain, into the deepest things ofnature, into the highest things of providence; to the roots of life,and to the stars; from the roots that no God waters to the stars whichgive no man light; over a world full of death and life without resting-placeor guidance.

But in one main point it differs radically from the work and thespirit of Æschylus. Its fatalism is of a darker and hardernature. To Prometheus the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankindwere bitter; upon Orestes the hand of heaven was laid too heavily tobear; yet in the not utterly infinite or everlasting distance we seebeyond them the promise of the morning on which mystery and justiceshall be made one; when righteousness and omnipotence at last shallkiss each other. But on the horizon of Shakespeare’s tragicfatalism we see no such twilight of atonement, such pledge of reconciliationas this. Requital, redemption, amends, equity, explanation, pityand mercy, are words without a meaning here.

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 here is 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 orof heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above. We have heardmuch and often from theologians of the light of revelation: and somesuch thing indeed we find in Æschylus: but the darkness of revelationis here.

For in this the most terrible work of human genius it is with thevery springs and sources of nature that her student has set himselfto 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 a world as this a man might be forgiven who should praythat chaos might come again. Nowhere else in Shakespeare’swork or in the universe of jarring lives are the lines of characterand event so broadly drawn or so sharply cut. Only the supremeself-command of this one poet could so mould and handle such types asto restrain and prevent their passing from the abnormal into the monstrous:yet even as much as this, at least in all cases but one, it surely hasaccomplished. In Regan alone would it be, I think, impossibleto find a touch or trace of anything less vile than it was devilish.Even Goneril has her one splendid hour, her fire-flaught of hellishglory; when she treads under foot the half-hearted goodness, the wordyand windy though sincere abhorrence, which is all that the mild andimpotent revolt of Albany can bring to bear against her imperious anddauntless devilhood; when she flaunts before the eyes of her “milk-livered”and “moral fool” the coming banners of France about the“plumed helm” of his slayer.

On the other side, Kent is the exception which answers to Regan onthis. Cordelia, the brotherless Antigone of our stage, has onepassing touch of intolerance for what her sister was afterwards to brandas indiscretion and dotage in their father, which redeems her from thecharge of perfection. Like Imogen, she is not too inhumanly divinefor the sense of divine irritation. Godlike though they be, theirvery godhead is human and feminine; and only therefore credible, andonly therefore adorable. Cloten and Regan, Goneril and Iachimo,have power to stir and embitter the sweetness of their blood.But for the contrast and even the contact of antagonists as abominableas these, the gold of their spirit would be too refined, the lily oftheir holiness too radiant, the violet of their virtue too sweet.As it is, Shakespeare has gone down perforce among the blackest andthe basest things of nature to find anything so equally exceptionalin evil as properly to counterbalance and make bearable the excellenceand extremity of their goodness. No otherwise could either angelhave escaped the blame implied in the very attribute and epithet ofblameless. But where the possible depth of human hell is so fouland unfathomable as it appears in the spirits which serve as foils tothese, we may endure that in them the inner height of heaven shouldbe no less immaculate and immeasurable.

It should be a truism wellnigh as musty as Hamlet’s half citedproverb, to enlarge upon the evidence given in King Lear of asympathy with the mass of social misery more wide and deep and directand bitter and tender than Shakespeare has shown elsewhere. Butas even to this day and even in respectable quarters the murmur is notquite duly extinct which would charge on Shakespeare a certain shareof divine indifference to suffering, of godlike satisfaction and a lessthan compassionate content, it is not yet perhaps utterly superfluousto insist on the utter fallacy and falsity of their creed who whetherin praise or in blame would rank him to his credit or discredit amongsuch poets as on this side at least may be classed rather with Goethethan with Shelley and with Gautier than with Hugo. A poet of revolutionhe is not, as none of his country in that generation could have been:but as surely as the author of Julius Cæsar has approvedhimself in the best and highest sense of the word at least potentiallya republican, so surely has the author of King Lear avowed himselfin the only good and rational sense of the words a spiritual if nota 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 struckwith all his strength a chord of which the resonance could excite suchangry agony and heartbreak of wrath as that of the brother kings whenthey smote their staffs against the ground in fierce imperious anguishof agonised and rebellious compassion, at the oracular cry of Calchasfor the innocent blood of Iphigenia. The doom even of Desdemonaseems as much less morally intolerable as it is more logically inevitablethan the doom of Cordelia. But doubtless the fatalism of Othellois as much darker and harder than that of any third among the playsof Shakespeare, as it is less dark and hard than the fatalism of KingLear. For upon the head of the very noblest man whom evenomnipotence or Shakespeare could ever call to life he has laid a burdenin one sense yet heavier than the burden of Lear, insomuch as the sufferercan with somewhat less confidence of universal appeal proclaim himselfa man more sinned against than 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 blinderand more unrighteous blow

Struck by the envious wrath of man or God

than ever fell on the old white head of that child-changed father.But at least he is destroyed by the stroke of a mightier hand than theirswho struck down Lear. As surely as Othello is the noblest manof man’s making, Iago is the most perfect evildoer, the most potentdemi-devil. It is of course the merest commonplace to say as much,and would be no less a waste of speech to add the half comfortable reflectionthat it is in any case no shame to fall by such a hand. But thissubtlest and strangest work of Shakespeare’s admits and requiressome closer than common scrutiny. Coleridge has admirably describedthe first great soliloquy which opens to us the pit of hell within as“the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity.” Butsubtle and profound and just as is this definitive appreciation, thereis more in the matter yet than even this. It is not only thatIago, so to speak, half tries to make himself half believe that Othellohas wronged him, and that the thought of it gnaws him inly like a poisonousmineral: though this also be true, it is not half the truth—norhalf that half again. Malignant as he is, the very subtlest andstrongest component of his complex nature is not even malignity.It is the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an inarticulate poet.In his immortal study on the affair of the diamond necklace, the mostprofound and potent humourist of his country in his century has unwittinglytouched on the mainspring of Iago’s character—“thevery pulse of the machine.” He describes his Circe de laMothe-Valois as a practical dramatic poet or playwright at least inlieu of 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 nothave written a Hamlet. Neither could Iago have writtenan Othello. (From this theorem, by the way, a reasoneror a casuist benighted enough to prefer articulate poets to inarticulate,Shakespeare to Cromwell, a fair Vittoria Colonna to a “foul Circe-Megæra,”and even such a strategist as Homer to such a strategist as Frederic-William,would not illogically draw such conclusions or infer such corollariesas might result in opinions hardly consonant with the Teutonic-Titanicevangel of the preacher who supplied him with his thesis.) “Butwhat he can do, that he will”: and if it be better to make a tragedythan to write one, to act a poem than to sing it, we must allow to Iagoa station in the hierarchy of poets very far in advance of his creator’s.None of the great inarticulate may more justly claim place and precedence.With all his poetic gift, he has no poetic weakness. Almost anycreator but his would have given him some grain of spite or some sparkof lust after Desdemona. To Shakespeare’s Iago she is nomore than is a rhyme to another and articulate poet. {179}His stanza must at any rate and at all costs be polished: to borrowthe metaphor used by Mr. Carlyle in apologetic illustration of a royalhero’s peculiar system of levying recruits for his colossal brigade.He has within him a sense or conscience of power incomparable: and thispower shall not be left, in Hamlet’s phrase, “to fust inhim unused.” A genuine and thorough capacity for human lustor hate would diminish and degrade the supremacy of his evil.He is almost as far above or beyond vice as he is beneath or beyondvirtue. And this it is that makes him impregnable and invulnerable.When once he has said it, we know as well as he that thenceforth henever will speak word. We could smile almost as we can see himto have smiled at Gratiano’s most ignorant and empty threat, beingwell assured that torments will in no wise ope his lips: that as surelyand as truthfully as ever did the tortured philosopher before him, hemight have told his tormentors that they did but bruise the coating,batter the crust, or break the shell of Iago. Could we imaginea far other lost spirit than Farinata degli Uberti’s endowed withFarinata’s might of will, and transferred from the sepulchresof fire to the dykes of Malebolge, we might conceive something of Iago’sattitude in hell—of his unalterable and indomitable posture forall eternity. As though it were possible and necessary that insome one point the extremities of all conceivable good and of all imaginableevil should meet and mix together in a new “marriage of heavenand hell,” the action in passion of the most devilish among allthe human damned could hardly be other than that of the most godlikeamong all divine saviours—the figure of Iago than a reflectionby hell-fire of the figure of Prometheus.

Between Iago and Othello the position of Desdemona is precisely thatdefined with such quaint sublimity of fancy in the old English byword—“betweenthe devil and the deep sea.” Deep and pure and strong andadorable 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 Mephistophelescould be matched for danger and for dread against the good bluff soldierlytrustworthy figure of honest Iago? The rough license of his tongueat once takes warrant from his good soldiership and again gives warrantfor his honesty: so that in a double sense it does him yeoman’sservice, and that twice told. It is pitifully ludicrous to seehim staged to the show like a member—and a very inefficient member—ofthe secret police. But it would seem impossible for actors tounderstand that he is not a would-be detective, an aspirant for thehonours of a Vidocq, a candidate for the laurels of a Vautrin: thathe is no less than Lepidus, or than Antony’s horse, “a triedand valiant soldier.” It is perhaps natural that the twodeepest and subtlest of all Shakespeare’s intellectual studiesin good and evil should be the two most painfully misused and misunderstoodalike by his commentators and his fellows of the stage: it is certainlyundeniable that no third figure of his creation has ever been on bothsides as persistently misconceived and misrepresented with such desperatepertinacity as Hamlet and Iago.

And it is only when Iago is justly appreciated that we can justlyappreciate either Othello or Desdemona. This again should surelybe no more than the truism that it sounds; but practically it wouldseem to be no less than an adventurous and audacious paradox.Remove or deform or diminish or modify the dominant features of thedestroyer, and we have but the eternal and vulgar figures of jealousyand innocence, newly vamped and veneered and padded and patched up forthe stalest purposes of puppetry. As it is, when Coleridge asks“which do we pity the most” at the fall of the curtain,we can surely answer, Othello. Noble as are the “most blessedconditions” of “the gentle Desdemona,” he is yet thenobler of the two; and has suffered more in one single pang than shecould suffer in life or in death.

But if Othello be the most pathetic, King Lear themost terrible, Hamlet the subtlest and deepest work of Shakespeare,the highest in abrupt and steep simplicity of epic tragedy is Macbeth.There needs no ghost come from the grave, any reader may too probablyremark, to tell us this. But in the present generation such noveltieshave been unearthed regarding Shakespeare that the reassertion of anold truth may seem to have upon it some glittering reflection from thebrazen brightness of a brand-new lie. Have not certain wise menof the east of England—Cantabrigian Magi, led by the star of theirgoddess Mathesis (“mad Mathesis,” as a daring poet was onceill-advised enough to dub her doubtful deity in defiance of scansionrather than of truth)—have they not detected in the very heartof this tragedy the “paddling palms and pinching fingers”of Thomas Middleton?

To the simpler eyes of less learned Thebans than these—Thebes,by the way, was Dryden’s irreverent name for Cambridge, the nursingmother of “his green unknowing youth,” when that “renegade”was recreant enough to compliment Oxford at her expense as the chosenAthens of “his riper age”—the likelihood is only tooevident that the sole text we possess of Macbeth has not beeninterpolated 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 wayof thanksgiving, have complained with a touch of petulance that it wasout of place and superfluous in the setting: nay, that it was incongruouswith all the circ*mstances—out of tone and out of harmony andout of keeping with character and tune and time. In other lipsindeed than Othello’s, at the crowning minute of culminant agony,the rush of imaginative reminiscence which brings back upon his eyesand ears the lightning foam and tideless thunder of the Pontic sea mightseem a thing less natural than sublime. But Othello has the passionof a poet closed in as it were and shut up behind the passion of a hero.For all his practical readiness of martial eye and ruling hand in action,he is also in his season “of imagination all compact.”Therefore it is that in the face and teeth of all devils akin to Iagothat hell could send forth to hiss at her election, we feel and recognisethe spotless exaltation, the sublime and sun-bright purity, of Desdemona’sinevitable and invulnerable love. When once we likewise have seenOthello’s visage in his mind, we see too how much more of greatnessis in this mind than in another hero’s. For such an one,even a boy may well think how thankfully and joyfully he would lay downhis life. Other friends we have of Shakespeare’s givingwhom we love deeply and well, if hardly with such love as could weepfor him all the tears of the body and all the blood of the heart: butthere is none we love like Othello.

I must part from his presence again for a season, and return to mytopic in the text of Macbeth. That it is piteously rentand ragged and clipped and garbled in some of its earlier scenes, therough construction and the poltfoot metre, lame sense and limping verse,each maimed and mangled subject of players’ and printers’most treasonable tyranny, contending as it were to seem harsher thanthe other, combine in this contention to bear indisputable and intolerablewitness. Only where the witches are, and one more potent and moreterrible than all witches and all devils at their beck, can we be surethat such traitors have not robbed us of one touch from Shakespeare’shand. The second scene of the play at least bears marks of suchhandling as the brutal Shakespearean Hector’s of the “mangledMyrmidons”; it is too visibly “noseless, handless, hackedand chipped” as it comes to us, crying on Hemings and Condell.And it is in this unlucky scene that unkindly criticism has not unsuccessfullysought for the gravest faults of language and manner to be found inShakespeare. 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 beenstretched forth; no blight of mistranslation by perversion has fallenupon the words which interpret and expound the hidden things of theirevil will.

To one tragedy as to one comedy of Shakespeare’s, the casualor the natural union of especial popularity with especial simplicityin selection and in treatment of character makes it as superfluous asit would be difficult to attempt any application of analytical criticism.There is nothing in them of a nature so compound or so complex as tocall for solution or resolution into its primal elements. Herethere is some genuine ground for the generally baseless and delusiveopinion of self-complacent sciolism that he who runs may read Shakespeare.These two plays it is hardly worth while to point out by name: all probablereaders will know them at once for Macbeth and As You LikeIt. There can hardly be a single point of incident or of characteron which the youngest reader will not find himself at one with the oldest,the dullest with the brightest among the scholars of Shakespeare.It would be an equal waste of working hours or of playtime if any ofthese should devote any part of either a whole-schoolday or a holidayto remark or to rhapsody on the character of Macbeth or of Orlando,of Rosalind or of Lady Macbeth. He that runs, let him read: andhe that has ears, let him hear.

I cannot but think that enough at least of time has been spent ifnot wasted by able and even by eminent men on examination of Coriolanuswith regard to its political aspect or bearing upon social questions.It is from first to last, for all its turmoil of battle and clamourof contentious factions, rather a private and domestic than a publicor historical tragedy. As in Julius Cæsar the familyhad been so wholly subordinated to the state, and all personal interestsso utterly dominated by the preponderance of national duties, that eventhe sweet and sublime figure of Portia passing in her “awful loveliness”was but as a profile half caught in the background of an episode, sohere on the contrary the whole force of the final impression is notthat of a conflict between patrician and plebeian, but solely that ofa match of passions played out for life and death between a mother anda son. The partisans of oligarchic or democratic systems may wrangleat their will over the supposed evidences of Shakespeare’s prejudiceagainst this creed and prepossession in favour of that: a third bystandermay rejoice in the proof thus established of his impartial indifferencetowards either: it is all nothing to the real point in hand. Thesubject of the whole play is not the exile’s revolt, the rebel’srepentance, or the traitor’s reward, but above all it is the son’stragedy. The inscription on the plinth of this tragic statue issimply to Volumnia Victrix.

