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diff --git a/16412.txt b/16412.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..94ab5cf --- /dev/null +++ b/16412.txt @@ -0,0 +1,7111 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Study of Shakespeare, by Algernon Charles +Swinburne, Edited by Edmund Gosse + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: A Study of Shakespeare + + +Author: Algernon Charles Swinburne + +Editor: Edmund Gosse + +Release Date: August 1, 2005 [eBook #16412] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE*** + + + + +This eBook was prepared by Les Bowler. + + + + + +A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE +BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. + + +PREFACE TO THIS EDITION + + +Begun in the winter of 1874, a first instalment of "A Study of +Shakespeare" appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ for May 1875, and a +second in the number for June 1876, but the completed work was not issued +in book form until June 1880. In a letter to me (January 31, 1875), +Swinburne said: + + "I am now at work on my long-designed essay or study on the metrical + progress or development of Shakespeare, as traceable by ear and _not_ + by finger, and the general changes of tone and stages of mind + expressed or involved in this change or progress of style." + +The book was produced at the moment when controversy with regard to the +internal evidence of composition in the writings attributed to +Shakespeare was raging high, and the amusing appendices were added at the +last moment that they might infuriate the pedants of the New Shakespeare +Society. They amply fulfilled that amiable purpose. + + EDMUND GOSSE + +September 1918 + + CONTENTS + A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE +I. FIRST PERIOD: LYRIC AND FANTASTIC +II. SECOND PERIOD: COMIC AND HISTORIC +III. THIRD PERIOD: TRAGIC AND ROMANTIC + APPENDIX +I. NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLAY OF KING EDWARD III. +II. REPORT OF THE PROCEEDINGS ON THIS FIRST ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF THE + NEWEST SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY +III. ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS + + + + +A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE. + + +I. + + +The greatest poet of our age has drawn a parallel of elaborate eloquence +between Shakespeare and the sea; and the likeness holds good in many +points of less significance than those which have been set down by the +master-hand. For two hundred years at least have students of every kind +put forth in every sort of boat on a longer or a shorter voyage of +research across the waters of that unsounded sea. From the paltriest +fishing-craft to such majestic galleys as were steered by Coleridge and +by Goethe, each division of the fleet has done or has essayed its turn of +work; some busied in dredging alongshore, some taking surveys of this or +that gulf or headland, some putting forth through shine and shadow into +the darkness of the great deep. Nor does it seem as if there would +sooner be an end to men's labour on this than on the other sea. But here +a difference is perceptible. The material ocean has been so far mastered +by the wisdom and the heroism of man that we may look for a time to come +when the mystery shall be manifest of its furthest north and south, and +men resolve the secret of 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 motive of 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-gauge will help us to the science of its storms, no lead- +line sound for us the depth of its divine and terrible serenity. + +As, however, each generation for some two centuries now or more has +witnessed fresh attempts at pilotage and fresh expeditions of discovery +undertaken in the seas of Shakespeare, it may be well to study a little +the laws of navigation in such waters as these, and look well to compass +and rudder before we accept the guidance of a strange helmsman or make +proffer for trial of our own. There are shoals and quicksands on which +many a seafarer has run his craft aground in time past, and others of +more special peril to adventurers of the present day. The chances of +shipwreck vary in a certain degree with each new change of vessel and +each fresh muster of hands. At one time a main rock of offence on which +the stoutest ships of discovery were wont to split was the narrow and +slippery reef of verbal emendation; and upon this our native pilots were +too many of them prone to steer. Others fell becalmed offshore in a +German fog of philosophic theories, and would not be persuaded that the +house of words they had built in honour of Shakespeare was "dark as +hell," seeing "it had bay-windows transparent as barricadoes, and the +clear-stories towards the south-north were as lustrous as ebony." These +are not the most besetting dangers of more modern steersmen: what we have +to guard against now is neither a repetition of the pedantries of +Steevens nor a recrudescence of the moralities of Ulrici. Fresh follies +spring up in new paths of criticism, and fresh labourers in a fruitless +field are at hand to gather them and to garner. A discovery of some +importance has recently been proclaimed as with blare of vociferous +trumpets and flutter of triumphal flags; no less a discovery than +this--that a singer must be tested by his song. Well, it is something +that criticism should at length be awake to that wholly indisputable +fact; that learned and laborious men who can hear only with their fingers +should open their eyes to admit such a novelty, their minds to accept +such a paradox, as that a painter should be studied in his pictures and a +poet in his verse. To the common herd of students and lovers of either +art this may perhaps appear no great discovery; but that it should at +length have dawned even upon the race of commentators is a sign which in +itself might be taken as a presage of new light to come in an epoch of +miracle yet to be. Unhappily it is as yet but a partial revelation that +has been vouchsafed to them. To the recognition of the apocalyptic fact +that a workman can only be known by his work, and that without +examination of his method and material that work can hardly be studied to +much purpose, they have yet to add the knowledge of a further truth no +less recondite and abstruse than this; that as the technical work of a +painter appeals to the eye, so the technical work of a poet appeals to +the ear. It follows that men who have none are as likely to arrive at +any profitable end by the application of metrical tests to the work of +Shakespeare as a blind man by the application of his theory of colours to +the work of Titian. + +It is certainly no news to other than professional critics that no means +of study can be more precious or more necessary to a student of +Shakespeare than this of tracing the course of his work by the growth and +development, through various modes and changes, of his metre. But the +faculty of using such means of study is not to be had for the asking; it +is not to be earned by the most assiduous toil, it is not to be secured +by the learning of years, it is not to be attained by the devotion of a +life. No proficiency in grammar and arithmetic, no science of numeration +and no scheme of prosody, will be here of the least avail. Though the +pedagogue were Briareus himself who would thus bring Shakespeare under +the rule of his rod or Shelley within the limit of his line, he would +lack fingers on which to count the syllables that make up their music, +the infinite varieties of measure that complete the changes and the +chimes of perfect verse. It is but lost labour that they rise up so +early, and so late take rest; not a Scaliger or Salmasius of them all +will sooner solve the riddle of the simplest than of the subtlest melody. +Least of all will the method of a scholiast be likely to serve him as a +clue to the hidden things of Shakespeare. For all the counting up of +numbers and casting up of figures that a whole university--nay, a whole +universe of pedants could accomplish, no teacher and no learner will ever +be a whit the nearer to the haven where they would be. In spite of all +tabulated statements and regulated summaries of research, the music which +will not be dissected or defined, the "spirit of sense" which is one and +indivisible from the body or the raiment of speech that clothes it, keeps +safe the secret of its sound. Yet it is no less a task than this that +the scholiasts have girt themselves to achieve: they will pluck out the +heart not of Hamlet's but of Shakespeare's mystery by the means of a +metrical test; and this test is to be applied by a purely arithmetical +process. It is useless to pretend or to protest that they work by any +rule but the rule of thumb and finger: that they have no ear to work by, +whatever outward show they may make of unmistakable ears, the very 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 secret of Shakespeare; but they will +never understand it properly who propose to secure it by the ingenious +device of numbering the syllables and tabulating the results of a +computation which shall attest in exact sequence the quantity, order, and +proportion of single and double endings, of rhyme and blank verse, of +regular lines and irregular, to be traced in each play by the horny eye +and the callous finger of a pedant. "I am ill at these numbers"; those +in which I have sought to become an expert are numbers of another sort; +but having, from wellnigh the first years I can remember, made of the +study of Shakespeare the chief intellectual business and found in it the +chief spiritual delight of my whole life, I can hardly think myself less +qualified than another to offer an opinion on the metrical points at +issue. + +The progress and expansion of style and harmony in the successive works +of Shakespeare must in some indefinite degree be perceptible to the +youngest as to the oldest, to the dullest as to the keenest of +Shakespearean students. But to trace and verify the various shades and +gradations of this progress, the ebb and flow of alternate influences, +the delicate and infinite subtleties of change and growth discernible in +the spirit and the speech of the greatest among poets, is a task not less +beyond the reach of a scholiast than beyond the faculties of a child. He +who would attempt it with any chance of profit must above all things +remember at starting that the inner and the outer qualities of a poet's +work are of their very nature indivisible; that any criticism is of +necessity worthless which looks to one side only, whether it be to the +outer or to the inner quality of the work; that the fatuity of pedantic +ignorance never devised a grosser absurdity than the attempt to separate +aesthetic from scientific criticism by a strict line of demarcation, and +to bring all critical work under one or the other head of this exhaustive +division. Criticism without accurate science of the thing criticised can +indeed have no other value than may belong to the genuine record of a +spontaneous impression; but it is not less certain that criticism which +busies itself only with the outer husk or technical shell of a great +artist's work, taking no account of the spirit or the thought which +informs it, cannot have even so much value as this. Without study of his +forms of metre or his scheme of colours we shall certainly fail to +appreciate or even to apprehend the gist or the worth of a painter's or a +poet's design; but to note down the number of special words and cast up +the sum of superfluous syllables used once or twice or twenty times in +the structure of a single poem will help us exactly as much as 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 paintings by the same hand +will not of itself afford much enlightenment to any but the youngest of +possible students; nor will a mere list of double or single, masculine or +feminine terminations discoverable in a given amount of verse from the +same quarter prove of much use or benefit to an adult reader of common +intelligence. What such an one requires is 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 the effect of every choice or change +of metre and of colour; which may show him at one glance the reason and +the result of every shade and of every tone which tends to compose and to +complete the gradual scale of their final harmonies. This method of +study is generally accepted as the only one applicable to the work of a +great painter by any criticism worthy of the name: it should also be +recognised as the sole method by 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 be no less easy, to trace through its +several stages of expansion and transfiguration the genius of Chaucer or +of Shakespeare, of Milton or of Shelley, than the genius of Titian or of +Raffaelle, of Turner or of Rossetti. Some great artists there are of +either kind in whom no such process of growth or transformation is +perceptible: of these are Coleridge and Blake; from the sunrise to the +sunset of their working day we can trace no demonstrable increase and no +visible diminution of the divine capacities or 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 than these +are yet liable to run through too much confidence is the love of their +own conjectures as to the actual date or the secret history of a +particular play or passage. To err on this side requires more thought, +more learning, and more ingenuity than we need think to find in a whole +tribe of finger-counters and figure-casters; but the outcome of these +good gifts, if strained or perverted to capricious use, may prove no less +barren of profit than the labours of a pedant on the letter of the text. +It is a tempting exercise of intelligence for a dexterous and keen-witted +scholar to apply his solid learning and his vivid fancy to the detection +or the interpretation of some new or obscure point in a great man's life +or work; but none the less is it a perilous pastime to give the reins to +a learned fancy, and let loose conjecture on the trail of any dubious +crotchet or the scent of any supposed allusion that may spring up in the +way of its confident and eager quest. To start a new solution of some +crucial problem, to track some new undercurrent of concealed significance +in a passage hitherto neglected or misconstrued, is to a critic of this +higher class a delight as keen as that of scientific discovery to +students of another sort: the pity is that he can bring no such certain +or immediate test to verify the value of his discovery as lies ready to +the hand of the man of science. Whether he have lit upon a windfall or a +mare's nest can be decided by no direct proof, but only by time and the +general acceptance of competent judges; and this cannot often be +reasonably expected for theories which can appeal for support or +confirmation to no positive evidence, but at best to a cloudy and +shifting probability. What personal or political allusions may lurk +under the text of Shakespeare we can never know, and should consequently +forbear to hang upon a hypothesis of this floating and nebulous kind any +serious opinion which might gravely affect our estimate of his work or +his position in regard to other men, with whom some public or private +interest may possibly have brought him into contact or collision. + +* * * * * + +The aim of the present study is simply to set down what the writer +believes to be certain demonstrable truths as to the progress and +development of style, the outer and the inner changes of manner as of +matter, of method as of design, which may be discerned in the work of +Shakespeare. The principle here adopted and the views here put forward +have not been suddenly discovered or lightly taken up out of any desire +to make a show of theoretical ingenuity. For years past I have held and +maintained, in private discussion with friends and fellow-students, the +opinions which I now submit to more public judgment. How far they may +coincide with those advanced by others I cannot say, and have not been +careful to inquire. The mere fact of coincidence or of dissent on such a +question is of less importance than the principle accepted by either +student as the groundwork of his theory, the mainstay of his opinion. It +is no part of my project or my hope to establish the actual date of any +among the various plays, or to determine point by point the lineal order +of their succession. I have examined no table or catalogue of recent or +of earlier date, from the time of Malone onwards, with a view to confute +by my reasoning the conclusions of 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 precise order of production, much less of +composition, which critics of the present or the past may have set their +wits to verify in vain; but it is quite possible to show that the work of +Shakespeare is naturally divisible into classes which may serve us to +distinguish and determine as by landmarks the several stages or periods +of his mind and art. + +Of these the three chief periods or stages are so unmistakably indicated +by the mere text itself, and so easily recognisable by the veriest tiro +in the school of Shakespeare, that even were I as certain of being the +first to point them out as I am conscious of having long since discovered +and verified them without assistance or suggestion from any but +Shakespeare himself, I should be disposed to claim but little credit for +a discovery which must in all likelihood have been forestalled by the +common insight of some hundred or more students in time past. The +difficulty begins with the really debatable question of subdivisions. +There are certain plays which may be said to hang on the borderland +between one period and the next, with one foot lingering and one +advanced; and these must be classed according to the dominant note of +their style, the greater or lesser proportion of qualities proper to the +earlier or the later stage of thought and writing. At one time I was +inclined to think the whole catalogue more accurately divisible into four +classes; but the line of demarcation between the third and fourth would +have been so much fainter than those which mark off the first period from +the second, and the second from the third, that it seemed on the whole a +more correct and adequate arrangement to assume that the last period +might be subdivided if necessary into a first and second stage. This +somewhat precise and pedantic scheme of study I have adopted from no love +of rigid or formal system, but simply to make the method of my critical +process as clear as the design. That design is to examine by internal +evidence alone the growth and the expression of spirit and of speech, the +ebb and flow of thought and style, discernible in the successive periods +of Shakespeare's work; to study the phases of mind, the changes of tone, +the passage or progress from an old manner to a new, the reversion or +relapse from a later to an earlier habit, which may assuredly be traced +in the modulations of his varying verse, but can only be traced by ear +and not by finger. I have busied myself with no baseless speculations as +to the possible or probable date of the first appearance of this play or +of that on the stage; and it is not unlikely that the order of succession +here adopted or suggested may not always coincide with the chronological +order of production; nor will the principle or theory by which I have +undertaken to class the successive plays of each period be affected or +impaired though it should chance that a play ranked by me as belonging to +a later stage of work should actually have been produced earlier than +others which in my lists are assigned to a subsequent date. It is not, +so to speak, the literal but the spiritual order which I have studied to +observe and to indicate: the periods which I seek to define belong not to +chronology but to art. No student need be reminded how common a thing it +is to recognise in the later work of a great artist some partial +reappearance of his early tone or manner, some passing return to his +early lines of work and to habits of style since modified or abandoned. +Such work, in part at least, may properly be said to belong rather to the +earlier stage whose manner it resumes than to the later stage at which it +was actually produced, and in which it stands out as a marked exception +among the works of the same period. A famous and a most singularly +beautiful example of this reflorescence as in a Saint Martin's summer of +undecaying genius is the exquisite and crowning love-scene in the opera +or "ballet-tragedy" of _Psyche_, written in his sixty-fifth year by the +august Roman hand of Pierre Corneille; a lyric symphony of spirit and of +song fulfilled with all the colour and all the music that autumn could +steal from spring if October had leave 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 three main stages of Shakespeare's work and +progress, than to classify under their several heads the representative +plays belonging to each period by the law of their nature, if not by the +accident of their date. There are certain dominant qualities which do on +the whole distinguish not only the later from the earlier plays, but the +second period from the first, the third period from the second; and it is +with these qualities alone that the higher criticism, be it aesthetic or +scientific, has properly anything to do. + +A new method of solution has been applied to various difficulties which +have been discovered or invented in the text by the care or the +perversity of recent commentators, whose principle of explanation is +easier to abuse than to use with any likelihood of profit. It is at +least simple enough for the simplest of critics to apply or misapply: +whenever they see or suspect an inequality or an incongruity which may be +wholly imperceptible to eyes uninured to the use of their spectacles, +they assume at once the presence of another workman, the intrusion of a +stranger's hand. This supposition of a double authorship is naturally as +impossible to refute as to establish by other than internal evidence 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 refuge of a +sciolist; a refuge which the soundest of scholars will be slowest to +seek, a resource which the most competent of critics will be least ready +to adopt. Once admitted as a principle of general application, there are +no lengths to which it may not carry, there are none to which it has not +carried, the audacious fatuity and the arrogant incompetence of tamperers +with the authentic text. Recent editors who have taken on themselves the +high office of guiding English youth in its first study of Shakespeare +have proposed to excise or to obelise whole passages which the delight +and wonder of youth and age alike, of the rawest as of the ripest among +students, have agreed to consecrate as examples of his genius at its +highest. In the last trumpet-notes of Macbeth's defiance and despair, in +the last rallying cry of the hero reawakened in the tyrant at his utmost +hour of need, there have been men and scholars, Englishmen and editors, +who have detected the alien voice of a pretender, the false ring of a +foreign blast that was not blown by Shakespeare; words that for centuries +past have touched with fire the hearts of thousands in each age since +they were first inspired--words with the whole sound in them of battle or +a breaking sea, with the whole soul of pity and terror mingled and melted +into each other in the fierce last speech of a spirit grown "aweary of +the sun," have been calmly transferred from the account of Shakespeare to +the score of Middleton. And this, forsooth, the student of the future is +to accept on the authority of men who bring to the support of their +decision the unanswerable plea of years spent in the collation and +examination of texts never hitherto explored and compared with such +energy of learned labour. If this be the issue of learning and of +industry, the most indolent and ignorant of readers who retains his +natural capacity to be moved and mastered by the natural delight of +contact with heavenly things is better off by far than the most studious +and strenuous of all scholiasts who ever claimed acquiescence or +challenged dissent on the strength of his lifelong labours and +hard-earned knowledge of the letter of the text. Such an one is indeed +"in a parlous state"; and any boy whose heart first begins to burn within +him, who feels his blood kindle and his spirit dilate, his pulse leap and +his eyes lighten, over a first study of Shakespeare, may say to 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 appeal and the pious +prayer which temper that severity of sentence--"Wilt thou rest damned? +God help thee, shallow man! God make incision in thee! Thou art raw." +And raw he is like to remain for all his learning, and for all incisions +that can be made in the horny hide of a self-conceit to be pierced by the +puncture of no man's pen. It was bad enough while theorists of this +breed confined themselves to the suggestion of a possible partnership +with Fletcher, a possible interpolation by Jonson; but in the descent +from these to the alleged adulteration of the text by Middleton and +Rowley we have surely sounded the very lowest depth of folly attainable +by the utmost alacrity in sinking which may yet be possible to the +bastard brood of Scriblerus. For my part, I shall not be surprised +though the next discoverer should assure us that half at least of +_Hamlet_ is evidently due to the collaboration of Heywood, while the +greater part of _Othello_ is 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 +composition of plays which the veriest insanity of conjecture or caprice +could not venture to lay wholly to his charge. This fancy, comparatively +harmless as it is, requires no ground of proof to go upon, no prop of +likelihood to support it; without so much help as may be borrowed from +the faintest and most fitful of traditions, it spins its own evidence +spider-like out of its own inner conscience or conceit, and proffers it +with confident complacency for men's acceptance. Here again I cannot but +see a mere waste of fruitless learning and bootless ingenuity. That +Shakespeare began by retouching and recasting the work of elder and +lesser men we all know; that he may afterwards have set his hand to the +task of adding or altering a line or a passage here and there in some few +of the plays brought out under his direction as manager or proprietor of +a theatre is of course possible, but can neither be affirmed nor denied +with any profit in default of the least fragment of historic or +traditional evidence. Any attempt to verify the imaginary touch of his +hand in plays of whose history we know no more than that they were acted +on the boards of his theatre can be but a diversion for the restless +leisure of ingenious and ambitious scholars; it will give no clue by +which the student who simply seeks to know what can be known with +certainty of the poet and his work may hope to be guided towards any safe +issue or trustworthy result. Less pardonable and more presumptuous than +this is the pretension of minor critics to dissect an authentic play of +Shakespeare scene by scene, and assign different parts of the same poem +to different dates by the same pedagogic rules of numeration and +mensuration which they would apply to the general question 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 wanderer may 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 to excuse his indulgence in the +seemingly profitless pastime of a truant disposition. It is a pure +impertinence to affirm with oracular assurance what might perhaps be +admissible as a suggestion offered with the due diffidence of modest and +genuine scholarship; to assert on the strength of a private pedant's +personal intuition that such must be the history or such the composition +of a great work whose history he alone could tell, whose composition he +alone could explain, who gave it to us as his genius had given it to him. + +From these several rocks and quicksands I trust at least to keep my +humbler course at a safe distance, and steer clear of all sandy shallows +of theory or sunken shoals of hypothesis on which no pilot can be certain +of safe anchorage; avoiding all assumption, though never so plausible, +for which no ground but that of fancy can be shown, all suggestion though +never so ingenious for which no proof but that of conjecture can be +advanced. For instance, I shall neither assume nor accept the theory of +a double authorship or of a double date by which the supposed +inequalities may be accounted for, the supposed difficulties may be swept +away, which for certain readers disturb the study of certain plays of +Shakespeare. Only where universal tradition and the general concurrence +of all reasonable critics past and present combine to indicate an +unmistakable difference of touch or an unmistakable diversity of date +between this and that portion of the same play, or where the internal +evidence of interpolation perceptible to the most careless and undeniable +by the most perverse of readers is supported by the public judgment of +men qualified to express and competent to defend an opinion, have I +thought it allowable to adopt this facile method of explanation. No +scholar, for example, believes in the single authorship of _Pericles_ or +_Andronicus_; none, I suppose, would now question the part taken by some +hireling or journeyman in the arrangement or completion for the stage of +_Timon of Athens_; and few probably would refuse to admit a doubt of the +total authenticity or uniform workmanship of the _Taming of the Shrew_. +As few, I hope, are prepared to follow the fantastic and confident +suggestions of every unquiet and arrogant innovator who may seek to +append his name to the long scroll of Shakespearean parasites by the +display of a brand-new hypothesis as to the uncertain date or authorship +of some passage or some play which has never before been subjected to the +scientific scrutiny of such a pertinacious analyst. The more modest +design of the present study has in part been already indicated, and will +explain as it proceeds if there be anything in it worth explanation. It +is no part of my ambition to loose the Gordian knots which others who +found them indissoluble have sought in vain to cut in sunder with blunter +swords than the Macedonian; but after so many adventures and attempts +there may perhaps yet be room for an attempt yet unessayed; for a study +by the ear alone of Shakespeare's metrical progress, and a study by light +of the knowledge thus obtained of the corresponsive progress within, +which found expression and embodiment in these outward and visible +changes. The one study will be then seen to be the natural complement +and the inevitable consequence of the other; and the patient pursuit of +the simpler and more apprehensible object of research will appear as the +only sure method by which a reasonable and faithful student may think to +attain so much as the porch or entrance to that higher knowledge which no +faithful and reasonable study of Shakespeare can ever for a moment fail +to keep in sight as the haven of its final hope, the goal of its ultimate +labour. + +When Christopher Marlowe came up to London from Cambridge, a boy in +years, a man in genius, and a god in ambition, he found the stage which +he was born to transfigure and re-create by the might and masterdom of +his genius encumbered with a litter of rude rhyming farces and tragedies +which the first wave of his imperial hand swept so utterly out of sight +and hearing that hardly by piecing together such fragments of that buried +rubbish as it is now possible to unearth can we rebuild in imagination so +much of the rough and crumbling walls that fell before the trumpet-blast +of _Tamburlaine_ as may give us some conception of the rabble dynasty of +rhymers whom he overthrew--of the citadel of dramatic barbarism which was +stormed and sacked at the first charge of the young conqueror who 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 plays +written wholly or mainly in ballad verse of fourteen syllables--of the +_Kings Darius_ and _Cambyses_, the _Promos and Cassandra_ of Whetstone, +or the _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_ of George Peele. If we turn from +these abortions of tragedy to the metrical farces which may fairly be +said to contain the germ or embryo of English comedy (a form of dramatic +art which certainly owes nothing to the father of our tragic stage), we +find far more of hope and promise in the broad free stretches of the +flagellant head-master of Eton and the bibulous Bishop of Bath and Wells; +and must admit that hands used to wield the crosier or the birch proved +themselves more skilful at the lighter labours of the stage, more +successful even in the secular and bloodless business of a field neither +clerical nor scholastic, than any tragic rival of the opposite party to +that so jovially headed by Orbilius Udall and Silenus Still. These twin +pillars of church and school and stage were strong enough to support on +the shoulders of their authority the first crude fabric or formless model +of our comic theatre, while the tragic boards were still creaking and +cracking under the jingling canter of _Cambyses_ or the tuneless tramp of +_Gorboduc_. This one play which the charity of Sidney excepts from his +general anathema on the nascent stage of England has hitherto been +erroneously described as written in blank verse; an error which I can +only attribute to the prevalence of a groundless assumption that whatever +is neither prose nor rhyme must of necessity be definable as blank verse. +But the measure, I must repeat, which was adopted by the authors of +_Gorboduc_ is by no means so definable. Blank it certainly is; but verse +it assuredly is not. There can be no verse where there is no modulation, +no rhythm where there is no music. Blank verse came into life in England +at the birth of the shoemaker's son who had but to open his yet beardless +lips, and the high-born poem which had Sackville to father and Sidney to +sponsor was silenced and eclipsed for ever among the poor plebeian crowd +of rhyming shadows that waited in death on the noble nothingness of its +patrician shade. + +These, I suppose, are the first or the only plays whose names recur to +the memory of the general reader when he thinks of the English stage +before Marlowe; but there was, I suspect, a whole class of plays then +current, and more or less supported by popular favour, of which hardly a +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 clip the +cumbrous and bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run all to seed +and weed, which jingled their thin bells at the tedious end of fourteen +weary syllables; and for this curtailment of the shambling and sprawling +lines which had hitherto done duty as tragic metre some credit may be due +to these obscure purveyors of forgotten ware for the second epoch of our +stage: if indeed, as I presume, we may suppose that this 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 example before them were +content simply to snip away the tags and fringes, to patch the seams and +tatters, of the ragged coat of rhyme which they might have exchanged for +that royal robe of heroic verse wherewith he had clothed the ungrown +limbs of limping and lisping tragedy. But if these also may be reckoned +among his precursors, the dismissal from stage service of the dolorous +and drudging metre employed by the earliest school of theatrical +rhymesters must be taken to mark a real step in advance; and in that case +we possess at least a single example of the rhyming tragedies which had +their hour between the last plays written wholly or partially in ballad +metre and the first plays written in 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, some in the measure of +_Don Juan_, some in the measure of _Venus and Adonis_. The couplets and +quatrains so much affected and so reluctantly abandoned by Shakespeare +after the first stage of his dramatic progress are in no other play that +I know of diversified by this alternate variation of _sesta_ with _ottava +rima_. This may have been an exceptional experiment due merely to the +caprice of one eccentric rhymester; but in any case we may assume it to +mark the extreme limit, the ultimate development of rhyming tragedy after +the ballad metre had been happily exploded. The play is on other grounds +worth attention as a sign of the times, though on poetical grounds it is +assuredly worth none. Part of it is written in blank verse, or at least +in rhymeless lines; 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 _Hernani_ on the French stage in the days of our fathers. That +_Selimus_ was published four years later than _Tamburlaine_, in the year +following the death of Marlowe, proves of course nothing as to the date +of its production; and even if it was written and acted in the year of +its publication, it undoubtedly in the main represents the work of a +prior era to the reformation of the stage by Marlowe. The level +regularity of its unrhymed scenes is just like that of the weaker +portions of _Titus Andronicus_ and the _First Part of King Henry the +Sixth_--the opening scene, for example, of either play. With +_Andronicus_ it has also in common the quality of exceptional +monstrosity, a delight in the parade of mutilation as well as of +massacre. It seems to me 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 retouched by Shakespeare which bear no traces of his touch is +a theory to the full as absurd as that which would impute to Shakespeare +the charge of their entire composition. + +The revolution effected by Marlowe naturally raised the same cry against +its author as the revolution effected by Hugo. That Shakespeare should +not at once have enlisted under his banner is less inexplicable than it +may seem. He was naturally addicted to rhyme, though if we put aside the +Sonnets we must admit that in rhyme he never did anything worth Marlowe's +_Hero and Leander_: he did not, like Marlowe, see at once that it must be +reserved for less active forms of poetry than the tragic drama; and he +was personally, it seems, in opposition to Marlowe and his school of +academic playwrights--the band of bards in which Oxford and Cambridge +were respectively and so respectably represented by Peele and Greene. But +in his very first plays, comic or tragic or historic, we can see the +collision and conflict of the two influences; his evil angel, rhyme, +yielding step by step and note by note to the strong advance of that +better genius who came to lead him into the loftier path of Marlowe. +There is not a single passage in _Titus Andronicus_ more Shakespearean +than the magnificent quatrain of Tamora upon the eagle and the little +birds; but the rest of 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 baser parts of the play; and these if any scenes we may +surely attribute to Shakespeare. Again, the last battle of Talbot seems +to me as undeniably the master's work as the scene in the Temple Gardens +or the courtship of Margaret by Suffolk; this latter indeed, full as it +is of natural and vivid grace, may perhaps not be beyond the highest +reach of one or two among the rivals of his earliest years of work; while +as we are certain that he cannot have written the opening scene, that he +was at any stage of his career incapable of it, so may we believe as well +as hope that he is guiltless of any complicity in that detestable part of +the play which attempts to defile the memory of the virgin saviour of her +country. {33} In style it is not, I think, above the range of George +Peele at his best: and to have written even the last of those scenes can +add but little discredit to the memory of a man already disgraced as the +defamer of Eleanor of Castile; while it would be a relief to feel assured +that there was but one English poet of any genius who could be capable of +either villainy. + +In this play, then, more decisively than in _Titus Andronicus_, we find +Shakespeare at work (so to speak) with both hands--with his left hand of +rhyme, and his right hand of blank verse. The left is loth to forego the +practice of its peculiar music; yet, as the action of the right grows +freer and its touch grows stronger, it becomes more and more certain that +the other must cease playing, under pain of producing mere discord and +disturbance in the scheme of tragic harmony. We imagine that the writer +must himself have felt the scene of the roses to be pitched in a truer +key than the noble scene of parting between the old hero and his son on +the verge of desperate battle and certain death. This is the last and +loftiest farewell note of rhyming tragedy; still, in _King Richard II_, +and in _Romeo and Juliet_, it struggles for awhile to keep its footing, +but now more visibly in vain. The rhymed scenes in these plays are too +plainly the survivals of a ruder and feebler stage of work; they cannot +hold their own in the new order with even such discordant effect of +incongruous excellence and inharmonious beauty as belongs to the death- +scene of the Talbots when matched against the quarrelling scene of +Somerset and York. Yet the briefest glance over the plays of the first +epoch in the work of Shakespeare will suffice to show how protracted was +the struggle and how gradual the defeat of rhyme. Setting aside the +retouched plays, we find on the list one tragedy, two histories, and four +if not five comedies, which the least critical reader would attribute to +this first epoch of work. In three of these comedies rhyme can hardly be +said to be beaten; that is, the rhyming scenes are on the whole equal to +the unrhymed in power and beauty. In the single tragedy, and in 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 large +proportion of rhymed verse, but as to quality the rhymed part bears no +proportion whatever to the unrhymed. In two scenes we may say that the +whole heart or spirit of _Romeo and Juliet_ is summed up and distilled +into perfect and pure expression; and these two are written in blank +verse of equable and blameless melody. Outside the garden scene in the +second act and the balcony scene in the third, there is much that is +fanciful and graceful, much of elegiac pathos and fervid if fantastic +passion; much also of superfluous rhetoric and (as it were) of wordy +melody, which flows and foams hither and thither into something of +extravagance and excess; but in these two there is no flaw, no outbreak, +no superflux, and no failure. Throughout certain scenes of the third and +fourth acts I think it may be reasonably and reverently allowed that the +river of verse has broken its banks, not as yet through the force and +weight of its gathering stream, but merely through the weakness of the +barriers or boundaries found insufficient to confine it. And here we may +with deference venture on a guess why 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 youngest tragedy he had not yet strength to +walk straight in the steps of the mighty master, but two months older +than himself by birth, whose foot never from the first faltered in the +arduous path of severer tragic verse. The loveliest of love-plays is +after all a child of "his salad days, when he was green in judgment," +though assuredly not "cold in blood"--a physical condition as difficult +to conceive of Shakespeare at any age as of Cleopatra. It is in the +scenes of vehement passion, of ardour and of agony, that we feel the +comparative weakness of a yet ungrown hand, the tentative uncertain grasp +of a stripling giant. The two utterly beautiful scenes are not of this +kind; they deal with simple joy and with simple sorrow, with the gladness +of meeting and the sadness of parting love; but between and 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 dare say so) quite +strong enough to deal. Apollo has not yet put on the sinews of Hercules. +At a later date we may fancy or may find that when the Herculean muscle +is full-grown the voice in him which was as the voice of Apollo is for a +passing moment impaired. In _Measure for Measure_, where the adult and +gigantic god has grappled with the greatest and most terrible of energies +and of passions, we miss the music of a younger note that rang through +_Romeo and Juliet_; but before the end this too revives, as pure, as +sweet, as fresh, but richer now and deeper than its first clear notes of +the morning, in the heavenly harmony of _Cymbeline_ and _The Tempest_. + +The same effusion or effervescence of words is perceptible in _King +Richard II_. as in the greater (and the less good) part of _Romeo and +Juliet_; and not less perceptible is the perpetual inclination of the +poet to revert for help to rhyme, to hark back in search of support +towards the half-forsaken habits of his poetic nonage. Feeling his +foothold insecure on the hard and high ascent of the steeps of rhymeless +verse, he stops and slips back ever and anon towards the smooth and +marshy meadow whence he has hardly begun to climb. Any student who +should wish to examine the conditions of the struggle at its height may +be content to analyse the first act of this the first historical play of +Shakespeare. As the tragedy moves onward, and the style gathers strength +while the action gathers speed,--as (to borrow the phrase so admirably +applied by Coleridge to Dryden) the poet's chariot-wheels get hot by +driving fast,--the temptation of rhyme grows weaker, and the hand grows +firmer which before lacked strength to wave it off. The one thing wholly +or greatly admirable in this play is the exposition of the somewhat +pitiful but not unpitiable character of King Richard. Among the scenes +devoted to this exposition I of course include the whole of the death- +scene of Gaunt, as well the part which precedes as the part which follows +the actual appearance of his nephew on the stage; and into these scenes +the intrusion of rhyme is rare and brief. They are written almost wholly +in pure and fluent rather than vigorous or various blank verse; though I +cannot discern in any of them an equality in power and passion to the +magnificent scene of abdication in Marlowe's _Edward II_. This play, I +think, must undoubtedly be regarded as the immediate model of +Shakespeare's; and the comparison is one of inexhaustible interest to all +students of dramatic poetry. To the highest height of the earlier master +I do not think that the mightier poet who was as yet in great measure his +pupil has ever risen in this the first (as I take it) of his historic +plays. Of composition and proportion he has perhaps already a somewhat +better idea. But in grasp of character, always excepting the one central +figure of the piece, we find his hand as yet the unsteadier of the two. +Even after a lifelong study of this as of all other plays of Shakespeare, +it is for me at least impossible to determine what I doubt if the poet +could himself have clearly defined--the main principle, the motive and +the meaning of such characters as York, Norfolk, and Aumerle. The +Gaveston and the Mortimer of Marlowe are far more solid and definite +figures than these; yet none after that of Richard is more important to +the scheme of Shakespeare. They are fitful, shifting, vaporous: their +outlines change, withdraw, dissolve, and "leave not a rack behind." They, +not Antony, are like the clouds of evening described in the most glorious +of so many glorious passages put long afterwards by Shakespeare into the +mouth of his latest Roman hero. They "cannot hold this visible shape" in +which the poet at first presents them even long enough to leave a +distinct image, a decisive impression for better or for worse, upon the +mind's eye of the most simple and open-hearted reader. They are ghosts, +not men; _simulacra modis pallentia miris_. You cannot descry so much as +the original intention of the artist's hand which began to draw and +relaxed its hold of the brush before the first lines were fairly traced. +And in the last, the worst and weakest scene of all, in which York pleads +with Bolingbroke for the death of the son whose mother pleads against her +husband for his life, there is a final relapse into rhyme and rhyming +epigram, into the "jigging vein" dried up (we might have hoped) long +since by the very glance of Marlowe's Apollonian scorn. It would be +easy, agreeable, and irrational to ascribe without further evidence than +its badness this misconceived and misshapen scene to some other 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 it has 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 certain passages in _Venus and Adonis_ +could not fall before his genius or his judgment was full-grown. To +invent an earlier play on the subject and imagine this scene a surviving +fragment, a floating waif of that imaginary wreck, would in my opinion be +an uncritical mode of evading the question at issue. It must be regarded +as the last hysterical struggle of rhyme to maintain its place in +tragedy; and the explanation, I would fain say the excuse, of its +reappearance may perhaps be simply this; that the poet was not yet +dramatist enough to feel for each of his characters an equal or +proportionate regard; to divide and disperse his interest among the +various crowd of figures which claim each in its place, and each after +its kind, fair and adequate share of their creator's attention and +sympathy. His present interest was here wholly concentrated on the +single figure of Richard; and when that for the time was absent, the +subordinate figures became to him but heavy and vexatious encumbrances, +to be shifted on and off the stage with as much of haste and as little of +labour as might be possible to an impatient and uncertain hand. Now all +tragic poets, I presume, from AEschylus the godlike father of them all to +the last aspirant who may struggle after the traces of his steps, have +been poets before they were tragedians; their lips have had power to sing +before their feet had strength to tread the stage, before their hands had +skill to paint or carve figures from the life. With Shakespeare it was +so as certainly as with Shelley, as evidently as with Hugo. It is in the +great comic poets, in Moliere and in Congreve, {42} our own lesser +Moliere, so far inferior in breadth and depth, in tenderness and +strength, to the greatest writer of the "great age," yet so near him in +science and in skill, so like him in brilliance and in force;--it is in +these that we find theatrical instinct twin-born with imaginative +impulse, dramatic power with inventive perception. + +In the second historic play which can be wholly ascribed to Shakespeare +we still find the poetic or rhetorical duality for the most part in +excess of the dramatic; but in _King Richard III_. the bonds of rhyme at +least are fairly broken. This only of all Shakespeare's plays belongs +absolutely to the school of Marlowe. The influence of the elder master, +and that influence alone, is perceptible from end to end. Here at last +we can see that Shakespeare has decidedly chosen his side. It is as +fiery in passion, as single in purpose, as rhetorical often though never +so inflated in expression, as _Tamburlaine_ itself. It is doubtless a +better piece of work than Marlowe ever did; I dare not say, than Marlowe +ever could have done. It is not for any man to measure, above all is it +not for any workman in the field of tragic poetry lightly to take on +himself the responsibility or the authority to pronounce, what it is that +Christopher Marlowe could not have done; but, dying as he did and when he +did, it is certain that he has not left us a work so generally and so +variously admirable as _King Richard III_. As certain is it that but for +him this play could never have been written. At a later date the subject +would have been handled otherwise, had the poet chosen to handle it at +all; and in his youth he could not have treated it as he has without the +guidance and example of Marlowe. Not only are its highest qualities of +energy, of exuberance, of pure and lofty style, of sonorous and +successive harmonies, the very qualities that never fail to distinguish +those first dramatic models which were fashioned by his ardent hand; the +strenuous and single-handed grasp of character, the motion and action of +combining and contending powers, which here for the first time we find +sustained with equal and unfaltering vigour throughout the length of a +whole play, we perceive, though imperfectly, in the work of Marlowe +before we can trace them even as latent or infant forces in the work of +Shakespeare. + +In the exquisite and delightful comedies of his earliest period we can +hardly discern any sign, any promise of them at all. One only of these, +the _Comedy of Errors_, has in it anything of dramatic composition and +movement; and what it has of these, I need hardly remind the 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 embroidered on the naked old canvas +of comic action those flowers of elegiac beauty which vivify and +diversify the scene of Plautus as reproduced by the art of Shakespeare. +In the next generation so noble a poet as Rotrou, 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 tragic excellence, found nothing +of this kind and little of any kind to add to the old poet's admirable +but arid sketch of farcical incident or accident. But in this light and +lovely work of the youth of Shakespeare we find for the first time that +strange and sweet admixture of farce with fancy, of lyric charm with +comic effect, which recurs so often in his later work, from the date of +_As You Like It_ to the date of the _Winter's Tale_, and which no later +poet had ventured to recombine in the same play till our own time had +given us, in the author of _Tragaldabas_, one who could alternate without +confusing the woodland courtship of Eliseo and Caprina with the tavern +braggardism of Grif and Minotoro. The sweetness and simplicity of lyric +or elegiac loveliness which fill and inform the scenes where Adriana, her +sister, and the Syracusan Antipholus exchange the expression of their +errors and their loves, belong to Shakespeare alone; and may help us to +understand how the young poet who at the outset of his divine career had +struck into this fresh untrodden path of poetic comedy should have been, +as we have seen that he was, loth to learn from another and an alien +teacher the hard and necessary lesson that this flowery path would never +lead him towards the loftier land of tragic poetry. For as yet, even in +the nominally or intentionally tragic and historic work of the first +period, we descry always and everywhere and still preponderant the lyric +element, the fantastic element, or even the elegiac element. All these +queens and heroines of history and tragedy have rather an Ovidian than a +Sophoclean grace of bearing and of speech. + +The example afforded by the _Comedy of Errors_ would suffice to show that +rhyme, however inadequate for tragic use, is by no means a bad instrument +for romantic comedy. In another of Shakespeare's earliest works, which +might almost be described as a lyrical farce, rhyme plays also a great +part; but the finest passage, the real crown and flower of _Love's +Labour's Lost_, is the praise or apology of love spoken by Biron in blank +verse. This is worthy of Marlowe for dignity and sweetness, but has also +the grace of a light and radiant fancy enamoured of itself, begotten +between thought and mirth, a child-god with grave lips and laughing eyes, +whose inspiration is nothing akin to Marlowe's. In this as in the +overture of the play and in its closing scene, but especially in the +noble passage which winds up for a year the courtship of Biron and +Rosaline, the spirit which informs the speech of the poet is finer of +touch and deeper of tone than in the sweetest of the serious interludes +of the _Comedy of Errors_. The play is in the main a yet lighter thing, +and more wayward and capricious in build, more formless and fantastic in +plot, more incomposite altogether than that first heir of Shakespeare's +comic invention, which on its own ground is perfect in its consistency, +blameless in composition and coherence; while in _Love's Labour's Lost_ +the fancy for the most part runs wild as the wind, and the structure of +the story is as that of a house of clouds which the wind builds and +unbuilds at pleasure. Here we find a very riot of rhymes, wild and +wanton in their half-grown grace as a troop of "young satyrs, +tender-hoofed and ruddy-horned"; during certain scenes we seem almost to +stand again by the cradle of new-born comedy, and hear the first lisping +and laughing accents run over from her baby lips in bubbling rhyme; but +when the note changes we recognise the speech of gods. For the first +time in our literature the higher key of poetic or romantic comedy is +finely touched to a fine issue. The divine instrument fashioned by +Marlowe for tragic purposes alone has found at once its new sweet use in +the hands of Shakespeare. The way is prepared for _As You Like It_ and +the _Tempest_; the language is discovered which will befit the lips of +Rosalind and Miranda. + +What was highest as poetry in the _Comedy of Errors_ was mainly in rhyme; +all indeed, we might say, between the prelude spoken by AEgeon and the +appearance in the last scene of his wife: in _Love's Labour's Lost_ what +was highest was couched wholly in blank verse; in the _Two Gentlemen of +Verona_ rhyme has fallen seemingly into abeyance, and there are no +passages of such elegiac beauty as in the former, of such exalted +eloquence as in the latter of these plays; there is an even sweetness, a +simple equality of grace in thought and language which keeps the whole +poem in tune, written as it is in a subdued key of unambitious harmony. +In perfect unity and keeping the composition of 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 chords here struck of character and +emotion, every shade of drawing and every note 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 which was 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 all the bright fantastic interludes of +Boyet and Adriano, Costard and Holofernes; worth even half the sallies of +Mercutio, and half the dancing doggrel or broad-witted prose of either +Dromio. But in the final poem which concludes and crowns the first epoch +of Shakespeare's work, the special graces and peculiar glories of each +that went before are gathered together as in one garland "of every hue +and every scent." The young genius of the master of all our poets finds +its consummation in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_. The blank verse is as +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 truest melody of +_Venus and Adonis_ or the _Comedy of Errors_. But here each kind of +excellence is equal throughout; there are here no purple patches on a +gown of serge, but one seamless and imperial robe of a single dye. Of +the lyric or the prosaic part, the counterchange of loves and laughters, +of fancy fine as air and imagination high as heaven, what need can there +be for any one to shame himself by the helpless attempt to say some word +not utterly unworthy? Let it suffice us to accept this poem as the +landmark of our first stage, and pause to look back from it on what lies +behind us of partial or of perfect work. + +The highest point attained in this first period lies in the domain of +comedy or romance, and belongs as much to lyric as to dramatic poetry; +its sovereign quality is that of sweetness and springtide of fairy fancy +crossed with light laughter and light trouble that end in perfect music. +In history as in tragedy the master's hand has not yet come to its full +strength and skill; its touch is not yet wholly assured, its work not yet +wholly blameless. Besides the plays undoubtedly and entirely due to the +still growing genius of Shakespeare, we have taken note 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 of _King Henry VI_., in +their earlier or later form, has not been touched upon; nor do I design +to reopen that perpetual source of debate unstanchable and inexhaustible +dispute by any length of scrutiny or inquisition of detail. Two points +must of course be taken for granted: that Marlowe was more or less +concerned in the production, and Shakespeare in the revision of these +plays; whether before or after his additions to the original _First Part +of King Henry VI_. we cannot determine, though the absence of rhyme might +seem to indicate a later date for the recast of the _Contention_. But it +is noticeable that the style of Marlowe appears more vividly and +distinctly in passages of the reformed than of the unreformed plays. +Those famous lines, for example, which open the fourth act of the _Second +Part of King Henry VI_. are not to be found in the corresponding scene of +the first part of the _Contention_; yet, whether they belong to the +original sketch of the play, or were inserted as an afterthought into the +revised and expanded copy, the authorship of these verses is surely +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 inconceivable that any +imitator but one should have had the power so to catch the very trick of +his hand, the very note of his voice, and incredible that the one who +might would have set himself to do so: for if this be not indeed the +voice and this the hand of Marlowe, then what we find in these verses is +not the fidelity of a follower, but the servility of a copyist. No +parasitic rhymester of past or present days who feeds 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 exactitude of the repetition is a strong +argument against the theory which attributes it to Shakespeare. That he +had much at starting to learn of Marlowe, and that he did learn much--that +in his earliest plays, and above all in his earliest historic plays, the +influence of the elder poet, the echo of his style, the iteration of his +manner, may perpetually be 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 we shall nowhere find in them. The sonorous accumulation +of emphatic epithets--as in the magnificent first verse of this +passage--is indeed at least as much a note of the young Shakespeare's +style as of his master's; but even were this one verse less in the manner +of the elder than the younger poet--and this we can hardly say that it +is--no single verse detached from its context can weigh a feather against +the full and flawless evidence of the whole speech. And of all this +there is nothing in the _Contention_; the scene there opens in bald and +flat nakedness of prose, striking at once into the immediate matter of +stage business without the decoration of a passing epithet or a single +trope. + +From this sample it might seem that the main difficulty must be to detect +anywhere the sign-manual of Shakespeare, even in the best passages of the +revised play. On the other hand, it has not unreasonably been maintained +that even in the next scene of this same act in its original form, and in +all those following which treat of Cade's insurrection, there is evidence +of such qualities as can hardly be ascribed to any hand then known but +Shakespeare's. The forcible realism, the simple vigour and lifelike +humour of these scenes, cannot, it is urged, 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 likeness or identity of tone between these +and all later scenes in which Shakespeare has 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 in revolt for any just or +unjust cause is always the mob, the unwashed rabble, the swinish +multitude; full as he is of wise and gracious tenderness for individual +character, of swift and ardent pity for personal suffering, he has no +deeper or finer feeling than scorn for "the beast with many heads" that +fawn and butt at bidding as they are swayed by the vain and violent +breath of any worthless herdsman. For the drovers who guide and misguide +at will the turbulent flocks of their mutinous cattle his store of bitter +words is inexhaustible; it is a treasure-house of obloquy which can never +be drained dry. All this, or nearly all this, we must admit; but it +brings us no nearer to any but a floating and conjectural kind of +solution. In the earliest form known to us of this play it should seem +that we have traces of Shakespeare's handiwork, in the latest that we +find evidence of Marlowe's. But it would be something too extravagant +for the veriest wind-sucker among commentators to start a theory that a +revision was made of his original work by Marlowe after additions had +been made to it by Shakespeare; yet we have seen that the most +unmistakable signs of Marlowe's handiwork, the passages which show most +plainly the personal and present seal of his genius, belong to the play +only in its revised form; while there is no part of the whole composition +which can so confidently be assigned to Shakespeare as to the one man +then capable of such work, as can an entire and important episode of the +play in its unrevised state. Now the proposition that Shakespeare was +the sole author of both plays in their earliest extant shape is refuted +at once and equally from without and from within, by evidence of +tradition and by evidence of style. There is therefore proof +irresistible and unmistakable of at least a double authorship; and the +one reasonable conclusion left to us would seem to be this; that the +first edition we possess of these plays is a partial transcript of the +text as it stood after the first additions had been made by Shakespeare +to the original work of Marlowe and others; for that this original was +the work of more hands than one, and hands of notably unequal power, we +have again the united witness of traditional and internal evidence to +warrant our belief: and that among the omissions of this imperfect text +were certain passages of the original work, which were ultimately +restored in the final revision of the entire poem as it now stands among +the collected works of Shakespeare. + +No competent critic who has given due study to the genius of Marlowe will +admit that there is a single passage of tragic or poetic interest in +either form of the text, which is beyond the reach of the father of +English tragedy: or, if there be one seeming exception in the expanded +and transfigured version of Clifford's monologue over his father's +corpse, which is certainly more in Shakespeare's tragic manner than in +Marlowe's, and in the style of a later period than that in which he was +on the whole apparently content to reproduce or to emulate the tragic +manner of Marlowe, there is at least but this one exception to the +general and absolute truth of the rule; and even this great tragic +passage is rather out of the range of Marlowe's style than beyond the +scope of his genius. In the later as in the earlier version of these +plays, the one manifest excellence of which we have no reason to suppose +him capable is manifest in the comic or prosaic scenes alone. The first +great rapid sketch of the dying cardinal, afterwards so nobly enlarged +and perfected on revision by the same or by a second artist, is as +clearly within the capacity of Marlowe as of Shakespeare; and in either +edition of the latter play, successively known as _The True Tragedy of +Richard Duke of York_, as the _Second Part of the Contention_, and as the +_Third Part of King Henry VI_., the dominant figure which darkens all the +close of the poem with presage of a direr day is drawn by the same strong +hand in the same tragic outline. From the first to the last stage of the +work there is no mark of change or progress here; the whole play indeed +has undergone less revision, as it certainly needed less, than the +preceding part of the _Contention_. Those great verses which resume the +whole spirit of Shakespeare's Richard--finer perhaps in themselves than +any passage of the play which bears his name--are wellnigh identical in +either form of the poem; but the reviser, with admirable judgment, has +struck out, whether from his own text or that of another, the line which +precedes them in the original sketch, where the passage runs thus:-- + + I had no father, I am like no father; + I have no brothers, I am like no brother; + +(this reiteration is exactly in the first manner of our tragic drama;) + + And this word love, which greybeards term divine, etc. + +It would be an impertinence to transcribe the rest of a passage which +rings in the ear of every reader's memory; but it may be noted that the +erasure by which its effect is so singularly heightened with the inborn +skill of so divine an instinct is just such an alteration as would be +equally likely to occur to the original writer on glancing over his +printed text or to a poet of kindred power, who, while busied in +retouching and filling out the sketch of his predecessor, might be struck +by the opening for so great an improvement at so small a cost of +suppression. My own conjecture would incline to the belief that we have +here a perfect example of the manner in which Shakespeare may be +presumed, when such a task was set before him, to have dealt with the +text of Marlowe. That at the outset of his career he was so employed, as +well as on the texts of lesser poets, we have on all hands as good +evidence of every kind as can be desired; proof on one side from the text +of the revised plays, which are as certainly in 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 of his rivals, whose imputations can +be made to bear no reasonable meaning but this by the most violent +ingenuity of perversion, and who presumably were not persons of such +frank imbecility, such innocent and infantine malevolence, as to forge +against their most dangerous enemy the pointless and edgeless weapon of a +charge which, if ungrounded, must have been easier to refute than to +devise. Assuming then that in common with other young poets of his day +he was thus engaged during the first years of his connection with the +stage, we should naturally have expected to find him handling the text of +Marlowe with more of reverence and less 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 occupied in recasting the verse of +Marlowe, not less ready to confine his labour to such slight and skilful +strokes of art as that which has led us into this byway of speculation; +to the correction of a false note, the addition of a finer touch, the +perfection of a meaning half expressed or a tone of half-uttered music; +to the invigoration of sense and metre by substitution of the right word +for the wrong, of a fuller phrase for one feebler; to the excision of +such archaic and superfluous repetitions as are signs of a cruder stage +of workmanship, relics of a ruder period of style, survivals of the +earliest form or habit of dramatic poetry. Such work as this, however +humble in our present eyes, which look before and after, would assuredly +have been worthy of the workman and his task; an office no less fruitful +of profit, and no more unbeseeming the pupil hand of the future master, +than the subordinate handiwork of the young Raffaelle or Leonardo on the +canvas of Verrocchio or Perugino. + +Of the doubtful or spurious plays which have been with more or less show +of reason ascribed to this first period of Shakespeare's art, I have here +no more to say than that I purpose in the proper place to take account of +the only two among them which bear the slightest trace of any possible +touch of his hand. For these two there is not, as it happens, the least +witness of tradition or outward likelihood which might warrant us in +assigning them a place apart from the rest, and nearer the chance of +reception into the rank that has been claimed for them; while those plays +in whose favour there is some apparent evidence from without, such as the +fact of early or even original attribution to the master's hand, are, +with one possible exception, utterly beyond the pale of human +consideration as at any stage whatever the conceivable work of +Shakespeare. + +Considering that his two attempts at narrative or rather semi-narrative +and semi-reflective poetry belong obviously to an early stage of his +earliest period, we may rather here than elsewhere take notice that there +are some curious points of coincidence for evil as for good between the +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 inferior work has +fared better at the blind hands of chance and the brutish hands of +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 personal +supervision in their passage through the press. Upon them, at least +since the time of Coleridge, who as usual has said on this subject the +first and the last word that need be said, it seems to me that fully +sufficient notice and fully adequate examination have been expended; and +that nothing at once new and true can now be profitably said in praise or +in dispraise of them. Of _A Lover's Complaint_, marked as it is +throughout with every possible sign suggestive of a far later date and a +far different inspiration, I have only space or need to remark that it +contains two of the most exquisitely Shakespearean verses ever vouchsafed +to us by Shakespeare, and two of the most execrably euphuistic or +dysphuistic lines ever inflicted on us by man. Upon the Sonnets such a +preposterous pyramid of presumptuous commentary has long since been +reared by the Cimmerian speculation and Boeotian "brain-sweat" of +sciolists and scholiasts, that no modest man will hope and no wise man +will desire to add to the structure or subtract from it one single brick +of proof or disproof, theorem or theory. As yet the one contemporary +book which has ever been supposed to throw any direct or indirect light +on the mystic matter remains as inaccessible and unhelpful to students as +though it had never been published fifteen years earlier than the date of +their publication and four years before the book in which Meres notices +the circulation of Shakespeare's "sugared sonnets among his private +friends." It would be a most noble and thankworthy addition to a list of +labours beyond praise and benefits beyond price, if my honoured friend +Dr. Grosart could find the means to put a crown upon the achievements of +his learning and a seal upon the obligations of our gratitude by the one +inestimable boon long hoped for against hoping, and as yet but "a vision +in a dream" to the most learned and most loving of true Shakespearean +students; 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 impudent +imposture called _The Passionate Pilgrim_ should be exposed and expelled +from its station at the far end of Shakespeare's poems. What Coleridge +said of Ben Jonson's epithet for "turtle-footed peace," we may say of the +label affixed to this rag-picker's bag of stolen goods: _The Passionate +Pilgrim_ is a pretty title, a very pretty title; pray what may it mean? +In all the larcenous little bundle of verse there is neither a poem which +bears that name nor a poem by which that name would be bearable. The +publisher of the booklet was like "one Ragozine, a most notorious +pirate"; and the method no less than the motive of his rascality in the +present instance is palpable and simple enough. Fired by the immediate +and instantly proverbial popularity of Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_, +he hired, we may suppose, some ready hack of unclean hand to supply him +with three doggrel sonnets on the same subject, noticeable only for their +porcine quality of prurience: he procured by some means a rough copy or +an incorrect transcript of two genuine and unpublished sonnets by +Shakespeare, which with the acute instinct of a felonious tradesman he +laid atop of his worthless wares by way of gilding to their base metal: +he stole from the two years published text of _Love's Labour's Lost_, and +reproduced with more or less mutilation or corruption, the sonnet of +Longavile, the "canzonet" of Biron, and the far lovelier love-song of +Dumaine. The rest of the ragman's gatherings, with three most notable +exceptions, is little better for the most part than dry rubbish or +disgusting refuse; unless a plea may haply be put in for the pretty +commonplaces of the lines on a "sweet rose, fair flower," and so forth; +for the couple of thin and pallid if tender and tolerable copies of verse +on "Beauty" and "Good Night," or the passably light and lively stray of +song on "crabbed age and youth." I need not say that those three +exceptions are the stolen and garbled work of Marlowe and of Barnfield, +our elder Shelley and our first-born Keats; the singer of Cynthia in +verse well worthy of Endymion, who would seem to have died as a poet in +the same fatal year of his age that Keats died as a man; the first +adequate English laureate of the nightingale, to be supplanted or +equalled by none until the advent of his mightier brother. + + + +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 thought and +all its pulse of passion, are yet to be scaled and sounded; but to this +stage belongs the special quality of faultless, joyous, facile command +upon each faculty required of the presiding genius for service or for +sport. It is in the middle period of his work that the language of +Shakespeare is most limpid in its fullness, the style most pure, the +thought most transparent through the close and luminous raiment of +perfect expression. The conceits and crudities of the first stage are +outgrown and cast aside; the harshness and obscurity which at times may +strike us as among the notes of his third manner have as yet no place in +the flawless work of this second stage. That which has to be said is not +yet too great for perfection of utterance; passion has not yet grappled +with thought in so close and fierce an embrace as to strain and rend the +garment of words, though stronger and subtler than ever was woven of +human speech. Neither in his first nor in his last stage would the style +of Shakespeare, even were it possible by study to reproduce it, be of +itself a perfect and blameless model; but his middle style, that in which +the typical plays of his second period are written, would be, if it were +possible to imitate, the most absolute pattern that could be set before +man. I do not speak of mere copyist's work, the parasitic knack of +retailing cast phrases, tricks and turns of accent, cadences and +catchwords proper only to the natural manner of the man who first came by +instinct upon them, and by instinct put them to use; I speak of that +faithful and fruitful discipleship of love with which the highest among +poets and the most original among workmen have naturally been always the +first to study and the most earnest to follow the footsteps of their +greatest precursors in that kind. And this only high and profitable form +of study and discipleship can set before itself, even in the work of +Shakespeare, no pattern so perfect, no model so absolute, as is afforded +by the style or manner of his second period. + +To this stage belong by spiritual right if not by material, by rule of +poetic order if not by date of actual succession, the greatest of his +English histories and four of his greatest and most perfect comedies; the +four greatest we might properly call them, reserving for another class +the last divine triad of romantic plays which it is alike inaccurate to +number among tragedies or comedies proper: the _Winter's Tale_, +_Cymbeline_, and the _Tempest_, which belong of course wholly to his last +manner, or, if accuracy must be strained even to pedantry, to the second +manner of his third or final stage. A single masterpiece which may be +classed either among histories or tragedies belongs to the middle period; +and to this also we must refer, if not the ultimate form, yet assuredly +the first sketch at least of that which is commonly regarded as the +typical and supreme work of Shakespeare. Three lesser comedies, one of +them in great part the recast or rather the transfiguration of an earlier +poet's work, complete the list of plays assignable to the second epoch of +his genius. + +The ripest fruit of historic or national drama, the consummation and the +crown of Shakespeare's labours in that line, must of course be recognised +and saluted by all students in the supreme and sovereign trilogy of King +Henry IV. and King Henry V. On a lower degree only than this final and +imperial work we find the two chronicle histories which remain to be +classed. In style as in structure they bear witness of a power less +perfect, a less impeccable hand. They have 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 less in their general scheme of action. Of +all Shakespeare's plays they are the most rhetorical; there is more talk +than song in them, less poetry than oratory; more finish than form, less +movement than incident. Scene is laid upon scene, and event succeeds +event, as stone might be laid on stone and story might succeed story in a +building reared by mere might of human handiwork; not as in a city or +temple whose walls had risen of themselves to the lyric breath and stroke +of a greater than Amphion; moulded out of music by no rule or line of +mortal measure, 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 its many +mansions, but less perfect in proportion and less aerial in build than +the very highest fabrics fashioned after their own great will by the +supreme architects of song. Of these plays, and of these alone among the +maturer works of Shakespeare, it may be said that the best parts are +discernible from the rest, divisible by analysis and separable by memory +from the scenes which precede them or follow and the characters which +surround them or succeed. Constance and Katherine rise up into +remembrance apart from their environment and above it, stand clear in our +minds of the crowded company with which the poet has begirt their central +figures. In all other of his great tragic works,--even in _Hamlet_, if +we have grace and sense to read it aright and not awry,--it is not of any +single person or separate passage that we think when we speak of it; it +is to the whole masterpiece that the mind turns at mention of its name. +The one entire and perfect chrysolite of _Othello_ is neither Othello nor +Desdemona nor Iago, but each and all; the play of _Hamlet_ is more than +Hamlet himself, the poem even here is too great to be resumed in the +person. But Constance is the jewel of _King John_, and Katherine is the +crowning blossom of _King Henry VIII_.