A loftier or a more perfect piece of man’s work was never donein all the world than this tragedy of Coriolanus: the one fitand crowning epithet for its companion or successor is that bestowedby Coleridge—“the most wonderful.” It wouldseem a sign or birthmark of only the greatest among poets that theyshould be sure to rise instantly for awhile above the very highest oftheir native height at the touch of a thought of Cleopatra. Sowas it, as we all know, with William Shakespeare: so is it, as we allsee, with Victor Hugo. As we feel in the marvellous and matchlessverses of Zim-Zizimi all the splendour and fragrance and miracleof her mere bodily presence, so from her first imperial dawn on thestage of Shakespeare to the setting of that eastern star behind a pallof undissolving cloud we feel the charm and the terror and the mysteryof her absolute and royal soul. Byron wrote once to Moore, withhow much truth or sincerity those may guess who would care to know,that his friend’s first “confounded book” of thinprurient jingle (“we call it a mellisonant tingle-tangle,”as Randolph’s mock Oberon says of a stolen sheep-bell) had beenthe first cause of all his erratic or erotic frailties: it is not impossiblethat spirits of another sort may remember that to their own innocentinfantine perceptions the first obscure electric revelation of whatBlake calls “the Eternal Female” was given through a blindwondering thrill of childish rapture by a lightning on the baby dawnof their senses and their soul from the sunrise of Shakespeare’sCleopatra.

Never has he given such proof of his incomparable instinct for abstinencefrom the wrong thing as well as achievement of the right. He hasutterly rejected and disdained all occasion of setting her off by meansof any lesser foil than all the glory of the world with all its empires.And we need not Antony’s example to show us that these are lessthan straws in the balance.

Entre elle et l’univers qui s’offraient àla fois
Il hésita, lâchant le monde dans son choix.

Even as that Roman grasp relaxed and let fall the world, so has Shakespeare’sself let go for awhile his greater world of imagination, with all itsall but infinite variety of life and thought and action, for love ofthat 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 putaside for her sake all other forms and figures of womanhood; he, fatheror creator of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona, and of Imogen, hetoo, like the sun-god and sender of all song, has anchored his eyeson her whom “Phœbus’ amorous pinches” couldnot leave “black,” nor “wrinkled deep in time”;on that incarnate and imperishable “spirit of sense,” towhom at the 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 hisown hand might have boasted herself that the loveliest and purest amongall her sisters of his begetting,

withher modest eyes
And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour,
Demurring upon me.

To sum up, Shakespeare has elsewhere given us in ideal incarnationthe perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfectmistress, or the perfect maiden: here only once for all he has givenus the perfect and the everlasting woman.

And what a world of great men and great things, “high actionsand high passions,” is this that he has spread under her for afootcloth or hung behind her for a curtain! The descendant ofthat other his ancestral Alcides, late offshoot of the god whom he lovedand who so long was loth to leave him, is here as in history the visibleone man revealed who could grapple for a second with very Rome and seemto throw it, more lightly than he could cope with Cleopatra. Andnot the Roman Landor himself could see or make us see more clearly thanhas his fellow provincial of Warwickshire that first imperial nephewof her great first paramour, who was to his actual uncle even such afoil and counterfeit and perverse and prosperous parody as the son ofHortense Beauharnais of Saint-Leu to the son of Letizia Buonaparte ofAjaccio. For Shakespeare too, like Landor, had watched his “sweetOctavius” smilingly and frowningly “draw under nose theknuckle of forefinger” as he looked out upon the trail of innocentblood after the bright receding figure of his brave young kinsman.The fair-faced false “present God” of his poetic parasites,the smooth triumphant patron and preserver with the heart of ice andiron, 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 handof Dercetas.

I have said nothing of Enobarbus or of Eros, the fugitive once ruinedby his flight and again redeemed by the death-agony of his dark anddoomed repentance, or the freedman transfigured by a death more fairthan freedom through the glory of the greatness of his faith: for whocan speak of all things or of half that are in Shakespeare? Andwho can speak worthily of any?

I am come now to that strange part of a task too high for me, whereI must needs speak not only (as may indeed well be) unworthily, butalso (as may well seem) unlovingly, of some certain portions in themature and authentic work of Shakespeare. “Though it behonest, it is never good” to do so: yet here I cannot choose butspeak plainly after my own poor conscience, and risk all chances ofchastisem*nt as fearful as any once threatened for her too faithfulmessenger by the heart-stricken wrath of Cleopatra.

In the greater part of this third period, taking a swift and generalview of it for contrast or comparison of qualities with the second,we constantly 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 stylewas often a boyish or a birdlike wantonness, very capable of such libertiesand levities as those of Lesbia’s sparrow with the lip or bosomof his mistress; as notably in the parts of Boyet and Mercutio: andindeed there is a bright vein of mere wordy wilfulness running throughoutthe golden youth of the two plays which connects Love’s Labour’sLost with Romeo and Juliet as by a thread of floss silk notalways “most excellently ravelled,” nor often unspottedor unentangled. In the second period this gaiety was replacedby the utmost frankness and fullness of humour, as a boy’s merrymadness by the witty wisdom of a man: but now for a time it would seemas if the good comic qualities of either period were displaced and oustedby mere coarseness and crudity like that of a hard harsh photograph.This ultra-Circean transformation of spirit and brutification of speechwe do not find in the lighter interludes of great and perfect tragedy:for the porter in Macbeth makes hardly an exception worth naming.It is when we come upon the singular little group of two or three playsnot accurately definable at all but roughly describable as tragi-comedies,or more properly in two cases at least as tragedies docked of theirnatural end, curtailed of the due catastrophe—it is then thatwe find for the swift sad bright lightnings of laughter from the lipsof the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless disappearance from the stageof King Lear seems for once a sure sign of inexplicable wearinessor forgetfulness on Shakespeare’s part, so nauseous and so sorrya substitute as the fetid fun and rancid ribaldry of Pandarus and Thersites.I must have leave to say that the coincidence of these two in the schemeof a single play is a thing hardly bearable by men who object to toostrong a savour of those too truly “Eternal Cesspools” overwhich the first of living humourists holds as it were for ever an everlastingnose—or rather, in one sense, does not hold but expand it forthe fuller inhalation of their too congenial fumes with an apparentrelish which will always seem the most deplorable to those who the mostgratefully and reasonably admire that high heroic genius, for love ofwhich the wiser sort of men must finally forgive all the noisy aberrationsof his misanthropy and philobulgary, anti-Gallican and Russolatrousinsanities of perverse and morbid eloquence.

The three detached or misclassified plays of Shakespeare in whichalone a reverent and reasonable critic might perhaps find somethingrationally and really exceptionable have also this far other qualityin common, that in them as in his topmost tragedies of the same periodeither the exaltation of his eloquence touches the very highest pointof expressible poetry, or his power of speculation alternately soundsthe gulfs and scales the summits of all imaginable thought. Inall three of them the power of passionate and imaginative eloquenceis not only equal in spirit or essence but identical in figure or inform: in those two of them which deal almost as much with speculativeintelligence as with poetic action and passion, the tones and methods,types and objects of thought, are also not equal only but identical.An all but absolute brotherhood in thought and style and tone and feelingunites the quasi-tragedy of Troilus and Cressida with what inthe lamentable default of as apt a phrase in English I must call byits proper designation in French the tragédie manquéeof Measure for Measure. In the simply romantic fragmentof the Shakespearean Pericles, where there was no call and noplace for the poetry of speculative or philosophic intelligence, thereis the 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 whenthe same year exposed for the expenditure of their sixpences two reasonablycorrect editions of a play unknown to the boards in the likeness ofTroilus 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 Princeof Tyre. Hitherto, ever since the appearance of his firstpoem, and its instant acceptance by all classes from courtiers to courtesansunder a somewhat dubious and two-headed form of popular success,—‘vraisuccès de scandale s’il en fut’—even the potentinfluence and unequivocal example of Rabelais had never once even inpassing or in seeming affected or infected the progressive and triumphalgenius of Shakespeare with a taint or touch of anything offensive tohealthier and cleanlier organs of perception than such as may belongto a genuine or a pretending Puritan. But on taking in his handthat one of these two new dramatic pamphlets which might first attracthim either by its double novelty as a never acted play or by a titleof yet more poetic and romantic associations than its fellow’s,such a purchaser as I have supposed, with his mind full of the sweetrich fresh humour which he would feel a right to expect from Shakespeare,could hardly have undergone less than a qualm or a pang of strong disrelishand distaste on finding one of the two leading comic figures of theplay break in upon it at his entrance not even with “a fool-bornjest,” but with full-mouthed and foul-mouthed effusion of suchrank and rancorous personalities as might properly pollute the lipseven of some emulous descendant or antiquarian reincarnation of Thersites,on application or even apprehension of a whip cracked in passing overthe assembled heads of a pseudocritical and mock-historic society.In either case we moderns at least might haply desire the interventionof a beadle’s hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty asever the son of Laertes applied to the shoulders of the first of thetype or the tribe of Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon—Iam speaking of Shakespeare’s Thersites—has no touch of humourin all his currish composition: Shakespeare had none as nature has noneto spare for such dirty dogs as those of his kind or generation.There is not even what Coleridge with such exquisite happiness definedas being the quintessential property of Swift—“animaRabelæsii habitans in sicco—the soul of Rabelais dwellingin a dry place.” It is the fallen soul of Swift himselfat its lowest, dwelling in a place yet drier: the familiar spirit orless than Socratic dæmon of the Dean informing the genius of Shakespeare.And thus for awhile infected and possessed, the divine genius had notpower to re-inform and re-create the dæmonic spirit by virtueof its own clear essence. This wonderful play, one of the mostadmirable 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, andas naturally, the least beloved of all. It would be as easy andas profitable a problem to solve the Rabelaisian riddle of the bombinatingchimæra 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 yetmore mysterious and magnificent monster of a play. That on itsproduction in print it was formally announced as “a new play neverstaled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar,”we know; must we infer or may we suppose that therefore it was not originallywritten for the stage? Not all plays were which even at that dateappeared in print: yet it would seem something more than strange thatone 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 haveso designed it in vain. Perhaps after all a better than any Germanor Germanising commentary on the subject would be the simple and summaryejacul*tion 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 writesuch a manner of dramatic poem at all? and having written, to keep itbeside him or let it out of his hands into stranger and more slipperykeeping, unacted and unprinted? A German will rush in with ananswer where an Englishman (non angelus sed Anglus) will naturallyfear to tread.

Alike in its most palpable perplexities and in its most patent splendours,this political and philosophic and poetic problem, this hybrid and hundred-facedand hydra-headed prodigy, at once defies and derides all definitivecomment. This however we may surely and confidently say of it,that of all Shakespeare’s offspring it is the one whose best thingslose least by extraction and separation from their context. Thatsome cynic had lately bitten him by the brain—and possibly a cynichimself in a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia—we might concludeas reasonably from consideration of the whole as from examination ofthe parts more especially and virulently affected: yet how much is herealso of hyper-Platonic subtlety and sublimity, of golden and Hyblæaneloquence above the reach and beyond the snap of any cynic’s tooth!Shakespeare, as under the guidance at once for good and for evil ofhis alternately Socratic and Swiftian familiar, has set himself as ifprepensely and on purpose to brutalise the type of Achilles and spiritualisethe type of Ulysses. The former is an enterprise never to be utterlyforgiven by any one who ever loved from the very birth of his boyhoodthe very name of the son of the sea-goddess in the glorious words ofMr. 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 and Andromachefare here hardly better than he: while of the momentary presentationof Helen on the dirtier boards of a stage more miry than the tub ofDiogenes I would not if I could and I must not though I would say somuch as one single proper word. The hysterics of the eponymoushero and the harlotries of the eponymous heroine remove both alike beyondthe outer pale of all rational and manly sympathy; though Shakespeare’sself may never have exceeded or equalled for subtle and accurate andbitter fidelity the study here given of an utterly light woman, shallowand loose and dissolute in the most literal sense, rather than perverseor unkindly or unclean; and though Keats alone in his most perfect moodof lyric passion and burning vision as full of fragrance as of flamecould have matched and all but overmatched those passages in which therapture of Troilus makes pale and humble by comparison the keenest rapturesof Romeo.

The relative disfavour in which the play of Measure for Measurehas doubtless been at all times generally held is not in my opinionsimply explicable on the theory which of late years has been so powerfullyand plausibly 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 mucha prototype or an autotype of the huge national vice of England.This comment is in itself as surely just and true as it is incisiveand direct: but it will not cover by any manner of means the whole question.The strong and radical objection distinctly brought forward againstthis play, and strenuously supported by the wisest and the warmest devoteeamong all the worshippers of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, thatthe Puritan 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 is absolutely correct and apt: justice is not merelyevaded or ignored or even defied: she is both in the older and the newersense of the word directly and deliberately baffled; buffeted, outraged,insulted, struck in the face. We are left hungry and thirsty afterhaving been made to thirst and hunger for some wholesome single grainat least of righteous and too long retarded retribution: we are trickedout of our dole, defeated of our due, lured and led on to look for someequitable and satisfying upshot, defrauded and derided and sent emptyaway.

That this play is in its very inmost essence a tragedy, and thatno sleight of hand or force of hand could give it even a tolerable showof coherence 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 Shakespeareat any time is worthy of Shakespeare at his highest: and of this everytouch, every line, every incident, every syllable, belongs to pure andsimple tragedy. The evasion of a tragic end by the invention andintromission of Mariana has deserved and received high praise for itsingenuity but ingenious evasion of a natural and proper end is usuallythe distinctive quality which denotes a workman of a very much lowerschool than the school of Shakespeare. In short and in fact, thewhole elaborate machinery by which the complete and completely unsatisfactoryresult of the whole plot is attained is so thoroughly worthy of sucha contriver as “the old fantastical duke of dark corners”as to be in a moral sense, if I dare say what I think, very far fromthoroughly worthy of the wisest and mightiest mind that ever was informedwith the spirit or genius of creative poetry.

I have one more note to add in passing which touches simply on amusical point in lyric verse; and from which I would therefore giveany biped who believes that ears “should be long to measure Shakespeare”all timely warning to avert the length of his own. A very singularquestion, and one to me unaccountable except by a supposition whichon charitable grounds I should be loth to entertain for a moment—namely,that such ears are commoner than I would fain believe on heads externallyor ostensibly human,—has been raised with regard to the firstimmortal song of Mariana in the moated grange. This question iswhether the second verse appended by Fletcher to that divine Shakespeareanfragment may not haply have been written by the author of the first.The visible and audible evidence that it cannot is of a kind which mustat once leap into sight of all human eyes and conviction of all humanears. The metre of Shakespeare’s verse, as written by Shakespeare,is not the metre of Fletcher’s. It can only seem the sameto those who hear by finger and not by ear: a class now at all eventsbut too evidently numerous enough to refute Sir Hugh’s antiquatedobjection to the once apparently tautologous 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 immediatelyand invariably to recall to a virtuous critical public of nice and nastymind the prose portions of the fourth act, the whole of the prose portionsof the fourth act, and nothing but the prose portions of the fourthact. To readers and writers of books who readily admit their ineligibilityas members of a Society for the Suppression of Shakespeare or Rabelais,of Homer or the Bible, it will seem that the third and fifth acts ofthis ill-fated and ill-famed play, and with them the poetical partsof the fourth act, are composed of metal incomparably more attractive.But the virtuous critic, after the alleged nature of the vulturine kind,would appear to have eyes and ears and nose for nothing else.It is true that somewhat more of humour, touched once and again withsubtler hints of deeper truth, is woven into the too realistic weftof these too lifelike scenes than into any of the corresponding partsin Measure for Measure or in Troilus and Cressida; truealso that in the hands of imitators, in hands so much weaker than Shakespeare’sas were Heywood’s or Davenport’s (who transplanted thisunlovely episode from Pericles into a play of his own), thesevery scenes or such as they reappear unredeemed by any such relief inall the rank and rampant ugliness of their raw repulsive realism: true,again, that Fletcher has once equalled them in audacity, while strippingoff the nakedness of his subject the last ragged and rude pretence ata moral purpose, and investing it instead with his very brightest robeof gay parti-coloured humour: but after all it remains equally truethat to senses less susceptible of attraction by carrion than belongto the vultures of critical and professional virtue they must alwaysremain as they have always been, something very considerably more thanunattractive. I at least for one must confess myself insufficientlyvirtuous to have ever at any time for any moment felt towards them thevery slightest touch of any feeling more attractive than repulsion.And herewith I hasten to wash my hands of the only unattractive matterin the only three of Shakespeare’s plays which offer any suchmatter to the perceptions of any healthy-minded and reasonable humancreature.

But what now shall I say that may not be too pitifully unworthy ofthe glories and the beauties, the unsurpassable pathos and sublimityinwoven with the imperial texture of this very play? the blood-red Tyrianpurple of tragic maternal jealousy which might seem to array it in aworthy attire 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 saidof that storm above all storms ever raised in poetry, which usheredinto a world of such wonders and strange chances the daughter of thewave-worn and world-wandering prince of Tyre? Nothing but thisperhaps, that it stands—or rather let me say that it blows andsounds and shines and rings and thunders and lightens as far ahead ofall others as the burlesque sea-storm of Rabelais beyond all possiblestorms of comedy. The recent compiler of a most admirably skilfuland most delicately invaluable compendium of Pantagruel or manual byway of guidebook to Rabelais has but too justly taken note of the irrefragableevidence there given that the one prose humourist who is to Aristophanesas the human twin-star Castor to Pollux the divine can never have practicallyweathered an actual gale; but if I may speak from a single experienceof one which a witness long inured to Indian storm as well as Indianbattle had never seen matched out of the tropics if ever overmatchedwithin them, I should venture to say, were the poet in question anyother mortal man than Shakespeare, to whom all things were better knownby instinct than ever they can be to others by experience, that thepainter of the storm in Pericles must have shared the adventureand relished the rapture of such an hour. None other most assuredlythan himself alone could have mingled with the material passion of theelements such human passion of pathos as thrills in such tenderly sublimeundertone of an agony so nobly subdued through the lament of Periclesover Thaisa. As in his opening speech of this scene we heard allthe clangour and resonance of warring wind and sea, so now we hear asound of sacred and spiritual music as solemn as the central monochordof the inner main itself.

That the three last acts of Pericles, with the possible ifnot over probable exception of the so-called Chorus, {210}are wholly the work of Shakespeare in the ripest fullness of his lattergenius, is a position which needs exactly as much proof as does hissingle-handed authorship of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and Othello.In the fifth act is a remarkable instance of a thing remarkably rarewith him; the recast or repetition in an improved and reinvigoratedform of a beautiful image or passage occurring in a previous play.The now only too famous metaphor of “patience on a monument smilingat grief”—too famous we might call it for its own fame—istransfigured as from human beauty to divine, in its transformation tothe comparison of Marina’s look with that of “Patience gazingon kings’ graves, and smiling Extremity out of act.”A precisely similar parallel is one to which I have referred elsewhere;that between the two passages respectively setting forth the reciprocallove of Helena and Hermia, of Emilia and Flavina. The change ofstyle and spirit in either case of reiteration is the change from asimpler to a sublimer form of beauty.

In the two first acts of Pericles there are faint and rarebut evident and positive traces of a passing touch from the hasty handof Shakespeare: even here too we may say after Dido:—

Nec tam aversus equos Tyriâ sol jungit ab urbe.

It has been said that those most unmistakable verses on “theblind mole” are not such as any man could insert into anotherman’s work, or slip in between the lines of an inferior poet:and that they occur naturally enough in a speech of no particular excellence.I take leave decisively to question the former assertion, and flatlyto contradict the latter. The pathetic and magnificent lines indispute do not occur naturally enough, or at all naturally, among thevery poor, flat, creeping verses between which they have been thrustwith such over freehanded recklessness. No purple patch was evermore pitifully out of place. There is indeed no second exampleof such wanton and wayward liberality; but the generally lean and barrenstyle of these opening acts does not crawl throughout on exactly thesame low level.

The last of the only three plays with which I venture to find anyfault on the score of moral taste is the first on my list of the onlythree plays belonging to this last period on which, as they now stand,I trace the indisputable track of another touch than Shakespeare’s.But in the two cases remaining our general task of distinction shouldon the whole be simple and easy enough for the veriest babes and sucklingsin the lower 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 assumptionof any student with an eye quick enough to catch the point where thetraces of his hand break off; but I should now be inclined to guessrather that on reconsideration of the subjects chosen he had rejectedor dismissed them for a time at least as unfit for dramatic handling.It could have needed no great expenditure of reasoning or reflectionto convince a man of lesser mind and less experience than Shakespeare’sthat no subject could possibly be more unmanageable, more indomitablyimproper for such a purpose, than he had selected in Timon of Athens.How he came ever to fall across such a subject, to hit upon such a choice,we can spend no profitable time or pains in trying to conjecture.It is clear, however, that at all events there was a season when theinexplicable attraction of it was too strong for him to resist the singulartemptation to embody in palpable form, to array in dramatic raiment,to invest with imaginative magnificence, the godless ascetic passionof misanthropy, the martyrdom of an atheistic Stylites. Timonis doubtless a man of far nobler type than any monomaniac of the tribeof Macarius: but his immeasurable superiority in spiritual rank to thehermit fathers of the desert serves merely to make him a thought madderand a grain more miserable than the whole Thebaid of Christomaniacsrolled into one. Foolish and fruitless as it has ever been tohunt through Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets on the false scentof a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark dream of trackinghis untraceable personality through labyrinthine byways of life andvisionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blind assumptionto accept the plain evidence in both so patent before us, that he toolike other men had his dark seasons of outer or of inner life, and likeother poets found them or made them fruitful as well as bitter, thoughit 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 most unconscionably unclean of all foul-minded fanatics might havebeen satisfied with the application to all women from his mother upwardsof the monstrous and magnificent obloquy found by Timon as insufficientto overwhelm as his gold was inadequate to satisfy one insatiable andindomitable “brace of harlots.” In Troilus andCressida we found too much that Swift might have written when halfinspired by the genius of Shakespeare; in the great and terrible fourthact of Timon we find such tragedy as Juvenal might have writtenwhen half deified by the spirit of Æschylus.

There is a noticeable difference between the case of Timonand the two other cases (diverse enough between themselves) of lateor mature work but partially assignable to the hand of Shakespeare.In Pericles we may know exactly how much was added by Shakespeareto the work of we know not whom; in The Two Noble Kinsmen wecan tell sometimes to a hair’s breadth in a hemistich by whomhow much was added to the posthumous text of Shakespeare; in Timonwe cannot assert with the same confidence in the same accuracy thatjust so many scenes and no more, just so many speeches and none other,were the work of Shakespeare’s or of some other hand. Throughoutthe first act his presence lightens on us by flashes, as his voice pealsout by fits, from behind or above the too meanly decorated altar oftragic or satiric song: in the second it is more sensibly continuous;in the third it is all but utterly eclipsed; in the fourth it is butvery rarely intercepted for a very brief interval in the dark divineservice of a darker Commination Day: in the fifth it predominates generallyover the sullen and brooding atmosphere with the fierce imperious glareof a “bloody sun” like that which the wasting shipmen watchedat noon “in a hot and copper sky.” There is here nomore to say of a poem inspired at once by the triune Furies of Ezekiel,of Juvenal, and of Dante.

I can imagine no reason but that already suggested why Shakespeareshould in a double sense have taken Chaucer for his model or examplein leaving half told a story which he had borrowed from the father andmaster of our narrative poetry. Among all competent scholars andall rational students of Shakespeare there can have been, except possiblywith regard to three of the shorter scenes, no room for doubt or perplexityon any detail of the subject since the perfect summary and the masterlydecision of Mr. Dyce. These three scenes, as no such reader willneed to be told or reminded, are the two first soliloquies of the Gaoler’sDaughter after the release of Palamon, and the scene of the portraits,as we may in a double sense call it, in which Emilia, after weighingagainst each other in solitude the likenesses of the cousins, receivesfrom her own kinsfolk a full and laboured description of their leadingchampions on either side. Even setting apart for once and fora moment the sovereign evidence of mere style, we must recognise inthis last instance a beautiful and significant example of that loyaland loving fidelity to the minor passing suggestions of Chaucer’stext which on all possible occasions of such comparison so markedlyand vividly distinguishes the work of Shakespeare’s from the workof Fletcher’s hand. Of the pestilent abuse and perversionto which Fletcher has put the perhaps already superfluous hints or sketchesby Shakespeare for an episodical underplot, in his transmutation ofPalamon’s love-stricken and luckless deliverer into the disgustingburlesque of a mock Ophelia, I have happily no need as I should certainlyhave 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 themidmost Paradise, the central Eden, of Shakespeare’s divine discovery—ofhis last sweet living invention. Here again is air as pure blowingover fields as fragrant as where Dante saw Matilda or Milton saw Proserpinegathering each as deathless flowers. We still have here to disentwineor disentangle his own from the weeds of glorious and of other thanglorious feature with which Fletcher has thought fit to interweave them;even in the close of the last scene of all we can say to a line, toa letter, where Shakespeare ends and Fletcher begins. That sceneis opened by Shakespeare in his most majestic vein of meditative ormoral verse, pointed and coloured as usual with him alone by directand absolute aptitude to the immediate sentiment and situation of thespeaker and of no man else: then either Fletcher strikes in for a momentwith a touch of somewhat more Shakespearean tone than usual, or possiblywe have a survival of some lines’ length, not unretouched by Fletcher,from Shakespeare’s first sketch for a conclusion of the somewhatcalamitous and cumbrous underplot, which in any case was ultimatelyleft for Fletcher to expand into such a shape and bring by such meansto such an end as we may safely swear that Shakespeare would never haveadmitted: then with the entrance and ensuing narrative of Pirithouswe have none but Shakespeare before us again, though it be Shakespeareundoubtedly in the rough, and not as he might have chosen to presenthimself after due revision, with rejection (we may well suppose) ofthis point and readjustment of that: then upon the arrival of the dyingArcite with his escort there follows a grievous little gap, a flaw butpitifully patched by Fletcher, whom we recognise at wellnigh his worstand weakest in Palamon’s appeal to his kinsman for a last word,“if his heart, his worthy, manly heart” (an exactand typical example of Fletcher’s tragically prosaic and prosaicallytragic dash of incurable commonplace), “be yet unbroken,”and in the flaccid and futile answer which fails so signally to supplythe place of the most famous and pathetic passage in all the masterpieceof Chaucer; a passage to which even Shakespeare could have added butsome depth and grandeur of his own giving, since neither he nor Dante’svery self nor any other among the divinest of men could have done moreor better than match it for tender and pure simplicity of words 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 devotethe anniversary “to tears” and “to honour,”the deeper note returns for one grand last time, grave at once and suddenand sweet as the full choral opening of an anthem: the note which nonecould ever catch of Shakespeare’s very voice gives out the peculiarcadence that it alone can give in the modulated instinct of a solemnchange or shifting of the metrical emphasis or ictus from oneto the other of two repeated words:—

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 wheezefrom the scrannel-pipe of a lesser player than Pan. Last of all,in words worthy to be the latest left of Shakespeare’s, his greatand gentle Theseus winds up the heavenly harmonies of his last belovedgreat 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 ofmany thousand times in the splendours of the planet whose glory is thelight of his very love itself, standing even as Dante

inthe 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 fifteenyears since gone home to Shakespeare, {220}of whom Charles Lamb said well that none could have written his bookabout Shakespeare but either himself alone or else he of whom the bookwas written, yet could we not hope that either would have any new thingto tell us of the Tempest, the Winter’s Tale, andCymbeline. And for ourselves, what else could we do butonly ring changes on the word beautiful as Celia on the word wonderfulin her laughing litany of love? or what better or what more can we dothan in the deepest and most heartfelt sense of an old conventionalphrase, thank God and Shakespeare? for how to praise either for sucha gift of gifts we know not, knowing only and surely that none willknow for ever.

True or false, and it would now seem something less than likely tobe true, the fancy which assumed the last lines spoken by Prospero tobe likewise the last words of the last completed work of Shakespearewas equally in either case at once natural and graceful. Thereis but one figure sweeter than Miranda’s and sublimer than Prospero’sin all the range of heaven on which the passion of our eyes could restat parting. And from one point of view there is even a more heavenlyquality perceptible in the light of this than of its two twin stars.In no nook or corner of the island as we leave it is any savour leftor any memory lingering of any inexpiable evil. Alonzo is absolved;even Antonio and Sebastian have made no such ineffaceable mark on itby the presence of their pardoned crimes as is made by those which costthe life of Mamillius and the labours of Imogen. Poor Calibanis left in such comfort as may be allowed him by divine grace in thefavourable aspect of Setebos; and his comrades go by us “reelingripe” and “gilded” not by “grand liquor”only but also by the summer lightning of men’s laughter: blownsoftly out of our sight, with a sound and a gust of music, by the breathof the song of Ariel.

The wild wind of the Winter’s Tale at its opening wouldseem to blow us back into a wintrier world indeed. And to thevery end I must confess that I have in me so much of the spirit of Rachelweeping in Ramah as will not be comforted because Mamillius is not.It is well for those whose hearts are light enough, to take perfectcomfort even in the substitution of his sister Perdita for the boy whodied of “thoughts high for one so tender.” Even thebeautiful suggestion that Shakespeare as he wrote had in mind his owndead little son still fresh and living at his heart can hardly add morethan a touch of additional tenderness to our perfect and piteous delightin him. And even in her daughter’s embrace it seems hardif his mother should have utterly forgotten the little voice that hadonly time to tell her just eight words of that ghost story which neithershe nor we were ever to hear ended. Any one but Shakespeare wouldhave sought to make pathetic profit out of the child by the easy meansof showing him if but once again as changed and stricken to the deathfor want of his mother and fear for her and hunger and thirst at hislittle high heart for the sight and touch of her: Shakespeare only couldfind a better way, a subtler and a deeper chord to strike, by givingus our last glimpse of him as he laughed and chattered with her “pastenduring,” to the shameful neglect of those ladies in the naturalblueness of whose eyebrows as well as their noses he so stoutly declinedto 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 tendersense of shame as perfectly and unpardonably as Shakespeare himselfat the close of King Lear would seem to have forgotten one whonever had forgotten Cordelia.

But yet—and here for once the phrase abhorred by Cleopatradoes not “allay the good” but only the bad “precedence”—ifever amends could be made for such unnatural show of seeming forgetfulness(“out on the seeming! I will write against it”—orwould, had I not written enough already), the poet most assuredly hasmade such amends here. At the sunrise of Perdita beside Florizelit seems as if the snows of sixteen winters had melted all togetherinto the splendour of one unutterable spring. They “smellApril and May” in a sweeter sense than it could be said of “youngMaster Fenton”: “nay, which is more,” as his friendand champion Mistress Quickly might have added to mine host’scommendatory remark, they speak all April and May; because April isin him as naturally as May in her, by just so many years’ differencebefore the Mayday of her birth as went to make up her dead brother’slittle lot of living breath, which in Beaumont’s most lovely andShakespeare-worthy phrase “was not a life; was but a piece ofchildhood thrown away.” Nor can I be content to find noword of old affection for Autolycus, who lived, as we may not doubt,though but a hint or promise be vouchsafed us for all assurance thathe lived by favour of his “good masters” once more to servePrince Florizel and wear three-pile for as much of his time as it mightplease him to put on “robes” like theirs that were “gentlemenborn,” and had “been so any time these four hours.”And yet another and a graver word must be given with all reverence tothe “grave and good Paulina,” whose glorious fire of godlikeindignation was as warmth and cordial to the innermost heart while yetbruised and wrung for the yet fresh loss of Mamillius.

The time is wellnigh come now for me to consecrate in this book mygood will if not good work to the threefold and thrice happy memoryof the three who have written of Shakespeare as never man wrote, norever man may write again; to the everlasting praise and honour and gloryof Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter Savage Landor;“wishing,” I hardly dare to say, “what I write maybe read by their light.” The play of plays, which is Cymbeline,remains alone to receive the last salute of all my love.