--a funeral flower as of "marigolds +on death-beds blowing," an opal of as pure water as "tears of perfect +moan," with fitful fire at its heart, ominous of evil and sorrow, set in +a mourning band 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 separate ears of wheat that overtop the ranks, than on the waving +width of the whole harvest at once. In the one play our memory turns +next to the figures of Arthur and the Bastard, in the other to those of +Wolsey and his king: the residue in either case is made up of outlines +more lightly and slightly drawn. In two scenes the figure of King John +rises indeed to the highest height even of Shakespearean tragedy; for the +rest of the play the lines of his character are cut no deeper, the +features of his personality stand out in no sharper relief, than those of +Eleanor or the French king; but the scene in which he tempts Hubert to +the edge of the pit of hell sounds a deeper note and touches a subtler +string in the tragic nature of man than had been struck by any poet save +Dante alone, since the reign of the Greek tragedians. The cunning and +profound simplicity of the few last weighty words which drop like flakes +of poison that blister where they fall from the deadly lips of the king +is a new quality in our tragic verse; there was no foretaste of such a +thing in the passionate imagination which clothed itself in the mighty +music of Marlowe's burning song. The elder master might indeed have +written the magnificent speech which ushers in with gradual rhetoric and +splendid reticence the black suggestion of a deed without a name; his +hand might have woven with no less imperial skill the elaborate raiment +of words and images which wraps up in fold upon fold, as with swaddling- +bands of purple and golden embroidery, the shapeless and miscreated birth +of a murderous purpose that labours into light even while it loathes the +light and itself; but only Shakespeare could give us the first sample of +that more secret and terrible knowledge which reveals itself in the brief +heavy whispers that seal the commission and sign the warrant of the king. +Webster alone of all our tragic poets has had strength to emulate in this +darkest line of art the handiwork of his master. We find nowhere such an +echo or reflection of the spirit of this scene as in the last tremendous +dialogue of Bosola with Ferdinand in the house of murder and madness, +while their spotted souls yet flutter between conscience and distraction, +hovering for an hour as with broken wings on the confines of either +province of hell. One pupil at least could put to this awful profit the +study of so great a model; but with the single and sublime exception of +that other design from the same great hand, which bares before us the +mortal anguish of Bracciano, no copy or imitation of the scene in which +John dies by poison has ever come near enough to evade the sentence it +provokes. The shrill tremulous agony of Fletcher's Valentinian is to the +sullen and slow death-pangs of Shakespeare's tyrant as the babble of a +suckling to the accents of a man. As far beyond the reach of any 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 noble Bastard. The +national side of Shakespeare's genius, the heroic vein of patriotism that +runs like a thread of living fire through the world-wide range of his +omnipresent spirit, has never, to my thinking, found vent or expression +to such glorious purpose as here. Not even in Hotspur or Prince Hal has +he mixed with more godlike sleight of hand all the lighter and graver +good qualities of the national character, or compounded of them all so +lovable a nature as this. In those others we admire and enjoy the same +bright fiery temper of soul, the same buoyant and fearless mastery of +fate or fortune, the same gladness and glory of life made lovely with all +the labour and laughter of its full fresh days; but no quality of theirs +binds our hearts to them as they are bound to Philip--not by his loyal +valour, his keen young wit, his kindliness, constancy, readiness of +service as swift and sure in the day of his master's bitterest shame and +shamefullest trouble as in the blithest hour of battle and that first +good fight which won back his father's spoils from his father's slayer; +but more than all these, for that lightning of divine rage and pity, of +tenderness that speaks in thunder and indignation that makes fire of its +tears, in the horror of great compassion which falls on him, the tempest +and storm of a beautiful and godlike anger which shakes his strength of +spirit and bows his high heart down at sight of Arthur dead. Being thus, +as he is, the English masterwork of Shakespeare's hand, we may well +accept him as the best man known to us that England ever made; the hero +that Nelson must have been had he never come too near Naples. + +I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare's Arthur; there are one or two +figures in the world of his work of which there are no words 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; the niche set apart +for them to inhabit in our secret hearts is not penetrable by the lights +and noises of common day. There are chapels in the cathedral 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. Love and death and memory keep charge for us +in silence of some beloved names. It is the crowning glory of genius, +the final miracle and transcendent gift of poetry, that it can add to the +number of these, and engrave on the very heart of our remembrance fresh +names and memories of its own creation. + +There is one younger child in this heavenly family of Shakespeare's who +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 other poets +who may be named in the same year with them: as Fletcher's Hengo, +Webster's Giovanni, and Landor's Caesarion. Of this princely trinity of +boys the "bud of Britain" is as yet the most famous flower; yet even in +the broken words of childish heroism that falter on his dying lips there +is nothing of more poignant pathos, more "dearly sweet and bitter," than +Giovanni's talk of his dead mother and all her sleepless nights now ended +for ever in a sleep beyond tears or dreams. Perhaps the most nearly +faultless in finish and proportion of perfect nature among all the noble +three is Landor's portrait of the imperial and right Roman child of Caesar +and Cleopatra. I know not but this may be found in the judgment of men +to come wellnigh the most pathetic and heroic figure bequeathed us after +more than eighty years of a glorious life by the indomitable genius of +our own last Roman and republican poet. + +We have come now to that point at the opening of the second stage in his +work where the supreme genius of all time begins first to meddle with the +mysteries and varieties of human character, to handle its finer and more +subtle qualities, to harmonise its more untuned and jarring discords; +giving here and thus the first proof of a power never shared in like +measure by the mightiest among the sons of men, a sovereign and serene +capacity to fathom the else unfathomable depths of spiritual nature, to +solve its else insoluble riddles, to reconcile its else irreconcilable +discrepancies. In his first stage Shakespeare had dropped his plummet no +deeper into the sea of the spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded before +him; and in the channel of simple emotion no poet could cast surer line +with steadier hand than he. Further down in the dark and fiery depths of +human pain and mortal passion no soul could search than his who first +rendered into speech the aspirations and the agonies of a ruined and +revolted spirit. And until Shakespeare found in himself the strength of +eyesight to read and the cunning of handiwork to render those wider +diversities of emotion and those further complexities of character which +lay outside the range of Marlowe, he certainly cannot be said to have +outrun the winged feet, outstripped the fiery flight of his forerunner. +In the heaven of our tragic song the first-born star on the forehead of +its herald god was not outshone till the full midsummer meridian of that +greater godhead before whom he was sent to prepare a pathway for the sun. +Through all the forenoon of our triumphant day, till the utter +consummation and ultimate ascension of dramatic poetry incarnate and +transfigured in the master-singer of the world, the quality of his +tragedy was as that of Marlowe's, broad, single, and intense; large of +hand, voluble of tongue, direct of purpose. With the dawn of its latter +epoch a new power comes upon it, to find clothing and expression in new +forms of speech and after a new style. The language has put off its +foreign decorations of lyric and elegiac ornament; it has found already +its infinite gain in the loss of those sweet superfluous graces which +encumbered the march and enchained the utterance of its childhood. The +figures which it invests are now no more the types of a single passion, +the incarnations of a single thought. They now demand a scrutiny which +tests the power of a mind and tries the value of a judgment; they appeal +to something more than the instant apprehension which sufficed to respond +to the immediate claim of those that went before them. Romeo and Juliet +were simply lovers, and their names bring back to us no further thought +than of their love and the lovely sorrow of its end; Antony and Cleopatra +shall be before all things lovers, but the thought of their love and its +triumphant tragedy shall recall other things beyond number--all the +forces and all the fortunes of mankind, all the chance and all the +consequence that waited on their imperial passion, all the infinite +variety of qualities and powers wrought together and welded into the +frame and composition of that love which shook from end to end all +nations and kingdoms of the earth. + +The same truth holds good in lighter matters; Biron and Rosaline in +comedy are as simply lovers and no more as were their counterparts and +coevals in tragedy: there is more in Benedick and Beatrice than this +simple quality of love that clothes itself in the strife of wits; the +injury done her cousin, which by the repercussion of its shock and +refraction of its effect serves to transfigure with such adorable +indignation and ardour of furious love and pity the whole bright light +nature of Beatrice, serves likewise by a fresh reflection and +counterchange of its consequence to exalt and enlarge the stature of her +lover's spirit after a fashion beyond the reach of Shakespeare in his +first stage. Mercutio again, like Philip, is a good friend and gallant +swordsman, quick-witted and hot-blooded, of a fiery and faithful temper, +loyal and light and swift alike of speech and swordstroke; and this is +all. But the character of the Bastard, clear and simple as broad +sunlight though it be, has in it other features than this single and +beautiful likeness of frank young manhood; his love of country and +loathing of the Church that would bring it into subjection are two sides +of the same national quality that has made and will always make every +Englishman of his type such another as he was in belief and in unbelief, +patriot and priest-hater; and no part of the design bears such witness to +the full-grown perfection of his creator's power and skill as the touch +that combines and fuses into absolute unity of concord the high and +various elements of faith in England, loyalty to the wretched lord who +has made him knight and acknowledged him kinsman, contempt for his +abjection at the foul feet of the Church, abhorrence of his crime and +constancy to his cause for something better worth the proof of war than +his miserable sake who hardly can be roused, even by such exhortation as +might put life and spirit into the dust of dead men's bones, to bid his +betters stand and strike in defence of the country dishonoured by his +reign. + +It is this new element of variety in unity, this study of the complex and +diverse shades in a single nature, which requires from any criticism +worth attention some inquisition of character as complement to the +investigation of style. Analysis of any sort would be inapplicable to +the actors who bear their parts in the comic, the tragic or historic +plays of the first period. There is nothing in them to analyse; they +are, as we have seen, like all the characters represented by Marlowe, the +embodiments or the exponents of single qualities and simple forces. The +question of style also is therefore so far a simple question; but with +the change and advance in thought and all matter of spiritual study and +speculation this question also becomes complex, and inseparable, if we +would pursue it 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 and the question of character, or as we might say the questions of +matter and of spirit, are more than ever indivisible from each other, +more inextricably inwoven than elsewhere into the one most difficult +question of authorship which has ever been disputed in the dense and +noisy school or fought out in the wide and windy field of Shakespearean +controversy. + +There can be few serious students of Shakespeare who have not sometimes +felt that possibly the hardest problem involved in their study is that +which requires for its solution some reasonable and acceptable theory as +to the play of _King Henry VIII_. None such has ever yet been offered; +and I certainly cannot pretend to supply one. Perhaps however it may be +possible to do some service by an attempt to disprove what is untenable, +even though it should not be possible to produce in its stead any +positive proof of what we may receive as matter of absolute faith. + +The veriest tiro in criticism who knows anything of the subject in hand +must perceive, what is certainly not beyond a schoolboy's range of +vision, that the metre and the language of this play are in great part so +like the language and the metre of Fletcher that the first and easiest +inference would be to assume the partnership of that poet in the work. In +former days it was Jonson whom the critics and commentators of their time +saw good to select as the colleague or the editor of Shakespeare; but a +later school of criticism has resigned the notion that the fifth act was +retouched and adjusted by the author of _Volpone_ to the taste of his +patron James. The later theory is more plausible than this; the primary +objection to it is that it is too facile and superficial. It is waste of +time to point out with any intelligent and imaginative child with a +tolerable ear for metre who had read a little of the one and the other +poet could see for himself--that much of the play is externally as like +the usual 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 +comparable resemblance to the work of Fletcher. I doubt if any man more +warmly admires a poet whom few can have studied more thoroughly than I; +and to whom, in spite of all sins of omission and commission,--and many +and grievous they are, beyond the plenary absolution of even the most +indulgent among critical confessors--I constantly return with a fresh +sense of attraction, which is constantly rewarded by a fresh sense of +gratitude and delight. It is assuredly from no wish to pluck a leaf from +his laurel, which has no need of foreign grafts or stolen garlands from +the loftier growth of Shakespeare's, that I venture to question his +capacity for the work assigned to him by recent criticism. The speech of +Buckingham, for example, on his way to execution, is of course at first +sight very like the finest speeches of the kind in Fletcher; here is the +same smooth and fluent declamation, the same prolonged and persistent +melody, which if not monotonous is certainly not various; the same pure, +lucid, perspicuous flow of simple rather than strong and elegant rather +than exquisite English; and yet, if we set it against the best examples +of the kind which may be selected from such tragedies as _Bonduca_ or +_The False One_, against the rebuke addressed by Caratach to his cousin +or by Caesar to the murderers of Pompey--and no finer instances of tragic +declamation can be chosen from the work of this great master of +rhetorical dignity and pathos--I cannot but think we shall perceive in it +a comparative severity and elevation which will be missed when we turn +back from it to the text of Fletcher. There is an aptness of phrase, an +abstinence from excess, a "plentiful lack" of mere flowery and +superfluous beauties, which we may rather wish than hope to find in the +most famous of Shakespeare's successors. But if not his work, we may be +sure it was his model; a model which he often approached, which he often +studied, but which he never attained. It is never for absolute truth and +fitness of expression, it is always for eloquence and sweetness, for +fluency and fancy, that we find the tragic scenes of Fletcher most +praiseworthy; and the motive or mainspring of interest is usually +anything but natural or simple. Now the motive here is as simple, the +emotion as natural as possible; the author is content to dispense with +all the violent or far-fetched or fantastic excitement from which +Fletcher could hardly ever bring himself completely to abstain. I am not +speaking here of those tragedies in which the hand of Beaumont is +traceable; to these, I need hardly say, the charge is comparatively +inapplicable which may fairly be brought against the unassisted works of +his elder colleague; but in any of the typical tragedies of Fletcher, in +_Thierry and Theodoret_, in _Valentinian_, in _The Double Marriage_, the +scenes which for power and beauty of style may reasonably be compared +with this of the execution of Buckingham will be found more forced in +situation, more fanciful in language than this. Many will be found more +beautiful, many more exciting; the famous interview of Thierry with the +veiled Ordella, and the scene answering to this in the fifth act where +Brunhalt is confronted with her dying son, will be at once remembered by +all dramatic students; and the parts of Lucina and Juliana may each be +described as a continuous arrangement of passionate and pathetic effects. +But in which of these parts and in which of these plays shall we find a +scene so simple, an effect so modest, a situation so unforced as here? +where may we look for the same temperance of tone, the same control of +excitement, the same steadiness of purpose? If indeed Fletcher could +have written this scene, or the farewell of Wolsey to his greatness, or +his parting scene with Cromwell, he was perhaps not a greater poet, but +he certainly was a tragic writer capable of loftier self-control and +severer self-command, than he has ever shown himself elsewhere. + +And yet, if this were all, we might be content to believe that the +dignity of the subject and the high example of his present associate had +for once lifted the natural genius of Fletcher above itself. But the +fine and subtle criticism of Mr. Spedding has in the main, I think, +successfully and clearly indicated the lines of demarcation undeniably +discernible in this play between the severer style of certain scenes or +speeches and the laxer and more fluid style of others; between the +graver, 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 dying speech of Buckingham and the christening speech of Cranmer, +it might after all be almost impossible to resist the internal evidence +of Fletcher's handiwork. Certainly we hear the same soft continuous note +of easy eloquence, level and limpid as a stream of crystalline +transparence, in the plaintive adieu of the condemned statesman and the +panegyrical prophecy of the favoured prelate. If this, I say, were all, +we might admit that there is nothing--I have already admitted it--in +either passage beyond the poetic reach of Fletcher. But on the +hypothesis so ably maintained by the editor of Bacon there hangs no less +a consequence than this: that we must assign to the same hand the +crowning glory of the whole poem, the death-scene of Katherine. Now if +Fletcher could have written that scene--a scene on which the only +criticism ever passed, the only commendation ever bestowed, by the +verdict of successive centuries, has been that of tears and silence--if +Fletcher could have written a scene so far beyond our applause, so far +above our acclamation, then the memory of no great poet has ever been so +grossly wronged, so shamefully defrauded of its highest claim to honour. +But, with all reverence for that memory, I must confess that I cannot +bring myself to believe it. Any explanation appears to me more probable +than this. Considering with what care every relic of his work was once +and again collected by his posthumous editors--even to the attribution, +not merely of plays in which he can have taken only the slightest part, +but of plays in which we know that he had no share at all--I cannot +believe that his friends would have let by far the brightest jewel in his +crown rest unreclaimed in the then less popular treasure-house of +Shakespeare. Belief or disbelief of this kind is however but a sandy +soil for conjecture to build upon. Whether or 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 must repeat that such a miraculous +example of a man's genius for once transcending itself and for ever +eclipsing all its other achievements appears to me beyond all critical, +beyond all theological credulity. Pathos and concentration are surely +not among the dominant notes of Fletcher's style or the salient qualities +of his intellect. Except perhaps in the beautiful and famous passage +where Hengo dies in his uncle's arms, I doubt whether in any of the +variously and highly coloured scenes played out upon the wide and +shifting stage of his fancy the genius of Fletcher has ever unlocked the +source of tears. Bellario and Aspatia were the children of his younger +colleague; at least, after the death of Beaumont we meet no such figures +on the stage of Fletcher. In effect, though Beaumont had a gift of grave +sardonic humour which found especial vent in burlesques of the heroic +style and in the systematic extravagance of such characters as Bessus, +{89} yet he was above all things a tragic poet; and though Fletcher had +great power of tragic eloquence and passionate effusion, yet his comic +genius was of a rarer and more precious quality; one _Spanish Curate_ is +worth many a _Valentinian_; as, on the other hand, one _Philaster_ is +worth many a _Scornful Lady_. Now there is no question here of Beaumont; +and there is no question that the passage here debated has been taken to +the heart of the whole world and baptized in the tears of generations as +no work of Fletcher's has ever been. That Beaumont could have written it +I do not believe; but I am wellnigh assured that Fletcher could not. I +can scarcely imagine that the most fluid sympathy, the "hysteric passion" +most easily distilled from the eyes of reader or spectator, can ever have +watered with its tears the scene or the page which sets forth, however +eloquently and effectively, 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 suggest the +handiwork of Fletcher, and which certainly do now and then seem almost +identical in style with his, I think we shall hardly find the difference +between these and other parts of the same play so wide and so distinct as +the difference between the undoubted work of Fletcher and the undoubted +work of Shakespeare. What that difference is we are fortunately able to +determine with exceptional certitude, and with no supplementary help from +conjecture of probabilities. In the play which is undoubtedly a joint +work of these poets the points of contact and the points of disunion are +unmistakable by the youngest eye. In the very last scene of _The Two +Noble Kinsmen_, we can tell with absolute certainty what speeches were +appended or interpolated by Fletcher; we can pronounce with positive +conviction what passages were completed and what parts were left +unfinished by Shakespeare. Even on Mr. Spedding's theory it can hardly +be possible to do as much for _King Henry VIII_. The lines of +demarcation, however visible or plausible, are fainter by far than these. +It is certainly not much less strange to come upon such passages in the +work of Shakespeare as the speeches of Buckingham and Cranmer than it +would be to encounter in the work of Sophocles a sample of the later and +laxer style of Euripides; to meet for instance in the _Antigone_ with a +passage which might pass muster as an extract from the _Iphigenia in +Aulis_. In metrical effects the style of the lesser English poet is an +exact counterpart of the style of the lesser Greek; there is the same +comparative tenuity and fluidity of verse, the same excess of short +unemphatic syllables, the same solution of the graver iambic into soft +overflow of lighter and longer feet which relaxes and dilutes the solid +harmony of tragic metre with notes of a more facile and feminine strain. +But in _King Henry VIII_. it should be remarked that though we not +unfrequently find the same preponderance as in Fletcher's work of verses +with a double ending--which in English verse at least are not in +themselves feminine, and need not be taken to constitute, as in +Fletcher's case they do, a note of comparative effeminacy or relaxation +in tragic style--we do not find the perpetual predominance of those +triple terminations so peculiarly and notably dear to that poet; {92} so +that even by the test of the metre-mongers who would reduce the whole +question at issue to a point which might at once be solved by the simple +process of numeration the argument in favour of Fletcher can hardly be +proved tenable; for the metre which evidently has one leading quality in +common with his is as evidently wanting in another at least as marked and +as necessary to establish--if established it can be by any such test +taken singly and, apart from all other points of evidence--the +collaboration of Fletcher with Shakespeare in this instance. And if the +proof by mere metrical similitude is thus imperfect, there is here +assuredly no other kind of test which may help to fortify the argument by +any suggestion of weight even comparable to this. In those passages +which would seem most plausibly to indicate the probable partnership of +Fletcher, the unity and sustained force of the style keep it generally +above the average level of his; there is less admixture or intrusion of +lyric or elegiac quality; there is more of temperance and proportion +alike in declamation and in debate. And throughout the whole play, and +under all the diversity of composite subject and conflicting interest +which disturbs the unity of action, there is a singleness of spirit, a +general unity or concord of inner tone, in marked contrast to the utter +discord and discrepancy of the several sections of _The Two Noble +Kinsmen_. We admit, then, that this play offers us in some not +unimportant passages the single instance of a style not elsewhere +precisely or altogether traceable in Shakespeare; that no exact parallel +to it can be found among his other plays; and that if not the partial +work it may certainly be taken as the general model of Fletcher in his +tragic poetry. On the other hand, we contend that its exceptional +quality might perhaps be explicable as a tentative essay in a new line by +one who tried so many styles before settling into his latest; and that, +without far stronger, clearer, and completer proof than has yet been or +can ever be advanced, the question is not solved but merely evaded by the +assumption of a double authorship. + +By far the ablest argument based upon a wider ground of reason or of +likelihood than this of mere metre that has yet been advanced in support +of the theory which would attribute a part of this play to some weaker +hand than Shakespeare's is due to the study of a critic whose +name--already by right of inheritance the most illustrious name of his +age and ours--is now for ever attached to that of Shakespeare himself by +right of the highest service ever done and the noblest duty ever paid to +his memory. The untimely death which removed beyond reach of our thanks +for all he had done and our hopes for all he might do, the man who first +had given to France the first among foreign poets--son of the greatest +Frenchman and translator of the greatest Englishman--was only in this not +untimely, that it forbore him till the great and wonderful work was done +which has bound two deathless names together by a closer than the common +link that connects the names of all sovereign poets. Among all classic +translations of the classic works of the world, I know of none that for +absolute mastery and perfect triumph over all accumulation of obstacles, +for supreme dominion over supreme difficulty, can be matched with the +translation of Shakespeare by Francois-Victor Hugo; unless a claim of +companionship may perchance be put in for Urquhart's unfinished version +of Rabelais. For such success in the impossible as finally disproves the +right of "that fool of a word" to existence--at least in the world of +letters--the two miracles of study and of sympathy which have given +Shakespeare to the French and Rabelais to the English, and each in his +habit as he lived, may take rank together in glorious rivalry beyond +eyeshot of all past or future competition. + +Among the essays appended to the version of Shakespeare which they +complete and illustrate, that which deals with the play now in question +gives as ample proof as any other of the sound and subtle insight brought +to 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 and +admirable than his large and solid knowledge, his full and lucid +comprehension at once of the text and of the history of Shakespeare's +plays; and if his research into the inner details of that history may +seem ever to have erred from the straight path of firm and simple +certainty into some dubious byway of theory or conjecture, we may be sure +at least that no lack of learning or devotion, of ardour or intelligence, +but more probably some noble thought that was fathered by a noble wish to +do honour to Shakespeare, has led him to attribute to his original some +quality foreign to the text, or to question the authenticity of what for +love of his author he might not wish to find in it. Thus he would reject +the main part of the fifth act as the work of a mere court laureate, an +official hack or hireling employed to anoint the memory of an archbishop +and lubricate the steps of a throne with the common oil of dramatic +adulation; and finding it in either case a task alike unworthy of +Shakespeare to glorify the name of Cranmer or to deify the names of the +queen then dead and the king yet living, it is but natural that he should +be induced by an unconscious bias or prepossession of the will to +depreciate the worth of the verse sent on work fitter for ushers and +embalmers and the general valetry or varletry of Church and State. That +this fifth act is unequal in point of interest to the better part of the +preceding acts with which it is connected by so light and loose a tie of +convenience is as indisputable as that the style of the last scene +savours now and then, and for some space together, more strongly than +ever of Fletcher's most especial and distinctive qualities, or that the +whole structure of the play if judged by any strict rule of pure art is +incomposite and incongruous, wanting in unity, consistency, and coherence +of interest. The fact is that here even more than in _King John_ the +poet's hands were hampered by a difficulty inherent in the subject. To +an English and Protestant audience, fresh from the passions and perils of +reformation and reaction, he had to present an English king at war with +the papacy, in whom the assertion of national independence was incarnate; +and to the sympathies of such an audience it was a matter of mere +necessity for him to commend the representative champion of their cause +by all means which he could compel into the service of his aim. Yet this +object was in both instances all but incompatible with the natural and +necessary interest of the plot. It was inevitable that this interest +should in the main be concentrated upon the victims of the personal or +national policy of either king; upon Constance and Arthur, upon Katherine +and Wolsey. Where these are not, either apparent in person on the stage, +or felt in 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 double +claims of the subject of the poem and the object of the poet were +satisfied and harmonised, by the effacement of John and the substitution +of Faulconbridge as the champion of the national cause and the +protagonist of the dramatic action. Considering this play in its double +aspect of tragedy and history, we might say that the English hero becomes +the central figure of the poem as seen from its historic side, while John +remains the central figure of the poem as seen from its tragic side; the +personal interest that depends on personal crime and retribution is +concentrated on the agony of the king; the national interest which he, +though the eponymous hero of the poem, was alike inadequate as a craven +and improper as a villain to sustain and represent in the eyes of the +spectators was happily and easily transferred to the one person of the +play who could properly express within the compass of its closing act at +once the protest against papal pretension, the defiance of foreign +invasion, and the prophetic assurance of self-dependent life and self- +sufficing strength inherent in the nation then fresh from a fiercer trial +of its quality, which an audience of the days of Queen Elizabeth would +justly expect from the poet who undertook to set before them in action +the history of the days of King John. That history had lately been +brought upon the stage under the hottest and most glaring light that +could be thrown on it by the fire of fanatical partisanship; _The +Troublesome Reign of King John_, weakest and most wooden of all wearisome +chronicles that ever cumbered the boards, had in it for sole principle of +life its power of congenial appeal to the same blatant and vulgar spirit +of Protestantism which inspired it. In all the flat interminable morass +of its tedious and tuneless verse I can find no blade or leaf of living +poetic growth, no touch but one of nature or of pathos, where Arthur +dying would fain send a last thought in search of his mother. From this +play Shakespeare can have got neither hint nor help towards the execution +of his own; the crude rough sketch of the Bastard as he brawls and +swaggers through the long length of its scenes is hardly so much as the +cast husk or chrysalid of the noble creature which was to 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 blockish model as this to work +from. The one preceding play known to me which deals professedly with +the same subject treats of quite other matters than are handled by +Shakespeare, and most notably with the scholastic adventures or +misadventures of Edward Prince of Wales and his whipping-boy Ned Browne. +A fresh and wellnigh a plausible argument might be raised by the critics +who deny the unity of authorship in King Henry VIII., on the ground that +if Shakespeare had completed the work himself he would surely not have +let slip the occasion to introduce one of the most 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 now unvaried and unbroken in +their gravity of emotion and event. Shakespeare, one would say, might +naturally have been expected to take up and remodel the well-known figure +of which his humble precursor could give but a rough thin outline, yet +sufficient it should seem to attract the tastes to which it appealed; for +this or some other quality of seasonable attraction served to float the +now forgotten play of Samuel Rowley through several editions. The +central figure of the huge hot-headed king, with his gusts of stormy good +humour and peals of burly oaths which might have suited "Garagantua's +mouth" and satisfied the requirements of Hotspur, appeals in a ruder +fashion to the survival of the same sympathies on which Shakespeare with +a finer instinct as evidently relied; the popular estimate of the bluff +and brawny tyrant "who broke the bonds of Rome" was not yet that of later +historians, though doubtless neither was it that of the writer or writers +who would champion him to the utterance. Perhaps the opposite verdicts +given by the instinct of the people on "bluff King Hal" and "Bloody Mary" +may be understood by reference to a famous verse of Juvenal. The +wretched queen was sparing of noble blood and lavish of poor men's +lives--_cerdonibus timenda_; and the curses under which her memory was +buried were spared by the people to her father, _Lamiarum caede madenti_. +In any case, the humblest not less than the highest of the poets who +wrote under the reign of his daughter found it safe to present him in a +popular light before an audience of whose general prepossession in his +favour William Shakespeare was no slower to take advantage than Samuel +Rowley. + +The two plays we have just discussed have one quality of style in common +which has already been noted; that in them rhetoric is in excess of +action or passion, and far in excess of poetry. They are not as yet +perfect examples of his second manner, though far ahead of his first +stage in performance as in promise. Compared with the full and living +figure of Katherine or of Constance, the study of Margaret of Anjou is +the mere sketch of a poet still in his pupilage: John and Henry, +Faulconbridge and Wolsey, are designs beyond reach of the hand which drew +the second and third Richard without much background or dramatic +perspective. But the difficulties inherent in either subject are not +surmounted throughout with absolute equality of success; the very point +of appeal to the sympathy and excitement of the time may have been +something of a disturbing force in the composition of the work--a +loadstone rock indeed, of tempting attraction to the patriot as well as +to the playwright, but possibly capable of proving in some measure a rock +of offence to the poet whose ship was piloted towards it. His perfect +triumph in the field of patriotic drama, coincident with the perfect +maturity of his comic genius and his general style, has now to show +itself. + +The great national trilogy which is at once the flower of Shakespeare's +second period and the crown of his achievements in historic drama--unless +indeed we so far depart from the established order and arrangement of his +works as to include his three Roman plays in the same class with these +English histories--offers perhaps the most singular example known to us +of the variety in fortune which befell his works on their first +appearance in print. None of these had better luck in that line at +starting than _King Henry IV_.; none had worse than _King Henry V_. With +_Romeo and Juliet_, the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, and _Hamlet_, it shares +the remarkable and undesirable honour of having been seized and boarded +by pirates even before it had left the dockyard. The masterbuilder's +hands had not yet put the craft into seaworthy condition when she was +overhauled by these Kidds and Blackbeards of the press. Of those four +plays, the two tragedies at least were thoroughly recast, and rewritten +from end to end: the pirated editions giving us a transcript, more or +less perfect or imperfect, accurate or corrupt, of the text as it first +came from the poet's hand; a text to be afterwards indefinitely modified +and incalculably improved. Not quite so much can be said of the comedy, +which certainly stood in less need of revision, and probably would not +have borne it so well; nevertheless every little passing touch of the +reviser's hand is here also a noticeable mark of invigoration and +improvement. But _King Henry V_., we may fairly say, is hardly less than +transformed. Not that it has been recast after the fashion of _Hamlet_, +or even rewritten after the fashion of _Romeo and Juliet_; but the +corruptions and imperfections of the pirated text are here more flagrant +than in any other instance; while the general revision of style by which +it is at once purified and fortified extends to every nook and corner of +the restored and renovated building. Even had we, however, a perfect and +trustworthy transcript of Shakespeare's original sketch for this play, +there can be little doubt that the rough draught would still prove almost +as different from the final masterpiece as is the soiled and ragged +canvas now before us, on which we trace the outline of figures so +strangely disfigured, made subject to such rude extremities of defacement +and defeature. There is indeed less difference between the two editions +in the comic than in the historic scenes; the pirates were probably more +careful to furnish their market with a fair sample of the lighter than of +the graver ware supplied by their plunder of the poet; Fluellen and +Pistol lose less through their misusage than the king; and the king +himself is less maltreated when he talks plain prose with his soldiers +than when he chops blank verse with his enemies or his lords. His rough +and ready courtship of the French princess is a good deal expanded as to +length, but (if I dare say so) less improved and heightened in tone than +we might well have wished and it might well have borne; in either text +the Hero's addresses savour rather of a ploughman than a prince, and his +finest courtesies are clownish though not churlish. We may probably see +in this rather a concession to the appetite of the groundlings than an +evasion of the difficulties inherent in the subject-matter of the scene; +too heavy as these might have been for another, we can conceive of none +too hard for the magnetic tact and intuitive delicacy of Shakespeare's +judgment and instinct. But it must fairly and honestly be admitted that +in this scene we find as little of the charm and humour inseparable from +the prince as of the courtesy and dignity to be expected from the king. + +It should on the other hand be noted that the finest touch in the comic +scenes, if not the finest in the whole portrait of Falstaff, is +apparently an afterthought, a touch added on revision of the original +design. In the first scene of the second act Mrs. Quickly's remark that +"he'll yield the crow a pudding one of these days" is common to both +versions of the play; but the six words following are only to be found in +the revised edition; and these six words 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 by the very dullest and horniest of human +eyes. "The king has killed his heart." Here is the point in Falstaff's +nature so strangely overlooked by the man of all men who we should have +said must be the first to seize and to appreciate it. It is as grievous +as it is inexplicable that the Shakespeare of France--the most infinite +in compassion, in "conscience and tender heart," of all great poets in +all ages and all nations of the world--should have missed the deep +tenderness of this supreme and subtlest touch in the work of the greatest +among his fellows. Again, with anything but "damnable" iteration, does +Shakespeare revert to it before the close of this very scene. Even +Pistol and Nym can see that what now ails their old master is no such +ailment as in his prosperous days was but too liable to "play the rogue +with his great toe." "The king hath run bad humours on the knight": "his +heart is fracted, and corroborate." And it is not thus merely through +the eclipse of that brief mirage, that fair prospect "of Africa, and +golden joys," in view of which he was ready to "take any man's horses." +This it is that distinguishes Falstaff from Panurge; that lifts him at +least to the moral level of Sancho Panza. I cannot but be reluctant to +set the verdict of my own judgment against that of Victor Hugo's; I need +none to remind me what and who he is whose judgment I for once oppose, +and what and who am I that I should oppose it; that he is he, and I am +but myself; yet against his classification of Falstaff, against his +definition of Shakespeare's unapproached and unapproachable masterpiece +in the school of comic art and humouristic nature, I must and do with all +my soul and strength protest. The admirable 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 human trinity of humourists whose names make radiant for ever the +Century of their new-born glory--not Shakespeare but Rabelais is +responsible for the creation or the discovery of such a type as this. +"_Suum cuique_ is our Roman justice"; the gradation from Panurge to +Falstaff is not downward but upward; though it be Victor Hugo's very 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 +unquestionably the superior of Panurge. The natural affection of Panurge +is bounded by the self-same limits as the natural theology of Polyphemus; +the love of the one, like the faith of the other, begins and ends alike +at one point; + + Myself, + And this great belly, first of deities; + +(in which line, by the way, we may hear as it were a first faint prelude +of the great proclamation to come--the hymn of praise and thanksgiving +for the coronation day of King Gaster; whose laureate, we know, was as +lovingly familiar with the Polyphemus of Euripides as Shakespeare with +his own Pantagruel.) In Sancho we come upon a creature capable of +love--but not of such love as kills or helps to kill, such love as may +end or even as may seem to end in anything like 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 (so long entombed, ignored, +repudiated, misconstrued, vilified, by so many generations and ages of +Galilean preachers and Pharisaic schoolmen)--Rabelais was content to +paint the flesh merely, in its honest human reality--human at least, if +also bestial; in its frank and rude reaction against the half brainless +and wholly bloodless teachers whose doctrine he himself on the one hand, +and Luther on the other, arose together to smite severally--to smite them +hip and thigh, even till the going down of the sun; the mock sun or +marshy meteor that served only to deepen the darkness encompassing on +every side the doubly dark ages--the ages of monarchy and theocracy, the +ages of death and of faith. To Panurge, therefore, it was unnecessary +and it might have seemed inconsequent to attribute other gifts or +functions than are proper to such intelligence as may accompany the +appetites of an animal. That most irreverend father in God, Friar John, +belongs to a higher class in the moral order of being; and he much rather +than his fellow-voyager and penitent is properly comparable with +Falstaff. It is impossible to connect the notion of rebuke with the sins +of Panurge. The actual lust and gluttony, the imaginary cowardice of +Falstaff, have been gravely and sharply rebuked by critical morality; we +have just noted a too recent and too eminent example of this; but what +mortal ever dreamed of casting these qualities in the teeth of his +supposed counterpart? The difference is as vast between Falstaff on the +field of battle and Panurge on the storm-tossed deck as between Falstaff +and Hotspur, Panurge and Friar John. No man could show cooler and +steadier nerve than is displayed in either case--by the 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 misconstruction which would +impute to Falstaff the quality of a Parolles or a Bobadil, a Bessus or a +Moron. The delightful encounter between the jester and the bear in the +crowning interlude of _La Princesse d'Elide_ shows once more, I may +remark, that Moliere had sat at the feet of Rabelais as delightedly as +Shakespeare before him. Such rapturous inebriety or Olympian +incontinence of humour only fires the blood of the graver and less +exuberant humourist when his lips are still warm and wet from the well- +spring of the _Dive Bouteille_. + +It is needless to do over again the work which was done, and well done, a +hundred years since, by the writer whose able essay in vindication and +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 fortified on all +hands to require or even to admit of corroboration; and the attempt to +appropriate any share of the lasting credit which is his due would be +nothing less than a disingenuous impertinence. I may here however notice +that in the very first scene of this trilogy which introduces us to the +ever dear and honoured presence of Sir John, his creator has put into the +mouth of a witness no friendlier or more candid than Ned Poins the +distinction between two as true-bred cowards as ever turned back and one +who will fight no longer than he sees reason. In this nutshell lies the +whole kernel of the matter; the sweet, sound, ripe, toothsome, wholesome +kernel of Falstaff's character and humour. He will fight as well as his +princely patron, and, like the prince, as long as he sees reason; but +neither Hal nor Jack has ever felt any touch of desire to pluck that +"mere scutcheon" honour "from the pale-faced moon." Harry Percy is as 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 equally daring +and calculating statesmen-warriors whose two most terrible, most perfect, +and most famous types are Louis XI. and Caesar Borgia. Gain, +"commodity," the principle of self-interest which never but in word and +in jest could become the principle of action with Faulconbridge,--himself +already far more "a man of this world" than a Launcelot or a Hotspur,--is +as evidently the mainspring of Henry's enterprise and life as of the +contract between King Philip and King John. The supple and shameless +egotism of the churchmen on whose political sophistries he relies for +external support is needed rather to varnish his project than to reassure +his conscience. Like Frederic the Great before his first Silesian war, +the future conqueror of Agincourt has practically made up his mind before +he seeks to find as good reason or as plausible excuse as were likewise +to suffice the future conqueror of Rosbach. In a word, Henry is +doubtless not the man, as old Auchindrane expresses it in the noble and +strangely neglected tragedy which bears solitary but sufficient witness +to the actual dramatic faculty of Sir Walter Scott's genius, to do the +devil's work without his wages; but neither is he, on the like +unprofitable terms, by any manner of means the man to do God's. No +completer incarnation could be shown us of the militant +Englishman--_Anglais pur sang_; but it is not only, as some have seemed +to think, with the highest, the purest, the noblest quality of English +character that his just and far-seeing creator has endowed him. The +godlike equity of Shakespeare's judgment, his implacable and impeccable +righteousness of instinct and of insight, was too deeply ingrained in the +very core of his genius to be perverted by any provincial or +pseudo-patriotic prepossessions; his patriotism was too national to be +provincial. Assuredly no poet ever had more than he: not even the king +of men and poets who fought at Marathon and sang of Salamis: much less +had any or has any one of our own, from Milton on to Campbell and from +Campbell even to Tennyson. In the mightiest chorus of _King Henry V_. we +hear the pealing ring of the same great English trumpet that was yet to +sound over the battle of the Baltic, and again in our later day over a +sea-fight of Shakespeare's own, more splendid and heart-cheering in its +calamity than that other and all others in their triumph; a war-song and +a sea-song divine and deep as death or as the sea, making thrice more +glorious at once the glorious three names of England, of Grenville, and +of Tennyson for ever. From the affectation of cosmopolitan indifference +not AEschylus, not Pindar, not Dante's very self was more alien or more +free than Shakespeare; but there was nothing of the dry Tyrtaean twang, +the dull mechanic resonance as of wooden echoes from a platform, in the +great historic chord of his lyre. "He is very English, too English, +even," says the Master on whom his enemies alone--assuredly not his most +loving, most reverent, and most thankful disciples--might possibly and +plausibly retort that he was "very French, too French, even"; but he +certainly was not "too English" to see and cleave to the main fact, the +radical and central truth, of personal or national character, of typical +history or tradition, without seeking to embellish, to degrade, in either +or in any way to falsify it. From king to king, from cardinal to +cardinal, from the earliest in date of subject to the latest of his +histories, we find the same thread running, the same link of honourable +and righteous judgment, of equitable and careful equanimity, connecting +and combining play with play in an unbroken and infrangible chain of +evidence to the singleness of the poet's eye, the identity of the +workman's hand, which could do justice and would do no more than justice, +alike to Henry and to Wolsey, to Pandulph and to John. His typical +English hero or historic protagonist is a man of their type who founded +and built up the empire of England in India; a hero after the future +pattern of Hastings and of Clive; not less daringly sagacious and not +more delicately scrupulous, not less indomitable or more impeccable than +they. A type by no means immaculate, a creature not at all too bright +and good for English nature's daily food in times of mercantile or +military enterprise; no whit more if no whit less excellent and radiant +than reality. _Amica Britannia, sed magis amica veritas_. The master +poet of England--all Englishmen may reasonably and honourably be proud of +it--has not two weights and two measures for friend and foe. This +palpable and patent fact, as his only and worthy French translator has +well remarked, would of itself suffice to exonerate his memory from the +imputation of having perpetrated in its evil entirety _The First Part of +King Henry VI_. + +There is, in my opinion, somewhat more of internal evidence than I have +ever seen adduced in support of the tradition current from an early date +as to the origin of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_; a tradition which +assigns to Queen Elizabeth the same office of midwife with regard to this +comedy as was discharged by Elwood with reference to _Paradise Regained_. +Nothing could so naturally or satisfactorily explain its existence as the +expression of a desire to see "Falstaff in love," which must have been +nothing less than the equivalent of a command to produce him under the +disguise of such a transfiguration on 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 spontaneously suggested itself to +Shakespeare as a natural or eligible aim for the fresh exercise of his +comic genius. To exhibit Falstaff as throughout the whole course of five +acts a credulous and baffled dupe, one "easier to be played on than a +pipe," was not really to reproduce him at all. The genuine Falstaff +could no more have played such a part than the genuine Petruchio could +have filled such an one as was assigned him by Fletcher in the luckless +hour when that misguided poet undertook to continue the subject and to +correct the moral of the next comedy in our catalogue of Shakespeare's. +_The Tamer Tamed_ is hardly less consistent or acceptable as a sequel to +the _Taming of the Shrew_ than the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ as a +supplement to _King Henry IV_.: and no conceivable comparison could more +forcibly convey, how broad and deep is the gulf of incongruity which +divides them. + +The plea for once suggested by the author in the way of excuse or +extenuation for this incompatibility of Falstaff with Falstaff--for the +violation of character goes far beyond mere inconsistency or the natural +ebb and flow of even the brightest wits and most vigorous intellects--will +commend itself more readily to the moralist than to the humanist; in +other words, to the preacher rather than to the thinker, the sophist +rather than the artist. Here only does Shakespeare show that he feels +the necessity of condescending to such evasion or such apology as is +implied in the explanation of Falstaff's incredible credulity by a +reference to "the guiltiness of his mind" and the admission, so +gratifying to all minds more moral than his own, that "wit may 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 serious good earnest? + +In the original version of this comedy there was not a note of poetry +from end to end; as it then appeared, it might be said to hold the same +place on the roll of Shakespeare's plays as is occupied by _Bartholomew +Fair_ on the roll of Ben Jonson's. From this point of view it is curious +to contrast the purely farcical masterpieces of the town-bred schoolboy +and the country lad. There is a certain faint air of the fields, the +river, and the park, even in the rough sketch of Shakespeare's +farce--wholly prosaic as it is, and in no point suggestive of any +unlikelihood in the report which represents it as the composition or +rather as the improvisation of a fortnight. We know at once that he must +have stroked the fallow greyhound that was outrun on "Cotsall"; that he +must--and perhaps once or twice at least too often--have played truant +(some readers, boys past or present, might wish for association's sake it +could actually have been Datchet-wards) from under the shadow of good Sir +Hugh's probably not over formidable though "threatening twigs of birch," +at all risks of being "preeches" on his return, in fulfilment of the +direful menace held out to that young namesake of his over whose +innocence Mrs. Quickly was so creditably vigilant. On the other hand, no +student of Jonson will need to be reminded how closely and precociously +familiar the big stalwart Westminster boy, Camden's favoured and grateful +pupil, must have made himself with the rankest haunts and most unsavoury +recesses of that ribald waterside and Smithfield life which he lived to +reproduce on the stage with a sometimes insufferable fidelity to details +from which Hogarth might have shrunk. Even his unrivalled proficiency in +classic learning can hardly have been the fruit of greater or more +willing diligence in school hours than he must have lavished on other +than scholastic studies in the streets. The humour of his huge +photographic group of divers "humours" is undeniably and incomparably +richer, broader, fuller of invention and variety, than any that +Shakespeare's lighter work can show; all the five acts of the latter +comedy can hardly serve as counterpoise, in weight and wealth of comic +effect, to the single scene in which Zeal-of-the-Land defines the moral +and theological boundaries of action and intention which distinguish the +innocent if not laudable desire to eat pig from the venial though not +mortal sin of longing to eat pig in the thick of the profane Fair, which +may rather be termed a foul than a fair. Taken from that point of view +which looks only to force and freedom and range of humorous effect, +Jonson's play is to his friend's as London is to Windsor; but in more +senses than one it is to Shakespeare's as the Thames at London Bridge is +to the Thames at Eton: the atmosphere of Smithfield is not more different +from the atmosphere of the playing-fields; and some, too delicate of nose +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 Windsor_ are +comparatively as poor and thin if set over against the full rich outlines +of Rabbi Busy and Dame Purecraft as these again are at all points alike +inferior to the real Shallow and the genuine Quickly of _King Henry IV_. +It is true that Jonson's humour has sometimes less in common with +Shakespeare's than with the humour of Swift, Smollett, and Carlyle. For +all his admiration and even imitation of Rabelais, Shakespeare has hardly +once or twice burnt but so 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 of Urania, he never turns into a dirtier byway or +back alley than the beaten path trodden occasionally by most of his kind +which leads them on a passing errand of no unnatural devotion to the +shrine of Venus Pandemos. + +When, however, we turn from the raw rough sketch to the enriched and +ennobled version of the present play we find it in this its better shape +more properly comparable with another and a nobler work of Jonson's--with +that magnificent comedy, the first avowed and included among his +collection by its author, which according to all tradition first owed its +appearance and success to the critical good sense and generous good +offices of Shakespeare. Neither my duly unqualified love for the greater +poet nor my duly qualified regard for the less can alter my sense that +their mutual relations are in this one case inverted; that _Every Man in +his Humour_ is altogether a better comedy and a work of higher art than +the _Merry Wives of Windsor_. Kitely is to Ford almost what Arnolphe is +to Sganarelle. (As according to the learned Metaphraste "Filio non +potest praeferri nisi filius," even so can no one but Moliere be +preferred or likened to Moliere.) Without actually touching like +Arnolphe on the hidden springs of tragedy, the jealous husband in +Jonson's play is only kept from trenching on the higher and forbidden +grounds of passion by the potent will and the consummate self-command of +the great master who called him up in perfect likeness to the life. +Another or a deeper tone, another or a stronger touch, in the last two +admirable scenes with his cashier and his wife, when his hot smouldering +suspicion at length catches fire and breaks out in agony of anger, would +have removed him altogether beyond the legitimate pale of comedy. As it +is, the self-control of the artist is as thorough as his grasp and +mastery of his subject are triumphant and complete. + +It would seem as though on revision of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ +Shakespeare had found himself unwilling or rather perhaps unable to leave +a single work of his hand without one touch or breath on it of beauty or +of poetry. The sole fitting element of harmonious relief or variety in +such a case could of course be found only in an interlude of pure fancy; +any touch of graver or deeper emotion would simply have untuned and +deranged the whole scheme of composition. A lesser poet might have been +powerless to resist the temptation or suggestion of sentiment that he +should give to the little loves of Anne Page and Fenton a touch of +pathetic or emotional interest; but "opulent as Shakespeare was, and of +his opulence prodigal" (to borrow a phrase from Coleridge), he knew +better than to patch with purple or embroider with seed-pearl the hem of +this homespun little piece of comic drugget. The match between cloth of +gold and cloth of frieze could hardly have borne any good issue in this +instance. Instead therefore of following the lead of Terence's or the +hint of Jonson's example, and exalting the accent of his comedy to the +full-mouthed pitch of a Chremes or a Kitely, he strikes out some forty +and odd lines of rather coarse and commonplace doggrel about brokers, +proctors, lousy fox-eyed serjeants, blue and red noses, and so forth, to +make room for the bright light interlude of fairyland child's-play which +might not unfittingly have found place even within the moon-charmed +circle of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. Even in that all heavenly poem +there are hardly to be found lines of more sweet and radiant simplicity +than here. + +The refined instinct, artistic judgment, and consummate taste of +Shakespeare were perhaps never so wonderfully shown as in his recast of +another man's work--a man of real if rough genius for comedy--which we +get in the _Taming of the Shrew_. Only the collation of scene with +scene, then of speech with speech, then of line with line, will show how +much may be borrowed from a stranger's material and how much may be added +to it by the same stroke of a single hand. All the force and humour +alike of character and situation belong to Shakespeare's eclipsed and +forlorn precursor; he has added nothing; he has tempered and enriched +everything. That the luckless author of the first sketch is like to +remain a man as nameless as the deed of the witches in _Macbeth_, unless +some chance or caprice of accident should suddenly flash favouring light +on his now impersonal and indiscoverable individuality, seems clear +enough when we take into account the double and final disproof of his +imaginary identity with Marlowe, which Mr. Dyce has put forward with such +unanswerable certitude. He is a clumsy and coarse-fingered plagiarist +from that poet, and his stolen jewels of expression look so grossly out +of place in the homely setting of his usual style that they seem +transmuted from real to sham. On the other hand, he is of all the Pre- +Shakespeareans known to us incomparably the truest, the richest, the most +powerful and original humourist; one indeed without a second on that +ground, for "the rest are nowhere." Now Marlowe, it need scarcely be +once again reiterated, was as certainly one of the least and worst among +jesters as he was one of the best and greatest among poets. There can +therefore be no serious question of his partnership in a play wherein the +comic achievement is excellent and the poetic attempts are execrable +throughout. + +The recast of it in which a greater than Berni has deigned to play the +part of that poet towards a lesser than Bojardo shows tact and delicacy +perhaps without a parallel in literature. No chance of improvement is +missed, while nothing of value is dropped or thrown away. {125} There is +just now and then a momentary return perceptible to the skipping metre +and fantastic manner of the first period, which may have been +unconsciously suggested by the nature of the task in hand--a task of +itself implying or suggesting some new study of old models; but the main +style of the play in all its weightier parts is as distinctly proper to +the second period, as clear an evidence of inner and spiritual affinity +(with actual tabulation of dates, were such a thing as feasible as it is +impossible, I must repeat that the argument would here be--what it is +now--in no wise concerned), as is the handling of character throughout; +but most especially the subtle force, the impeccable and careful +instinct, the masculine delicacy of touch, by which the somewhat +ruffianly temperament of the original Ferando is at once refined and +invigorated through its transmutation into the hearty and humorous +manliness of Petruchio's. + +It is observable that those few and faint traces which we have noticed in +this play of a faded archaic style trying as it were to resume a mockery +of revirescence are not wholly even if mainly confined to the underplot +which a suggestion or surmise of Mr. Collier's long since assigned to +Haughton, author of _Englishmen for my Money, or A Woman will have her +Will_: a spirited, vigorous, and remarkably regular comedy of intrigue, +full of rough and ready incident, bright boisterous humour, honest lively +provinciality and gay high-handed Philistinism. To take no account of +this attribution would be to show myself as shamelessly as shamefully +deficient in that respect and gratitude which all genuine and thankful +students will always be as ready to offer as all thankless and insolent +sciolists can ever be to disclaim, to the venerable scholar who since I +was first engaged on these notes has added yet another obligation to the +many under which he had already laid all younger and lesser labourers in +the same field of study, by the issue in a form fitly ennobled and +enriched of his great historical work on our early stage. It might seem +something of an unintended impertinence to add that such recognition of +his theory no more implies a blind acceptance of it--whatever such +acceptance on my part might be worth--than the expression of such +gratitude and respect could reasonably be supposed to imply an equally +blind confidence in the authority or the value of that version of +Shakespeare's text which has been the means of exposing a name so long +and so justly honoured, not merely to the natural and rational +inquisition of rival students, but to the rancorous and ribald obloquy of +thankless and frontless pretenders. + +Here perhaps as well as anywhere else I may find a proper place to +intercalate the little word I have to say in partial redemption of my +pledge to take in due time some notice at more or less length, of the +only two among the plays doubtfully ascribed to Shakespeare which in my +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 to that +one which in itself is incomparably the more worthy of discussion, +admiration, and regard. The reason of this lies in the very excellence +which has attracted to it the notice of such competent judges and the +suffrage of such eminent names as would make the task of elaborate +commentary and analytic examination something more than superfluous on my +part; whereas the other has never been and will never be assigned to +Shakespeare by any critical student whose verdict is worth a minute's +consideration or the marketable value of a straw. Nevertheless it is on +other grounds worth notice; and such notice, to be itself of any value, +must of necessity be elaborate and minute. The critical analysis of +_King Edward III_. I have therefore relegated to its proper place in an +appendix; while I reserve a corner of my text, at once out of admiration +for the play itself and out of reverence for the names and authority of +some who have given their verdict in its behalf, for a rough and rapid +word or two on _Arden of Feversham_. + +It is with equally inexpressible surprise that I find Mr. Collier +accepting as Shakespeare's any part of _A Warning for Fair Women_, and +rejecting without compromise or hesitation the belief or theory which +would assign to the youth of Shakespeare the incomparably nobler tragic +poem in question. {129} His first ascription to Shakespeare of _A +Warning for Fair Women_ is couched in terms far more dubious and +diffident than such as he afterwards adopts. It "might," he says, "be +given to Shakespeare on grounds far more plausible" (on what, except +possibly those of date, I cannot imagine) "than those applicable to +_Arden of Feversham_." He then proceeds to cite some detached lines and +passages of undeniable beauty and vigour, containing equally undeniable +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 a surely too +trenchant fashion, "Here we say, _aut Shakespeare aut diabolus_." I must +confess, with all esteem for the critic and all admiration for the brief +scene cited, that I cannot say, Shakespeare. + +There are spirits of another sort from whom we naturally expect such +assumptions and inferences as start from the vantage ground of a few +separate or separable passages, and clear at a flying leap the empty +space intervening which divides them from the goal of evidence as to +authorship. Such a spirit was that of the late Mr. Simpson, to whose +wealth of misused learning and fertility of misapplied conjecture I have +already paid all due tribute; but who must have had beyond all other sane +men--most assuredly, beyond all other fairly competent critics--the gift +bestowed on him by a malignant fairy of mistaking assumption for argument +and possibility for proof. He was the very Columbus of mare's nests; to +the discovery of them, though they lay far beyond the pillars of +Hercules, he would apply all shifts and all resources possible to an +ultra-Baconian process of unphilosophical induction. On the devoted head +of Shakespeare--who is also called Shakspere and Chaxpur--he would have +piled a load of rubbish, among which the crude and vigorous old tragedy +under discussion shines out like a veritable diamond of the desert. His +"School of Shakspere," though not an academy to be often of necessity +perambulated by the most peripatetic student of Shakespeare, will remain +as a monument of critical or uncritical industry, a storehouse of curious +if not of precious relics, and a warning for other than fair women--or +fair scholars--to remember where "it is written that the shoemaker 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 for +admitting the possibility of Shakespeare's authorship in the case of +_Arden of Feversham_, and the pretexts for imagining the probability of +his partnership in _A Warning for Fair Women_. There is a practically +infinite distinction between the evidence suggested by verbal or even +more than verbal resemblance of detached line to line or selected passage +to passage, and the proof supplied by the general harmony and spiritual +similarity of a whole poem, on comparison of it as a whole with the known +works of the hypothetical author. This proof, at all events, we surely +do not get from consideration in this light 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 from contemplation under the same light of +the claim producible for _Arden of Feversham_. + +_A Warning for Fair Women_ is unquestionably in its way a noticeable and +valuable "piece of work," as Sly might have defined it. It is perhaps +the best example anywhere extant of a merely realistic tragedy--of +realism pure and simple applied to the service of the highest of the +arts. Very rarely does it rise for a very brief interval to the height +of tragic or poetic style, however simple and homely. The epilogue +affixed to _Arden of Feversham_ asks pardon of the "gentlemen" composing +its audience for "this naked tragedy," on the plea that "simple truth is +gracious enough" without needless ornament or bedizenment of "glozing +stuff." Far more appropriate would such an apology have been as in this +case was at least superfluous, if appended by way of epilogue to _A +Warning for Fair Women_. That is indeed a naked tragedy; nine-tenths of +it are in no wise beyond the reach of an able, industrious, and practised +reporter, commissioned by the proprietors of the journal on whose staff +he might be engaged to throw into the force of scenic dialogue his +transcript of the evidence in a popular and exciting case of adultery and +murder. The one figure on the stage of this author which stands out +sharply defined in our recollection against a background of +undistinguished shadows is the figure of the adulterer and murderer. This +most discreditable of Browns has a distinct and brawny outline of his +own, a gait and accent as of a genuine and recognisable man, who might +have put to some better profit 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 criminal heroines that the vast gulf +of difference between the capacities of the two poets yawns patent to the +sense of all readers. Anne Sanders and Alice Arden stand as far beyond +comparison apart as might a portrait by any average academician and a +portrait by Watts or Millais. Once only, in the simple and noble scene +cited by the over-generous partiality of Mr. Collier, does the widow and +murderess of Sanders rise to the tragic height of the situation and the +dramatic level of the part so unfalteringly sustained from first to last +by the wife and the murderess of Arden. + +There is the self-same relative difference between the two subordinate +groups of innocent or guilty characters. That is an excellent and +effective touch of realism, where Brown comes across his victim's little +boy playing truant in the street with a small schoolfellow; but in _Arden +of Feversham_ the number of touches as telling and as striking as this +one is practically numberless. They also show a far stronger and keener +faculty of poetic if not of dramatic imagination. The casual encounter +of little Sanders with the yet red-handed murderer of his father is not +comparable for depth and subtlety of effect with the scene in which +Arden's friend Franklin, riding with him to Raynham Down, breaks off his +"pretty tale" of a perjured wife, overpowered by a "fighting at his +heart," at the moment when they come close upon the ambushed assassins in +Alice Arden's pay. But the internal evidence in this case, as I have +already intimated, does not hinge upon the proof or the suggestion +offered by any single passage or by any number of single passages. The +first and last evidence of real and demonstrable weight is the evidence +of character. A good deal might be said on the score of style in favour +of its attribution to a poet of the first order, writing at a time when +there were but two such poets writing for the stage; but even this is +here a point of merely secondary importance. It need only be noted in +passing that if the problem be reduced to a question between the +authorship of Shakespeare and the authorship of Marlowe there is no need +and no room for further argument. The whole style of treatment from end +to end is about as like the method of Marlowe as the method of Balzac is +like the method of Dumas. There could be no alternative in 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 stage who excelled +him as a tragic dramatist not less--to say the very least--than he was +excelled by Marlowe as a narrative and tragic poet. + +If we accept, as I have been told that Goethe accepted (a point which I +regret my inability to verify), the former of these alternatives--or if +at least we assume it for argument's sake in passing--we may easily +strengthen our position by adducing as further evidence in its favour the +author's thoroughly Shakespearean fidelity to the details of the prose +narrative on which his tragedy is founded. But, it may be objected, we +find the same fidelity to a similar text in the case of _A Warning for +Fair Women_. And here again starts up the primal and radical difference +between the two works: it starts up and will not be overlooked. Equal +fidelity to the narrative text we do undoubtedly find in either case; the +same fidelity we assuredly do not find. The one is a typical example of +prosaic realism, the other of poetic reality. Light from darkness or +truth from falsehood is not more infallibly discernible. The fidelity in +the one case is exactly, as I have already indicated, the fidelity of a +reporter to his notes. The fidelity in the other case is exactly the +fidelity of Shakespeare in his Roman plays to the text of Plutarch. It +is a fidelity which admits--I had almost written, which requires--the +fullest play of the highest imagination. No more than the most realistic +of reporters will it omit or falsify any necessary or even admissible +detail; but the indefinable quality which it adds to the lowest as to the +highest of these is (as Lamb says of passion) "the all in all in poetry." +Turning again for illustration to one of the highest names in imaginative +literature--a name sometimes most improperly and absurdly inscribed on +the register of the realistic school, {137} we may say that the +difference on this point is not the difference between Balzac and Dumas, +but the distinction between Balzac and M. Zola. Let us take by way of +example the character next in importance to that of the heroine--the +character of her paramour. A viler figure was 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 will combining with the +masterly art of the creator who fashions out of the worst kind of human +clay the breathing likeness of a creature so hatefully pitiful and so +pitifully hateful overcomes, absorbs, annihilates all sense of such +abhorrence and repulsion as would prove the work which excited them no +high or even true work of art. Even the wonderful touch of dastardly +brutality and pitiful self-pity with which Mosbie at once receives and +repels the condolence of his mistress on his wound-- + + _Alice_.--Sweet Mosbie, hide thine arm, it kills my heart. + + _Mosbie_.--_Ay, Mistress Arden, this is your favour_.-- + +even this does not make unendurable the scenic representation of what in +actual life would be unendurable for any man to witness. Such an +exhibition of currish cowardice and sullen bullying spite increases +rather our wondering pity for its victim than our wondering sense of her +degradation. And this is a kind of triumph which only such an 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 belong by right of +weird sisterhood. The wives of the thane of Glamis and the governor of +Tharsus, it need hardly be said, are both of them creations of a much +later date--if not of the very latest discernible or definable stage in +the art of Shakespeare. Deeply dyed as she is in bloodguiltiness, the +wife of Arden is much less of a born criminal than these. To her, at +once the agent and the patient of her crime, the victim and the +instrument of sacrifice and blood-offering to Venus Libitina, goddess of +love and death,--to her, even in the deepest pit of her deliberate +wickedness, remorse is natural and redemption conceivable. Like the +Phaedra of Racine, and herein so nobly unlike the Phaedra of Euripides, +she is capable of the deepest and bitterest penitence,--incapable of +dying with a hideous and homicidal falsehood on her long polluted lips. +Her latest breath is not a lie but a prayer. + +Considering, then, in conclusion, the various and marvellous gifts +displayed for the first time on our stage by the great poet, the great +dramatist, the strong and subtle searcher of hearts, the just and +merciful judge and painter of human passions, who gave this tragedy to +the new-born literature of our drama; taking into account the really +wonderful skill, the absoluteness of intuition and inspiration, with +which every stroke is put in that touches off character or tones down +effect, even in the sketching and grouping of such minor figures as the +ruffianly hireling Black 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 ludicrous infirmity but rather a terrible passion; I cannot but +finally take heart to say, even in the absence of all external or +traditional testimony, that it seems to me not pardonable merely nor +permissible, but simply logical and reasonable, to set down this poem, a +young man's work on the face of it, as the possible work of no man's +youthful hand but Shakespeare's. + +No similar question is raised, no parallel problem stated, in the case of +any one other among the plays now or ever ascribed on grounds more or +less dubious to that same indubitable hand. This hand I do not recognise +even in the _Yorkshire Tragedy_, full as it is to overflowing of fierce +animal power, and hot as with the furious breath of some caged wild +beast. Heywood, who as the most realistic and in some sense prosaic +dramatist of his time has been credited (though but in a modestly +tentative and suggestive fashion) with its authorship, was as incapable +of writing it as Chapman of writing the Shakespearean parts of _The Two +Noble Kinsmen_ or Fletcher of writing the scenes of Wolsey's fall and +Katherine's death in _King Henry VIII_. To the only editor of +Shakespeare responsible for the two earlier of the three suggestions here +set aside, they may be forgiven on the score of insufficient scholarship +and want of critical training; but on what ground the third suggestion +can be excused in the case of men who should have a better right than +most others to speak with some show of authority on a point of higher +criticism, I must confess myself utterly at a loss to imagine. In the +_Yorkshire Tragedy_ the submissive devotion of its miserable heroine to +her maddened husband is merely doglike,--though not even, in the +exquisitely true and tender phrase of our sovereign poetess, "most +passionately patient." There is no likeness in this poor trampled figure +to "one of Shakespeare's women": Griselda was no ideal of his. To find +its parallel in the dramatic literature of the great age, we must look to +lesser great men than Shakespeare. Ben Jonson, a too exclusively +masculine poet, will give us a couple of companion figures for her--or +one such figure at least; for the wife of Fitzdottrel, submissive as she +is even to the verge of undignified if not indecorous absurdity, is less +of a human spaniel than the wife of Corvino. Another such is Robert +Davenport's Abstemia, so warmly admired by Washington Irving; another is +the heroine of that singularly powerful and humorous tragi-comedy, +labelled to _How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad_, which in its central +situation anticipates that of Leigh Hunt's beautiful _Legend of +Florence_; while Decker has revived, in one of our sweetest and most +graceful examples of dramatic romance, the original incarnation of that +somewhat pitiful ideal which even in a ruder and more Russian century of +painful European progress out of night and winter could only be made +credible, acceptable, or endurable, by the yet unequalled genius of +Chaucer and Boccaccio. + +For concentrated might and overwhelming weight of realism, this lurid +little play beats _A Warning for Fair Women_ fairly out of the field. It +is and must always be (I had nearly said, thank heaven) unsurpassable for +pure potency of horror; and the breathless heat of the action, its raging +rate of speed, leaves actually no breathing-time for 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 right quality for a dramatist; it is +not the fit property of a poet. Ford and Webster, even Tourneur and +Marston, who have all been more or less wrongfully though more or less +plausibly attacked on the score of excess in horror, have none of them +left us anything so nakedly terrible, so terribly naked as this. Passion +is here not merely stripped to the skin but stripped to the bones. I +cannot tell who could and I cannot guess who would have written it. "'Tis +a very excellent piece of work"; may we never exactly look upon its like +again! + +I thought it at one time far from impossible, if not very nearly +probable, that the author of _Arden of Feversham_ might be one with the +author of the famous additional scenes to _The Spanish Tragedy_, and that +either both of these "pieces of work" or neither must be Shakespeare's. I +still adhere to Coleridge's verdict, which indeed must be that of all +judges capable of passing any sentence worthier of record than are + + Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle + For girls of nine: + +to the effect that those magnificent passages, wellnigh overcharged at +every point with passion and subtlety, sincerity and instinct of pathetic +truth, are no less like Shakespeare's work than unlike Jonson's: though +hardly perhaps more unlike the typical manner of his adult and matured +style than is the general tone of _The Case is Altered_, his one +surviving comedy of that earlier period in which we know from Henslowe +that the stout-hearted and long struggling young playwright went through +so much theatrical hackwork and piecework in the same rough harness with +other now more or less notable workmen then drudging under the manager's +dull narrow sidelong eye for bare bread and bare shelter. But this +unlikeness, great as it is and serious and singular, between his former +and his latter style in high comedy, gives no warrant for us to believe +him capable of so immeasurable a transformation in tragic style and so +indescribable a decadence in tragic power as would be implied in a +descent from the "fine madness" of "old Jeronymo" to the flat sanity and +smoke-dried sobriety of _Catiline_ and _Sejanus_.