I think, as far as I can tell, I may say I have always loved thisone beyond all other children of Shakespeare. The too literalegoism of this profession will not be attributed by any candid or evencommonly honest reader to the violence of vanity so much more than comicalas to make me suppose that such a record or assurance could in itselfbe matter of interest to any man: but simply to the real and simplereason, that I wish to show cause for my choice of this work to windup with, beyond the mere chance of its position at the close of thechaotically inconsequent catalogue of contents affixed to the firstedition. In this casualty—for no good thing can reasonablybe ascribed to design on the part of the first editors—there wouldseem to be something more than usual of what we may call, if it so pleaseus, a happy providence. It is certain that no studious arrangementcould possibly have brought the book to a happier end. Here isdepth enough with height enough of tragic beauty and passion, terrorand love and pity, to approve the presence of the most tragic Master’shand; subtlety enough of sweet and bitter truth to attest the passageof the mightiest and wisest scholar or teacher in the school of thehuman spirit; beauty with delight enough and glory of life and graceof nature to proclaim the advent of the one omnipotent Maker among allwho bear that name. Here above all is the most heavenly triadof human 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 whowas “truest speaker” and those who “called her brother,when she was but their sister; she them brothers, when they were soindeed.” The very crown and flower of all her father’sdaughters,—I do not speak here of her human father, but her divine—thewoman above all Shakespeare’s women is Imogen. As in Cleopatrawe found the incarnate sex, the woman everlasting, so in Imogen we findhalf glorified already the immortal godhead of womanhood. I wouldfain have some honey in my words at parting—with Shakespeare never,but for ever with these notes on Shakespeare; and I am therefore somethingmore than fain to close my book upon the name of the woman best belovedin all the world of song and all the tide of time; upon the name ofShakespeare’s Imogen.

APPENDIX.

NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLAY OF KING EDWARD III.
1879.

The epitaph of German criticism on Shakespeare was long since writtenby the 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:—AYorkshire Tragedy.—The three last pieces are not only unquestionablyShakespeare’s, but in my opinion they deserve to be classed amonghis best and maturest works.”

This memorable opinion is the verdict of the modest and judiciousHerr von Schlegel: who had likewise in his day the condescension toinform our ignorance of the melancholy fact so strangely overlookedby the contemporaries of Christopher Marlowe, that “his versesare flowing, but without energy.” Strange, but true; toostrange, we may reasonably infer, not to be true. Only to Germaneyes has the treasure-house of English poetry ever disclosed a secretof this kind: to German ears alone has such discord or default beenever 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 thereis no known writer of Shakespeare’s age to whom it could be ascribedwithout the infliction of an unwarrantable insult on that writer’smemory. Sir John Oldcastle is the compound piecework offour minor playwrights, one of them afterwards and otherwise eminentas a poet—Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathaway: a thin sampleof poetic patchery cobbled up and stitched together so as to serve itshour for a season without falling to pieces at the first touch.The Yorkshire Tragedy is a coarse, crude, and vigorous impromptu,in which we possibly might almost think it possible that Shakespearehad a hand (or at least a finger), if we had any reason to suppose thatduring the last ten or twelve years of his life {232}he was likely to have taken part in any such dramatic improvisation.

The example and the exposure of Schlegel’s misadventures inthis line have not sufficed to warn off minor blunderers from treadingwith emulous confidence “through forthrights and meanders”in the very muddiest of their precursor’s traces. We maynotice, for one example, the revival—or at least the discussionas of something worth serious notice—of a wellnigh still-borntheory, first dropped in a modest corner of the critical world exactlya hundred and seventeen years ago. Its parent, notwithstandingthis perhaps venial indiscretion, was apparently an honest and modestgentleman; and the play itself, which this ingenuous theorist was fain,with all diffidence, to try whether haply he might be permitted to foiston the apocryphal fatherhood of Shakespeare, is not without such minormerits as may excuse us for wasting a few minutes on examination ofthe theory which seeks to confer on it the factitious and artificialattraction of a spurious and adventitious interest.

“The Raigne of King Edward the third: As it hath bin sundrietimes plaied about the Citie of London,” was published in 1596,and ran through two or three anonymous editions before the date of thegeneration was out which first produced it. Having thus run tothe end of its natural tether, it fell as naturally into the oblivionwhich has devoured, and has not again disgorged, so many a more preciousproduction of its period. In 1760 it was reprinted in the “Prolusions”of Edward Capell, whose text is now before me. This editor wasthe first mortal to suggest that his newly unearthed treasure mightpossibly be a windfall from the topless tree of Shakespeare. Being,as I have said, a duly modest and an evidently honest man, he admits“with candour” that there is no jot or tittle of “externalevidence” whatsoever to be alleged in support of this gratuitousattribution: but he submits, with some fair show of reason, that thereis a certain “resemblance between the style of” Shakespeare’s“earlier performances and of the work in question”; andwithout the slightest show of any reason whatever he appends to thishumble and plausible plea the unspeakably unhappy assertion that atthe time of its appearance “there was no known writer equal tosuch a play”; whereas at a moderate computation there were, Ishould say, on the authority of Henslowe’s Diary, at least a dozen—andnot improbably a score. In any case there was one then newly dead,too long before his time, whose memory stands even higher above thepossible ascription of such a work than that of the adolescent Shakespeare’svery self.

Of one point we may be sure, even where so much is unsure as we findit here: in the curt atheological phrase of the Persian Lucretius, “onething is certain, and the rest is lies.” The author of KingEdward III. was a devout student and a humble follower of ChristopherMarlowe, not yet wholly disengaged by that august and beneficent influencefrom all attraction towards the “jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits”;and fitter 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 signs of this growing struggle, the traces of this incomplete emancipation,are perceptible throughout in the alternate prevalence of two conflictingand irreconcilable styles; which yet affords no evidence or suggestionof a double authorship. For the intelligence which moulds andinforms the whole work, the spirit which pervades and imbues the generaldesign, is of a piece, so to speak, throughout; a point imperceptibleto the eye, a touchstone intangible by the finger, alike of a scholiastand a dunce.

Another test, no less unmistakable by the student and no less indiscernibleto the sciolist, is this: that whatever may be the demerits of thisplay, they are due to no voluntary or involuntary carelessness or haste.Here is not the swift impatient journeywork of a rough and ready hand;here is no sign of such compulsory hurry in the discharge of a tasksomething less than welcome, if not of an imposition something lessthan tolerable, as we may rationally believe ourselves able to tracein great part of Marlowe’s work: in the latter half of TheJew of Malta, in the burlesque interludes of Doctor Faustus,and wellnigh throughout the whole scheme and course of The Massacreat Paris. Whatever in King Edward III. is mediocreor worse is evidently such as it is through no passionate or slovenlyprecipitation of handiwork, but through pure incompetence to do better.The blame of the failure, the shame of the shortcoming, cannot be laidto the account of any momentary excess or default in emotion, of passingexhaustion or excitement, of intermittent impulse and reaction; it isan indication of lifelong and irremediable impotence. And it isfurther to be noted that by far the least unsuccessful parts of theplay are also by far the most unimportant. The capacity of theauthor seems to shrink and swell alternately, to erect its plumes anddeject them, to contract and to dilate the range and orbit of its flightin a steadily inverse degree to the proportionate interest of the subjector worth of the topic in hand. There could be no surer proof thatit is neither the early nor the hasty work of a great or even a remarkablepoet. It is the best that could be done at any time by a conscientiousand studious workman of technically insufficient culture and of naturallylimited means.

I would not, however, be supposed to undervalue the genuine and gracefulability of execution displayed by the author at his best. He couldwrite at 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 needs conformfor ever. By the rule which would attribute to Shakespeare everyline written in his first manner which appeared during the first yearsof his poetic progress, it is hard to say what amount of bad verse orbetter, current during the rise and the reign of their several influences,—forthis kind of echo or of copywork, consciously or unconsciously repercussiveand reflective, begins with the very first audible sound of a man’svoice in song, with the very first noticeable stroke of his hand inpainting—it is hard to say what amount of tolerable or intolerablework might not or may not be assignable by scholiasts of the futureto Byron or to Shelley, to Mr. Tennyson or to Mr. Browning. Atime by this rule might come—but I am fain to think better ofthe Fates—when by comparison of detached words and collation ofdismembered phrases the memory of Mr. Tennyson would be weighted anddegraded by the ascription of whole volumes of pilfered and dilutedverse now current—if not yet submerged—under the name orthe pseudonym of the present {237}Viceroy—or Vice-empress is it?—of India. But the obvioustruth is this: the voice of Shakespeare’s adolescence had as usualan echo in it of other men’s notes: I can remember the name ofbut one poet whose voice from the beginning had none; who started witha style of his own, though he may have chosen to annex—“annexthe wise it call”; convey is obsolete—to annex wholephrases or whole verses at need, for the use or the ease of an idleminute; and this name of course is Marlowe’s. So starting,Shakespeare had yet (like all other and lesser poets born) some perceptiblenotes in his yet half boyish voice that were not borrowed; and thesewere at once caught up and re-echoed by such fellow-pupils with Shakespeareof the young Master of them all—such humbler and feebler disciples,or simpler sheep (shall we call them?) of the great “dead shepherd”—asthe now indistinguishable author of King Edward III.

In the first scene of the first act the impotent imitation of Marloweis pitifully patent. Possibly there may also be an imitation ofthe still imitative style of Shakespeare, and the style may be moreaccurately definable as a copy of a copy—a study after the mannerof Marlowe, not at second hand, but at third. In any case, beingobviously too flat and feeble to show a touch of either godlike hand,this scene may be set aside at once to make way for the second.

The second scene is more animated, but low in style till we cometo the outbreak of rhyme. In other words, the energetic or activepart is at best passable—fluent and decent commonplace: but wherethe style turns undramatic and runs into mere elegiacs, a likeness becomesperceptible to the first elegiac style of Shakespeare. Witnessthese lines spoken by the King in contemplation of the Countess of Salisbury’sbeauty, while yet 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 sawor heard these pretty lines, he should have felt the unconscious rebukeimplied in such close and facile imitation of his own early elegiacs.As a serious mimicry of his first manner, a critical parody summingup in little space the sweet faults of his poetic nonage, with its barrenovergrowth of unprofitable flowers,—bright point, soft metaphor,and sweet elaborate antithesis—this is as good of its kind asanything between Aristophanes and Horace Smith. Indeed, it mayremind us of that parody on the soft, superfluous, flowery and frothystyle of Agathon, which at the opening of the Thesmophoriazusæcannot but make the youngest and most ignorant reader laugh, thoughthe oldest and most learned has never set eyes on a line of the originalverses which supplied the incarnate god of comic song with matter forsuch 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,may serve 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 butone poor couplet intervening—suggests rather the oversight ofan unfledged poet than the obtuseness of a full-grown poeticule or poetaster.

But of how many among the servile or semi-servile throng of imitatorsin every generation may not as much as this be said by tolerant or kindlyjudges! Among the herd of such diminutives as swarm after theheel or fawn upon the hand of Mr. Tennyson, more than one, more thantwo or three, have come as close as his poor little viceregal or vice-imperialparasite to the very touch and action of the master’s hand whichfeeds them unawares from his platter as they fawn; as close as thisnameless and short-winded satellite to the gesture and the stroke ofShakespeare’s. For this also must be noted; that the resemblancehere is but of stray words, of single lines, of separable passages.The whole tone of the text, the whole build of the play, the whole schemeof the poem, is far enough from any such resemblance. The structure,the composition, is feeble, incongruous, inadequate, effete. Anystudent will remark at a first glance what a short-breathed runner,what a broken-winded athlete in the lists of tragic verse, is the indiscoverableauthor of this play.

There is another point which the Neo-Shakespearean synagogue willby no man 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 comedyof the period we find here and there the same sweet and simple echoesof the very cradle-song (so to call it) of our drama: so like Shakespeare,they might say who knew nothing of Shakespeare’s fellows, thatwe cannot choose but recognise his hand. Here as always firstin the field—the genuine and golden harvest-field of Shakespeareancriticism, Charles Lamb has cited a passage from Green’s TuQuoque—a comedy miserably misreprinted in Dodsley’sOld Plays—on which he observes that “this is so like Shakespeare,that we seem to remember it,” being as it is a girl’s gentlelamentation over the selfish, exacting, suspicious and trustless loveof man, as contrasted with the swift simple surrender of a woman’slove at the first heartfelt appeal to her pity—“we seemto remember it,” says Lamb, as a speech of Desdemona uttered ona first perception or suspicion of jealousy or alienation in Othello.This lovely passage, if I dare say so in contravention to the authorityof Lamb, is indeed as like the manner of Shakespeare as it can be—toeyes ignorant of what his fellows can do; but it is not like the mannerof the Shakespeare who wrote Othello. This, however, isbeside the question. It is very like the Shakespeare who wrotethe Comedy of Errors—Love’s Labour’s Lost—Romeoand Juliet. It is so like that had we fallen upon it in anyof these plays it would long since have been a household word in allmen’s mouths for sweetness, truth, simplicity, perfect and instinctiveaccuracy of touch. It is very much liker the first manner of Shakespearethan any passage in King Edward III. And no Sham Shakespeareancritic that I know of has yet assigned to the hapless object of hishowling homage the authorship of Green’s Tu Quoque.

Returning to our text, we find in the short speech of the King withwhich the first act is wound up yet another couplet which has the veryring in it of Shakespeare’s early notes—the catch at wordsrather than play on words which his tripping tongue in youth could neverresist:

Countess, albeit my business urgeth me,
It shall attend while I attend on thee.

And with this pretty little instance of courtly and courteous euphuismwe pass from the first to the second and most important act in the play.

Any reader well versed in the text of Shakespeare, and ill versedin the work of his early rivals and his later pupils, might surely beforgiven if on a first reading of the speech with which this act openshe should cry out with Capell that here at least was the unformed handof the Master perceptible and verifiable indeed. The writer, hemight say, has the very glance of his eye, the very trick of his gait,the very note of his accent. But on getting a little more knowledge,such a reader will find the use of it in the perception to which hewill have attained that in his early plays, as in his two early poems,the style of Shakespeare was not for the most part distinctively hisown. It was that of a crew, a knot of young writers, among whomhe found at once both leaders and followers to be guided and to guide.A mere glance into the rich lyric literature of the period will sufficeto show the dullest eye and teach the densest ear how nearly innumerablewere the Englishmen of Elizabeth’s time who could sing in thecourtly or pastoral key of the season, each man of them a few notesof his own, simple or fantastic, but all sweet, clear, genuine of theirkind:—

Facies non omnibusuna,
Nec diversa tamen:

and yet so close is the generic likeness between flower and flowerof the same lyrical garden that the first half of the quotation seemsbut half applicable here. In Bird’s, Morley’s, Dowland’scollections of music with the words appended—in such jewelledvolumes as England’s Helicon and Davison’s PoeticalRhapsody—their name is Legion, their numbers are numberless.You cannot call them imitators, this man of that, or all of any; theywere all of one school, but it was a school without a master or a head.And even so it was with the earliest sect or gathering of dramatic writersin England. Marlowe alone stood apart and above them all—theyoung Shakespeare among the rest; but among these we cannot count, wecannot guess, how many were wellnigh as competent as he to continuethe fluent rhyme, to prolong the facile echo, of Greene and Peele, theirfirst and most famous leaders.

No more docile or capable pupil could have been desired by any masterin any art than the author of David and Bethsabe has found inthe writer of this second act. He has indeed surpassed his model,if not in grace and sweetness, yet in taste or tact of expression, incontinuity and equality of style. Vigour is not the principalnote of his manner, but compared with the soft effusive ebullience ofhis master’s we may fairly call it vigorous and condensed.But all this merit or demerit is matter of mere language only.The poet—a very pretty poet in his way, and doubtless capableof gracious work enough in the idyllic or elegiac line of business—showsabout as much capacity to grasp and handle the fine intimacies of characterand the large issues of circ*mstance to any tragic or dramatic purpose,as might be expected from an idyllic or elegiac poet who should suddenlyassume the buskin of tragedy. Let us suppose that Moschus, forexample, on the strength of having written a sweeter elegy than everbefore was chanted over the untimely grave of a friend and fellow-singer,had said within himself, “Go to, I will be Sophocles”; canwe imagine that the tragic result would have been other than tragicalindeed for the credit of his gentle name, and comical indeed for allwho might have envied the mild and modest excellence which fashion orhypocrisy might for years have induced them to besprinkle with the frothand 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 transcribea few passages to show how far the writer could reach at his best; leavingfor others to indicate how far short of that not inaccessible pointhe is too generally content to fall and to remain.

The opening speech is spoken by one Lodowick, a parasite of the King’s;who would appear, like François Villon under the roof of hisFat Madge, to have succeeded in reconciling the professional duties—mayI not say, the generally discordant and discrepant offices?—ofa 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 disturbèd 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, whichis in great part made up of such rhymeless couplets, each tagged withan empty verbal antithesis; but taken as a sample of dramatic writing,it is but just better than what is utterly intolerable. Dogberryhas defined it exactly; it is most tolerable—and not to be endured.

The following speech of King Edward is in that better style of whichthe author’s two chief models were not at their best incapablefor awhile under the influence and guidance (we may suppose) of theirfriend Marlowe.

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 Cæsar 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 caughtsuch an echo of Marlowe as may have fallen from the lips of Shakespearein his salad days, in his period of poetic pupilage, we have but a verylittle way to go forward before we come upon indisputable proof thatthe pupil was one of feebler hand and fainter voice than Shakespeare.Let us take the 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 recogniseat once the flat and futile imitation of Marlowe; not of his great generalstyle alone, but of one special and transcendant passage which can neverbe too often 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 admirèd 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 mightylines and the thin tinkle of their feeble imitator’s, yet we cannotchoose but catch the ineffectual note of a would-be echo in the speechof the King to his parasite—

For so much moving hath a poet’s pen, etc., etc.

It is really not worth while to transcribe the poor meagre versiclesat length: 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 andas near the style of Shakespeare’s early plays as is the styleof Constable’s sonnets to that of Shakespeare’s. Unlesswe are to assign to the Master every unaccredited song, sonnet, elegy,tragedy, comedy, and farce of his period, which bears the same marksof the same date—a date, like our own, of too prolific and imitativeproduction—as we find inscribed on the greater part of his ownearly work; unless we are to carry even as far as this the audacityand arrogance of our sciolism, we must somewhere make a halt—andit must be on the near side of such an attribution as that of KingEdward 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, thistime, much to the author’s credit. It would need a veryfine touch from a very powerful hand to improve on the delicacy anddexterity of the prelude or overture to the King’s avowal of adulterouslove. But when all is said, though very delicate and very dexterous,it is not forcible work: I do not mean by forcible the same as violent,spasmodic, emphatic beyond the modesty of nature; a poet is of courseonly to be commended, and that heartily, for keeping within this bound;but he is not to be commended for coming short of it. This wholescene is full of mild and temperate beauty, of fanciful yet earnestsimplicity; but the note of it, the expression, the dominant key ofthe style, is less appropriate to the utterance of a deep and deadlypassion than—at the utmost—of what modern tongues mightcall a strong and rather dangerous flirtation. Passion, so tospeak, is quite out of this writer’s call; the depths and heightsof 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 hisutmost merit and demerit, his final achievement and shortcoming, ishere complete and exact. Witness the sweet quiet example of idyllicwork which I extract from a scene beginning in the regular amœbæanstyle of ancient pastoral.

Edward. Thou hear’st me say that Ido 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.But throughout this part of the play the recurrence of a faint and intermittentresemblance to Shakespeare is more frequently noticeable than elsewhere.{252} A studentof imperfect memory but not of defective intuition might pardonablyassign such couplets, on hearing them cited, to the master-hand itself;but such a student would be likelier to refer them to the sonnetteerthan to the dramatist. And a casual likeness to the style of Shakespeare’ssonnets is not exactly sufficient evidence to warrant such an otherwiseunwarrantable addition of appendage to the list of Shakespeare’splays.

A little further on we come upon the first and last passage whichdoes actually recall by its wording a famous instance of the full andripened style 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 ofthe famous passage in Measure for Measure which here may seemto be faintly prefigured:

Itwere 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 whichgapes between the first style of Shakespeare and the last. Butmen of Shakespeare’s stamp, I venture to think, do not thus repeatthemselves. The echo of the passage in A Midsummer Night’sDream, describing the girlish friendship of Hermia and Helena, whichwe find in the first act of The Two Noble Kinsmen, describingthe like girlish friendship of Emilia and Flavina, is an echo of anothersort. Both, I need hardly say, are unquestionably Shakespeare’s;but the fashion in which the matured poet retouches and completes thesketch of his earlier years—composes an oil painting, as it were,from the hints and suggestions of a water-colour sketch long since designedand long since half forgotten—is essentially different from themere verbal and literal trick of repetition which sciolists might thinkto detect in the present instance. Again we must needs fall backon the inevitable and indefinable test of style; a test which couldbe of no avail if we were foolish enough to appeal to scholiasts andtheir attendant dunces, but which should be of some avail if we appealto experts and their attentive scholars; and by this test we can butremark that neither the passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dreamnor the corresponsive passage in The Two Noble Kinsmen couldhave been written by any hand known to us but Shakespeare’s; whereasthe 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 writtenby Shakespeare alone.

As on a first reading of the Hippolytus of Euripides we feelthat, for all the grace and freshness and lyric charm of its openingscenes, the claim of the poem to our ultimate approval or disapprovalmust needs depend on the success or failure of the first interview betweenTheseus and his calumniated son; and as on finding that scene to befeeble and futile and prosaic and verbose we feel that the poet whohad a woman’s spite against women has here effectually and finallyshown himself powerless to handle the simplest elements of masculinepassion, of manly character and instinct; so in this less importantcase we feel that the writer, having ventured on such a subject as thecompulsory temptation of a daughter by a father, who has been entrappedinto so shameful an undertaking through the treacherous exaction ofan equivocal promise unwarily confirmed by an inconsiderate oath, mustbe judged by the result of his own enterprise; must fail or stand asa poet by its failure or success. And his failure is only notcomplete; he is but just redeemed from utter discomfiture by the fluencyand simplicity of his equable but inadequate style. Here as beforewe find plentiful examples of the gracefully conventional tone currentamong the lesser writers of the hour.

Warwick. How shall I enter on this gracelesserrand?
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;but the verses following are of the flattest order of commonplace.Hay and grass and the spear of Achilles—of which tradition

themoral 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 fullof terrible 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 us take but one or two more instances of the better sort.

Countess. Unnatural besiege! Woe meunhappy,
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 encompassèd 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 havethee 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 loathèd 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 readerof something 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 mymind turns so,
My body sink my soul in endless woe![Exit.

So much for the central and crowning scene, the test, the climax,the hinge on which the first part of this play turns; and seems to me,in turning, to emit but a feeble and rusty squeak. No probablereader will need 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 aboutthe time of this play’s first appearance among Shakespeare’s“private friends”; in other words, which enjoyed such akind of public privacy or private publicity as one or two among themost eminent English poets of our own day have occasionally chosen forsome part of their work, to screen it for awhile as under the shelterand the shade of crepuscular laurels, till ripe for the sunshine orthe storm of public judgment. In the present case, this debatableverse looks to me more like a loan or maybe a theft from Shakespeare’sprivate store of undramatic poetry than a misapplication by its ownauthor to dramatic purposes of a line too apt and exquisite to endurewithout injury the transference from its original setting.

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,be classed as something more than passably good: it is elegant, lively,even spirited in style; showing at all events a marked advance uponthe scene which I have already stigmatised as a failure—that whichattempts to render the interview between Warwick and the King.It is hardly, however, I should say, above the highest reach of Greeneor Peele at the smoothest and straightest of his flight. At itsopening, indeed, we come upon a line which inevitably recalls one ofthe finest touches in a much later and deservedly more popular historicaldrama. On being informed by Derby 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 and statesmanlikesagacity of Audley leads him at once as by intuition to the inferencethus eloquently expressed in a strain of thrilling and exalted poetry;

Undoubtedly, then something is amiss.

Who can read this without a reminiscence of Sir Christopher Hatton’scharacteristically cautious conclusion at sight of the military preparationsarrayed 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 interviewwith the two nobles has at least the merit of ease and animation.

Derby. Befall my sovereign all my sovereign’swish!

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 withyou?

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 thosehorse
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 speaksthe 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 otherpassage of the play. But how much of Shakespeare’s earliestmanner may be accounted the special and exclusive property of Shakespeare?

After this dismissal of the two nobles, the pimping poeticule, Villonmanqué or (whom shall we call him?) réussi, reappearswith a message to Cæsar (as the King is pleased to style himself)from “the more than Cleopatra’s match” (as he designatesthe Countess), to intimate that “ere night she will resolve hismajesty.” Hereupon an unseasonable “drum within”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 lovèd 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 of frank and direct simplicity.

Edward. I see the boy. O, how hismother’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 “witha smiling cheer.”

Edward. Why, there it goes! that very smileof 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 readerwho might 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 taskin the way of citation, I shall not give so full a transcript from thenext and 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 senseof offer or proposal has no parallel in the plays of Shakespeare.)

Countess. My father on his blessing hathcommanded—

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 forhate.
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 makethe 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 thispoint onwards I can find nothing especially commendable in the remainderof the scene except its brevity. The King of course abjures hispurpose, and of course compares the Countess with Lucretia to the disadvantageof the Roman matron; summons his son, Warwick, and the attendant lords;appoints each man his post by sea or land; and starts for Flanders ina duly moral and military state of mind.

Here ends the first part of the play; and with it all possible indication,though never so shadowy, of the possible shadowy presence of Shakespeare.At the opening of the third act we are thrown among a wholly new setof characters and events, all utterly out of all harmony and keepingwith all that has gone before. Edward alone survives as nominalprotagonist; 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, this infantineshifting and shuffling of the scenes and figures, it is impossible tofind among the rudest and weakest attempts of the dawning or decliningdrama 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 sheer honestyand conscience not unworthy of a considerate hearing. To his editionof Shakespeare I therefore refer all readers desirous of further excerptsthan I care to give.

The first scene of the third act is a storehouse of contemporarycommonplace. Nothing fresher than such stale pot-pourri as thefollowing is to be gathered up in thin sprinklings from off the dryflat soil. A messenger informs the French king that he has descriedoff shore

The proud armado (sic) of King Edward’sships;
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 thePre-Marlowites; with equal regard, as may be seen, for grammar and forsense in the construction of his periods. The narrative of a sea-fightensuing on this is pitiable beyond pity and contemptibly beneath contempt.

In the next scene we have a flying view of peasants in flight, witha description of five cities on fire not undeserving of its place inthe play, immediately after the preceding sea-piece: but relieved bysuch wealth of pleasantry as marks the following jest, in which themost purblind 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, vulgarand verbose; yet in this Sham Shakespearean scene of our present poeticule’sI have noted one genuine Shakespearean word, “solely singularfor its singleness.”

So may thy temples with Bellona’s hand
Be still adorned with laurel victory!

In this notably inelegant expression of goodwill we find the sameuse of the word “laurel” as an adjective and epithet ofvictory which thus confronts us in the penultimate speech of the thirdscene in the first act of Antony and Cleopatra.

Uponyour 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 tohis son, wishing the prince to win his spurs unaided, and earn the first-fruitsof his fame single-handed against the heaviest odds; but the forciblefeebleness 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 dialogue betweenthe Black Prince and Audley on the verge of battle, is relieved by thisone last touch of quasi-Shakespearean thought or style discoverablein the play of which I must presently take a short—and a long—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 coupé, mal cousu; such is the most favourableverdict I can pass on this voluminous effusion of a spirit smackingrather of the schools than of the field. The first six lines orso might pass muster as the early handiwork of Shakespeare; the resthas as little of his manner as his 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 affectthe adolescent style of Shakespeare, and which happens to find itselfas admirably 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 thanin such lines as these.

Thyself art bruised and bent with many broils,
And stratagems forepast with iron pens
Are texèd {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 everhave put by the mouth of any but a farcical mask a query so provocativeof response 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 resolvèd proffer
Can overthrow the limit of our fate:

and so forth. Again the hastiest reader will have been remindedof a passage 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 wasblown by 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 nospecial analysis and affords no necessary extract. We may justobserve as examples of style the play on words between the flight ofhovering ravens and the flight of routed soldiers, and the descriptionof the sudden fog

Which now hath hid the airy floor of heaven,
And made at noon a night unnatural
Upon the quaking and dismayèd world.

The interest rises again with the reappearance and release of Salisbury,and lifts the style for a moment to its own level. Àtout seigneur tout honneur; the author deserves some dole of moderateapprobation for his tribute to the national chivalry of a Frenchmanas here exemplified in the person of Prince Charles.

Of the two next scenes, in which the battle of Poitiers is so inadequately“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 doubtlessdie in 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 noticeat the opening of the fifth act. If in all the historical groundworkof this play there is one point of attraction which we might have thoughtcertain to stimulate the utmost enterprise and evoke the utmost capacitiesof an aspiring dramatist, it must surely be sought in the crowning sceneof the story; in the scene of Queen Philippa’s intercession forthe burgesses of Calais. We know how Shakespeare on the like occasionwas wont to transmute into golden verse the silver speech supplied tohim by North’s version of Amyot’s Plutarch. {273}With the text of Lord Berners before him, the author of King EdwardIII. has given us for the gold of Froissart not even adulteratedcopper, but unadulterated lead. Incredible as it may seem to readersof the historian, the poeticule has actually contrived so far to transfigureby dint of disfiguring him that this most noble and pathetic scene inall the annals of chivalry, when passed through the alembic of his incompetence,appears in a garb of transforming verse under a guise at once weak andwordy, coarse and unchivalrous. The whole scene is at all pointsalike in its unlikeness to the workmanship of Shakespeare.

Here then I think we may finally draw bridle: for the rest of thecourse is not worth running; there is nothing in the residue of thislast act which deserves analysis or calls for commentary. We havenow examined the whole main body of the work with somewhat more thannecessary care; and our conclusion is simply this: that if any man ofcommon reading, common modesty, common judgment, and common sense, canbe found to maintain the theory of Shakespeare’s possible partnershipin the composition of this play, such a man will assuredly admit thatthe only discernible or imaginable touches of his hand are very slight,very few, and very early. For myself, I am and have always beenperfectly satisfied with one single and simple piece of evidence thatShakespeare had not a finger in the concoction of King Edward III.He was the author of King Henry V.

NOTE.

I was not surprised to hear that my essay on the historical playof King Edward III. had on its first appearance met in various quarterswith assailants of various kinds. There are some forms of attackto which no answer is possible for a man of any human self-respect butthe lifelong silence of contemptuous disgust. To such as theseI will never condescend to advert or to allude further than by the remarknow as it were forced from me, that never once in my life have I hador will I have recourse in self-defence either to the blackguard’sloaded bludgeon of personalities or to the dastard’s sheatheddagger of disguise. I have reviled no man’s person: I haveoutraged no man’s privacy. When I have found myself misledeither by imperfection of knowledge or of memory, or by too much confidencein a generally trustworthy guide, I have silently corrected the misquotationor readily repaired the error. To the successive and representativeheroes of the undying Dunciad I have left and will always leave thefoul use of their own foul weapons. I have spoken freely and fearlessly,and so shall on all occasions continue to speak, of what I find to beworthy of praise or dispraise, contempt or honour, in the public worksand actions of men. Here ends and here has always ended in literarymatters the proper province of a gentleman; beyond it, though sometimesintruded on in time past by trespassers of a nobler race, begins theproper province of a blackguard.

REPORT ON THE PROCEEDINGS ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF THENEWEST SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY.

A paper was read by Mr. A. on the disputed authorship of A MidsummerNight’s Dream. He was decidedly of opinion that thisplay was to be ascribed to George Chapman. He based this opinionprincipally on the ground of style. From its similarity of subjecthe had at first been disposed to assign it to Cyril Tourneur, authorof The Revenger’s Tragedy; and he had drawn up in supportof this theory a series of parallel passages extracted from the speechesof Vindice in that drama and of Oberon in the present play. Hepointed out however that the character of Puck could hardly have beenthe work of any English poet but the author of Bussy d’Ambois.There was here likewise that gravity and condensation of thought conveyedthrough the medium of the “full and heightened style” commendedby Webster, and that preponderance of philosophic or political discourseover poetic interest and dramatic action for which the author in questionhad 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’sLabour’s Lost?), Mr. A. cited the well-known scene in whichOberon discourses with Puck on matters concerning Mary Stuart and QueenElizabeth, instead of despatching him at once on his immediate errand.This was universally accepted as proof positive, and the reading concludedamid signs of unanimous assent, when

Mr. B. had nothing to urge against the argument they had just heard,but he must remind them that there was a more weighty kind of evidencethan that adduced by Mr. A.; and to this he doubted not they would alldefer. He could prove by a tabulated statement that the words“to” and “from” occurred on an average fromseven to nine times in every play of Chapman; whereas in the play underconsideration the word “to” occurred exactly twelve timesand the word “from” precisely ten. He was thereforeof opinion that the authorship should in all probability be assignedto Anthony Munday.