--I cannot but think, +too, that Lamb's first hypothetical ascription of these wonderful scenes +to Webster, so much the most Shakespearean in gait and port and accent of +all Shakespeare's liege men-at-arms, was due to a far happier and more +trustworthy instinct than led him in later years to liken them rather to +"the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus." + +We have wandered it may be somewhat out of the right time into a far +other province of poetry than the golden land of Shakespeare's ripest +harvest-fields of humour. And now, before we may enter the "flowery +square" made by the summer growth of his four greatest works in pure and +perfect comedy "beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind" of all happiest +and most fragrant imagination, we have but one field to cross, one brook +to ford, that hardly can be thought to keep us out of Paradise. In the +garden-plot on whose wicket is inscribed _All's Well that Ends Well_, we +are hardly distant from Eden itself + + About a young dove's flutter from a wood. + +The ninth story of the third day of the Decameron is one of the few +subjects chosen by Shakespeare--as so many were taken by Fletcher--which +are less fit, we may venture to think, for dramatic than for narrative +treatment. He has here again shown all possible delicacy of instinct in +handling a matter which unluckily it was not possible to handle on the +stage with absolute and positive delicacy of feeling or expression. Dr. +Johnson--in my humble opinion, with some justice; though his verdict has +been disputed on the score of undeserved austerity--"could not reconcile +his heart to Bertram"; and I, unworthy as I may be to second or support +on the score of morality the finding of so great a moralist, cannot +reconcile my instincts to Helena. Parolles is 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 comic art. But the whole charm and beauty of +the play, the quality which raises it to the rank of its fellows by +making it loveable as well as admirable, we find only in the "sweet, +serene, skylike" sanctity and attraction of adorable old age, made more +than ever near and dear to us in the incomparable figure of the old +Countess of Roussillon. At the close of the play, Fletcher would +inevitably have married her to Lafeu--or rather possibly, to the King. + +At the entrance of the heavenly quadrilateral, or under the rising dawn +of the four fixed stars which compose our Northern Cross among the +constellations of dramatic romance hung high in the highest air of +poetry, we may well pause for very dread of our own delight, lest +unawares we break into mere babble of childish rapture and infantile +thanksgiving for such light vouchsafed even to our "settentrional vedovo +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 starry +trinity of the _Winter's Tale_, the _Tempest_, and _Cymbeline_: and +beyond these the divine darkness of everlasting and all-maternal night. +These seven lamps of the romantic drama have in them--if I may strain the +similitude a little further yet--more of lyric light than could fitly be +lent to feed the fire or the sunshine of the worlds of pure tragedy or +comedy. There is more play, more vibration as it were, in the splendours +of their spheres. Only in the heaven of Shakespeare's making can we pass +and repass at pleasure from the sunny to the stormy lights, from the +glory of _Cymbeline_ to the glory of _Othello_. + +In this first group of four--wholly differing on that point from the +later constellation of three--there is but very seldom, not more than +once or twice at most, a shooting or passing gleam of anything more lurid +or less lovely than "a light of laughing flowers." There is but just +enough of evil or even of passion admitted into their sweet spheres of +life to proclaim them living: and all that does find entrance is so +tempered by the radiance of the rest that we retain but softened and +lightened recollections even of Shylock and Don John when we think of the +_Merchant of Venice_ and _Much Ado about Nothing_; we hardly feel in _As +You Like It_ the presence or the existence of Oliver and Duke Frederick; +and in _Twelfth Night_, for all its name of the midwinter, we find +nothing to remember that might jar with the loveliness of love and the +summer light of life. + +No astronomer can ever tell which if any one among these four may be to +the others as a sun; for in this special tract of heaven "one star +differeth" not "from another star in glory." From each and all of them, +even "while this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close [us] in," we +cannot _but_ hear the harmony of a single immortal soul + + Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins. + +The coincidence of the divine passage in which I have for once permitted +myself the freedom of altering for quotation's sake one little word, with +a noble excerpt given by Hallam from the Latin prose writings of +Campanella, may recall to us with a doubly appropriate sense of +harmonious fitness the subtly beautiful image of Lord Tennyson;-- + + Star to star vibrates light: may soul to soul + Strike thro' a finer element of her own? + +Surely, if ever she may, such a clash might we fancy to have passed from +the spirit of the most glorious martyr and poet to the spirit of the 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 claim of the divine +philosopher to share with the godlike dramatist their common and crowning +name of poet, all Englishmen at least may now perceive by study of +Campanella's sonnets in the noble and exquisite version of Mr. Symonds; +to whom among other kindred debts we owe no higher obligation than is due +to him as the giver of these poems to the inmost heart of all among his +countrymen whose hearts are worthy to hold and to hoard up such treasure. + +Where nothing at once new and true can be said, it is always best to say +nothing; as it is in this case to refrain from all reiteration of +rhapsody which must have been somewhat "mouldy ere" any living man's +"grandsires had nails on their toes," if not at that yet remoter date +"when King Pepin of France was a little boy" and "Queen Guinever of +Britain was a little wench." In the _Merchant of Venice_, at all events, +there is hardly a single character from Portia to old Gobbo, a single +incident from the exaction of Shylock's bond to the computation of hairs +in Launcelot's beard and Dobbin's tail, which has not been more +plentifully beprosed than ever Rosalind was berhymed. Much wordy wind +has also been wasted on comparison of Shakespeare's Jew with Marlowe's; +that is, of a living subject for terror and pity with a mere mouthpiece +for the utterance of poetry as magnificent as any but the best of +Shakespeare's. + +Nor can it well be worth any man's while to say or to hear for the +thousandth time that _As You Like It_ would be one of those works which +prove, as Landor said long since, the falsehood of the stale axiom that +no work of man's can be perfect, were it not for that one unlucky slip of +the brush which has left so ugly a little smear in 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 hardly think that matters were +much mended in George Sand's adaptation of 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 beauty or spiritual harmony to the +necessities and traditions of the stage discernible in all the world-wide +work of Shakespeare. In the one case it is unhappily undeniable; no mans +conscience, no conceivable sense of right and wrong, but must more or +less feel as did Coleridge's the double violence done it in the upshot of +_Measure for Measure_. Even in the much more nearly spotless work which +we have next to glance at, some readers have perhaps not unreasonably +found a similar objection to 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 couples after such a fashion as to secure a nominally +happy and undeniably matrimonial ending is the theatrical idol whose +tyranny exacts this holocaust of higher and better feelings than the mere +liquorish desire to leave the board of fancy with a palatable morsel of +cheap sugar on the tongue. + +If it is proverbially impossible to determine by selection the greatest +work of Shakespeare, it is easy enough to decide on the date and the name +of his most perfect comic masterpiece. For absolute power of +composition, for faultless balance and blameless rectitude of design, +there is unquestionably no creation of his hand that will bear comparison +with _Much Ado About Nothing_. The ultimate marriage of Hero and +Claudio, on which I have already remarked as in itself a doubtfully +desirable consummation, makes no flaw in the dramatic perfection of a +piece which could not otherwise have been wound up at all. This was its +one inevitable conclusion, if the action were not to come to a tragic +end; and a tragic end would here have been as painfully and as grossly +out of place as is any but a tragic end to the action of _Measure for +Measure_. As for Beatrice, she is as perfect a lady, though of a far +different age and breeding, as Celimene or Millamant; and a decidedly +more perfect woman than could properly or permissibly have trod the stage +of Congreve or Moliere. She would have disarranged all the dramatic +proprieties and harmonies of the one great school of pure comedy. The +good fierce outbreak of her high true heart in two swift words--"Kill +Claudio" {154}--would have 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's absolute +inability to see the plainest aims, to learn the simplest rudiments, to +appreciate the most practical requisites of art, whether applied to +theatrical action or to any other as evident as exalted aim, than the +instance afforded by that criticism of time past which sagaciously +remarked that "any less amusingly absurd" constables than Dogberry and +Verges would have filled their parts in the action of the play equally +well. Our own day has doubtless brought forth critics and students of +else unparalleled capacity for the task of laying wind-eggs in mare's +nests, and wasting all the warmth of their brains and tongues in the +hopeful endeavour to hatch them: but so fine a specimen was never dropped +yet as this of the plumed or plumeless biped who discovered that if +Dogberry had not been Dogberry and Verges had not been Verges they would +have been equally unsuccessful in their honest attempt to warn Leonato +betimes of the plot against his daughter's honour. The only explanation +of the mistake is this; and it is one of which the force will be +intelligible only to those who are acquainted with the very singular +physiology of that remarkably prolific animal known to critical science +as the Shakespearean scholiast: that if Dogberry had been other than +Dogberry, or if Verges had been other than Verges, the action and +catastrophe of the whole play could never have taken place at all. + +All true Pantagruelians will always, or at least as long as may be +permitted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, cherish with an +especial regard the comedy in which Shakespeare also has shown himself as +surely the loving as he would surely have been the beloved disciple of +that insuppressible divine, the immortal and most reverend vicar of +Meudon. Two only among the mighty men who lived and wrote and died +within the century which gave birth to Shakespeare were found worthy of +so great an honour at his hands as the double homage of citation and +imitation: and these two, naturally and properly enough, were Francois +Rabelais and Christopher Marlowe. We cannot but recognise on what far +travels in what good company "Feste the jester" had but lately been, on +that night of "very gracious fooling" when he was pleased to enlighten +the unforgetful mind of Sir Andrew as to the history of Pigrogromitus, +and of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus. At what precise +degree of latitude and longitude between the blessed islands of Medamothy +and Papimania this equinoctial may intersect the Sporades of the outer +ocean, is a problem on the solution of which the energy of those many +modern sons of Aguecheek who have undertaken the task of writing about +and about the text and the history of Shakespeare might be expended with +an unusually reasonable hope and expectation of arriving at an +exceptionally profitable end. + +Even apart from their sunny identity of spirit and bright sweet +brotherhood of style, the two comedies of _Twelfth Night_ and _As You +Like It_ would stand forth confessed as the common offspring of the same +spiritual period by force and by right of the trace or badge they proudly +and professedly bear in common, as of a recent touch from the ripe and +rich and radiant influence of Rabelais. No better and no fuller +vindication of his happy memory could be afforded than by the evident +fact that the two comedies which bear the imprint of his sign-manual are +among all Shakespeare's works as signally remarkable for the cleanliness +as for the richness of their humour. Here is the right royal seal of +Pantagruel, clean-cut and clearly stamped, and unincrusted with any flake +of dirt from the dubious finger of Panurge. In the comic parts of those +plays in which the humour is rank and flagrant that exhales from the lips +of Lucio, of Boult, or of Thersites, there is no trace or glimpse of +Rabelais. From him Shakespeare has learnt nothing and borrowed nothing +that was not wise and good and sweet and clean and pure. All the more +honour, undoubtedly, to Shakespeare, that he would borrow nothing else: +but assuredly, also, all the more honour to Rabelais, that he had enough +of this to lend. + +It is less creditable to England than honourable to France that a +Frenchman should have been the first of Shakespearean students to +discover and to prove that the great triad of his Roman plays is not a +consecutive work of the same epoch. Until the appearance of Francois- +Victor Hugo's incomparable translation, with its elaborate and admirable +commentary, it seems to have been the universal and certainly a most +natural habit of English criticism to take the three as they usually +appear together, in the order of historical chronology, and by tacit +implication to assume that they were composed in such order. I should +take some shame to myself but that I feel more of grateful pride than of +natural shame in the avowal that I at all events owe the first revelation +of the truth now so clear and apparent in this matter, to the son of the +common lord and master of all poets born in his age--be they liege +subjects as loyal as myself or as contumacious as I grieve to find one at +least of my elders and betters, whenever I perceive--as too often I +cannot choose but perceive--that the voice is the voice of 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 glorify +enough, belongs all the credit of discerning for himself and discovering +for us all the truth that _Julius Caesar_ is at all points equally like +the greatest works of Shakespeare's middle period and unlike the works of +his last. It is in the main a play belonging to the same order as _King +Henry IV_.; but it differs from our English Henriade--as remarkably +unlike Voltaire's as _Zaire_ is unlike _Othello_--not more by the absence +of Falstaff than by the presence of Brutus. Here at least Shakespeare +has made full amends, if not to all modern democrats, yet assuredly to +all historical republicans, for any possible or apparent preference of +royal to popular traditions. Whatever manner of man may have been the +actual Roman, our Shakespearean Brutus is undoubtedly the very noblest +figure of a typical 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 order to have the +privilege of afterwards informing the readers of a pitiful pamphlet on +England that Landor had "pestered him with Southey"; an impertinence, I +may add, which Mr. Landor at once rebuked with the sharpest 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 one point, then not less certainly on +the other, we may be assured that his convictions and his prepossessions +would have been shared by the author of _Coriolanus_ and _Julius Caesar_. + +Having now come perforce to the inevitable verge of _Hamlet_, I hasten to +declare that I can advance no pretension to compete with the claim of +that "literary man" who became immortal by dint of one dinner with a +bishop, and in right of that last glass poured out for him in sign of +amity by "Sylvester Blougram, styled _in partibus Episcopus_, _necnon_ +the deuce knows what." I do not propose to prove my perception of any +point in the character of Hamlet "unseized by the Germans yet." I can +only determine, as the Church Catechism was long since wont to bid me, +"to keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue" not only +"from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering"--though this itself is a form +of abstinence not universally or even commonly practised among the +rampant rout of rival commentators--but also, now as ever throughout this +study, from all conscious repetition of what others have said before me. + +In _Hamlet_, as it seems to me, we set foot as it were on the bridge +between the middle and the final period of Shakespeare. That priceless +waif of piratical salvage which we owe to the happy rapacity of a hungry +publisher is of course more accurately definable as the first play of +_Hamlet_ than as the first edition of the play. And this first _Hamlet_, +on the whole, belongs altogether to the middle period. The deeper +complexities of the subject are merely indicated. Simple and trenchant +outlines of character are yet to be supplanted by features of subtler +suggestion and infinite interfusion. Hamlet himself is almost more of a +satirist than a philosopher: Asper and Macilente, Felice and Malevole, +the grim studies after Hamlet unconsciously or consciously taken by +Jonson and Marston, may pass as wellnigh passable imitations, with an +inevitable streak of caricature in them, of the first Hamlet; they would +have been at once puerile and ghastly travesties of the second. The +Queen, whose finished figure is now something of a riddle, stands out +simply enough in the first sketch as confidant of Horatio if not as +accomplice of Hamlet. There is not more difference between the sweet +quiet flow of those plain verses which open the original play within the +play and the stiff sonorous tramp of their substitutes, full-charged with +heavy classic artillery of Phoebus and Neptune and Tellus and Hymen, than +there is between the straightforward agents of their own destiny whom we +meet in the first _Hamlet_ and the obliquely moving patients who veer +sideways to their doom in the second. + +This minor transformation of style in the inner play, made solely with +the evident view of marking the distinction between its duly artificial +forms of speech and the duly natural forms of speech passing between the +spectators, is but one among innumerable indications which only a +purblind perversity of prepossession can overlook of the especial store +set by Shakespeare himself on this favourite work, and the exceptional +pains taken by him to preserve it for aftertime in such fullness of +finished form as might make it worthiest of profound and perpetual study +by the light of far other lamps than illuminate the stage. Of all vulgar +errors the most wanton, the most wilful, and the most resolutely +tenacious of life, is that belief bequeathed from the days of Pope, in +which it was pardonable, to the days of Mr. Carlyle, in which it is not +excusable, to the effect that Shakespeare threw off _Hamlet_ as an eagle +may moult a feather or a fool may break a jest; that he dropped his work +as a bird may drop an egg or a sophist a fallacy; that he wrote "for +gain, not glory," or that having written _Hamlet_ he thought it nothing +very wonderful to have written. For himself to have written, he +possibly, nay probably, did not think it anything miraculous; but that he +was in the fullest degree conscious of its wonderful positive worth to +all men for all time, we have the best evidence possible--his own; 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, "By God 'tis +good," and so for all its real goodness and his real greatness make sure +that both the workman and his work should be less unnaturally than +unreasonably laughed at; Shakespeare knew a better way of showing +confidence in himself, but he showed not a whit less confidence. Scene +by scene, line for line, stroke upon stroke and 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 contemporary pence, but merely and +wholly with a purpose to make it worthy of himself and his future +students. Pence and praise enough it had evidently brought him in from +the first. No more palpable proof of this can be desired than the +instantaneous attacks on it, the jeers, howls, hoots and hisses of which +a careful ear may catch some far faint echo even yet; the fearful and +furtive yelp from beneath of the masked and writhing poeticule, the +shrill reverberation all around it of plagiarism and parody. Not one +single alteration in the whole play can possibly have been made with a +view to stage effect or to present popularity and profit; or we must +suppose that Shakespeare, however great as a man, was naturally even +greater as a fool. There is a class of mortals to whom this inference is +always grateful--to whom the fond belief that every great man must needs +be a great fool would seem always 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 for the stage and increased its value for the closet +in exact and perfect proportion. Now, this is not a matter of opinion--of +Mr. Pope's opinion or Mr. Carlyle's; it is a matter of fact and evidence. +Even in Shakespeare's time the actors threw out his additions; they throw +out these very same additions in our own. The one especial speech, if +any one such especial speech there be, in which the personal genius of +Shakespeare soars up to the very highest of its height and strikes down +to the very deepest of its depth, is passed 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--at least, more than once or twice--to the +supreme soliloquy of Hamlet. Those words which combine the noblest +pleading ever proffered for the rights of human reason with the loftiest +vindication ever uttered of those rights, no mortal ear within our +knowledge has ever heard spoken on the stage. A convocation even of all +priests could not have been more unhesitatingly unanimous in its +rejection than seems to have been the hereditary verdict of all actors. +It could hardly have been found worthier of theological than it has been +found of theatrical condemnation. Yet, beyond all question, magnificent +as is that monologue on suicide and doubt which has passed from a proverb +into a byword, it is actually eclipsed and distanced at once on +philosophic and on poetical grounds by the later soliloquy on reason and +resolution. + +That Shakespeare was in the genuine sense--that is, in the best and +highest and widest meaning of the term--a free thinker, this otherwise +practically and avowedly superfluous effusion of all inmost thought +appears to me to supply full and sufficient evidence for the conviction +of every candid and rational man. To that loftiest and most righteous +title which any just and reasoning soul can ever deserve to claim, the +greatest save one of all poetic thinkers has thus made good his right for +ever. + +I trust it will be taken as no breach of my past pledge to abstain from +all intrusion on the sacred ground of Gigadibs and the Germans, if I +venture to indicate a touch inserted by Shakespeare for no other +perceptible or conceivable purpose than to obviate by anticipation the +indomitable and ineradicable fallacy of criticism which would find the +keynote of Hamlet's character in the quality of irresolution. I may +observe at once that the misconception involved in such a reading of the +riddle ought to have been evident even without this episodical stroke of +illustration. In any case it should be plain to any reader that the +signal characteristic of Hamlet's inmost nature is by no means +irresolution or hesitation or any form of weakness, but rather the strong +conflux of contending forces. That during four whole acts Hamlet cannot +or does not make up his mind to any direct and deliberate action against +his uncle is true enough; true, also, we may say, that Hamlet had +somewhat more of mind than another man to make up, and might properly +want somewhat more time than might another man to do it in; but not, I +venture to say in spite of Goethe, through innate inadequacy to his task +and unconquerable weakness of the will; not, I venture to think in spite +of Hugo, through immedicable scepticism of the spirit and irremediable +propensity to nebulous intellectual refinement. One practical point in +the action of the play precludes us from accepting so ready a solution of +the riddle as is suggested either by the simple theory of +half-heartedness or by the simple hypothesis of doubt. There is +absolutely no other reason, we might say there was no other excuse, for +the introduction or intrusion of an else superfluous episode into a play +which was already, and which remains even after all possible excisions, +one of the longest plays on record. The compulsory expedition of Hamlet +to England, his discovery by the way of the plot laid against his life, +his interception of the King's letter and his forgery of a substitute for +it against the lives of the King's agents, the ensuing adventure of the +sea-fight, with Hamlet's daring act of hot-headed personal intrepidity, +his capture and subsequent release on terms giving no less patent proof +of his cool-headed and ready-witted courage and resource than the attack +had afforded of his physically impulsive and even impetuous hardihood--all +this serves no purpose whatever but that of exhibiting the instant and +almost unscrupulous resolution of Hamlet's character in time of practical +need. But for all that he or Hamlet has got by it, Shakespeare might too +evidently have spared his pains; and for all this voice as of one crying +in a wilderness, Hamlet will too surely remain to the majority of +students, not less than to all actors and all editors and all critics, +the standing type and embodied emblem of irresolution, half-heartedness, +and doubt. + +That Hamlet should seem at times to accept for himself, and even to +enforce by reiteration of argument upon his conscience and his reason, +some such conviction or suspicion as to his own character, tells much +rather in disfavour than in favour of its truth. A man whose natural +temptation was to swerve, whose inborn inclination was to shrink and +skulk aside from duty and from action, would hardly be the first and last +person to suspect his own weakness, the one only unbiassed judge and +witness of sufficiently sharp-sighted candour and accuracy to estimate +aright his poverty of nature and the malformation of his mind. But the +high-hearted and tender-conscienced Hamlet, with his native bias towards +introspection intensified and inflamed and directed and dilated at once +by one imperative pressure and oppression of unavoidable and unalterable +circumstance, was assuredly and exactly the one only man to be troubled +by any momentary fear that such might indeed be the solution of his +riddle, and to feel or to fancy for the moment some kind of ease and +relief in the sense of that very trouble. A born doubter would have +doubted even of Horatio; hardly can all positive and almost palpable +evidence of underhand instigation and inspired good intentions induce +Hamlet for some time to doubt even of Ophelia. + + + +III. + + +The entrance to the third period of Shakespeare is like the entrance to +that lost and lesser Paradise of old, + + With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms. + +Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony, Timon, these are names indeed +of something more than tragic purport. Only in the sunnier distance +beyond, where the sunset of Shakespeare's imagination seems to melt or +flow back into the sunrise, do we discern Prospero beside Miranda, +Florizel by Perdita, Palamon with Arcite, the same knightly and kindly +Duke Theseus as of old; and above them all, and all others of his divine +and human children, the crowning and final and ineffable figure of +Imogen. + +Of all Shakespeare's plays, _King Lear_ is unquestionably that in which +he has come nearest to the height and to the likeness of the one tragic +poet on any side greater than himself whom the world in all its ages has +ever seen born of time. It is by far the most AEschylean of his works; +the most elemental and primaeval, the most oceanic and Titanic in +conception. He deals here with no subtleties as in _Hamlet_, with no +conventions as in _Othello_: there is no question of "a divided duty" or +a problem half insoluble, a matter of country and connection, of family +or of race; we look upward and downward, and in vain, into the deepest +things of nature, 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 +which give no man light; over a world full of death and life without +resting-place or guidance. + +But in one main point it differs radically from the work and the spirit +of AEschylus. Its fatalism is of a darker and harder nature. To +Prometheus the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind were bitter; upon +Orestes the hand of heaven was laid too heavily to bear; yet in the not +utterly infinite or everlasting distance we see beyond them the promise +of the morning on which mystery and justice shall be made one; when +righteousness and omnipotence at last shall kiss each other. But on the +horizon of Shakespeare's tragic fatalism we see no such twilight of +atonement, such pledge of reconciliation as this. Requital, redemption, +amends, equity, explanation, pity and 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 the +keynote 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 by +casting of lots: far less is there any light of heavenly harmony or of +heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above. We have heard much and +often from theologians of the light of revelation: and some such thing +indeed we find in AEschylus: but the darkness of revelation is here. + +For in this the most terrible work of human genius it is with the very +springs and sources of nature that her student has set himself to deal. +The veil of the temple of our humanity is rent in twain. Nature herself, +we might say, is revealed--and revealed as unnatural. In face of such a +world as this a man might be forgiven who should pray that chaos might +come again. Nowhere else in Shakespeare's work or in the universe of +jarring lives are the lines of character and event so broadly drawn or so +sharply cut. Only the supreme self-command of this one poet could so +mould and handle such types as to 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 has accomplished. In Regan alone would it +be, I think, impossible to find a touch or trace of anything less vile +than it was devilish. Even Goneril has her one splendid hour, her fire- +flaught of hellish glory; when she treads under foot the half-hearted +goodness, the wordy and windy though sincere abhorrence, which is all +that the mild and impotent revolt of Albany can bring to bear against her +imperious and dauntless 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 on this. +Cordelia, the brotherless Antigone of our stage, has one passing touch of +intolerance for what her sister was afterwards to brand as indiscretion +and dotage in their father, which redeems her from the charge of +perfection. Like Imogen, she is not too inhumanly divine for the sense +of divine irritation. Godlike though they be, their very godhead is +human and feminine; and only therefore credible, and only 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 abominable as these, the gold of their spirit +would be too refined, the lily of their holiness too radiant, the violet +of their virtue too sweet. As it is, Shakespeare has gone down perforce +among the blackest and the basest things of nature to find anything so +equally exceptional in evil as properly to counterbalance and make +bearable the excellence and extremity of their goodness. No otherwise +could either angel have escaped the blame implied in the very attribute +and epithet of blameless. But where the possible depth of human hell is +so foul and unfathomable as it appears in the spirits which serve as +foils to these, we may endure that in them the inner height of heaven +should be no less immaculate and immeasurable. + +It should be a truism wellnigh as musty as Hamlet's half cited proverb, +to enlarge upon the evidence given in _King Lear_ of a sympathy with the +mass of social misery more wide and deep and direct and bitter and tender +than Shakespeare has shown elsewhere. But as even to this day and even +in respectable quarters the murmur is not quite duly extinct which would +charge on Shakespeare a certain share of divine indifference to +suffering, of godlike satisfaction and a less than compassionate content, +it is not yet perhaps utterly superfluous to insist on the utter fallacy +and falsity of their creed who whether in praise or in blame would rank +him to his credit or discredit among such poets as on this side at least +may be classed rather with Goethe than with Shelley and with Gautier than +with Hugo. A poet of revolution he is not, as none of his country in +that generation could have been: but as surely as the author of _Julius +Caesar_ has approved himself in the best and highest sense of the word at +least potentially a republican, so surely has the author of _King Lear_ +avowed himself in the only good and rational sense of the words a +spiritual if not a political democrat and socialist. + +It is only, I think, in this most tragic of tragedies that the sovereign +lord and incarnate god of pity and terror can be said to have struck with +all his strength a chord of which the resonance could excite such angry +agony and heartbreak of wrath as that of the brother kings when they +smote their staffs against the ground in fierce imperious anguish of +agonised and rebellious compassion, at the oracular cry of Calchas for +the innocent blood of Iphigenia. The doom even of Desdemona seems as +much less morally intolerable as it is more logically inevitable than the +doom of Cordelia. But doubtless the fatalism of _Othello_ is as much +darker and harder than that of any third among the plays of Shakespeare, +as it is less dark and hard than the fatalism of _King Lear_. For upon +the head of the very noblest man whom even omnipotence or Shakespeare +could ever call to life he has laid a burden in one sense yet heavier +than the burden of Lear, insomuch as the sufferer can with somewhat less +confidence of universal appeal proclaim himself a 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 the +prosperous days of his labour and his triumph so utterly and wholly +nobler than the self-centred and wayward king, that the capture of his +soul and body in the unimaginable snare of Iago seems a yet blinder and +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 theirs who +struck down Lear. As surely as Othello is the noblest man of man's +making, Iago is the most perfect evildoer, the most potent demi-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 reflection that it is in +any case no shame to fall by such a hand. But this subtlest and +strangest work of Shakespeare's admits and requires some closer than +common scrutiny. Coleridge has admirably described the first great +soliloquy which opens to us the pit of hell within as "the motive-hunting +of a motiveless malignity." But subtle and profound and just as is this +definitive appreciation, there is more in the matter yet than even this. +It is not only that Iago, so to speak, half tries to make himself half +believe that Othello has wronged him, and that the thought of it gnaws +him inly like a poisonous mineral: though this also be true, it is not +half the truth--nor half that half again. Malignant as he is, the very +subtlest and strongest 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 most profound and potent humourist of his country in his +century has unwittingly touched on the mainspring of Iago's +character--"the very pulse of the machine." He describes his Circe de la +Mothe-Valois as a practical dramatic poet or playwright at least in lieu +of play-writer: while indicating how and wherefore, with all her +constructive skill and rhythmic art in action, such genius as hers so +differs from the genius of Shakespeare that she undeniably could not have +written a _Hamlet_. Neither could Iago have written an _Othello_. (From +this theorem, by the way, a reasoner or a casuist benighted enough to +prefer articulate poets to inarticulate, Shakespeare to Cromwell, a fair +Vittoria Colonna to a "foul Circe-Megaera," and even such a strategist as +Homer to such a strategist as Frederic-William, would not illogically +draw such conclusions or infer such corollaries as might result in +opinions hardly consonant with the Teutonic-Titanic evangel of the +preacher who supplied him with his thesis.) "But what he can do, that he +will": and if it be better to make a tragedy than to write one, to act a +poem than to sing it, we must allow to Iago a 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 any creator but his would +have given him some grain of spite or some spark of lust after Desdemona. +To Shakespeare's Iago she is no more than is a rhyme to another and +articulate poet. {179} His stanza must at any rate and at all costs be +polished: to borrow the metaphor used by Mr. Carlyle in apologetic +illustration of a royal hero's peculiar system of levying recruits for +his colossal brigade. He has within him a sense or conscience of power +incomparable: and this power shall not be left, in Hamlet's phrase, "to +fust in him unused." A genuine and thorough capacity for human lust or +hate would diminish and degrade the supremacy of his evil. He is almost +as far above or beyond vice as he is beneath or beyond virtue. And this +it is that makes him impregnable and invulnerable. When once he has said +it, we know as well as he that thenceforth he never will speak word. We +could smile almost as we can see him to have smiled at Gratiano's most +ignorant and empty threat, being well assured that torments will in no +wise ope his lips: that as surely and as truthfully as ever did the +tortured philosopher before him, he might have told his tormentors that +they did but bruise the coating, batter the crust, or break the shell of +Iago. Could we imagine a far other lost spirit than Farinata degli +Uberti's endowed with Farinata's might of will, and transferred from the +sepulchres of fire to the dykes of Malebolge, we might conceive something +of Iago's attitude in hell--of his unalterable and indomitable posture +for all eternity. As though it were possible and necessary that in some +one point the extremities of all conceivable good and of all imaginable +evil should meet and mix together in a new "marriage of heaven and hell," +the action in passion of the most devilish among all the human damned +could hardly be other than that of the most godlike among all divine +saviours--the figure of Iago than a reflection by hell-fire of the figure +of Prometheus. + +Between Iago and Othello the position of Desdemona is precisely that +defined with such quaint sublimity of fancy in the old English +byword--"between the devil and the deep sea." Deep and pure and strong +and adorable always and terrible and pitiless on occasion as the sea is +the great soul of the glorious hero to whom she has given herself; and +what likeness of man's enemy from Satan down to Mephistopheles could be +matched for danger and for dread against the good bluff soldierly +trustworthy figure of honest Iago? The rough license of his tongue at +once takes warrant from his good soldiership and again gives warrant for +his honesty: so that in a double sense it does him yeoman's service, and +that twice told. It is pitifully ludicrous to see him staged to the show +like a member--and a very inefficient member--of the secret police. But +it would seem impossible for actors to understand that he is not a would- +be detective, an aspirant for the honours of a Vidocq, a candidate for +the laurels of a Vautrin: that he is no less than Lepidus, or than +Antony's horse, "a tried and valiant soldier." It is perhaps natural +that the two deepest and subtlest of all Shakespeare's intellectual +studies in good and evil should be the two most painfully misused and +misunderstood alike by his commentators and his fellows of the stage: it +is certainly undeniable that no third figure of his creation has ever +been on both sides as persistently misconceived and misrepresented with +such desperate pertinacity as Hamlet and Iago. + +And it is only when Iago is justly appreciated that we can justly +appreciate either Othello or Desdemona. This again should surely be no +more than the truism that it sounds; but practically it would seem to be +no less than an adventurous and audacious paradox. Remove or deform or +diminish or modify the dominant features of the destroyer, and we have +but the eternal and vulgar figures of jealousy and innocence, newly +vamped and veneered and padded and patched up for the 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 blessed conditions" of "the gentle Desdemona," he is yet the nobler +of the two; and has suffered more in one single pang than she could +suffer in life or in death. + +But if _Othello_ be the most pathetic, _King Lear_ the most terrible, +_Hamlet_ the subtlest and deepest work of Shakespeare, the highest in +abrupt and steep simplicity of epic tragedy is _Macbeth_. There needs no +ghost come from the grave, any reader may too probably remark, to tell us +this. But in the present generation such novelties have been unearthed +regarding Shakespeare that the reassertion of an old truth may seem to +have upon it some glittering reflection from the brazen brightness of a +brand-new lie. Have not certain wise men of the east of +England--Cantabrigian Magi, led by the star of their goddess Mathesis +("mad Mathesis," as a daring poet was once ill-advised enough to dub her +doubtful deity in defiance of scansion rather than of truth)--have they +not detected in the very heart of 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 nursing mother of +"his green unknowing youth," when that "renegade" was recreant enough to +compliment Oxford at her expense as the chosen Athens of "his riper +age"--the likelihood is only too evident that the sole text we possess of +_Macbeth_ has not been interpolated but mutilated. In their version of +_Othello_, remarkably enough, the "player-editors," contrary to their +wont, have added to the treasure-house of their text one of the most +precious jewels that ever the prodigal afterthought of a great poet +bestowed upon the rapture of his readers. Some of these, by way of +thanksgiving, have complained with a touch of petulance that it was out +of place and superfluous in the setting: nay, that it was incongruous +with all the circumstances--out of tone and out of harmony and out of +keeping with character and tune and time. In other lips indeed than +Othello's, at the crowning minute of culminant agony, the rush of +imaginative reminiscence which brings back upon his eyes and ears the +lightning foam and tideless thunder of the Pontic sea might seem a thing +less natural than sublime. But Othello has the passion of 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 Iago that hell could send forth to +hiss at her election, we feel and recognise the spotless exaltation, the +sublime and sun-bright purity, of Desdemona's inevitable and invulnerable +love. When once we likewise have seen Othello's visage in his mind, we +see too how much more of greatness is 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 down his life. Other friends we have of +Shakespeare's giving whom we love deeply and well, if hardly with such +love as could weep for him all the tears of the body and all the blood of +the heart: but there is none we love like Othello. + +I must part from his presence again for a season, and return to my topic +in the text of _Macbeth_. That it is piteously rent and ragged and +clipped and garbled in some of its earlier scenes, the rough 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 than the other, combine in this +contention to bear indisputable and intolerable witness. Only where the +witches are, and one more potent and more terrible than all witches and +all devils at their beck, can we be sure that such traitors have not +robbed us of one touch from Shakespeare's hand. The second scene of the +play at least bears marks of such handling as the brutal Shakespearean +Hector's of the "mangled Myrmidons"; it is too visibly "noseless, +handless, hacked and chipped" as it comes to us, crying on Hemings and +Condell. And it is in this unlucky scene that unkindly criticism has not +unsuccessfully sought for the gravest faults of language and manner to be +found in Shakespeare. For certainly it cannot be cleared from the charge +of a style stiffened and swollen with clumsy braid and crabbed bombast. +But against the weird sisters, and her who sits above them and apart, +more awful than Hecate's very self, no mangling hand has been stretched +forth; no blight of mistranslation by perversion has fallen upon the +words which interpret and expound the hidden things of their evil will. + +To one tragedy as to one comedy of Shakespeare's, the casual or the +natural union of especial popularity with especial simplicity in +selection and in treatment of character makes it as superfluous as it +would be difficult to attempt any application of analytical criticism. +There is nothing in them of a nature so compound or so complex as to call +for solution or resolution into its primal elements. Here there is some +genuine ground for the generally baseless and delusive opinion 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 probable readers +will know them at once for _Macbeth_ and _As You Like It_. There can +hardly be a single point of incident or of character on 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 of these should devote +any part of either a whole-schoolday or a holiday to remark or to +rhapsody on the character of Macbeth or of Orlando, of Rosalind or of +Lady Macbeth. He that runs, let him read: and he that has ears, let him +hear. + +I cannot but think that enough at least of time has been spent if not +wasted by able and even by eminent men on examination of _Coriolanus_ +with regard to its political aspect or bearing upon social questions. It +is from first to last, for all its turmoil of battle and clamour of +contentious factions, rather a private and domestic than a public or +historical tragedy. As in _Julius Caesar_ the family had been so wholly +subordinated to the state, and all personal interests so utterly +dominated by the preponderance of national duties, that even the sweet +and sublime figure of Portia passing in her "awful loveliness" was but as +a profile half caught in the background of an episode, so here on the +contrary the whole force of the final impression is not that of a +conflict between patrician and plebeian, but solely that of a match of +passions played out for life and death between a mother and a son. The +partisans of oligarchic or democratic systems may wrangle at their will +over the supposed evidences of Shakespeare's prejudice against this creed +and prepossession in favour of that: a third bystander may rejoice in the +proof thus established of his impartial indifference towards either: it +is all nothing to the real point in hand. The subject of the whole play +is not the exile's revolt, the rebel's repentance, or the traitor's +reward, but above all it is the son's tragedy. The inscription on the +plinth of this tragic statue is simply to Volumnia Victrix. + +A loftier or a more perfect piece of man's work was never done in all the +world than this tragedy of _Coriolanus_: the one fit and crowning epithet +for its companion or successor is that bestowed by Coleridge--"the most +wonderful." It would seem a sign or birthmark of only the greatest among +poets that they should be sure to rise instantly for awhile above the +very highest of their native height at the touch of a thought of +Cleopatra. So was it, as we all know, with William Shakespeare: so is +it, as we all see, with Victor Hugo. As we feel in the marvellous and +matchless verses