As nobody present could dispute this conclusion, Mr. C. proceededto read the argument by which he proposed to establish the fact, hithertounaccountably overlooked by all preceding commentators, that the characterof Romeo was obviously designed as a satire on Lord Burghley.The first and perhaps the strongest evidence in favour of this propositionwas the extreme difficulty, he might almost say the utter impossibility,of discovering a single point of likeness between the two characters.This would naturally be the first precaution taken by a poor playerwho designed to attack an all-powerful Minister. But more directlight was thrown upon the subject by a passage in which “thatkind of fruit that maids call medlars when they laugh alone” ismentioned in connection with a wish of Romeo’s regarding his mistress.This must evidently be taken to refer to some recent occasion on whichthe policy of Lord Burghley (possibly in the matter of the Anjou marriage)had been rebuked 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 Lord Burghley’s patronageand the recipient of his bounty. That this poet was the authorof 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 hehad always thought so when at school. The plaudits excited bythis announcement had scarcely subsided, when the Chairman clenchedthe matter by observing that he rather thought the same opinion hadultimately been entertained by his own grandmother.

Mr. D. then read a paper on the authorship and the hidden meaningof two contemporary plays which, he must regretfully remark, were tooobviously calculated to cast a most unfavourable and even sinister lighton the moral character of the new Shakespeare; whose possibly suspiciousreadiness to attack the vices of others with a view to diverting attentionfrom his own was signally exemplified in the well-known fact that, evenwhile putting on a feint of respect and tenderness for his memory, hehad exposed the profligate haunts and habits of Christopher Marloweunder the transparent pseudonym of Christopher Sly. To the firstof these plays attention had long since been drawn by a person of whomit was only necessary to say that he had devoted a long life to thestudy and illustration of Shakespeare and his age, and had actuallypresumed to publish a well-known edition of the poet at a date previousto the establishment of the present Society. He (Mr. D.) was confidentthat not another syllable could be necessary to expose that person tothe contempt of all present. He proceeded, however, with the kindencouragement of the Chairman, to indulge at that editor’s expensein sundry personalities both “loose and humorous,” whichbeing totally unfit for publication here are reserved for a privateissue of “Loose and Humorous Papers” to be edited, witha running marginal commentary or illustrative and explanatory versionof the utmost possible fullness, {279}by the Founder and another member of the Society. To these itmight possibly be undesirable for them to attract the notice of theoutside world. Reverting therefore to his first subject from variousreferences to the presumed private character, habits, gait, appearance,and bearing of the gentleman in question, Mr. D. observed that the ascriptionof a share in the Taming of the Shrew to William Haughton (hithertosupposed the author of a comedy called Englishmen for my Money)implied a doubly discreditable blunder. The real fact, as he wouldimmediately prove, was not that Haughton was joint author with Shakespeareof the Taming of the Shrew, but that Shakespeare was joint authorwith Haughton of Englishmen for my Money. He would notenlarge on the obvious fact that Shakespeare, so notorious a plundererof others, had actually been reduced to steal from his own poor storean image transplanted from the last scene of the third act of Romeoand Juliet into the last scene of the third act of Englishmenfor my Money; where the well-known and pitiful phrase—“Night’scandles are burnt out”—reappears in all its paltry vulgarityas follows;—“Night’s candles burn obscure.”Ample as was the proof here supplied, he would prefer to rely exclusivelyupon such further evidence as might be said to lie at once on the surfaceand in a nutshell.

The second title of this play, by which the first title was in afew years totally superseded, ran thus: A Woman will have her Will.Now even 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,as in the proverbial case of Sir Thomas Lucy; and above all for punson his own Christian name, as in his 135th, 136th, and 143rd sonnets.It must now be but too evident to the meanest intelligence—tothe meanest intelligence, he repeated; for to such only did he or wouldhe then and there or ever or anywhere address himself—(loud applause)that the graceless author, more utterly lost to all sense of shame thanany Don Juan or other typical libertine of fiction, had come forwardto placard by way of self-advertisem*nt on his own stage, and beforethe very eyes of a Maiden Queen, the scandalous confidence in his ownpowers of fascination and seduction so cynically expressed in the tooeasily intelligible vaunt—A Woman will have her Will [Shakespeare].In the penultimate line of the hundred and forty-third sonnet the veryphrase might be said to occur:

So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will.

Having thus established his case in the first instance to the satisfaction,as he trusted, not only of the present Society, but of any asylum forincurables in any part of the country, the learned member now passedon to the consideration of the allusions at once to Shakespeare andto a celebrated fellow-countryman, fellow-poet, and personal friendof his—Michael Drayton—contained in a play which had beendoubtfully attributed to Shakespeare himself by such absurd idiots aslooked rather to the poetical and dramatic quality of a poem or a playthan to such tests as those to which alone any member of that Societywould ever dream of appealing. What these were he need not specify;it was enough to say in recommendation of them that they had ratherless to do with any question of dramatic or other poetry than with thedifferential calculus or the squaring of the circle. It followedthat only the most perversely ignorant and æsthetically presumptuousof readers could imagine the possibility of Shakespeare’s concernor partnership in a play which had no more Shakespearean quality aboutit than mere poetry, mere passion, mere pathos, mere beauty and vigourof thought and language, mere command of dramatic effect, mere depthand subtlety of power to read, interpret, and reproduce the secretsof the heart and spirit. Could any further evidence be requiredof the unfitness and unworthiness to hold or to utter any opinion onthe matter in hand which had consistently been displayed by the poorcreatures to whom he had just referred, it would be found, as he feltsure the Founder and all worthy members of their Society would be thefirst to admit, in the despicable diffidence, the pitiful modesty, thecontemptible deficiency in common assurance, with which the suggestionof Shakespeare’s partnership in this play had generally been putforward and backed up. The tragedy of Arden of Fevershamwas indeed connected with Shakespeare—and that, as he should proceedto show, only too intimately; but Shakespeare was not connected withit—that is, in the capacity of its author. In what capacitywould be but too evident when he mentioned the names of the two leadingruffians concerned in the murder of the principal character—BlackWill and Shakebag. The single original of these two charactershe need scarcely pause to point out. It would be observed thata double precaution had been taken against any charge of libel or personalattack which might be brought against the author and supported by theall-powerful court influence of Shakespeare’s two principal patrons,the Earls of Essex and Southampton. Two figures were substitutedfor one, and the unmistakable name of Will Shakebag was cut in halfand divided between them. Care had moreover been taken to disguisethe person by altering the complexion of the individual aimed at.That the actual Shakespeare was a fair man they had the evidence ofthe coloured bust at Stratford. Could any capable and fair-mindedman—he would appeal to their justly honoured Founder—requirefurther evidence as to the original of Black Will Shakebag? Anotherimportant character in the play was Black Will’s accomplice andArden’s servant—Michael, after whom the play had also atone time been called Murderous Michael. The single factthat Shakespeare and Drayton were both of them Warwickshire men wouldsuffice, he could not doubt, to carry conviction with it to the mindof every member present, with regard to the original of this personage.It now only remained for him to produce the name of the real authorof this play. He would do so at once—Ben Jonson. Aboutthe time of its production Jonson was notoriously engaged in writingthose additions to the Spanish Tragedy of which a preposterousattempt had been made to deprive him on the paltry ground that the style(forsooth) of these additional scenes was very like the style of Shakespeareand utterly unlike the style of Jonson. To dispose for ever ofthis pitiful argument it would be sufficient to mention the names ofits two first and principal supporters—Charles Lamb and SamuelTaylor Coleridge (hisses and laughter). Now, in these “adycionsto Jeronymo” a painter was introduced complaining of the murderof his son. In the play before them a painter was introduced asan accomplice in the murder of Arden. It was unnecessary to dwellupon so trivial a point of difference as that between the stage employmentor the moral character of the one artist and the other. In eithercase they were as closely as possible connected with a murder.There was a painter in the Spanish Tragedy, and there was alsoa painter in Arden of Feversham. He need not—he wouldnot add another word in confirmation of the now established fact, thatBen Jonson had in this play held up to perpetual infamy—whetherdeserved or undeserved he would not pretend to say—the names oftwo poets who afterwards became his friends, but whom he had previouslygibbeted or at least pilloried in public as Black Will Shakespeare andMurderous Michael Drayton.

Mr. E. then brought forward a subject of singular interest and importance—“Thelameness of Shakespeare—was it moral or physical?”He would not insult their intelligence by dwelling on the absurd andexploded hypothesis that this expression was allegorical, but wouldat once assume that the infirmity in question was physical. Thenarose the question—In which leg? He was prepared, on theevidence of an early play, to prove to demonstration that the injuredand interesting limb was the left. “This shoe is my father,”says Launce in the Two Gentlemen of Verona; “no, this leftshoe is my father; no, no, this left shoe is my mother; nay, that cannotbe so neither; yes, it is so, it is so; it hath the worser sole.”This passage was not necessary either to the progress of the play orto the development of the character; he believed he was justified inasserting that it was not borrowed from the original novel on whichthe play was founded; the inference was obvious, that without some personalallusion it must have been as unintelligib1e to the audience as it hadhitherto been to the commentators. His conjecture was confirmed,and the whole subject illustrated with a new light, by the well-knownline in one of the Sonnets, in which the poet describes himself as “madelame by Fortune’s dearest spite”: a line of which the innermeaning and personal application had also by a remarkable chance beenreserved for him (Mr. E.) to discover. There could be no doubtthat we had here a clue to the origin of the physical infirmity referredto; 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.The epithet “dearest,” like so much else in the Sonnets,was evidently susceptible of a double interpretation. The firstand most natural explanation of the term would at once suggest itself;the playhouse would of necessity be dearest to the actor dependent onit for subsistence, as the means of getting his bread; but he thoughtit not unreasonable to infer from this unmistakable allusion that theentrance fee charged at the Fortune may probably have been higher thanthe price of seats in any other house. Whether or not this fact,taken in conjunction with the accident already mentioned, should beassumed as the immediate cause of Shakespeare’s subsequent changeof service, he was not prepared to pronounce with such positive confidenceas they might naturally expect from a member of the Society; but hewould take upon himself to affirm that his main thesis was now and forever established on the most irrefragable evidence, and that no assailantcould by any possibility dislodge by so much as a hair’s breadththe least fragment of a single brick in the impregnable structure ofproof raised by the argument to which they had just listened.

This demonstration being thus satisfactorily concluded, Mr. F. proceededto read his paper on the date of Othello, and on the variousparts of that play respectively assignable to Samuel Rowley, to GeorgeWilkins, and to Robert Daborne. It was evident that the storyof Othello and Desdemona was originally quite distinct from that partof the play in which Iago was a leading figure. This he was preparedto show at some length by means of the weak-ending test, the light-endingtest, the double-ending test, the triple-ending test, the heavy-monosyllabic-eleventh-syllable-of-the-double-endingtest, the run-on-line test, and the central-pause test. Of thepartnership of other poets in the play he was able to adduce a simplerbut not less cogent proof. A member of their Committee said toan objector lately: “To me, there are the handwritings of fourdifferent men, the thoughts and powers of four different men, in theplay. If you can’t see them now, you must wait till, bystudy, you can. I can’t give you eyes.” To thisargument he (Mr. F.) felt that it would be an insult to their understandingsif he should attempt to add another word. Still, for those whowere willing to try and learn, and educate their ears and eyes, he hadprepared six tabulated 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 totaland unaccountable suspension of all his faculties, he found the speakerdrawing gradually near the end of his figures, and so far succeededin shaking 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 thesame hand as the third scene he should have no difficulty in provingto the satisfaction of all capable and fair-minded men. In thefirst and fourth scenes the word “virtuous” was used asa dissyllable; in the third it was used 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 Elementsof Geometry 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 in the verse of Shakespeare’stime), company (two consecutive lines with the triple ending), Cassio(again), conscience, petition, ability, importunity, conversation,marriage, dungeon, mandragora, passion, monstrous, conclusion, bounteous.He could not imagine any man in his senses questioning the weight ofthis evidence. Now, let them take the rhymed speeches of the Dukeand Brabantio in Act i. Sc. 3, and compare them with the speech of Othelloin Act iv. Sc. 2,

Had it pleased heaven
To try me with affliction.

He appealed to any expert whether this was not in Shakespeare’seasy fourth budding manner, with, too, various other points alreadytouched on. On the other hand, take the opening of Brabantio’sspeech—

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 floweringmanner—the style of the later part of the earlier stage of Shakespeare’srhetorical first period but one. It was no more possible to movethe one passage up to the date of the other than to invert the orderof the alphabet. Here, then, putting aside for the moment thepart of the play supplied by Shakespeare’s assistants in the lastthree acts—miserably weak some of it was—they were ableto disentangle the early love-play from the latter work in which Iagowas principally concerned. There was at least fifteen years’growth between them, the steps of which could he traced in the poet’sintermediate plays by any one who chose to work carefully enough atthem. Set any of the speeches addressed in the Shakespeare partof the last act by Othello to Desdemona beside the consolatory addressof the Duke to Brabantio, and see the difference of the rhetoric andstyle in the two. If they turned to characters, Othello and Desdemonawere even 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’sLost the question of complexion was identical, though the partswere reversed. He would cite but a few parallel passages in evidenceof this relationship between the subjects 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, orchild could bring himself or herself to believe that the connectionof these plays was casual or the date of the first Othello removablefrom the date of the early contemporary late-first-period-but-one playLove’s Labour’s Lost, or that anybody’s opinionthat they were so was worth one straw? When therefore by the introductionof the Iago episode Shakespeare in his later days had with the assistanceof three fellow-poets completed the unfinished work of his youth, thejunction thus effected of the Brabantio part of the play with this Iagounderplot supplied them with an evidence wholly distinct from that ofthe metrical test which yet confirmed in every point the conclusionindependently arrived at and supported by the irresistible coincidenceof all the tests. He defied anybody to accept his principle ofstudy or adopt his method of work, and arrive at a different conclusionfrom himself.

The reading of Mr. G.’s paper on the authorship of the soliloquiesin Hamlet was unavoidably postponed till the next meeting, thelearned member having only time on this occasion to give a brief summaryof the points he was prepared to establish and the grounds on whichhe was prepared to establish them. A year or two since, when hefirst thought of starting the present Society, he had never read a lineof the play in question, having always understood it to be admittedlyspurious: but on being assured of the contrary by one of the two foremostpoets of the English-speaking world, who was good enough to read outto him in proof of this assertion all that part of the play which couldreasonably be assigned to Shakespeare, he had of course at once surrenderedhis own former opinion, well grounded as it had hitherto seemed to beon the most solid of all possible foundations. At their next meetinghe would show cause for attributing to Ben Jonson not only the soliloquiesusually but inconsiderately quoted as Shakespeare’s, but the entireoriginal conception of the character of the Prince of Denmark.The resemblance of this character to that of Volpone in The Foxand to that of Face in The Alchemist could not possibly escapethe notice of the most cursory reader. The principle of disguisewas the same in each case, whether the end in view were simply personalprofit, or (as in the case of Hamlet) personal profit combined withrevenge; and whether the disguise assumed was that of madness, of sickness,or of a foreign personality, the assumption of character was in allthree cases identical. As to style, he was only too anxious tomeet (and, he doubted not, to beat) on his own ground any antagonistwhose ear had begotten {291}the crude and untenable theory that the Hamlet soliloquies were notdistinctly within the range of the man who could produce those of Critesand of Macilente in Cynthia’s Revels and Every Man outof his Humour. The author of those soliloquies could, anddid, in the parallel passages of Hamlet, rise near the heightof the master he honoured and loved.

The further discussion of this subject was reserved for the nextmeeting of the Society, as was also the reading of Mr. H.’s paperon the subsequent quarrel between the two joint authors of Hamlet, whichled to Jonson’s caricature of Shakespeare (then retired from Londonsociety to a country life of solitude) under the name of Morose, andto Shakespeare’s retort on Jonson, who was no less evidently attackedunder the designation of Ariel. The allusions to the subject ofShakespeare’s sonnets in the courtship and marriage of Epicœneby Morose were as obvious as the allusions in the part of Ariel to therepeated incarceration of Jonson, first on a criminal and secondly ona political charge, and to his probable release in the former case (duringthe reign of Elizabeth=Sycorax) at the intercession of Shakespeare,who was allowed on all hands to have represented himself in the characterof Prospero (“it was mine art that let thee out”).Mr. I. would afterwards read a paper on the evidence for Shakespeare’swhole or part authorship of a dozen or so of the least known plays ofhis time, which, besides having various words and phrases in commonwith his acknowledged works, were obviously too bad to be attributedto any other known writer of the period. Eminent among these wasthe tragedy of Andromana, or the Merchant’s Wife, longsince rejected from the list of Shirley’s works as unworthy ofthat poet’s hand. Unquestionably it was so; not less unworthythan A Larum for London of Marlowe’s. The consequentinference that it must needs be the work of the new Shakespeare’swas surely no less cogent in this than in the former case. Theallusion occurring in it to a play bearing date just twenty-six yearsafter the death of Shakespeare, and written by a poet then unborn, wasa strong point in favour of his theory. (This argument was receivedwith general marks of adhesion.) What, he would ask, could bemore natural than that Shirley when engaged on the revision and arrangementfor the stage of this posthumous work of the new Shakespeare’s(a fact which could require no further proof than he had already adduced),should have inserted this reference in order to disguise the name ofits real author, and protect it from the disfavour of an audience withwhom that name was notoriously out of fashion? This reasoning,conclusive in itself, became even more irresistible—or would becomeso, if that were anything less than an absolute impossibility—oncomparison 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 ofa king.

ThoughI 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 theMerchant of Venice. The transference of the Rialto to Iberiawas of a piece with the discovery of a sea-coast in Bohemia. Inthe same scene Andromana says to her lover, finding him reluctant totake his leave, almost in the very words of Romeo to Juliet,

Then let us standand outface danger,
Since you will have it so.

It was obvious that only the author of the one passage could havethought it necessary to disguise his plagiarism in the other by an inversionof sexes between the two speakers. In the same scene were threeother indisputable instances of repetition.

Mariners might withfar 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 identityof authorship 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 wordswere coupled in the very same order:

Morevalidity,
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 fireany time this two and thirty years.

In Act ii. Scene 2 the hero, on being informed how heavy are theodds against 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 theprince wish
. . .. . ..
He had fewer by a thousand men.

Could any member doubt that we had here the same hand which gaveus the like debate between King Henry and Westmoreland on the eve ofa*gincourt? or could any member suppose that in the subsequent remarkof the same military confidant, “I smell a rat, sir,” therewas merely a fortuitous coincidence with Hamlet’s reflection ashe “whips out his rapier”—in itself a martial proceeding—undersimilar circ*mstances to the same effect?

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 thatthe tattered rogues proved ultimately victorious. But he had—theymight hardly believe it, but so it was—even yet stronger and moreconvincing evidence to offer. It would be remembered that a playcalled The Double Falsehood, formerly attributed to Shakespeareon the authority of Theobald, was now generally supposed to have beenin its original form the work of Shirley. What, then, he wouldask, could be more natural or more probable than that a play formerlyascribed to Shirley should prove to be the genuine work of Shakespeare?Common sense, common reason, common logic, all alike and all equallycombined to enforce upon every candid judgment this inevitable conclusion.This, however, was nothing in comparison to the final proof which hehad yet to lay before them. He need not remind them that in theopinion of their illustrious German teachers, the first men to discoverand reveal to his unworthy countrymen the very existence of the newShakespeare, the authenticity of any play ascribed to the possibly tooprolific pen of that poet was invariably to be determined in the lastresort by consideration of its demerits. No English critic, therefore,who felt himself worthy to have been born a German, would venture toquestion the postulate on which all sound principles of criticism withregard to this subject must infallibly be founded: that, given any playof unknown or doubtful authorship, the worse it was, the likelier wasit to be Shakespeare’s. (This proposition was received withevery sign of unanimous assent.) Now, on this ground he was preparedto maintain that the claims of Andromana to their most respectful,their most cordial, their most unhesitating acceptance were absolutelybeyond all possibility of parallel. Not Mucedorus or FairEm, not The Birth of Merlin or Thomas Lord Cromwell,could reasonably or fairly be regarded as on the same level of worthlessnesswith this incomparable production. No mortal man who had survivedits perusal could for a moment hesitate to agree that it was the mostincredibly, ineffably, inconceivably, unmitigatedly, irredeemably, inexpressiblydamnable piece of bad work ever perpetrated by human hand. Nomortal critic of the genuine Anglo-German school could therefore hesitatefor a moment to agree that in common consistency he was bound to acceptit as the possible work of no human hand but the hand of the New Shakespeare.

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 had ample reason to congratulate themselves and him on the result.They had established an entirely new kind of criticism, working by entirelynew means towards an entirely new end, in honour of an entirely newkind of Shakespeare. They had proved to demonstration and overwhelmedwith obloquy the incompetence, the imbecility, the untrustworthiness,the blunders, the forgeries, the inaccuracies, the obliquities, theutter moral 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 processof putting forward various theories, and still more various facts, butall of equally incontrovertible value and relevance, of which no Englishman—hemight say, no mortal—outside the Society had ever heard or dreamedtill now. They had discovered the one trustworthy and indisputablemethod, so easy and so simple that it must now seem wonderful it shouldnever have been discovered before, by which to pluck out the heart ofthe poet’s mystery and detect the secret of his touch; the studyof Shakespeare by rule of thumb. Every man, woman, and child bornwith five fingers on each hand was henceforward better qualified asa critic than any poet or scholar of time past. But it was not,whatever outsiders might pretend to think, exclusively on the verse-test,as it had facetiously been called on account of its total incompatibilitywith any conceivable scheme of metre or principle of rhythm—itwas not exclusively on this precious and unanswerable test that theyrelied. Within the Society as well as without, the pretensionsof those who would acknowledge no other means of deciding on debatedquestions had been refuted and repelled. What were the other meansof investigation and verification in which not less than in the metricaltest they were accustomed to put their faith, and by which they doubtednot to attain in the future even more remarkable results than theirresearches had as yet achieved, the debate just concluded, in commonwith every other for which they ever had met or ever were likely tomeet, would amply suffice to show. By such processes as had beenapplied on this as on all occasions to the text of Shakespeare’sworks and the traditions of his life, they trusted in a very few yearsto subvert all theories which had hitherto been held and extirpate allideas which had hitherto been cherished on the subject: and having thuscleared the ground for his advent, to discover for the admiration ofthe world, as the name of their Society implied, a New Shakespeare.The first step towards this end must of course be the demolition ofthe old one; and he would venture to say they had already made a goodbeginning in that direction. They had disproved or they woulddisprove the claim of Shakespeare to the sole authorship of Macbeth,Julius Cæsar, King Lear, Hamlet, and Othello; theyhad established or they would establish the fact of his partnershipin Locrine, Mucedorus, The Birth of Merlin, Dr. Dodipoll, andSir Giles Goosecap. They had with them the incomparablecritics of Germany; men whose knowledge and judgment on all questionsof English literature were as far beyond the reach of their Englishfollowers as the freedom and enlightenment enjoyed by the subjects ofa military empire were beyond the reach of the citizens of a democraticrepublic. They had established and affiliated to their own primitivebody or church various branch societies or sects, in England and elsewhere,devoted to the pursuit of the same end by the same means and methodof study as had just been exemplified in the transactions of the presentmeeting. Still there remained much to be done; in witness of whichhe proposed to lay before them at their next meeting, by way of inaugurationunder a happy omen of their new year’s work, the complete bodyof evidence by means of which he was prepared to demonstrate that someconsiderable portion, if not the greater part, of the remaining playsh*therto assigned to Shakespeare was due to the collaboration of a contemporaryactor and playwright, well known by name, but hitherto insufficientlyappreciated; Robert Armin, the author of A Nest of Ninnies.

ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS.

The humble but hard-working journeyman of letters who was chargedwith the honourable duty of reporting the transactions at the last meetingof the Newest Shakespeare Society on the auspicious occasion of itsfirst anniversary, 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 and painstakingreport. Anxious above all things to secure for himself such creditas may be due to the modest merit of scrupulous fidelity, he desiresto lay before the public so much of the corrections conveyed in theirrespective letters of reclamation as may be necessary to complete orto 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 AMidsummer Night’s Dream may make the reasoning put forwardby that gentleman liable to the misconception of a hasty reader.The omission of various qualifying phrases has left his argument withoutsuch explanation, his statements without such reservation, as he hadbeen careful to supply. He did not say in so many words that hehad been disposed to assign this drama to the author of The Revenger’sTragedy simply on the score of the affinity discernible betweenthe subjects of the two plays. He is not prone to self-confidenceor to indulgence in paradox. What he did say was undeniable byany but those who trusted only to their ear, and refused to correctthe conclusions thus arrived at by the help of other organs which Godhad given them—their fingers, for example, and their toes; bymeans of which a critic of trained and competent scholarship might withthe utmost confidence count up as far as twenty, to the great profitof all students who were willing to accept his guidance and be boundby his decision on matters of art and poetry. Only the most purblindcould fail to observe, what only the most perverse could hesitate toadmit, that there was at first sight an obvious connection between thepoison-flower—“purple from love’s wound”—squeezedby Oberon into the eyes of the sleeping Titania and the poison rubbedby Vindice upon the skull of the murdered Gloriana. No studentof Ulrici’s invaluable work would think this a far-fetched reference.That eminent critic had verified the meaning and detected the allusionunderlying many a passage of Shakespeare in which the connection ofmoral idea was more difficult to establish than this. In the fifthact of either play there was a masque or dramatic show of a sanguinarykind; in the one case the bloodshed was turned to merry-making, in theother the merry-making was turned to bloodshed. Oberon’sphrase, “till I torment thee for this injury,” might easilybe mistaken for a quotation from the part of Vindice. This explanation,he trusted, would suffice to exonerate his original view from any chargeof haste or rashness; especially as he had now completely given it up,and adopted one (if possible) more impregnably based on internal andexternal evidence.

Mr. C. was not unnaturally surprised and indignant to find his positionas to Romeo and Lord Burghley barely indicated, and the notice givenof the arguments by which it was supported so docked and curtailed asto convey a most inadequate conception of their force. Among thechief points of his argument were these: that the forsaken Rosalinewas evidently intended for the late Queen Mary, during whose reign Cecilhad notoriously conformed to the observances of her creed, though readyon the accession of Elizabeth to throw it overboard at a day’snotice; (it was not to be overlooked that the friar on first hearingthe announcement of this change of faith is made earnestly to remonstrate,prefacing his reproaches with an invocation of two sacred names—aninvocation peculiar to Catholics;) that the resemblance between oldCapulet and Henry VIII. is obvious to the most careless reader; hisoath of “God’s bread!” immediately followed by theavowal “it makes me mad” is an unmistakable allusion tothe passions excited by the eucharistic controversy; his violence towardsJuliet at the end of the third act at once suggests the alienation ofher father’s heart from the daughter of Anne Boleyn; the self-congratulationon her own “stainless” condition as a virgin expressed byJuliet in soliloquy (Act iii. Sc. 2) while in the act of awaiting herbridegroom conveys a furtive stroke of satire at the similar vaunt ofElizabeth when likewise meditating marriage and preparing to receivea suitor from the hostile house of Valois. It must be unnecessaryto point out the resemblance or rather the identity between the characterand fortune of Paris and the character and fortune of Essex, whose fatehad been foreseen and whose end prefigured by the poet with almost propheticsagacity. To the far-reaching eye of Shakespeare it must haveseemed natural and inevitable that Paris (Essex) should fall by thehand of Romeo (Burghley) immediately before the monument of the Capuletswhere their common mistress was interred alive—immediately, thatis, before the termination of the Tudor dynasty in the person of Elizabeth,who towards the close of her reign may fitly have been regarded as onealready buried with her fathers, though yet living in a state of suspendedanimation under the influence of a deadly narcotic potion administeredby the friends of Romeo—by the partisans, that is, of the Cecilianpolicy. The Nurse was not less evidently designed to representthe Established Church. Allusions to the marriage of the clergyare profusely scattered through her speeches. Her deceased husbandwas probably meant for Sir Thomas More—“a merry man”to the last moment of his existence—who might well be supposedby a slight poetic license to have foreseen in the infancy of Elizabethher future backsliding and fall from the straight path “when shecame to age.” The passing expression of tenderness withwhich the Nurse refers to his memory—“God be with his soul!”—impliesat once the respect in which the name of the martyr Chancellor was stillgenerally held, and the lingering remains of Catholic tradition whichstill made a prayer for the dead rise naturally to Anglican lips.On the other hand, the strife between Anglicans and Puritans, the struggleof episcopalian with Calvinistic reformers, was quite as plainly typifiedin the quarrel between the Nurse and Mercutio, in which the Martin Marprelatecontroversy was first unmistakably represented on the stage. The“saucy merchant, that was so full of his ropery,” with hisridicule of the “stale” practice of Lenten fasting and abstinence,his contempt for “a Lenten pie,” and his preference fora flesh diet as “very good meat in Lent,” is clearly a discipleof Calvin; and the impotence of the Nurse, however scandalised at thenakedness of his ribald profanity, to protect herself against it byappeal to reason or tradition, is dwelt upon with an emphasis sufficientto indicate the secret tendency of the poet’s own sympathies andconvictions. In Romeo’s attempt at conciliation, and hispoor excuse for Mercutio (which yet the Nurse, an emblem of the temporisingand accommodating pliancy of episcopalian Protestantism, shows herselfonly too ready to accept as valid) as “one that God hath made,for himself to mar,”—the allusion here is evidently to thedemocratic and revolutionary tendencies of the doctrine of Knox andCalvin, with its ultimate developments of individualism and privatejudgment—we recognise the note of Burghley’s lifelong policyand its endeavour to fuse the Protestant or Puritan party with the stateChurch of the Tudors as by law established. The distaste of Elizabeth’sbishops for such advances, their flutter of apprehension at the daringand their burst of indignation at the insolence of the Calvinists, aresignificantly expressed in terms which seem to hint at a possible returnfor help and protection to the shelter of the older faith and the supportof its partisans. “An ’a speak anything against me,I’ll take him down an ’a were lustier than he is, and twentysuch Jacks;” (the allusion here is again obvious, to the baptismalname of John Calvin and John Knox, if not also to the popular bywordof Jack Presbyter;) “and if I cannot,” (here the sense ofinsecurity and dependence on foreign help or secular power becomes transparent)“I’ll find those that shall.” She disclaimscommunion with the Protestant Churches of the continent, with Amsterdamor Geneva: “I am none of his flirt-gills; I am none of his skains-mates.”Peter, who carries her fan (“to hide her face: for her fan’sthe fairer face”; we may take this to be a symbol of the formof episcopal consecration still retained in the Anglican Church as acover for its separation from Catholicism), is undoubtedly meant forWhitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury; the name Peter, as applied to amenial who will stand by and suffer every knave to use the Church athis pleasure, but is ready to draw as soon as another man if only hemay be sure of having the secular arm of the law on his side, impliesa bitter sarcasm on the intruding official of state then establishedby law as occupant of a see divorced from its connection with that ofthe apostle. The sense of instability natural to an institutionwhich is compelled to rely for support on ministers who are themselvesdependent on the state whose pay they draw for power to strike a blowin self-defence could hardly be better expressed than by the solemnand piteous, almost agonised asseveration; “Now, afore God, Iam so vexed, that every part about me quivers.” To Shakespeare,it cannot be doubted, the impending dissolution or dislocation of theAnglican system in “every part” by civil war and religiousdiscord must even then have been but too ominously evident.