of _Zim-Zizimi_ all the splendour and fragrance and +miracle of her mere bodily presence, so from her first imperial dawn on +the stage of Shakespeare to the setting of that eastern star behind a +pall of undissolving cloud we feel the charm and the terror and the +mystery of her absolute and royal soul. Byron wrote once to Moore, with +how much truth or sincerity those may guess who would care to know, that +his friend's first "confounded book" of thin prurient jingle ("we call it +a mellisonant tingle-tangle," as Randolph's mock Oberon says of a stolen +sheep-bell) had been the first cause of all his erratic or erotic +frailties: it is not impossible that spirits of another sort may remember +that to their own innocent infantine perceptions the first obscure +electric revelation of what Blake calls "the Eternal Female" was given +through a blind wondering thrill of childish rapture by a lightning on +the baby dawn of their senses and their soul from the sunrise of +Shakespeare's Cleopatra. + +Never has he given such proof of his incomparable instinct for abstinence +from the wrong thing as well as achievement of the right. He has utterly +rejected and disdained all occasion of setting her off by means of 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 less than straws in +the balance. + + Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient a la fois + Il hesita, lachant le monde dans son choix. + +Even as that Roman grasp relaxed and let fall the world, so has +Shakespeare's self let go for awhile his greater world of imagination, +with all its all but infinite variety of life and thought and action, for +love of that more infinite variety which custom could not stale. Himself +a second and a yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid a world, +and a world more wonderful than ever, at her feet. He has put aside for +her sake all other forms and figures of womanhood; he, father or creator +of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona, and of Imogen, he too, like the +sun-god and sender of all song, has anchored his eyes on her whom +"Phoebus' amorous pinches" could not leave "black," nor "wrinkled deep in +time"; on that incarnate and imperishable "spirit of sense," to whom 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 his own hand +might have boasted herself that the loveliest and purest among all her +sisters of his begetting, + + with her modest eyes + And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour, + Demurring upon me. + +To sum up, Shakespeare has elsewhere given us in ideal incarnation the +perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect +mistress, or the perfect maiden: here only once for all he has given us +the perfect and the everlasting woman. + +And what a world of great men and great things, "high actions and high +passions," is this that he has spread under her for a footcloth or hung +behind her for a curtain! The descendant of that other his ancestral +Alcides, late offshoot of the god whom he loved and who so long was loth +to leave him, is here as in history the visible one man revealed who +could grapple for a second with very Rome and seem to throw it, more +lightly than he could cope with Cleopatra. And not the Roman Landor +himself could see or make us see more clearly than has his fellow +provincial of Warwickshire that first imperial nephew of her great first +paramour, who was to his actual uncle even such a foil and counterfeit +and perverse and prosperous parody as the son of Hortense Beauharnais of +Saint-Leu to the son of Letizia Buonaparte of Ajaccio. For Shakespeare +too, like Landor, had watched his "sweet Octavius" smilingly and +frowningly "draw under nose the knuckle of forefinger" as he looked out +upon the trail of innocent blood 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 and iron, smiles before us to the very life. It is of no account now +to remember that + + he at Philippi kept + His sword even like a dancer: + +for the sword of Antony that struck for him is in the renegade hand of +Dercetas. + +I have said nothing of Enobarbus or of Eros, the fugitive once ruined by +his flight and again redeemed by the death-agony of his dark and doomed +repentance, or the freedman transfigured by a death more fair than +freedom through the glory of the greatness of his faith: for who can +speak of all things or of half that are in Shakespeare? And who can +speak worthily of any? + +I am come now to that strange part of a task too high for me, where I +must needs speak not only (as may indeed well be) unworthily, but also +(as may well seem) unlovingly, of some certain portions in the mature and +authentic work of Shakespeare. "Though it be honest, it is never good" +to do so: yet here I cannot choose but speak plainly after my own poor +conscience, and risk all chances of chastisement as fearful as any once +threatened for her too faithful messenger by the heart-stricken wrath of +Cleopatra. + +In the greater part of this third period, taking a swift and general view +of it for contrast or comparison of qualities with the second, we +constantly find beauty and melody, transfigured into harmony and +sublimity; an exchange unquestionably for the better: but in certain +stages, or only perhaps in a single stage of it, we frequently find +humour and reality supplanted by realism and obscenity; an exchange +undeniably for the worse. The note of his earliest comic style was often +a boyish or a birdlike wantonness, very capable of such liberties and +levities as those of Lesbia's sparrow with the lip or bosom of his +mistress; as notably in the parts of Boyet and Mercutio: and indeed there +is a bright vein of mere wordy wilfulness running throughout the golden +youth of the two plays which connects _Love's Labour's Lost_ with _Romeo +and Juliet_ as by a thread of floss silk not always "most excellently +ravelled," nor often unspotted or unentangled. In the second period this +gaiety was replaced by the utmost frankness and fullness of humour, as a +boy's merry madness by the witty wisdom of a man: but now for a time it +would seem as if the good comic qualities of either period were displaced +and ousted by mere coarseness and crudity like that of a hard harsh +photograph. This ultra-Circean transformation of spirit and +brutification of speech we 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 plays not accurately definable at all but roughly +describable as tragi-comedies, or more properly in two cases at least as +tragedies docked of their natural end, curtailed of the due +catastrophe--it is then that we find for the swift sad bright lightnings +of laughter from the lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless +disappearance from the stage of _King Lear_ seems for once a sure sign of +inexplicable weariness or forgetfulness on Shakespeare's part, so +nauseous and so sorry a 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 scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bearable by +men who object to too strong a savour of those too truly "Eternal +Cesspools" over which the first of living humourists holds as it were for +ever an everlasting nose--or rather, in one sense, does not hold but +expand it for the fuller inhalation of their too congenial fumes with an +apparent relish which will always seem the most deplorable to those who +the most gratefully and reasonably admire that high heroic genius, for +love of which the wiser sort of men must finally forgive all the noisy +aberrations of his misanthropy and philobulgary, anti-Gallican and +Russolatrous insanities of perverse and morbid eloquence. + +The three detached or misclassified plays of Shakespeare in which alone a +reverent and reasonable critic might perhaps find something rationally +and really exceptionable have also this far other quality in common, that +in them as in his topmost tragedies of the same period either the +exaltation of his eloquence touches the very highest point of expressible +poetry, or his power of speculation alternately sounds the gulfs and +scales the summits of all imaginable thought. In all three of them the +power of passionate and imaginative eloquence is not only equal in spirit +or essence but identical in figure or in form: in those two of them which +deal almost as much with speculative intelligence 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 feeling unites the quasi-tragedy of +_Troilus and Cressida_ with what in the lamentable default of as apt a +phrase in English I must call by its proper designation in French the +_tragedie manquee_ of _Measure for Measure_. In the simply romantic +fragment of the Shakespearean _Pericles_, where there was no call and no +place for the poetry of speculative or philosophic intelligence, there is +the same positive and unmistakable identity of imaginative and passionate +style. + +I cannot but conjecture that the habitual students of Shakespeare's +printed plays must have felt startled as by something of a shock when the +same year exposed for the expenditure of their sixpences two reasonably +correct editions of a play unknown to the boards in the likeness of +_Troilus and Cressida_, side by side or cheek by jowl with a most +unreasonably and unconscionably incorrect issue of a much older stage +favourite, now newly beautified and fortified, in _Pericles Prince of +Tyre_. Hitherto, ever since the appearance of his first poem, and its +instant acceptance by all classes from courtiers to courtesans under a +somewhat dubious and two-headed form of popular success,--'vrai succes de +scandale s'il en fut'--even the potent influence and unequivocal example +of Rabelais had never once even in passing or in seeming affected or +infected the progressive and triumphal genius of Shakespeare with a taint +or touch of anything offensive to healthier and cleanlier organs of +perception than such as may belong to a genuine or a pretending Puritan. +But on taking in his hand that one of these two new dramatic pamphlets +which might first attract him either by its double novelty as a never +acted play or by a title of yet more poetic and romantic associations +than its fellow's, such a purchaser as I have supposed, with his mind +full of the sweet rich 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 disrelish and distaste on finding one of the two leading comic +figures of the play break in upon it at his entrance not even with "a +fool-born jest," but with full-mouthed and foul-mouthed effusion of such +rank and rancorous personalities as might properly pollute the lips even +of some emulous descendant or antiquarian reincarnation of Thersites, on +application or even apprehension of a whip cracked in passing over the +assembled heads of a pseudocritical and mock-historic society. In either +case we moderns at least might haply desire the intervention of a +beadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty as ever the son of +Laertes applied to the shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of +Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon--I am speaking of +Shakespeare's Thersites--has no touch of humour in all his currish +composition: Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare for such +dirty dogs as those of his kind or generation. There is not even what +Coleridge with such exquisite happiness defined as being the +quintessential property of Swift--"_anima Rabelaesii habitans in +sicco_--the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place." It is the fallen +soul of Swift himself at its lowest, dwelling in a place yet drier: the +familiar spirit or less than Socratic daemon of the Dean informing the +genius of Shakespeare. And thus for awhile infected and possessed, the +divine genius had not power to re-inform and re-create the daemonic +spirit by virtue of its own clear essence. This wonderful play, one of +the most admirable among all the works of Shakespeare's immeasurable and +unfathomable intelligence, as it must always hold its natural high place +among the most admired, will always in all probability be also, and as +naturally, the least beloved of all. It would be as easy and as +profitable a problem to solve the Rabelaisian riddle of the bombinating +chimaera with its potential or hypothetical faculty of deriving +sustenance from a course of diet on second intentions, as to read the +riddle of Shakespeare's design in the procreation of this yet more +mysterious and magnificent monster of a play. That on its production in +print it was formally announced as "a new play never staled 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 originally written +for the stage? Not all plays were which even at that date appeared in +print: yet it would seem something more than strange that one such play, +written simply for the study, should have been the extra-professional +work of Shakespeare: and yet again it would seem stranger that he should +have designed this prodigious nondescript or portent of supreme genius +for the public stage: and strangest of all, if so, that he should have so +designed it in vain. Perhaps after all a better than any German or +Germanising commentary on the subject would be the simple and summary +ejaculation of Celia--"O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful +wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping!" +The perplexities of the whole matter seem literally to crowd and thicken +upon us at every step. What ailed the man or any man to write such a +manner of dramatic poem at all? and having written, to keep it beside him +or let it out of his hands into stranger and more slippery keeping, +unacted and unprinted? A German will rush in with an answer where an +Englishman (_non angelus sed Anglus_) will naturally fear 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-faced and hydra-headed prodigy, at once defies and +derides all definitive comment. This however we may surely and +confidently say of it, that of all Shakespeare's offspring it is the one +whose best things lose least by extraction and separation from their +context. That some cynic had lately bitten him by the brain--and +possibly a cynic himself in a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia--we +might conclude as reasonably from consideration of the whole as from +examination of the parts more especially and virulently affected: yet how +much is here also of hyper-Platonic subtlety and sublimity, of golden and +Hyblaean eloquence above the reach and beyond the snap of any cynic's +tooth! Shakespeare, as under the guidance at once for good and for evil +of his alternately Socratic and Swiftian familiar, has set himself as if +prepensely and on purpose to brutalise the type of Achilles and +spiritualise the type of Ulysses. The former is an enterprise never to +be utterly forgiven by any one who ever loved from the very birth of his +boyhood the very name of the son of the sea-goddess in the glorious words +of Mr. Browning's young first-born poem, + + Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed, + And bound [his] forehead with Proserpine's hair. + +It is true, if that be any little compensation, that Hector and +Andromache fare here hardly better than he: while of the momentary +presentation of Helen on the dirtier boards of a stage more miry than the +tub of Diogenes I would not if I could and I must not though I would say +so much as one single proper word. The hysterics of the eponymous hero +and the harlotries of the eponymous heroine remove both alike beyond the +outer pale of all rational and manly sympathy; though Shakespeare's self +may never have exceeded or equalled for subtle and accurate and bitter +fidelity the study here given of an utterly light woman, shallow and +loose and dissolute in the most literal sense, rather than perverse or +unkindly or unclean; and though Keats alone in his most perfect mood of +lyric passion and burning vision as full of fragrance as of flame could +have matched and all but overmatched those passages in which the rapture +of Troilus makes pale and humble by comparison the keenest raptures of +Romeo. + +The relative disfavour in which the play of _Measure for Measure_ has +doubtless been at all times generally held is not in my opinion simply +explicable on the theory which of late years has been so powerfully and +plausibly advanced and advocated on the highest poetic or judicial +authority in France or in the world, that in the land of many-coloured +cant and many-coated hypocrisy the type of Angelo is something too much a +prototype or an autotype of the huge national vice of England. This +comment is in itself as surely just and true as it is incisive and +direct: but it will not cover by any manner of means the whole question. +The strong and radical objection distinctly brought forward against this +play, and strenuously supported by the wisest and the warmest devotee +among all the worshippers of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, that the +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 merely evaded or ignored or +even defied: she is both in the older and the newer sense of the word +directly and deliberately baffled; buffeted, outraged, insulted, struck +in the face. We are left hungry and thirsty after having been made to +thirst and hunger for some wholesome single grain at least of righteous +and too long retarded retribution: we are tricked out of our dole, +defeated of our due, lured and led on to look for some equitable and +satisfying upshot, defrauded and derided and sent empty away. + +That this play is in its very inmost essence a tragedy, and that no +sleight of hand or force of hand could give it even a tolerable show of +coherence or consistency when clipped and docked of its proper and +rightful end, the mere tone of style prevalent throughout all its better +parts to the absolute exclusion of any other would of itself most amply +suffice to show. Almost all that is here worthy of Shakespeare at any +time is worthy of Shakespeare at his highest: and of this every touch, +every line, every incident, every syllable, belongs to pure and simple +tragedy. The evasion of a tragic end by the invention and intromission +of Mariana has deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity but +ingenious evasion of a natural and proper end is usually the distinctive +quality which denotes a workman of a very much lower school than the +school of Shakespeare. In short and in fact, the whole elaborate +machinery by which the complete and completely unsatisfactory result of +the whole plot is attained is so thoroughly worthy of such a contriver as +"the old fantastical duke of dark corners" as to be in a moral sense, if +I dare say what I think, very far from thoroughly worthy of the wisest +and mightiest mind that ever was informed with the spirit or genius of +creative poetry. + +I have one more note to add in passing which touches simply on a musical +point in lyric verse; and from which I would therefore give any biped who +believes that ears "should be long to measure Shakespeare" all timely +warning to avert the length of his own. A very singular question, and +one to me unaccountable except by a supposition which on charitable +grounds I should be loth to entertain for a moment--namely, that such +ears are commoner than I would fain believe on heads externally or +ostensibly human,--has been raised with regard to the first immortal song +of Mariana in the moated grange. This question is whether the second +verse appended by Fletcher to that divine Shakespearean fragment 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 must at once leap into +sight of all human eyes and conviction of all human ears. The metre of +Shakespeare's verse, as written by Shakespeare, is not the metre of +Fletcher's. It can only seem the same to those who hear by finger and +not by ear: a class now at all events but too evidently numerous enough +to refute Sir Hugh's antiquated objection 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 immediately and +invariably to recall to a virtuous critical public of nice and nasty mind +the prose portions of the fourth act, the whole of the prose portions of +the fourth act, and nothing but the prose portions of the fourth act. To +readers and writers of books who readily admit their ineligibility as +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 of this +ill-fated and ill-famed play, and with them the poetical parts of 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 with subtler hints of +deeper truth, is woven into the too realistic weft of these too lifelike +scenes than into any of the corresponding parts in _Measure for Measure_ +or in _Troilus and Cressida_; true also that in the hands of imitators, +in hands so much weaker than Shakespeare's as were Heywood's or +Davenport's (who transplanted this unlovely episode from _Pericles_ into +a play of his own), these very scenes or such as they reappear unredeemed +by any such relief in all the rank and rampant ugliness of their raw +repulsive realism: true, again, that Fletcher has once equalled them in +audacity, while stripping off the nakedness of his subject the last +ragged and rude pretence at a moral purpose, and investing it instead +with his very brightest robe of gay parti-coloured humour: but after all +it remains equally true that to senses less susceptible of attraction by +carrion than belong to the vultures of critical and professional virtue +they must always remain as they have always been, something very +considerably more than unattractive. I at least for one must confess +myself insufficiently virtuous to have ever at any time for any moment +felt towards them the very slightest touch of any feeling more attractive +than repulsion. And herewith I hasten to wash my hands of the only +unattractive matter in the only three of Shakespeare's plays which offer +any such matter to the perceptions of any healthy-minded and reasonable +human creature. + +But what now shall I say that may not be too pitifully unworthy of the +glories and the beauties, the unsurpassable pathos and sublimity inwoven +with the imperial texture of this very play? the blood-red Tyrian purple +of tragic maternal jealousy which might seem to array it in a worthy +attire of its Tyrian name; the flower-soft loveliness of maiden +lamentation over the flower-strewn seaside grave of Marina's old +sea-tossed nurse, where I am unvirtuous enough (as virtue goes among +moralists) to feel more at home and better at ease than in the atmosphere +of her later lodging in Mitylene? What, above all, shall be said of that +storm above all storms ever raised in poetry, which ushered into a world +of such wonders and strange chances the daughter of the wave-worn and +world-wandering prince of Tyre? Nothing but this perhaps, that it +stands--or rather let me say that it blows and sounds and shines and +rings and thunders and lightens as far ahead of all others as the +burlesque sea-storm of Rabelais beyond all possible storms of comedy. The +recent compiler of a most admirably skilful and most delicately +invaluable compendium of Pantagruel or manual by way of guidebook to +Rabelais has but too justly taken note of the irrefragable evidence there +given that the one prose humourist who is to Aristophanes as the human +twin-star Castor to Pollux the divine can never have practically +weathered an actual gale; but if I may speak from a single experience of +one which a witness long inured to Indian storm as well as Indian battle +had never seen matched out of the tropics if ever overmatched within +them, I should venture to say, were the poet in question any other mortal +man than Shakespeare, to whom all things were better known by instinct +than ever they can be to others by experience, that the painter of the +storm in _Pericles_ must have shared the adventure and relished the +rapture of such an hour. None other most assuredly than himself alone +could have mingled with the material passion of the elements such human +passion of pathos as thrills in such tenderly sublime undertone of an +agony so nobly subdued through the lament of Pericles over Thaisa. As in +his opening speech of this scene we heard all the clangour and resonance +of warring wind and sea, so now we hear a sound of sacred and spiritual +music as solemn as the central monochord of the inner main itself. + +That the three last acts of _Pericles_, with the possible if not over +probable exception of the so-called Chorus, {210} are wholly the work of +Shakespeare in the ripest fullness of his latter genius, is a position +which needs exactly as much proof as does his single-handed authorship of +_Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth_, and _Othello_. In the fifth act is a remarkable +instance of a thing remarkably rare with him; the recast or repetition in +an improved and reinvigorated form of a beautiful image or passage +occurring in a previous play. The now only too famous metaphor of +"patience on a monument smiling at grief"--too famous we might call it +for its own fame--is transfigured as from human beauty to divine, in its +transformation to the comparison of Marina's look with that of "Patience +gazing on 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 reciprocal love of Helena +and Hermia, of Emilia and Flavina. The change of style and spirit in +either case of reiteration is the change from a simpler to a sublimer +form of beauty. + +In the two first acts of _Pericles_ there are faint and rare but evident +and positive traces of a passing touch from the hasty hand of +Shakespeare: even here too we may say after Dido:-- + + Nec tam aversus equos Tyria sol jungit ab urbe. + +It has been said that those most unmistakable verses on "the blind mole" +are not such as any man could insert into another man's work, or slip 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 flatly to contradict the latter. +The pathetic and magnificent lines in dispute do not occur naturally +enough, or at all naturally, among the very poor, flat, creeping verses +between which they have been thrust with such over freehanded +recklessness. No purple patch was ever more pitifully out of place. +There is indeed no second example of such wanton and wayward liberality; +but the generally lean and barren style of these opening acts does not +crawl throughout on exactly the same low level. + +The last of the only three plays with which I venture to find any fault +on the score of moral taste is the first on my list of the only three +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 should on the whole +be simple and easy enough for the veriest babes and sucklings in the +lower school of Shakespeare. + +That the two great posthumous fragments we possess of Shakespeare's +uncompleted work are incomplete simply because the labour spent on either +was cut short by his timeless death is the first natural assumption of +any student with an eye quick enough to catch the point where the traces +of his hand break off; but I should now be inclined to guess rather that +on reconsideration of the subjects chosen he had rejected or dismissed +them for a time at least as unfit for dramatic handling. It could have +needed no great expenditure of reasoning or reflection to convince a man +of lesser mind and less experience than Shakespeare's that no subject +could possibly be more unmanageable, more indomitably improper 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 the inexplicable attraction of +it was too strong for him to resist the singular temptation to embody in +palpable form, to array in dramatic raiment, to invest with imaginative +magnificence, the godless ascetic passion of misanthropy, the martyrdom +of an atheistic Stylites. Timon is doubtless a man of far nobler type +than any monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius: but his immeasurable +superiority in spiritual rank to the hermit fathers of the desert serves +merely to make him a thought madder and a grain more miserable than the +whole Thebaid of Christomaniacs rolled into one. Foolish and fruitless +as it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets on +the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark +dream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine byways +of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blind +assumption to accept the plain evidence in both so patent before us, that +he too like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of inner life, and +like other poets found them or made them fruitful as well as bitter, +though it might be but of bitter fruit. And of such there is here enough +to glut the gorge of all the monks in monkery, or strengthen for a forty +days' fast any brutallest unwashed theomaniac of the Thebaid. The most +unconscionably unclean of all foul-minded fanatics might have been +satisfied with the application to all women from his mother upwards of +the monstrous and magnificent obloquy found by Timon as insufficient to +overwhelm as his gold was inadequate to satisfy one insatiable and +indomitable "brace of harlots." In _Troilus and Cressida_ we found too +much that Swift might have written when half inspired by the genius of +Shakespeare; in the great and terrible fourth act of _Timon_ we find such +tragedy as Juvenal might have written when half deified by the spirit of +AEschylus. + +There is a noticeable difference between the case of _Timon_ and the two +other cases (diverse enough between themselves) of late or mature work +but partially assignable to the hand of Shakespeare. In _Pericles_ we +may know exactly how much was added by Shakespeare to the work of we know +not whom; in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ we can tell sometimes to a hair's +breadth in a hemistich by whom how much was added to the posthumous text +of Shakespeare; in _Timon_ we cannot assert with the same confidence in +the same accuracy that just so many scenes and no more, just so many +speeches and none other, were the work of Shakespeare's or of some other +hand. Throughout the first act his presence lightens on us by flashes, +as his voice peals out by fits, from behind or above the too meanly +decorated altar of tragic 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 but very rarely intercepted for a very brief interval in the +dark divine service of a darker Commination Day: in the fifth it +predominates generally over the sullen and brooding atmosphere with the +fierce imperious glare of a "bloody sun" like that which the wasting +shipmen watched at noon "in a hot and copper sky." There is here no more +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 Shakespeare should +in a double sense have taken Chaucer for his model or example in leaving +half told a story which he had borrowed from the father and master of our +narrative poetry. Among all competent scholars and all rational students +of Shakespeare there can have been, except possibly with regard to three +of the shorter scenes, no room for doubt or perplexity on any detail of +the subject since the perfect summary and the masterly decision of Mr. +Dyce. These three scenes, as no such reader will need to be told or +reminded, are the two first soliloquies of the Gaoler's Daughter after +the release of Palamon, and the scene of the portraits, as we may in a +double sense call it, in which Emilia, after weighing against each other +in solitude the likenesses of the cousins, receives from her own kinsfolk +a full and laboured description of their leading champions on either +side. Even setting apart for once and for a moment the sovereign +evidence of mere style, we must recognise in this last instance a +beautiful and significant example of that loyal and loving fidelity to +the minor passing suggestions of Chaucer's text which on all possible +occasions of such comparison so markedly and vividly distinguishes the +work of Shakespeare's from the work of Fletcher's hand. Of the pestilent +abuse and perversion to which Fletcher has put the perhaps already +superfluous hints or sketches by Shakespeare for an episodical underplot, +in his transmutation of Palamon's love-stricken and luckless deliverer +into the disgusting burlesque of a mock Ophelia, I have happily no need +as I should certainly have no patience to speak. {217} + +After the always immitigable gloom of _Timon_ and the sometimes +malodorous exhalations of the three preceding plays, it is nothing less +than "very heaven" to find and feel ourselves again in the midmost +Paradise, the central Eden, of Shakespeare's divine discovery--of his +last sweet living invention. Here again is air as pure blowing over +fields as fragrant as where Dante saw Matilda or Milton saw Proserpine +gathering each as deathless flowers. We still have here to disentwine or +disentangle his own from the weeds of glorious and of other than glorious +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, to a letter, +where Shakespeare ends and Fletcher begins. That scene is opened by +Shakespeare in his most majestic vein of meditative or moral verse, +pointed and coloured as usual with him alone by direct and absolute +aptitude to the immediate sentiment and situation of the speaker and of +no man else: then either Fletcher strikes in for a moment with a touch of +somewhat more Shakespearean tone than usual, or possibly we have a +survival of some lines' length, not unretouched by Fletcher, from +Shakespeare's first sketch for a conclusion of the somewhat calamitous +and cumbrous underplot, which in any case was ultimately left for +Fletcher to expand into such a shape and bring by such means to such an +end as we may safely swear that Shakespeare would never have admitted: +then with the entrance and ensuing narrative of Pirithous we have none +but Shakespeare before us again, though it be Shakespeare undoubtedly in +the rough, and not as he might have chosen to present himself after due +revision, with rejection (we may well suppose) of this point and +readjustment of that: then upon the arrival of the dying Arcite with his +escort there follows a grievous little gap, a flaw but pitifully patched +by Fletcher, whom we recognise at wellnigh his worst and weakest in +Palamon's appeal to his kinsman for a last word, "if his heart, _his +worthy, manly heart_" (an exact and typical example of Fletcher's +tragically prosaic and prosaically tragic dash of incurable commonplace), +"be yet unbroken," and in the flaccid and futile answer which fails so +signally to supply the place of the most famous and pathetic passage in +all the masterpiece of Chaucer; a passage to which even Shakespeare could +have added but some depth and grandeur of his own giving, since neither +he nor Dante's very self nor any other among the divinest of men could +have done more or better than match it for tender and pure simplicity of +words more "dearly sweet and bitter" than the bitterest or the sweetest +of men's tears. Then, after the duly and properly conventional +engagement on the parts of Palamon and Emilia respectively to devote the +anniversary "to tears" and "to honour," the deeper note returns for one +grand last time, grave at once and sudden and sweet as the full choral +opening of an anthem: the note which none could ever catch of +Shakespeare's very voice gives out the peculiar cadence that it alone can +give in the modulated instinct of a solemn change or shifting of the +metrical emphasis or _ictus_ from one to 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 sounded +from Apollo's own harp after a somewhat hoarse and reedy wheeze from the +scrannel-pipe of a lesser player than Pan. Last of all, in words worthy +to be the latest left of Shakespeare's, his great and gentle Theseus +winds up the heavenly harmonies of his last beloved great poem. + +And now, coming at length within the very circle of Shakespeare's +culminant and crowning constellation, bathing my whole soul and spirit +for the last and (if I live long enough) as surely for the first of many +thousand times in the splendours of the planet whose glory is the light +of his very love itself, standing even as Dante + + in the clear + Amorous silence of the Swooning-sphere, + +what shall I say of thanksgiving before the final feast of Shakespeare? + +The grace must surely be short enough if it would at all be gracious. +Even were Shakespeare's self alive again, or he now but fifteen years +since gone home to Shakespeare, {220} of whom Charles Lamb said well that +none could have written his book about Shakespeare but either himself +alone or else he of whom the book was written, yet could we not hope that +either would have any new thing to tell us of the _Tempest_, the +_Winter's Tale_, and _Cymbeline_. And for ourselves, what else could we +do but only ring changes on the word beautiful as Celia on the word +wonderful in her laughing litany of love? or what better or what more can +we do than in the deepest and most heartfelt sense of an old conventional +phrase, thank God and Shakespeare? for how to praise either for such a +gift of gifts we know not, knowing only and surely that none will know +for ever. + +True or false, and it would now seem something less than likely to be +true, the fancy which assumed the last lines spoken by Prospero to be +likewise the last words of the last completed work of Shakespeare was +equally in either case at once natural and graceful. There is but one +figure sweeter than Miranda's and sublimer than Prospero's in all the +range of heaven on which the passion of our eyes could rest at parting. +And from one point of view there is even a more heavenly quality +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 left or any memory +lingering of any inexpiable evil. Alonzo is absolved; even Antonio and +Sebastian have made no such ineffaceable mark on it by the presence of +their pardoned crimes as is made by those which cost the life of +Mamillius and the labours of Imogen. Poor Caliban is left in such +comfort as may be allowed him by divine grace in the favourable aspect of +Setebos; and his comrades go by us "reeling ripe" and "gilded" not by +"grand liquor" only but also by the summer lightning of men's laughter: +blown softly out of our sight, with a sound and a gust of music, by the +breath of the song of Ariel. + +The wild wind of the _Winter's Tale_ at its opening would seem to blow us +back into a wintrier world indeed. And to the very end I must confess +that I have in me so much of the spirit of Rachel weeping in Ramah as +will not be comforted because Mamillius is not. It is well for those +whose hearts are light enough, to take perfect comfort even in the +substitution of his sister Perdita for the boy who died of "thoughts high +for one so tender." Even the beautiful suggestion that Shakespeare as he +wrote had in mind his own dead little son still fresh and living at his +heart can hardly add more than a touch of additional tenderness to our +perfect and piteous delight in him. And even in her daughter's embrace +it seems hard if his mother should have utterly forgotten the little +voice that had only time to tell her just eight words of that ghost story +which neither she nor we were ever to hear ended. Any one but +Shakespeare would have sought to make pathetic profit out of the child by +the easy means of showing him if but once again as changed and stricken +to the death for want of his mother and fear for her and hunger and +thirst at his little high heart for the sight and touch of her: +Shakespeare only could find a better way, a subtler and a deeper chord to +strike, by giving us our last glimpse of him as he laughed and chattered +with her "past enduring," to the shameful neglect of those ladies in the +natural blueness of whose eyebrows as well as their noses he so stoutly +declined to believe. And at the very end (as aforesaid) it may be that +we remember him all the better because the father whose jealousy killed +him and the mother for love of whom he died would seem to have forgotten +the little brave sweet spirit with all its truth of love and tender sense +of shame as perfectly and unpardonably as Shakespeare himself at the +close of _King Lear_ would seem to have forgotten one who never had +forgotten Cordelia. + +But yet--and here for once the phrase abhorred by Cleopatra does not +"allay the good" but only the bad "precedence"--if ever amends could be +made for such unnatural show of seeming forgetfulness ("out on the +seeming! I will write against it"--or would, had I not written enough +already), the poet most assuredly has made such amends here. At the +sunrise of Perdita beside Florizel it seems as if the snows of sixteen +winters had melted all together into the splendour of one unutterable +spring. They "smell April and May" in a sweeter sense than it could be +said of "young Master Fenton": "nay, which is more," as his friend and +champion Mistress Quickly might have added to mine host's commendatory +remark, they speak all April and May; because April is in him as +naturally as May in her, by just so many years' difference before the +Mayday of her birth as went to make up her dead brother's little lot of +living breath, which in Beaumont's most lovely and Shakespeare-worthy +phrase "was not a life; was but a piece of childhood thrown away." Nor +can I be content to find no word of old affection for Autolycus, who +lived, as we may not doubt, though but a hint or promise be vouchsafed us +for all assurance that he lived by favour of his "good masters" once more +to serve Prince Florizel and wear three-pile for as much of his time as +it might please him to put on "robes" like theirs that were "gentlemen +born," and had "been so any time these four hours." And yet another and +a graver word must be given with all reverence to the "grave and good +Paulina," whose glorious fire of godlike indignation was as warmth and +cordial to the innermost heart while yet bruised and wrung for the yet +fresh loss of Mamillius. + +The time is wellnigh come now for me to consecrate in this book my good +will if not good work to the threefold and thrice happy memory of the +three who have written of Shakespeare as never man wrote, nor ever man +may write again; to the everlasting praise and honour and glory of +Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter Savage Landor; +"wishing," I hardly dare to say, "what I write may be 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 this one +beyond all other children of Shakespeare. The too literal egoism of this +profession will not be attributed by any candid or even commonly honest +reader to the violence of vanity so much more than comical as to make me +suppose that such a record or assurance could in itself be matter of +interest to any man: but simply to the real and simple reason, that I +wish to show cause for my choice of this work to wind up with, beyond the +mere chance of its position at the close of the chaotically inconsequent +catalogue of contents affixed to the first edition. In this casualty--for +no good thing can reasonably be ascribed to design on the part of the +first editors--there would seem to be something more than usual of what +we may call, if it so please us, a happy providence. It is certain that +no studious arrangement could possibly have brought the book to a happier +end. Here is depth enough with height enough of tragic beauty and +passion, terror and love and pity, to approve the presence of the most +tragic Master's hand; subtlety enough of sweet and bitter truth to attest +the passage of the mightiest and wisest scholar or teacher in the school +of the human spirit; beauty with delight enough and glory of life and +grace of nature to proclaim the advent of the one omnipotent Maker among +all who bear that name. Here above all is the most heavenly triad of +human figures that ever even Shakespeare brought together; a diviner +three, as it were a living god-garland of the noblest earth-born brothers +and loveworthiest heaven-born sister, than the very givers of all grace +and 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 "the +king-becoming graces"; but we think first and last of her who was "truest +speaker" and those who "called her brother, when she was but their +sister; she them brothers, when they were so indeed." The very crown and +flower of all her father's daughters,--I do not speak here of her human +father, but her divine--the woman above all Shakespeare's women is +Imogen. As in Cleopatra we found the incarnate sex, the woman +everlasting, so in Imogen we find half glorified already the immortal +godhead of womanhood. I would fain have some honey in my words at +parting--with Shakespeare never, but for ever with these notes on +Shakespeare; and I am therefore something more than fain to close my book +upon the name of the woman best beloved in all the world of song and all +the tide of time; upon the name of Shakespeare's Imogen. + + + + +APPENDIX. + + +NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL PLAY OF KING EDWARD III. +1879. + + +The epitaph of German criticism on Shakespeare was long since written by +the unconscious hand which penned the following sentence; an inscription +worthy of perpetual record on the registers of Gotham or in the daybook +of the yet unstranded Ship of Fools. + +"_Thomas Lord Cromwell:--Sir John Oldcastle:--A Yorkshire Tragedy_.