If further confirmation could be needed of the underlying significanceof allusion traceable throughout this play, it might amply be suppliedby fresh reference to the first scene in which the Nurse makes her appearanceon the stage, and is checked by Lady Capulet in the full tide of affectionateregret for her lost husband. We can well imagine Anne Boleyn cuttingshort the regrets of some indiscreet courtier for Sir Thomas More inthe very words of the text;

Enough of this; I pray thee, hold thy peace.

The “parlous knock” which left so big a lump upon thebrow of the infant Juliet is evidently an allusion to the declarationof Elizabeth’s illegitimacy while yet in her cradle. Theseal of bastardy set upon the baby 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 forsakeRomeo for Paris indicates the bias of the hierarchy in favour of Essex—“alovely gentleman”—rather than of the ultra-Protestant policyof Burghley, who doubtless in the eyes of courtiers and churchmen was“a dish-clout to him.”

These were a few of the points, set down at random, which he hadbeen enabled to verify within the limits of a single play. Theywould suffice to give an idea of the process by which, when appliedin detail to every one of Shakespeare’s plays, he trusted to establishthe secret history and import of each, not less than the general sequenceand significance of all. Further instalments of this work wouldprobably be issued in the forthcoming or future Transactions of theNewest Shakespeare Society; and it was confidently expected that thefinal monument of his research when thoroughly completed and illustratedby copious appendices, would prove as worthy as any work of mere Englishscholarship could hope to be of a place beside the inestimable commentariesof Gervinus, Ulrici, and the PolypseudocriticopantodapomorosophisticometricoglossematographicomaniacalCompany for the Confusion of Shakespeare and Diffusion of Verbiage (Unlimited).

CHIMÆRA BOMBINANS IN VACUO.

NOTE.

Mindful of the good old apologue regarding “the squeak of thereal pig,” I think it here worth while to certify the reader oflittle faith, that the more incredibly impudent absurdities above citedare not so much or so often the freaks of parody or the fancies of burlesqueas select excerpts and transcripts of printed and published utterancesfrom the “pink soft litter” of a living brood—fromthe reports of an actual Society, issued in an abridged and doubtlessan emasculated form through the columns of a weekly newspaper.One final and unapproachable instance, one transcendant and pyramidalexample of classical taste and of critical scholarship, I did not ventureto impair by transference from those columns and transplantation intothese pages among humbler specimens of minor monstrosity. Letit stand here once more on record as “a good jest for ever”—orrather as the best and therefore as the worst, as the worst and thereforeas the best, of all possible bad jests ever to be cracked between thisand the crack of doom. Sophocles, said a learned member, was theproper parallel to Shakespeare among the ancient tragedians: Æschylus—hear,O heaven, and give ear, O earth!—Æschylus was only aMarlowe.

The hand which here transcribes this most transcendant utterancehas written before now many lines in verse and in prose to the honourand glory of Christopher Marlowe: it has never—be the humble avowalthus blushingly recorded—it has never set down as the writer’sopinion that he was only an Æschylus. In other words, ithas never registered as my deliberate and judicial verdict the findingthat he was only the equal of the greatest among all tragic and allprophetic poets; of the man who combined all the light of the Greekswith all the fire of the Hebrews; who varied at his will the revelationof the single gift of Isaiah with the display of the mightiest amongthe manifold gifts of Shakespeare.

Footnotes.

{30} Reprintedby Dr. Grosart in his beautiful and valuable edition of Greene’sworks.

{33} Onething is certain: that damnable last scene at which the gorge riseseven to remember it is in execution as unlike the crudest phase of Shakespeare’sstyle as in conception it is unlike the idlest birth of his spirit.Let us hope that so foul a thing could not have been done in even tolerablygood verse.

{42} Itis not the least of Lord Macaulay’s offences against art thathe should have contributed the temporary weight of his influence asa critic to the support of so ignorant and absurd a tradition of criticismas that which classes the great writer here mentioned with the brutalif “brawny” Wycherley—a classification almost to beparalleled with that which in the days of our fathers saw fit to coupletogether the names of Balzac and of Sue. Any competent criticwill always recognise in The Way of the World one of the glories,in The Country Wife one of the disgraces, of dramatic and ofEnglish literature. The stains discernible on the masterpieceof Congreve are trivial and conventional; the mere conception of theother man’s work displays a mind so prurient and leprous, uncoverssuch an unfathomable and unimaginable beastliness of imagination, thatin the present age at least he would probably have figured as a virtuousjournalist and professional rebuker of poetic vice or artistic aberration.

{63} Sincethis passage first went to press, I have received from Dr. Grosart themost happy news that he has procured a perfect copy of this preciousvolume, and will shortly add it to his occasional issues of golden waifsand strays forgotten by the ebb-tide of time. Not even the disintermentof Robert Chester’s “glorified” poem, with its appendedjewels of verse from Shakespeare’s very hand and from others onlyless great than Shakespeare’s, all now at last reset in theirstrange original framework, was a gift of greater price than this.

{89} Comparewith Beaumont’s admirable farce of Bessus the wretched imitationof it attempted after his death in the Nice Valour of Fletcher;whose proper genius was neither for pure tragedy nor broad farce, butfor high comedy and heroic romance—a field of his own invention;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 of Jonson.He could give us no Fox or Alchemist; but the inventorof Bessus and Calianax was worthy of the esteem and affection returnedto him by the creator of Morose and Rabbi Busy.

{92} A desperateattempt has been made to support the metrical argument in favour ofFletcher’s authorship by the production of a list in which suchwords as slavery, emperor, pitying, difference, and even Christians,were actually registered as trisyllabic terminations. To suchunimaginable shifts are critics of the finger-counting or syllabic schoolinevitably and fatally reduced in the effort to establish by rule ofthumb even so much as may seem verifiable by that rule in the provinceof poetical criticism. Prosody is at best no more than the skeletonof verse, 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 skeletonof worthless or irrelevant fact, but the shadow of such a skeleton reflectedin water. It would seem that critics who hear only through theirfingers have not even fingers to hear with.

{108}“La dynastie du bon sens, inaugurée dans Panurge, continuéedans Sancho Pança, tourne à mal et avorte dans Falstaff.”(William Shakespeare, deuxième partie, livre premier,ch. ii,)

{125}Possibly some readers may agree with my second thoughts, in thinkingthat one exception may here be made and some surprise be here expressedat Shakespeare’s rejection of Sly’s memorable query—“Whenwill the fool come again, Sim?” It is true that he couldwell afford to spare it, as what could he not well afford to spare?but I will confess that it seems to me worthy of a place among his ownSly’s most admirable and notable 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) theauthor quotes a passage from “the induction to A Warning forFair Women, 1599 (to which Shakespeare most assuredly contributed).”It will be seen that I do not shrink from admitting the full weightof authority which can be thrown into the scale against my own opinion.To such an assertion from the insolent organs of pretentious ignoranceI should be content with the simple rejoinder that Shakespeare mostassuredly did nothing whatever of the sort; but to return such an answerin the present case would be to write myself down—and that incompany to which I should most emphatically object—as somethingvery decidedly more—and worse—than an ass.

{137}Not for the first and probably not for the last time I turn, with allconfidence as with all reverence, for illustration and confirmationof my own words, to the exquisite critical genius of a long honouredand long lamented fellow-craftsman. The following admirable andfinal estimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in theintellectual force of Honoré de Balzac could only have been takenby the inevitable intuition and rendered by the subtlest eloquence ofCharles Baudelaire. Nothing could more aptly and perfectly illustratethe distinction indicated in my text between unimaginative realism andimaginative reality.

“I have many a time been astonished that to pass for an observershould be Balzac’s great popular title to fame. To me ithad always seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, anda passionate visionary. All his characters are gifted with theardour of life which animated himself. All his fictions are asdeeply coloured as dreams. From the highest of the aristocracyto the lowest of the mob, all the actors in his Human Comedyare keener after living, more active and cunning in their struggles,more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous in enjoyment,more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows themto us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions,has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will.It is actually Balzac himself. And as all the beings of the outerworld presented themselves to his mind’s eye in strong reliefand with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to hisfigures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their lights.Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderateambition to see everything, to bring everything to sight, to guess everything,to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forciblythe principal lines, so as to preserve the perspective of the whole.He reminds me sometimes of those etchers who are never satisfied withthe biting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines themain scratches of the plate. From this astonishing natural dispositionof mind wonderful results have been produced. But this dispositionis generally defined as Balzac’s great fault. More properlyspeaking, it is exactly his great distinctive duality. But whocan boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a methodwhich may permit him to invest—and that with a sure hand—whatis purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple? Who cando this? Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no greatthing.”

Nor was any very great thing done by the author of A Warning forFair Women.

{141}I do not know or remember in the whole radiant range of Elizabethandrama more than one parallel tribute to that paid in this play by anEnglish poet to the yet foreign art of painting, through the eloquentmouth of this enthusiastic villain of genius, whom we might regard asa more genuinely Titianic sort of Wainwright. The parallel passageis that most lovely and fervid of all imaginative panegyrics on thisart, extracted by Lamb from the comedy of Doctor Dodipoll; whichsaw the light or twilight of publication just eight years later thanArden of Feversham.

{154}I remember to have somewhere at some time fallen in with some remarkby some commentator to some such effect as this: that it would be somewhatdifficult to excuse the unwomanly violence of this demand. Doubtlessit would. And doubtless it would be somewhat more than difficultto extenuate the unmaidenly indelicacy of Jeanne Darc.

{179}What would at least be partly lust in another man is all but purelyhatred in Iago.

NowI 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,” and the incarnate father of lies, mademanifest in the flesh, here speaks all but all the truth for once, tohimself alone.

{205}I add the proof in a footnote, so as to take up no more than a smallnecessary space of my text with the establishment of a fact which yetcan seem insignificant to no mortal who has a human ear for lyric song.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 asparrow’s. The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereuswas a jest compared to the mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands ofFletcher: who thereby reduced the close of the first verse into agreementif not into accordance with the close of his own. This appendedverse, as all the world 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 theirhelp convince himself of the difference in metre here. But notonly does the last line, with unsolicited and literally superfluousliberality, offer us a syllable over measure; the words are such asabsolutely to defy antiphonal repetition or reverberation of the threelast in either line. Let us therefore, like good scriptural scholars,according equally to the letter and the spirit of the text, render untoFletcher the things which be Fletcher’s, and unto Shakespearethe things which be Shakespeare’s.

{210}It is worth remark that in a still older sample of an older and ruderform of play than can have been the very earliest mould in which thepristine or pre-Shakespearean model of Pericles was cast, thepart of Chorus here assigned to Gower was filled by a representativeof his fellow-poet Lydgate.

{217}Except perhaps one little word of due praise for the pretty imitationor recollection of his dead friend Beaumont rather than of Shakespeare,in the description of the crazed girl whose “careless tressesa wreath of bullrush rounded” where she sat playing with flowersfor emblems at a game of love and sorrow—but liker in all elseto Bellario by another fountain-side than to Ophelia by the brook ofdeath.

{220}On the 17th of September, 1864.

{232}The once too celebrated crime which in this play was exhibited on thepublic stage with the forcible fidelity of a wellnigh brutal realismtook actual place on the private stage of fact in the year 1604.Four years afterwards the play was published as Shakespeare’s.Eight years more, and Shakespeare was with Æschylus.

{237}Written in 1879.

{239}Capell has altered this to “proud perfumes”; marking thechange in a note, with the scrupulous honesty which would seem to haveusually distinguished him from more daring and more famous editors.

{245a}The feeble archaic inversion in this line is one among many small signswhich all together suffice, if not to throw back the date of this playto 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. “Brickto coral”—these three words describe exactly the differencein tone and shade of literary colour.

{246}Here for the first time we come upon a verse not unworthy of Marlowehimself—a verse in spirit as in cadence recalling the deep oceanicreverberations of his “mighty line,” profound and just andsimple and single as a note of the music of the sea. But it wouldbe hard if a devout and studious disciple were never to catch one passingtone of his master’s habitual accent.—It may be worth whileto observe that we find here the same modulation of verse—commonenough since then, but new to the patient auditors of Gorboducand Locrine—which we find in the finest passage of Marlowe’simperfect play of Dido, completed by Nash after the young Master’suntimely death.

Why star’st thou in my face? If thou wiltstay,
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, takenfrom the crudest and feeblest work of Marlowe, in the wide and wordyexpanse of King Edward III.

{247}A pre-Shakespearean word of single occurrence in a single play of Shakespeare’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 insufficiencyin metre.

{255}Yet another essentially non-Shakespearean word, though doubtless onceused by Shakespeare; this time a most ungraceful Gallicism.

{256}It may obviate any chance of mistake if I observe that here as elsewhere,when I mention the name that is above every name in English literature,I refer to the old Shakespeare, and not to “the new Shakspere”;a novus hom*o with whom I have no acquaintance, and with whom(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 invocateand endamagement, a mere απαξ λεyομενονcan carry no weight of evidence with it worth any student’s consideration.

{262b}This form is used four times by Shakespeare as the equivalent of Bretagne;once only, in one of his latest plays, as a synonym for Britain.

{263a}Another word indiscoverable in any genuine verse of Shakespeare’s,though not (I believe) unused on occasion by some among the poets contemporarywith 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 or misusedby Shakespeare.

{264b}Qu. Why, so is your desire: If that the law, etc.?

{264c}Sic. I should once have thought it impossible that anymortal ear could endure the shock of this unspeakable and incomparableverse, and find in the passage which contains it an echo or a traceof the “music, wit, and oracle” of Shakespeare. Butin those days I had yet to learn what manner of ears are pricked upto listen “when rank Thersites opes his mastiff jaws” incriticism of Homer or of Shakespeare. In a corner of the prefaceto an edition of “Shakspere” which bears on its title-pagethe name (correctly spelt) of Queen Victoria’s youngest son prefixedto the name I have just transcribed, a small pellet of dry dirt wasflung upwards at me from behind by the “able editor” thusirritably impatient to figure in public as the volunteer valet or literarylackey of Prince Leopold. Hence I gathered the edifying assurancethat this aspirant to the honours of literature in livery had been remindedof my humbler attempts in literature without a livery by the congenialmusic of certain four-footed fellow-critics and fellow-lodgers of hisown in the neighbourhood of Hampstead Heath. Especially and mostnaturally had their native woodnotes wild recalled to the listeningbiped (whom partial nature had so far distinguished from the herd) thedeep astonishment and the due disgust with which he had discovered theunintelligible fact that to men so ignorant of music or the laws ofmusic in verse as my presumptuous and pitiable self the test of metricalharmony lay not in an appeal to the fingers but only in an appeal tothe ear—“the ear which he” (that is, which the presentwriter) “makes so much of—AND WHICH SHOULD BE LONG TO MEASURESHAKSPERE.” Here then the great Sham Shakespearean secretis out at last. Had I but known in time my lifelong error in thinkingthat a capacity to estimate the refinements of word-music was not tobe gauged by length of ear, by hairiness of ear, or by thickness ofear, but by delicacy of ear alone, I should as soon have thought ofmeasuring my own poor human organs against those of the patriarch orleader of the herd as of questioning his indisputable right to lay downthe law to all who agree with his great fundamental theorem—thatthe longest ear is the most competent to judge of metre. Habemusconfitentem asinum.

{266}A Latin pun, or rather a punning Latinism, not altogether out of Shakespeare’searliest line. But see the note preceding this one.

{269}The simple substitution of the word “is” for the word “and”would rectify 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 the compositionof his Roman plays rather than his use of Hall and Holinshed in thecomposition of his English histories, because Froissart is a model moreproperly 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 missionit is to make manifest that no burlesque invention of mere man’sdevice can improve upon the inexhaustible capacities of Nature as shownin the production and perfection of the type irreverently describedby Dryden as ‘God Almighty’s fool.’

{279}This word was incomprehensibly misprinted in the first issue of theSociety’s Report, where it appeared as “foulness.”To prevent misapprehension, the whole staff of printers was at oncedischarged.

{291}When the learned member made use of this remarkable phrase he probablyhad in his mind the suggestive query of Agnès, si les enfantsqu’on fait se faisaient pas l’oreille? But theflower of rhetoric here gathered was beyond the reach of Arnolphe’sinnocent ward. The procreation in such a case is even more difficultfor fancy to realise than the conception.