--The +three last pieces are not only unquestionably Shakespeare's, but in my +opinion they deserve to be classed among his best and maturest works." + +This memorable opinion is the verdict of the modest and judicious Herr +von Schlegel: who had likewise in his day the condescension to inform our +ignorance of the melancholy fact so strangely overlooked by the +contemporaries of Christopher Marlowe, that "his verses are flowing, but +without energy." Strange, but true; too strange, we may reasonably +infer, not to be true. Only to German eyes has the treasure-house of +English poetry ever disclosed a secret of this kind: to German ears alone +has such discord or default been ever perceptible in its harmonies. + +Now the facts with regard to this triad of plays are briefly these. +_Thomas Lord Cromwell_ is a piece of such utterly shapeless, spiritless, +bodiless, soulless, senseless, helpless, worthless rubbish, that there is +no known writer of Shakespeare's age to whom it could be ascribed without +the infliction of an unwarrantable insult on that writer's memory. _Sir +John Oldcastle_ is the compound piecework of four minor playwrights, one +of them afterwards and otherwise eminent as a poet--Munday, Drayton, +Wilson, and Hathaway: a thin sample of poetic patchery cobbled up and +stitched together so as to serve its hour 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 Shakespeare had a hand (or at least a finger), if we had +any reason to suppose that during 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 in this line +have not sufficed to warn off minor blunderers from treading with emulous +confidence "through forthrights and meanders" in the very muddiest of +their precursor's traces. We may notice, for one example, the revival--or +at least the discussion as of something worth serious notice--of a +wellnigh still-born theory, first dropped in a modest corner of the +critical world exactly a hundred and seventeen years ago. Its parent, +notwithstanding this perhaps venial indiscretion, was apparently an +honest and modest gentleman; and the play itself, which this ingenuous +theorist was fain, with all diffidence, to try whether haply he might be +permitted to foist on the apocryphal fatherhood of Shakespeare, is not +without such minor merits as may excuse us for wasting a few minutes on +examination of the theory which seeks to confer on it the factitious and +artificial attraction of a spurious and adventitious interest. + +"The Raigne of King Edward the third: As it hath bin sundrie times plaied +about the Citie of London," was published in 1596, and ran through two or +three anonymous editions before the date of the generation was out which +first produced it. Having thus run to the end of its natural tether, it +fell as naturally into the oblivion which has devoured, and has not again +disgorged, so many a more precious production of its period. In 1760 it +was reprinted in the "Prolusions" of Edward Capell, whose text is now +before me. This editor was the first mortal to suggest that his newly +unearthed treasure might possibly 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 +"external evidence" whatsoever to be alleged in support of this +gratuitous attribution: but he submits, with some fair show of reason, +that there is a certain "resemblance between the style of" Shakespeare's +"earlier performances and of the work in question"; and without the +slightest show of any reason whatever he appends to this humble and +plausible plea the unspeakably unhappy assertion that at the time of its +appearance "there was no known writer equal to such a play"; whereas at a +moderate computation there were, I should say, on the authority of +Henslowe's Diary, at least a dozen--and not improbably a score. In any +case there was one then newly dead, too long before his time, whose +memory stands even higher above the possible ascription of such a work +than that of the adolescent Shakespeare's very self. + +Of one point we may be sure, even where so much is unsure as we find it +here: in the curt atheological phrase of the Persian Lucretius, "one +thing is certain, and the rest is lies." The author of _King Edward +III_. was a devout student and a humble follower of Christopher Marlowe, +not yet wholly disengaged by that august and beneficent influence from +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 punier +limbs 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 conflicting and +irreconcilable styles; which yet affords no evidence or suggestion of a +double authorship. For the intelligence which moulds and informs the +whole work, the spirit which pervades and imbues the general design, is +of a piece, so to speak, throughout; a point imperceptible to the eye, a +touchstone intangible by the finger, alike of a scholiast and a dunce. + +Another test, no less unmistakable by the student and no less +indiscernible to the sciolist, is this: that whatever may be the demerits +of this play, 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 task +something less than welcome, if not of an imposition something less than +tolerable, as we may rationally believe ourselves able to trace in great +part of Marlowe's work: in the latter half of _The Jew of Malta_, in the +burlesque interludes of _Doctor Faustus_, and wellnigh throughout the +whole scheme and course of _The Massacre at Paris_. Whatever in _King +Edward III_. is mediocre or worse is evidently such as it is through no +passionate or slovenly precipitation of handiwork, but through pure +incompetence to do better. The blame of the failure, the shame of the +shortcoming, cannot be laid to the account of any momentary excess or +default in emotion, of passing exhaustion or excitement, of intermittent +impulse and reaction; it is an indication of lifelong and irremediable +impotence. And it is further to be noted that by far the least +unsuccessful parts of the play are also by far the most unimportant. The +capacity of the author seems to shrink and swell alternately, to erect +its plumes and deject them, to contract and to dilate the range and orbit +of its flight in a steadily inverse degree to the proportionate interest +of the subject or worth of the topic in hand. There could be no surer +proof that it is neither the early nor the hasty work of a great or even +a remarkable poet. It is the best that could be done at any time by a +conscientious and studious workman of technically insufficient culture +and of naturally limited means. + +I would not, however, be supposed to undervalue the genuine and graceful +ability of execution displayed by the author at his best. He could write +at times very much after the earliest fashion of the adolescent +Shakespeare; in other words, after the fashion of the day or hour, to +which in some degree the greatest writer of that hour or that day cannot +choose but conform at starting, and the smallest writer must needs +conform for ever. By the rule which would attribute to Shakespeare every +line written in his first manner which appeared during the first years of +his poetic progress, it is hard to say what amount of bad verse or +better, current during the rise and the reign of their several +influences,--for this kind of echo or of copywork, consciously or +unconsciously repercussive and reflective, begins with the very first +audible sound of a man's voice in song, with the very first noticeable +stroke of his hand in painting--it is hard to say what amount of +tolerable or intolerable work might not or may not be assignable by +scholiasts of the future to Byron or to Shelley, to Mr. Tennyson or to +Mr. Browning. A time by this rule might come--but I am fain to think +better of the Fates--when by comparison of detached words and collation +of dismembered phrases the memory of Mr. Tennyson would be weighted and +degraded by the ascription of whole volumes of pilfered and diluted verse +now current--if not yet submerged--under the name or the pseudonym of the +present {237} Viceroy--or Vice-empress is it?--of India. But the obvious +truth is this: the voice of Shakespeare's adolescence had as usual an +echo in it of other men's notes: I can remember the name of but one poet +whose voice from the beginning had none; who started with a style of his +own, though he may have chosen to annex--"annex the wise it call"; +_convey_ is obsolete--to annex whole phrases or whole verses at need, for +the use or the ease of an idle minute; and this name of course is +Marlowe's. So starting, Shakespeare had yet (like all other and lesser +poets born) some perceptible notes in his yet half boyish voice that were +not borrowed; and these were at once caught up and re-echoed by such +fellow-pupils with Shakespeare of the young Master of them all--such +humbler and feebler disciples, or simpler sheep (shall we call them?) of +the great "dead shepherd"--as the now indistinguishable author of _King +Edward III_. + +In the first scene of the first act the impotent imitation of Marlowe is +pitifully patent. Possibly there may also be an imitation of the still +imitative style of Shakespeare, and the style may be more accurately +definable as a copy of a copy--a study after the manner of Marlowe, not +at second hand, but at third. In any case, being obviously 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 come to the +outbreak of rhyme. In other words, the energetic or active part is at +best passable--fluent and decent commonplace: but where the style turns +undramatic and runs into mere elegiacs, a likeness becomes perceptible to +the first elegiac style of Shakespeare. Witness these lines spoken by +the King in contemplation of the Countess of Salisbury's beauty, 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 saw or heard +these pretty lines, he should have felt the unconscious rebuke implied in +such close and facile imitation of his own early elegiacs. As a serious +mimicry of his first manner, a critical parody summing up in little space +the sweet faults of his poetic nonage, with its barren overgrowth of +unprofitable flowers,--bright point, soft metaphor, and sweet elaborate +antithesis--this is as good of its kind as anything between Aristophanes +and Horace Smith. Indeed, it may remind us of that parody on the soft, +superfluous, flowery and frothy style of Agathon, which at the opening of +the _Thesmophoriazusae_ cannot but make the youngest and most ignorant +reader laugh, though the oldest and most learned has never set eyes on a +line of the original verses which supplied the incarnate god of comic +song with matter for such exquisite burlesque. + +To the speech above cited the reply of the Countess is even gracefuller, +and closer to the same general model of fanciful elegiac dialogue:-- + + Let not thy presence, like the April sun, + Flatter our earth, and suddenly be done: + More happy do not make our outward wall + Than thou wilt grace our inward house withal. + Our house, my liege, is like a country swain, + Whose habit rude, and manners blunt and plain. + Presageth naught; yet inly beautified + With bounty's riches, and fair hidden pride; + For where the golden ore doth buried lie, + The ground, undecked with nature's tapestry, + Seems barren, sere, unfertile, fruitless, dry; + And where the upper turf of earth doth boast + His pride, perfumes, {239} and particoloured cost, + Delve there, and find this issue and their pride + To spring from ordure and corruption's side. + But, to make up my all too long compare, + These ragged walls no testimony are + What is within; but, like a cloak, doth hide + From weather's waste the under garnished pride. + More gracious than my terms can let thee be, + Entreat thyself to stay awhile with me. + +Not only the exquisite grace of this charming last couplet, but the +smooth 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 oversight +perceptible to any eye and painful to any ear not sealed up by stepdame +nature from all perception of pleasure or of pain derivable from good +verse or bad--the reckless reiteration of the same rhyme with but one +poor couplet intervening--suggests rather the oversight of an unfledged +poet than the obtuseness of a full-grown poeticule or poetaster. + +But of how many among the servile or semi-servile throng of imitators in +every generation may not as much as this be said by tolerant or kindly +judges! Among the herd of such diminutives as swarm after the heel or +fawn upon the hand of Mr. Tennyson, more than one, more than two or +three, have come as close as his poor little viceregal or vice-imperial +parasite to the very touch and action of the master's hand which feeds +them unawares from his platter as they fawn; as close as this nameless +and short-winded satellite to the gesture and the stroke of +Shakespeare's. For this also must be noted; that the resemblance here 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 scheme of the +poem, is far enough from any such resemblance. The structure, the +composition, is feeble, incongruous, inadequate, effete. Any student +will remark at a first glance what a short-breathed runner, what a broken- +winded athlete in the lists of tragic verse, is the indiscoverable author +of this play. + +There is another point which the Neo-Shakespearean synagogue will by no +man be expected to appreciate; for to apprehend it requires some +knowledge and some understanding of the poetry of the Shakespearean +age--so surely we now should call it, rather than Elizabethan or +Jacobean, for the sake of verbal convenience, if not for the sake of +literary decency; and such knowledge or understanding no sane man will +expect to find in any such quarter. Even in the broad coarse comedy of +the period we find here and there the same sweet and simple echoes of the +very cradle-song (so to call it) of our drama: so like Shakespeare, they +might say who knew nothing of Shakespeare's fellows, that we cannot +choose but recognise his hand. Here as always first in the field--the +genuine and golden harvest-field of Shakespearean criticism, Charles Lamb +has cited a passage from _Green's Tu Quoque_--a comedy miserably +misreprinted in Dodsley's Old Plays--on which he observes that "this is +so like Shakespeare, that we seem to remember it," being as it is a +girl's gentle lamentation over the selfish, exacting, suspicious and +trustless love of man, as contrasted with the swift simple surrender of a +woman's love at the first heartfelt appeal to her pity--"we seem to +remember it," says Lamb, as a speech of Desdemona uttered on a first +perception or suspicion of jealousy or alienation in Othello. This +lovely passage, if I dare say so in contravention to the authority of +Lamb, is indeed as like the manner of Shakespeare as it can be--to eyes +ignorant of what his fellows can do; but it is not like the manner of the +Shakespeare who wrote _Othello_. This, however, is beside the question. +It is very like the Shakespeare who wrote the _Comedy of Errors--Love's +Labour's Lost--Romeo and Juliet_. It is so like that had we fallen upon +it in any of these plays it would long since have been a household word +in all men's mouths for sweetness, truth, simplicity, perfect and +instinctive accuracy of touch. It is very much liker the first manner of +Shakespeare than any passage in _King Edward III_. And no Sham +Shakespearean critic that I know of has yet assigned to the hapless +object of his howling homage the authorship of _Green's Tu Quoque_. + +Returning to our text, we find in the short speech of the King with which +the first act is wound up yet another couplet which has the very ring in +it of Shakespeare's early notes--the catch at words rather than play on +words which his tripping tongue in youth could never resist: + + Countess, albeit my business urgeth me, + It shall attend while I attend on thee. + +And with this pretty little instance of courtly and courteous euphuism we +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 versed in the +work of his early rivals and his later pupils, might surely be forgiven +if on a first reading of the speech with which this act opens he should +cry out with Capell that here at least was the unformed hand of the +Master perceptible and verifiable indeed. The writer, he might 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 he will have attained that +in his early plays, as in his two early poems, the style of Shakespeare +was not for the most part distinctively his own. It was that of a crew, +a knot of young writers, among whom he found at once both leaders and +followers to be guided and to guide. A mere glance into the rich lyric +literature of the period will suffice to show the dullest eye and teach +the densest ear how nearly innumerable were the Englishmen of Elizabeth's +time who could sing in the courtly or pastoral key of the season, each +man of them a few notes of his own, simple or fantastic, but all sweet, +clear, genuine of their kind:-- + + Facies non omnibus una, + Nec diversa tamen: + +and yet so close is the generic likeness between flower and flower of the +same lyrical garden that the first half of the quotation seems but half +applicable here. In Bird's, Morley's, Dowland's collections of music +with the words appended--in such jewelled volumes as _England's Helicon_ +and _Davison's Poetical Rhapsody_--their name is Legion, their numbers +are numberless. You cannot call them imitators, this man of that, or all +of any; they were 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 writers in England. Marlowe alone stood apart and above them +all--the young Shakespeare among the rest; but among these we cannot +count, we cannot guess, how many were wellnigh as competent as he to +continue the fluent rhyme, to prolong the facile echo, of Greene and +Peele, their first and most famous leaders. + +No more docile or capable pupil could have been desired by any master in +any art than the author of _David and Bethsabe_ has found in the writer +of this second act. He has indeed surpassed his model, if not in grace +and sweetness, yet in taste or tact of expression, in continuity and +equality of style. Vigour is not the principal note of his manner, but +compared with the soft effusive ebullience of his 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 capable of gracious work enough in the idyllic or elegiac line +of business--shows about as much capacity to grasp and handle the fine +intimacies of character and the large issues of circumstance to any +tragic or dramatic purpose, as might be expected from an idyllic or +elegiac poet who should suddenly assume the buskin of tragedy. Let us +suppose that Moschus, for example, on the strength of having written a +sweeter elegy than ever before was chanted over the untimely grave of a +friend and fellow-singer, had said within himself, "Go to, I will be +Sophocles"; can we imagine that the tragic result would have been other +than tragical indeed for the credit of his gentle name, and comical +indeed for all who might have envied the mild and modest excellence which +fashion or hypocrisy might for years have induced them to besprinkle with +the froth and slaver of their promiscuous and pointless adulation? + +As the play is not more generally known than it deserves to be,--or +perhaps we may say it is somewhat less known, though its claim to general +notice is faint indeed compared with that of many a poem of its age +familiar only to special students in our own--I will transcribe a few +passages to show how far the writer could reach at his best; leaving for +others to indicate how far short of that not inaccessible point he 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 Francois Villon under the roof of his Fat Madge, +to have succeeded in reconciling the professional duties--may I not say, +the generally discordant and discrepant offices?--of a poet and a pimp. + + I might perceive his eye in her eye lost, + His ear to drink her sweet tongue's utterance; + And changing passion, like inconstant clouds, + That, rackt upon the carriage of the winds, + Increase, and die, in his disturbed cheeks. + Lo, when she blushed, even then did he look pale; + As if her cheeks by some enchanted power + Attracted had the cherry blood from his: {245a} + Anon, with reverent fear when she grew pale, + His cheeks put on their scarlet ornaments; + But no more like her oriental red + Than brick to coral, or live things to dead. {245b} + Why did he then thus counterfeit her looks? + If she did blush, 'twas tender modest shame, + Being in the sacred presence of a king; + If he did blush, 'twas red immodest shame + To vail his eyes amiss, being a king; + If she looked pale, 'twas silly woman's fear + To bear herself in presence of a king; + If he looked pale, it was with guilty fear + To dote amiss, being a mighty king. + +This is better than the insufferable style of _Locrine_, which is in +great part made up of such rhymeless couplets, each tagged with an empty +verbal antithesis; but taken as a sample of dramatic writing, it is but +just better than what is utterly intolerable. Dogberry has defined it +exactly; it is most tolerable--and not to be endured. + +The following speech of King Edward is in that better style of which the +author's two chief models were not at their best incapable for awhile +under the influence and guidance (we may suppose) of their friend +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 Caesar from his Roman grave + To hear war beautified by her discourse. + Wisdom is foolishness, but in her tongue; + Beauty a slander, but in her fair face; + There is no summer but in her cheerful looks, + Nor frosty winter but in her disdain. + I cannot blame the Scots that did besiege her, + For she is all the treasure of our land; + But call them cowards that they ran away, + Having so rich and fair a cause to stay. + +But if for a moment we may fancy that here and there we have caught such +an echo of Marlowe as may have fallen from the lips of Shakespeare in his +salad days, in his period of poetic pupilage, we have but a very little +way to go forward before we come upon indisputable proof that the 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 recognise at once +the flat and futile imitation of Marlowe; not of his great general style +alone, but of one special and transcendant passage which can never be 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 admired themes; + If all the heavenly quintessence they still + From their immortal flowers of poesy, + Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive + The highest reaches of a human wit; + If these had made one poem's period, + And all combined in beauty's worthiness, + Yet should there hover in their restless heads + One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, + Which into words no virtue can digest. {248} + +Infinite as is the distance between the long roll of these mighty lines +and the thin tinkle of their feeble imitator's, yet we cannot choose but +catch the ineffectual note of a would-be echo in the speech of 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 versicles at +length: but a glance at the text will show how much fitter was their +author to continue the tradition of Peele than to emulate the innovations +of Marlowe. In the speeches that follow there is much pretty verbiage +after the general manner of Elizabethan sonnetteers, touched here and +there 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 prettiest +lines by way of sample would give a favourable impression but too likely +to be reversed on further and fuller acquaintance. + + Forget not to set down, how passionate, + How heart-sick, and how full of languishment, + Her beauty makes me. . . . . . + Write on, while I peruse her in my thoughts. + Her voice to music, or the nightingale: + To music every summer-leaping swain + Compares his sunburnt lover when she speaks; + And why should I speak of the nightingale? + The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong; + And that, compared, is too satirical: + For sin, though sin, would not be so esteemed; + But rather virtue sin, sin virtue deemed. + Her hair, far softer than the silkworm's twist, + Like as a flattering glass, doth make more fair + The yellow amber:--_Like a flattering glass_ + Comes in too soon; for, writing of her eyes, + I'll say that like a glass they catch the sun, + And thence the hot reflection doth rebound + Against my breast, and burns the heart within. + Ah, what a world of descant makes my soul + Upon this voluntary ground of love! + +"Pretty enough, very pretty! but" exactly as like and as near the style +of Shakespeare's early plays as is the style of Constable's sonnets to +that of Shakespeare's. Unless we are to assign to the Master every +unaccredited song, sonnet, elegy, tragedy, comedy, and farce of his +period, which bears the same marks of the same date--a date, like our +own, of too prolific and imitative production--as we find inscribed on +the greater part of his own early work; unless we are to carry even as +far as this the audacity and arrogance of our sciolism, we must somewhere +make a halt--and it must be on the near side of such an attribution as +that of _King Edward III_. to the hand of Shakespeare. + +With the disappearance of the poetic pimp and the entrance of the +unsuspecting Countess, the style rises yet again--and really, this time, +much to the author's credit. It would need a very fine touch from a very +powerful hand to improve on the delicacy and dexterity of the prelude or +overture to the King's avowal of adulterous love. But when all is said, +though very delicate and very dexterous, it is not forcible work: I do +not mean by forcible the same as violent, spasmodic, emphatic beyond the +modesty of nature; a poet is of course only to be commended, and that +heartily, for keeping within this bound; but he is not to be commended +for coming short of it. This whole scene is full of mild and temperate +beauty, of fanciful yet earnest simplicity; but the note of it, the +expression, the dominant key of the style, is less appropriate to the +utterance of a deep and deadly passion than--at the utmost--of what +modern tongues might call a strong and rather dangerous flirtation. +Passion, so to speak, is quite out of this writer's call; the depths and +heights of manly as of womanly emotion are alike beyond his reach. + + Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, + He turns to favour and to prettiness. + +"To favour and to prettiness"; the definition of his utmost merit and +demerit, his final achievement and shortcoming, is here complete and +exact. Witness the sweet quiet example of idyllic work which I extract +from a scene beginning in the regular amoebaean style of ancient +pastoral. + + _Edward_. Thou hear'st me say that I do dote on thee. + + _Countess_. If on my beauty, take it if thou canst; + Though little, I do prize it ten times less: + If on my virtue, take it if thou canst; + For virtue's store by giving doth augment: + Be it on what it will that I can give + And thou canst take away, inherit it. + + _Edward_. It is thy beauty that I would enjoy. + + _Countess_. O, were it painted, I would wipe it off, + And dispossess myself to give it thee: + But, sovereign, it is soldered to my life; + Take one and both; for like an humble shadow + It haunts the sunshine of my summer's life. + + _Edward_. But thou mayst lend it me to sport withal. + + _Countess_. As easy may my intellectual soul + Be lent away, and yet my body live, + As lend my body, palace to my soul, + Away from her, and yet retain my soul. + My body is her bower, her court, her abbey, + And she an angel, pure, divine, unspotted; + If I should lend her house, my lord, to thee, + I kill my poor soul, and my poor soul me. + +Once more, this last couplet is very much in the style of Shakespeare's +sonnets; nor is it wholly unlike even the dramatic style of Shakespeare +in 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 +intermittent resemblance to Shakespeare is more frequently noticeable +than elsewhere. {252} A student of imperfect memory but not of defective +intuition might pardonably assign such couplets, on hearing them cited, +to the master-hand itself; but such a student would be likelier to refer +them to the sonnetteer than to the dramatist. And a casual likeness to +the style of Shakespeare's sonnets is not exactly sufficient evidence to +warrant such an otherwise unwarrantable addition of appendage to the list +of Shakespeare's plays. + +A little further on we come upon the first and last passage which does +actually recall by its wording a famous instance of the full and ripened +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 of the +famous passage in _Measure for Measure_ which here may seem to be faintly +prefigured: + + It were as good + To pardon him that hath from nature stolen + A man already made, as to remit + Their saucy sweetness, that do coin heaven's image + In stamps that are forbid: + +and the very difference of style is not wider than the gulf which gapes +between the first style of Shakespeare and the last. But men of +Shakespeare's stamp, I venture to think, do not thus repeat themselves. +The echo of the passage in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, describing the +girlish friendship of Hermia and Helena, which we find in the first act +of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, describing the like girlish friendship of +Emilia and Flavina, is an echo of another sort. Both, I need hardly say, +are unquestionably Shakespeare's; but the fashion in which the matured +poet retouches and completes the sketch of his earlier years--composes an +oil painting, as it were, from the hints and suggestions of a +water-colour sketch long since designed and long since half forgotten--is +essentially different from the mere verbal and literal trick of +repetition which sciolists might think to detect in the present instance. +Again we must needs fall back on the inevitable and indefinable test of +style; a test which could be of no avail if we were foolish enough to +appeal to scholiasts and their attendant dunces, but which should be of +some avail if we appeal to experts and their attentive scholars; and by +this test we can but remark that neither the passage in _A Midsummer +Night's Dream_ nor the corresponsive passage in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ +could have been written by any hand known to us but Shakespeare's; +whereas the passage in _King Edward III_. might as certainly have been +written by any one out of a dozen poets then living as the answering +passage in _Measure for Measure_ could assuredly have been written by +Shakespeare alone. + +As on a first reading of the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides we feel that, for +all the grace and freshness and lyric charm of its opening scenes, the +claim of the poem to our ultimate approval or disapproval must needs +depend on the success or failure of the first interview between Theseus +and his calumniated son; and as on finding that scene to be feeble and +futile and prosaic and verbose we feel that the poet who had a woman's +spite against women has here effectually and finally shown himself +powerless to handle the simplest elements of masculine passion, of manly +character and instinct; so in this less important case we feel that the +writer, having ventured on such a subject as the compulsory temptation of +a daughter by a father, who has been entrapped into so shameful an +undertaking through the treacherous exaction of an equivocal promise +unwarily confirmed by an inconsiderate oath, must be judged by the result +of his own enterprise; must fail or stand as a poet by its failure or +success. And his failure is only not complete; he is but just redeemed +from utter discomfiture by the fluency and simplicity of his equable but +inadequate style. Here as before we find plentiful examples of the +gracefully conventional tone current among the lesser writers of the +hour. + + _Warwick_. How shall I enter on this graceless errand? + I must not call her child; for where's the father + That will in such a suit seduce his child? + Then, _Wife of Salisbury_;--shall I so begin? + No, he's my friend; and where is found the friend + That will do friendship such endamagement?--{255} + Neither my daughter, nor my dear friend's wife, + I am not Warwick, as thou think'st I am, + But an attorney from the court of hell; + That thus have housed my spirit in his form + To do a message to thee from the king. + +This beginning is fair enough, if not specially fruitful in promise; but +the verses following are of the flattest order of commonplace. Hay and +grass and the spear of Achilles--of which tradition + + the moral is, + What mighty men misdo, they can amend-- + +these are the fresh and original types on which our little poet is +compelled to fall back for support and illustration to a scene so full of +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 me unhappy, + To have escaped the danger of my foes, + And to be ten times worse invir'd by friends! + +(Here we come upon two more words unknown to Shakespeare; {256} +_besiege_, as a noun substantive, and _invired_ for _environed_.) + + Hath he no means to stain my honest blood + But to corrupt the author of my blood + To be his scandalous and vile soliciter? + No marvel though the branches be infected, + When poison hath encompassed the roots; + No marvel though the leprous infant die, + When the stern dam envenometh the dug. + Why then, give sin a passport to offend, + And youth the dangerous rein of liberty; + Blot out the strict forbidding of the law; + And cancel every canon that prescribes + A shame for shame or penance for offence. + No, let me die, if his too boisterous will + Will have it so, before I will consent + To be an actor in his graceless lust. + + _Warwick_. Why, now thou speak'st as I would have thee speak; + And mark how I unsay my words again. + An honourable grave is more esteemed + Than the polluted closet of a king; + The greater man, the greater is the thing, + Be it good or bad, that he shall undertake; + An unreputed mote, flying in the sun, + Presents a greater substance than it is; + The freshest summer's day doth soonest taint + The loathed carrion that it seems to kiss; + Deep are the blows made with a mighty axe; + That sin doth ten times aggravate itself + That is committed in a holy place; + An evil deed, done by authority, + Is sin, and subornation: Deck an ape + In tissue, and the beauty of the robe + Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast. + +(Here are four passably good lines, which vaguely remind the reader of +something better read elsewhere; a common case enough with the more +tolerable work of small imitative poets.) + + A spacious field of reasons could I urge + Between his glory, daughter, and thy shame: + That poison shows worst in a golden cup; + Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash; + _Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds_; + And every glory that inclines to sin, + The shame is treble by the opposite. + So leave I, with my blessing in thy bosom; + Which then convert to a most heavy curse, + When thou convert'st from honour's golden name + To the black faction of bed-blotting shame! [_Exit_. + + _Countess_. I'll follow thee:--And when my mind turns so, + My body sink my soul in endless woe! [_Exit_. + +So much for the central and crowning scene, the test, the climax, 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 probable reader will +need to be reminded that the line which I have perhaps unnecessarily +italicised appears also as the last verse in the ninety-fourth of those +"sugared sonnets" which we know were in circulation about the time of +this play's first appearance among Shakespeare's "private friends"; in +other words, which enjoyed such a kind of public privacy or private +publicity as one or two among the most eminent English poets of our own +day have occasionally chosen for some part of their work, to screen it +for awhile as under the shelter and the shade of crepuscular laurels, +till ripe for the sunshine or the storm of public judgment. In the +present case, this debatable verse looks to me more like a loan or maybe +a theft from Shakespeare's private store of undramatic poetry than a +misapplication by its own author to dramatic purposes of a line too apt +and exquisite to endure without 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 upon the scene +which I have already stigmatised as a failure--that which attempts to +render the interview between Warwick and the King. It is hardly, +however, I should say, above the highest reach of Greene or Peele at the +smoothest and straightest of his flight. At its opening, indeed, we come +upon a line which inevitably recalls one of the finest touches in a much +later and deservedly more popular historical drama. 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 +statesmanlike sagacity of Audley leads him at once as by intuition to the +inference thus 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's +characteristically cautious conclusion at sight of the military +preparations arrayed against the immediate advent of the Armada? + + I cannot but surmise--forgive, my friend, + If the conjecture's rash--I cannot but + Surmise the state some danger apprehends! + +With the entrance of the King the tone of this scene naturally rises--"in +good time," as most readers will say. His brief interview with the two +nobles has at least the merit of ease and animation. + + _Derby_. Befall my sovereign all my sovereign's wish! + + _Edward_. Ah, that thou wert a witch, to make it so! + + _Derby_. The emperor greeteth you. + + _Edward_. Would it were the countess! + + _Derby_. And hath accorded to your highness' suit. + + _Edward_. Thou liest, she hath not: But I would she had! + + _Audley_. All love and duty to my lord the king! + + Edward. _Well, all but one is none_:--What news with you? + + _Audley_. I have, my liege, levied those horse and foot, + According to your charge, and brought them hither. + + _Edward_. Then let those foot trudge hence upon those horse + According to their discharge, and begone.-- + + _Derby_. I'll look upon the countess' mind + Anon. + + _Derby_. The countess' mind, my liege? + + _Edward_. I mean, the emperor:--Leave me alone. + + _Audley_. What's in his mind? + + _Derby_. Let's leave him to his humour. + + [_Exeunt_ DERBY and AUDLEY + + _Edward_. Thus from the heart's abundance speaks the tongue + Countess for emperor: And indeed, why not? + She is as _imperator_ over me; + And I to her + Am as a kneeling vassal, that observes + The pleasure or displeasure of her eye. + +In this little scene there is perhaps on the whole more general likeness +to Shakespeare's earliest manner than we can trace in any other passage +of the play. But how much of Shakespeare's earliest manner may be +accounted the special and exclusive property of Shakespeare? + +After this dismissal of the two nobles, the pimping poeticule, Villon +manque or (whom shall we call him?) reussi, reappears with a message to +Caesar (as the King is pleased to style himself) from "the more than +Cleopatra's match" (as he designates the Countess), to intimate that "ere +night she will resolve his majesty." 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 loved glory dazzles them. + +Hereupon Lodowick introduces the Black Prince (that is to be), and +"retires to the door." The following scene opens well, with a tone of +frank and direct simplicity. + + _Edward_. I see the boy. O, how his mother's face, + Moulded in his, corrects my strayed desire, + And rates my heart, and chides my thievish eye; + Who, being rich enough in seeing her, + Yet seeks elsewhere: and basest theft is that + Which cannot check itself on poverty.-- + Now, boy, what news? + + _Prince_. I have assembled, my dear lord and father, + The choicest buds of all our English blood, + For our affairs in France; and here we come + To take direction from your majesty. + + _Edward_. Still do I see in him delineate + His mother's visage; those his eyes are hers, + Who, looking wistly {262a} on me, made me blush; + For faults against themselves give evidence: + Lust is a fire; and men, like lanterns, show + Light lust within themselves even through themselves. + Away, loose silks of wavering vanity! + Shall the large limit of fair Brittany {262b} + By me be overthrown? and shall I not + Master this little mansion of myself? + Give me an armour of eternal steel; + I go to conquer kings. And shall I then + Subdue myself, and be my enemy's friend? + It must not be.--Come, boy, forward, advance! + Let's with our colours sweep the air of France. + +Here Lodowick announces the approach of the Countess "with a smiling +cheer." + + _Edward_. Why, there it goes! that very smile of hers + Hath ransomed captive France; and set the king, + The dauphin, and the peers, at liberty.-- + Go, leave me, Ned, and revel with thy friends. [_Exit_ PRINCE. + Thy mother is but black; and thou, like her, + Dost put into my mind how foul she is. + Go, fetch the countess hither in thy hand, + And let her chase away these winter clouds; + For she gives beauty both to heaven and earth. [_Exit_ LODOWICK. + The sin is more, to hack and hew poor men, + Than to embrace in an unlawful bed + The register of all rarieties {263a} + Since leathern Adam till this youngest hour. + + _Re-enter_ LODOWICK _with the_ COUNTESS. + + Go, Lodowick, put thy hand into my purse, + Play, spend, give, riot, waste; do what thou wilt, + So thou wilt hence awhile, and leave me here. [_Exit_ LODOWICK. + +Having already, out of a desire and determination to do no possible +injustice to the actual merits of this play in the eyes of any reader who +might never have gone over the text on which I had to comment, exceeded +in no small degree the limits I had intended to impose upon my task in +the way of citation, I shall not give so full a transcript from the next +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 sense of offer +or proposal has no parallel in the plays of Shakespeare.) + + _Countess_. My father on his blessing hath commanded-- + + _Edward_. That thou shalt yield to me. + + _Countess_. Ay, dear my liege, your due. + + _Edward_. And that, my dearest love, can be no less + Than right for right, and render {263b} love for love. + + _Countess_. Than wrong for wrong, and endless hate for hate. + But, sith I see your majesty so bent, + That my unwillingness, my husband's love, + Your high estate, nor no respect respected, + Can be my help, but that your mightiness + Will overbear and awe these dear regards, + I bind my discontent to my content, + And what I would not I'll compel I will; + Provided that yourself remove those lets + That stand between your highness' love and mine. + + _Edward_. Name them, fair countess, and by heaven I will. + + _Countess_. It is their lives that stand between our love + That I would have choked up, my sovereign. + + _Edward_. Whose lives, my lady? + + _Countess_. My thrice loving liege, + Your queen, and Salisbury my wedded husband; + Who living have that title in our love + That we can not bestow but by their death. + + _Edward_. Thy opposition {264a} is beyond our law. + + _Countess_. So is your desire: If the law {264b} + Can hinder you to execute the one, + Let it forbid you to attempt the other: + I cannot think you love me as you say + Unless you do make good what you have sworn. + + _Edward_. No more: thy husband and the queen shall die. + Fairer thou art by far than Hero was; + Beardless Leander not so strong as I: + He swom an easy current for his love; + But I will, through a helly spout of blood, {264c} + Arrive that Sestos where my Hero lies. + + _Countess_. Nay, you'll do more; you'll make the river too + With their heartbloods that keep our love asunder; + Of which my husband and your wife are twain. + + _Edward_. Thy beauty makes them guilty of their death + And gives in evidence that they shall die; + Upon which verdict I their judge condemn them. + + _Countess_. O perjured beauty! more corrupted judge! + When, to the great star-chamber o'er our heads, + The universal sessions calls to count + This packing evil, we both shall tremble for it. + + _Edward_. What says my fair love? is she resolute? + + _Countess_. Resolute to be dissolved: {266} and, therefore, this: + Keep but thy word, great king, and I am thine. + Stand where thou dost; I'll part a little from thee; + And see how I will yield me to thy hands. + Here by my side do hang my wedding knives; + Take thou the one, and with it kill thy queen, + And learn by me to find her where she lies; + And with the other I'll despatch my love, + Which now lies fast asleep within my heart: + When they are gone, then I'll consent to love. + +Such genuinely good wine as this needs no bush. But from this point +onwards I can find nothing especially commendable in the remainder of the +scene except its brevity. The King of course abjures his purpose, and of +course compares the Countess with Lucretia to the disadvantage of the +Roman matron; summons his son, Warwick, and the attendant lords; appoints +each man his post by sea or land; and starts for Flanders in a 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 set of characters and events, all utterly out of all harmony +and keeping with all that has gone before. Edward alone survives as +nominal protagonist; but this survival--assuredly not of the fittest--is +merely the survival of the shadow of a name. Anything more pitifully +crude and feeble, more helplessly inartistic and incomposite, than this +process or pretence of juncture where there is no juncture, this +infantine shifting and shuffling of the scenes and figures, it is +impossible to find among the rudest and weakest attempts of the dawning +or declining drama in its first or second childhood. + +It is the less necessary to analyse at any length the three remaining +acts of this play, that the work has already been done to my hand, and +well done, by Charles Knight; who, though no professed critic or esoteric +expert in Shakespearean letters, approved himself by dint of sheer +honesty and conscience not unworthy of a considerate hearing. To his +edition of Shakespeare I therefore refer all readers desirous of further +excerpts than I care to give. + +The first scene of the third act is a storehouse of contemporary +commonplace. Nothing fresher than such stale pot-pourri as the following +is to be gathered up in thin sprinklings from off the dry flat soil. A +messenger informs the French king that he has descried off shore + + The proud armado (_sic_) of King Edward's ships; + Which at the first, far off when I did ken, + Seemed as it were a grove of withered pines; + But, drawing on, their glorious bright aspect, + Their streaming ensigns wrought of coloured silk, + Like to a meadow full of sundry flowers, + Adorns the naked bosom of the earth; + +and so on after the exactest and therefore feeblest fashion of the Pre- +Marlowites; with equal regard, as may be seen, for grammar and for sense +in the construction of his periods. The narrative of a sea-fight ensuing +on this is pitiable beyond pity and contemptibly beneath contempt. + +In the next scene we have a flying view of peasants in flight, with a +description of five cities on fire not undeserving of its place in the +play, immediately after the preceding sea-piece: but relieved by such +wealth of pleasantry as marks the following jest, in which the most +purblind eye will be the quickest to discover a touch of the genuine +Shakespearean humour. + + _1st Frenchman_. What, is it quarter-day, that you remove, + And carry bag and baggage too? + + _2nd Frenchman_. Quarter-day? ay, and quartering-day, I fear. + _Euge_! + +The scene of debate before Cressy is equally flat and futile, vulgar and +verbose; yet in this Sham Shakespearean scene of our present poeticule's +I have noted one genuine Shakespearean word, "solely singular for 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 same use of +the word "laurel" as an adjective and epithet of victory which thus +confronts us in the penultimate speech of the third scene in the first +act of _Antony and Cleopatra_. + + Upon your sword + Sit laurel victory, and smooth success + Be strewed before your feet! + +There is something more (as less there could not be) of spirit and +movement in the battle-scene where Edward refuses to send relief to his +son, wishing the prince to win his spurs unaided, and earn the +first-fruits of his fame single-handed against the heaviest odds; but the +forcible feebleness of a minor poet's fancy shows itself amusingly in the +mock stoicism and braggart philosophy of the King's reassuring +reflection, "We have more sons than one." + +In the first and third scenes of the fourth act we may concede some +slight merit to the picture of a chivalrous emulation in magnanimity +between the Duke of Burgundy and his former fellow-student, whose refusal +to break his parole as a prisoner extorts from his friend the concession +refused to his importunity as an envoy: but the execution is by no means +worthy of the subject. + +The limp loquacity of long-winded rhetoric, so natural to men and +soldiers in an hour of emergency, which distinguishes the dialogue +between the Black Prince and Audley on the verge of battle, is relieved +by this one last touch of quasi-Shakespearean thought or style +discoverable in 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 coupe, mal cousu_; such is the most favourable verdict I can pass +on this voluminous effusion of a spirit smacking rather of the schools +than of the field. The first six lines or so might pass muster as the +early handiwork of Shakespeare; the rest has 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 such +poor catches at a word as this; + + And let those milkwhite messengers of time + Show thy time's learning in this dangerous time; + +a villainous trick of verbiage which went nigh now and then to affect the +adolescent style of Shakespeare, and which happens to find itself as +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 than in +such lines as these. + + Thyself art bruised and bent with many broils, + And stratagems forepast with iron pens + Are texed {271} in thine honourable face; + Thou art a married man in this distress, + But danger woos me as a blushing maid; + Teach me an answer to this perilous time. + + _Audley_. To die is all as common as to live; + The one in choice, the other holds in chase; + For from the instant we begin to live + We do pursue and hunt the time to die: + First bud we, then we blow, and after seed; + Then presently we fall; and as a shade + Follows the body, so we follow death. + If then we hunt for death, why do we fear it? + If we fear it, why do we follow it? + +(Let me intimate a doubt in passing, whether Shakespeare would ever have +put by the mouth of any but a farcical mask a query so provocative of +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 resolved proffer + Can overthrow the limit of our fate: + +and so forth. Again the hastiest reader will have been reminded of 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 was blown +by the same breath which in time gained power to fill that archangelic +trumpet. Credat Zoilus Shakespearomastix, non ego. + +The next scene is something better than passable, but demands no special +analysis and affords no necessary extract. We may just observe as +examples of style the play on words between the flight of hovering ravens +and the flight of routed soldiers, and the description of the sudden fog + + Which now hath hid the airy floor of heaven, + And made at noon a night unnatural + Upon the quaking and dismayed world. + +The interest rises again with the reappearance and release of Salisbury, +and lifts the style for a moment to its own level. _A tout seigneur tout +honneur_; the author deserves some dole of moderate approbation for his +tribute to the national chivalry of a Frenchman as 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 reader +believes them to be the possible work of the same hand which set before +all men's eyes for all time the field of Agincourt, he will doubtless die +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 notice at +the opening of the fifth act. If in all the historical groundwork of +this play there is one point of attraction which we might have thought +certain to stimulate the utmost enterprise and evoke the utmost +capacities of an aspiring dramatist, it must surely be sought in the +crowning scene of the story; in the scene of Queen Philippa's +intercession for the burgesses of Calais. We know how Shakespeare on the +like occasion was wont to transmute into golden verse the silver speech +supplied to him by North's version of Amyot's Plutarch. {273} With the +text of Lord Berners before him, the author of _King Edward III_. has +given us for the gold of Froissart not even adulterated copper, but +unadulterated lead. Incredible as it may seem to readers of the +historian, the poeticule has actually contrived so far to transfigure by +dint of disfiguring him that this most noble and pathetic scene in all +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 and wordy, coarse and unchivalrous. The whole scene is at all +points alike in its unlikeness to the workmanship of Shakespeare. + +Here then I think we may finally draw bridle: for the rest of the course +is not worth running; there is nothing in the residue of this last act +which deserves analysis or calls for commentary. We have now examined +the whole main body of the work with somewhat more than necessary care; +and our conclusion is simply this: that if any man of common reading, +common modesty, common judgment, and common sense, can be found to +maintain the theory of Shakespeare's possible partnership in the +composition of this play, such a man will assuredly admit that the only +discernible or imaginable touches of his hand are very slight, very few, +and very early. For myself, I am and have always been perfectly +satisfied with one single and simple piece of evidence that Shakespeare +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 play of King +Edward III. had on its first appearance met in various quarters with +assailants of various kinds. There are some forms of attack to which no +answer is possible for a man of any human self-respect but the lifelong +silence of contemptuous disgust. To such as these I will never +condescend to advert or to allude further than by the remark now as it +were forced from me, that never once in my life have I had or will I have +recourse in self-defence either to the blackguard's loaded bludgeon of +personalities or to the dastard's sheathed dagger of disguise. I have +reviled no man's person: I have outraged no man's privacy. When I have +found myself misled either by imperfection of knowledge or of memory, or +by too much confidence in a generally trustworthy guide, I have silently +corrected the misquotation or readily repaired the error. To the +successive and representative heroes of the undying Dunciad I have left +and will always leave the foul 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 be worthy of praise or dispraise, contempt or +honour, in the public works and actions of men. Here ends and here has +always ended in literary matters the proper province of a gentleman; +beyond it, though sometimes intruded on in time past by trespassers of a +nobler race, begins the proper province of a blackguard. + + + +REPORT ON THE PROCEEDINGS ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF THE NEWEST +SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY. + + +A paper was read by Mr. A. on the disputed authorship of _A Midsummer +Night's Dream_. He was decidedly of opinion that this play was to be +ascribed to George Chapman. He based this opinion principally on the +ground of style. From its similarity of subject he had at first been +disposed to assign it to Cyril Tourneur, author of _The Revenger's +Tragedy_; and he had drawn up in support of this theory a series of +parallel passages extracted from the speeches of Vindice in that drama +and of Oberon in the present play. He pointed out however that the +character of Puck could hardly have been the work of any English poet but +the author of _Bussy d'Ambois_. There was here likewise that gravity and +condensation of thought conveyed through the medium of the "full and +heightened style" commended by Webster, and that preponderance of +philosophic or political discourse over poetic interest and dramatic +action for which the author in question had been justly censured. + +Some of the audience appearing slightly startled by this remark (indeed +it afterwards appeared that the Chairman had been on the point of asking +the learned member whether he was not thinking rather of _Love's Labour's +Lost_?), Mr. A. cited the well-known scene in which Oberon discourses +with Puck on matters concerning Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth, instead +of despatching him at once on his immediate errand. This was universally +accepted as proof positive, and the reading concluded amid 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 evidence than +that adduced by Mr. A.; and to this he doubted not they would all defer. +He could prove by a tabulated statement that the words "to" and "from" +occurred on an average from seven to nine times in every play of Chapman; +whereas in the play under consideration the word "to" occurred exactly +twelve times and the word "from" precisely ten. He was therefore of +opinion that the authorship should in all probability be assigned to +Anthony Munday. + +As nobody present could dispute this conclusion, Mr. C. proceeded to read +the argument by which he proposed to establish the fact, hitherto +unaccountably overlooked by all preceding commentators, that the +character of Romeo was obviously designed as a satire on Lord Burghley. +The first and perhaps the strongest evidence in favour of this +proposition was 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 +player who designed to attack an all-powerful Minister. But more direct +light was thrown upon the subject by a passage in which "that kind of +fruit that maids call medlars when they laugh alone" is mentioned in +connection with a wish of Romeo's regarding his mistress. This must +evidently be taken to refer to some recent occasion on which the 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 Chairman +reminded the Society that the play in question was now generally ascribed +to George Peele, {278} who was notoriously the solicitor of Lord +Burghley's patronage and the recipient of his bounty. That this poet was +the author of _Romeo and Juliet_ could no longer be a matter of doubt, as +he was confident they would all agree with him on hearing that a living +poet of note had positively assured him of the fact; adding that he had +always thought so when at school. The plaudits excited by this +announcement had scarcely subsided, when the Chairman clenched the matter +by observing that he rather thought the same opinion had ultimately been +entertained by his own grandmother. + +Mr. D. then read a paper on the authorship and the hidden meaning of two +contemporary plays which, he must regretfully remark, were too obviously +calculated to cast a most unfavourable and even sinister light on the +moral character of the new Shakespeare; whose possibly suspicious +readiness to attack the vices of others with a view to diverting +attention from his own was signally exemplified in the well-known fact +that, even while putting on a feint of respect and tenderness for his +memory, he had exposed the profligate haunts and habits of Christopher +Marlowe under the transparent pseudonym of Christopher Sly. To the first +of these plays attention had long since been drawn by a person of whom it +was only necessary to say that he had devoted a long life to the study +and illustration of Shakespeare and his age, and had actually presumed to +publish a well-known edition of the poet at a date previous to the +establishment of the present Society. He (Mr. D.) was confident that not +another syllable could be necessary to expose that person to the contempt +of all present. He proceeded, however, with the kind encouragement of +the Chairman, to indulge at that editor's expense in sundry personalities +both "loose and humorous," which being totally unfit for publication here +are reserved for a private issue of "Loose and Humorous Papers" to be +edited, with a running marginal commentary or illustrative and +explanatory version of the utmost possible fullness, {279} by the Founder +and another member of the Society. To these it might possibly be +undesirable for them to attract the notice of the outside world. +Reverting therefore to his first subject from various references to the +presumed private character, habits, gait, appearance, and bearing of the +gentleman in question, Mr. D. observed that the ascription of a share in +the _Taming of the Shrew_ to William Haughton (hitherto supposed the +author of a comedy called _Englishmen for my Money_) implied a doubly +discreditable blunder. The real fact, as he would immediately prove, was +not that Haughton was joint author with Shakespeare of the _Taming of the +Shrew_, but that Shakespeare was joint author with Haughton of +_Englishmen for my Money_. He would not enlarge on the obvious fact that +Shakespeare, so notorious a plunderer of others, had actually been +reduced to steal from his own poor store an image transplanted from the +last scene of the third act of _Romeo and Juliet_ into the last scene of +the third act of _Englishmen for my Money_; where the well-known and +pitiful phrase--"Night's candles are burnt out"--reappears in all its +paltry vulgarity as follows;--"Night's candles burn obscure." Ample as +was the proof here supplied, he would prefer to rely exclusively upon +such further evidence as might be said to lie at once on the surface and +in a nutshell. + +The second title of this play, by which the first title was in a few +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 and +delightful treatise by Sir John Harrington, the peculiar fondness of +Shakespeare for puns was notorious; but especially for puns on names, as +in the proverbial case of Sir Thomas Lucy; and above all for puns on his +own Christian name, as in his 135th, 136th, and 143rd sonnets. It must +now be but too evident to the meanest intelligence--to the meanest +intelligence, he repeated; for to such only did he or would he then and +there or ever or anywhere address himself--(loud applause) that the +graceless author, more utterly lost to all sense of shame than any Don +Juan or other typical libertine of fiction, had come forward to placard +by way of self-advertisement on his own stage, and before the very eyes +of a Maiden Queen, the scandalous confidence in his own powers of +fascination and seduction so cynically expressed in the too easily +intelligible vaunt--A Woman will have her Will [Shakespeare]. In the +penultimate line of the hundred and forty-third sonnet the very phrase +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 for incurables in any part of the country, the learned member now +passed on to the consideration of the allusions at once to Shakespeare +and to a celebrated fellow-countryman, fellow-poet, and personal friend +of his--Michael Drayton--contained in a play which had been doubtfully +attributed to Shakespeare himself by such absurd idiots as looked rather +to the poetical and dramatic quality of a poem or a play than to such +tests as those to which alone any member of that Society would ever dream +of appealing. What these were he need not specify; it was enough to say +in recommendation of them that they had rather less to do with any +question of dramatic or other poetry than with the differential calculus +or the squaring of the circle. It followed that only the most perversely +ignorant and aesthetically presumptuous of readers could imagine the +possibility of Shakespeare's concern or partnership in a play which had +no more Shakespearean quality about it than mere poetry, mere passion, +mere pathos, mere beauty and vigour of thought and language, mere command +of dramatic effect, mere depth and subtlety of power to read, interpret, +and reproduce the secrets of the heart and spirit. Could any further +evidence be required of the unfitness and unworthiness to hold or to +utter any opinion on the matter in hand which had consistently been +displayed by the poor creatures to whom he had just referred, it would be +found, as he felt sure the Founder and all worthy members of their +Society would be the first to admit, in the despicable diffidence, the +pitiful modesty, the contemptible deficiency in common assurance, with +which the suggestion of Shakespeare's partnership in this play had +generally been put forward and backed up. The tragedy of _Arden of +Feversham_ was indeed connected with Shakespeare--and that, as he should +proceed to show, only too intimately; but Shakespeare was not connected +with it--that is, in the capacity of its author. In what capacity would +be but too evident when he mentioned the names of the two leading +ruffians concerned in the murder of the principal character--Black Will +and Shakebag. The single original of these two characters he need +scarcely pause to point out. It would be observed that a double +precaution had been taken against any charge of libel or personal attack +which might be brought against the author and supported by the +all-powerful court influence of Shakespeare's two principal patrons, the +Earls of Essex and Southampton. Two figures were substituted for one, +and the unmistakable name of Will Shakebag was cut in half and divided +between them. Care had moreover been taken to disguise the person by +altering the complexion of the individual aimed at. That the actual +Shakespeare was a fair man they had the evidence of the coloured bust at +Stratford. Could any capable and fair-minded man--he would appeal to +their justly honoured Founder--require further evidence as to the +original of Black Will Shakebag? Another important character in the play +was Black Will's accomplice and Arden's servant--Michael, after whom the +play had also at one time been called _Murderous Michael_. The single +fact that Shakespeare and Drayton were both of them Warwickshire men +would suffice, he could not doubt, to carry conviction with it to the +mind of every member present, with regard to the original of this +personage. It now only remained for him to produce the name of the real +author of this play. He would do so at once--Ben Jonson. About the time +of its production Jonson was notoriously engaged in writing those +additions to the _Spanish Tragedy_ of which a preposterous attempt had +been made to deprive him on the paltry ground that the style (forsooth) +of these additional scenes was very like the style of Shakespeare and +utterly unlike the style of Jonson. To dispose for ever of this pitiful +argument it would be sufficient to mention the names of its two first and +principal supporters--Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hisses +and laughter). Now, in these "adycions to Jeronymo" a painter was +introduced complaining of the murder of his son. In the play before them +a painter was introduced as an accomplice in the murder of Arden. It was +unnecessary to dwell upon so trivial a point of difference as that +between the stage employment or the moral character of the one artist and +the other. In either case they were as closely as possible connected +with a murder. There was a painter in the _Spanish Tragedy_, and there +was also a painter in _Arden of Feversham_. He need not--he would not +add another word in confirmation of the now established fact, that Ben +Jonson had in this play held up to perpetual infamy--whether deserved or +undeserved he would not pretend to say--the names of two poets who +afterwards became his friends, but whom he had previously gibbeted or at +least pilloried in public as Black Will Shakespeare and Murderous Michael +Drayton. + +Mr. E. then brought forward a subject of singular interest and +importance--"The lameness of Shakespeare--was it moral or physical?" He +would not insult their intelligence by dwelling on the absurd and +exploded hypothesis that this expression was allegorical, but would at +once assume that the infirmity in question was physical. Then arose the +question--In which leg? He was prepared, on the evidence of an early +play, to prove to demonstration that the injured and interesting limb was +the left. "This shoe is my father," says Launce in the _Two Gentlemen of +Verona_; "no, this left shoe is my father; no, no, this left shoe is my +mother; nay, that cannot be 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 or to the development of the character; he believed he was +justified in asserting that it was not borrowed from the original novel +on which the play was founded; the inference was obvious, that without +some personal allusion it must have been as unintelligib1e to the +audience as it had hitherto been to the commentators. His conjecture was +confirmed, and the whole subject illustrated with a new light, by the +well-known line in one of the Sonnets, in which the poet describes +himself as "made lame by Fortune's dearest spite": a line of which the +inner meaning and personal application had also by a remarkable chance +been reserved for him (Mr. E.) to discover. There could be no doubt that +we had here a clue to the origin of the physical infirmity referred to; +an accident which must have befallen Shakespeare in early life while +acting at the Fortune theatre, and consequently before his connection +with 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 first and most natural +explanation of the term would at once suggest itself; the playhouse would +of necessity be dearest to the actor dependent on it for subsistence, as +the means of getting his bread; but he thought it not unreasonable to +infer from this unmistakable allusion that the entrance fee charged at +the Fortune may probably have been higher than the price of seats in any +other house. Whether or not this fact, taken in conjunction with the +accident already mentioned, should be assumed as the immediate cause of +Shakespeare's subsequent change of service, he was not prepared to +pronounce with such positive confidence as they might naturally expect +from a member of the Society; but he would take upon himself to affirm +that his main thesis was now and for ever established on the most +irrefragable evidence, and that no assailant could by any possibility +dislodge by so much as a hair's breadth the least fragment of a single +brick in the impregnable structure of proof raised by the argument to +which they had just listened. + +This demonstration being thus satisfactorily concluded, Mr. F. proceeded +to read his paper on the date of _Othello_, and on the various parts of +that play respectively assignable to Samuel Rowley, to George Wilkins, +and to Robert Daborne. It was evident that the story of Othello and +Desdemona was originally quite distinct from that part of the play in +which Iago was a leading figure. This he was prepared to show at some +length by means of the weak-ending test, the light-ending test, the +double-ending test, the triple-ending test, the heavy-monosyllabic- +eleventh-syllable-of-the-double-ending test, the run-on-line test, and +the central-pause test. Of the partnership of other poets in the play +he was able to adduce a simpler but not less cogent proof. A member +of their Committee said to an objector lately: "To me, there are the +handwritings of four different men, the thoughts and powers of four +different men, in the play. If you can't see them now, you must +wait till, by study, you can. I can't give you eyes." To this argument +he (Mr. F.) felt that it would be an insult to their understandings if he +should attempt to add another word. Still, for those who were willing to +try and learn, and educate their ears and eyes, he had prepared six +tabulated statements-- + +(At this important point of a most interesting paper, our reporter +unhappily became unconscious, and remained for some considerable period +in a state of deathlike stupor. On recovering from this total and +unaccountable suspension of all his faculties, he found the speaker +drawing gradually near the end of his figures, and so far succeeded in +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 the same +hand as the third scene he should have no difficulty in proving to the +satisfaction of all capable and fair-minded men. In the first and fourth +scenes the word "virtuous" was used as a 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 triple +endings which had originally led the able editor of Euclid's Elements of +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's time), 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 of this evidence. Now, let them take the +rhymed speeches of the Duke and Brabantio in Act i. Sc. 3, and compare +them with the speech of Othello in Act iv. Sc. 2, + + Had it pleased heaven + To try me with affliction. + +He appealed to any expert whether this was not in Shakespeare's easy +fourth budding manner, with, too, various other points already touched +on. On the other hand, take the opening of Brabantio's speech-- + + So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile; + We lose it not so long as we can smile. + +That, he said, was in Shakespeare's difficult second flowering manner--the +style of the later part of the earlier stage of Shakespeare's rhetorical +first period but one. It was no more possible to move the one passage up +to the date of the other than to invert the order of the alphabet. Here, +then, putting aside for the moment the part of the play supplied by +Shakespeare's assistants in the last three acts--miserably weak some of +it was--they were able to disentangle the early love-play from the latter +work in which Iago was principally concerned. There was at least fifteen +years' growth between them, the steps of which could he traced in the +poet's intermediate plays by any one who chose to work carefully enough +at them. Set any of the speeches addressed in the Shakespeare part of +the last act by Othello to Desdemona beside the consolatory address of +the Duke to Brabantio, and see the difference of the rhetoric and style +in the two. If they turned to characters, Othello and Desdemona were +even more clearly the companion pair to Biron and Rosaline of _Love's +Labour's Lost_ than were Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet the match-pair +(_sic_) of Romeo and Juliet. In _Love's Labour's Lost_ the question of +complexion was identical, though the parts were reversed. He would cite +but a few parallel passages in evidence of 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, or child +could bring himself or herself to believe that the connection of these +plays was casual or the date of the first Othello removable from the date +of the early contemporary late-first-period-but-one play _Love's Labour's +Lost_, or that anybody's opinion that they were so was worth one straw? +When therefore by the introduction of the Iago episode Shakespeare in his +later days had with the assistance of three fellow-poets completed the +unfinished work of his youth, the junction thus effected of the Brabantio +part of the play with this Iago underplot supplied them with an evidence +wholly distinct from that of the metrical test which yet confirmed in +every point the conclusion independently arrived at and supported by the +irresistible coincidence of all the tests. He defied anybody to accept +his principle of study or adopt his method of work, and arrive at a +different conclusion from himself. + +The reading of Mr. G.'s paper on the authorship of the soliloquies in +_Hamlet_ was unavoidably postponed till the next meeting, the learned +member having only time on this occasion to give a brief summary of the +points he was prepared to establish and the grounds on which he was +prepared to establish them. A year or two since, when he first thought +of starting the present Society, he had never read a line of the play in +question, having always understood it to be admittedly spurious: but on +being assured of the contrary by one of the two foremost poets of the +English-speaking world, who was good enough to read out to him in proof +of this assertion all that part of the play which could reasonably be +assigned to Shakespeare, he had of course at once surrendered his own +former opinion, well grounded as it had hitherto seemed to be on the most +solid of all possible foundations. At their next meeting he would show +cause for attributing to Ben Jonson not only the soliloquies usually but +inconsiderately quoted as Shakespeare's, but the entire original +conception of the character of the Prince of Denmark. The resemblance of +this character to that of Volpone in _The Fox_ and to that of Face in +_The Alchemist_ could not possibly escape the notice of the most cursory +reader. The principle of disguise was the same in each case, whether the +end in view were simply personal profit, or (as in the case of Hamlet) +personal profit combined with revenge; and whether the disguise assumed +was that of madness, of sickness, or of a foreign personality, the +assumption of character was in all three cases identical. As to style, +he was only too anxious to meet (and, he doubted not, to beat) on his own +ground any antagonist whose ear had begotten {291} the crude and +untenable theory that the Hamlet soliloquies were not distinctly within +the range of the man who could produce those of Crites and of Macilente +in _Cynthia's Revels_ and _Every Man out of his Humour_. The author of +those soliloquies could, and did, in the parallel passages of _Hamlet_, +rise near the height of the master he honoured and loved. + +The further discussion of this subject was reserved for the next meeting +of the Society, as was also the reading of Mr. H.'s paper on the +subsequent quarrel between the two joint authors of Hamlet, which led to +Jonson's caricature of Shakespeare (then retired from London society to a +country life of solitude) under the name of Morose, and to Shakespeare's +retort on Jonson, who was no less evidently attacked under the +designation of Ariel. The allusions to the subject of Shakespeare's +sonnets in the courtship and marriage of Epicoene by Morose were as +obvious as the allusions in the part of Ariel to the repeated +incarceration of Jonson, first on a criminal and secondly on a political +charge, and to his probable release in the former case (during the reign +of Elizabeth=Sycorax) at the intercession of Shakespeare, who was allowed +on all hands to have represented himself in the character of Prospero +("it was mine art that let thee out"). Mr. I. would afterwards read a +paper on the evidence for Shakespeare's whole or part authorship of a +dozen or so of the least known plays of his time, which, besides having +various words and phrases in common with his acknowledged works, were +obviously too bad to be attributed to any other known writer of the +period. Eminent among these was the tragedy of _Andromana, or the +Merchant's Wife_, long since rejected from the list of Shirley's works as +unworthy of that poet's hand. Unquestionably it was so; not less +unworthy than _A Larum for London_ of Marlowe's. The consequent +inference that it must needs be the work of the new Shakespeare's was +surely no less cogent in this than in the former case. The allusion +occurring in it to a play bearing date just twenty-six years after the +death of Shakespeare, and written by a poet then unborn, was a strong +point in favour of his theory. (This argument was received with general +marks of adhesion.) What, he would ask, could be more natural than that +Shirley when engaged on the revision and arrangement for 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 of its real author, and protect +it from the disfavour of an audience with whom that name was notoriously +out of fashion? This reasoning, conclusive in itself, became even more +irresistible--or would become so, if that were anything less than an +absolute impossibility--on comparison of parallel passages, + + Though kings still hug suspicion in their bosoms, + They hate the causer. (_Andromana_, Act i. Sc. 3.) + +Compare this with the avowal put by Shakespeare into the mouth of a king. + + Though I did wish him dead + I hate the murderer. (_King Richard II_., Act v. Sc. 6.) + +Again in the same scene: + + For then her husband comes home from the Rialto. + +Compare this with various passages (too familiar to quote) in the +_Merchant of Venice_. The transference of the Rialto to Iberia was of a +piece with the discovery of a sea-coast in Bohemia. In the same scene +Andromana says to her lover, finding him reluctant to take his leave, +almost in the very words of Romeo to Juliet, + + Then let us stand and outface danger, + Since you will have it so. + +It was obvious that only the author of the one passage could have thought +it necessary to disguise his plagiarism in the other by an inversion of +sexes between the two speakers. In the same scene were three other +indisputable instances of repetition. + + Mariners might with far greater ease + Hear whole shoals of sirens singing. + +Compare _Comedy of Errors_, Act iii. Scene 2. + + Sing, siren, for thyself. + +In this case identity of sex was as palpable an evidence for identity of +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 words were coupled +in the very same order: + + _More validity_, + More honourable state, more courtship lies + In carrion flies than Romeo. + +Again: + + It would have killed a salamander. + +Compare the _First Part of King Henry IV_, Act iii. Scene 3. + + I have maintained that salamander of yours with fire any time this two + and thirty years. + +In Act ii. Scene 2 the hero, on being informed how heavy are the odds +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 the prince wish + . . . . . . . + He had fewer by a thousand men. + +Could any member doubt that we had here the same hand which gave us the +like debate between King Henry and Westmoreland on the eve of Agincourt? +or could any member suppose that in the subsequent remark of the same +military confidant, "I smell a rat, sir," there was merely a fortuitous +coincidence with Hamlet's reflection as he "whips out his rapier"--in +itself a martial proceeding--under similar circumstances 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's +ragged regiment. In both cases, moreover, it was to be noted that the +tattered rogues proved ultimately victorious. But he had--they might +hardly believe it, but so it was--even yet stronger and more convincing +evidence to offer. It would be remembered that a play called _The Double +Falsehood_, formerly attributed to Shakespeare on the authority of +Theobald, was now generally supposed to have been in its original form +the work of Shirley. What, then, he would ask, could be more natural or +more probable than that a play formerly ascribed to Shirley should prove +to be the genuine work of Shakespeare? Common sense, common reason, +common logic, all alike and all equally combined to enforce upon every +candid judgment this inevitable conclusion. This, however, was nothing +in comparison to the final proof which he had yet to lay before them. He +need not remind them that in the opinion of their illustrious German +teachers, the first men to discover and reveal to his unworthy countrymen +the very existence of the new Shakespeare, the authenticity of any play +ascribed to the possibly too prolific pen of that poet was invariably to +be determined in the last resort by consideration of its demerits. No +English critic, therefore, who felt himself worthy to have been born a +German, would venture to question the postulate on which all sound +principles of criticism with regard to this subject must infallibly be +founded: that, given any play of unknown or doubtful authorship, the +worse it was, the likelier was it to be Shakespeare's. (This proposition +was received with every sign of unanimous assent.) Now, on this ground +he was prepared to maintain that the claims of _Andromana_ to their most +respectful, their most cordial, their most unhesitating acceptance were +absolutely beyond all possibility of parallel. Not _Mucedorus_ or _Fair +Em_, not _The Birth of Merlin_ or _Thomas Lord Cromwell_, could +reasonably or fairly be regarded as on the same level of worthlessness +with this incomparable production. No mortal man who had survived its +perusal could for a moment hesitate to agree that it was the most +incredibly, ineffably, inconceivably, unmitigatedly, irredeemably, +inexpressibly damnable piece of bad work ever perpetrated by human hand. +No mortal critic of the genuine Anglo-German school could therefore +hesitate for a moment to agree that in common consistency he was bound to +accept it 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 the +benefits conferred by the Society during the twelve months which had +elapsed 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 entirely new +means towards an entirely new end, in honour of an entirely new kind of +Shakespeare. They had proved to demonstration and overwhelmed with +obloquy the incompetence, the imbecility, the untrustworthiness, the +blunders, the forgeries, the inaccuracies, the obliquities, the utter +moral and literary worthlessness, of previous students and societies. +They had revealed to the world at large the generally prevalent ignorance +of Shakespeare and his works which so discreditably distinguished his +countrymen. This they had been enabled to do by the simple process of +putting forward various theories, and still more various facts, but all +of equally incontrovertible value and relevance, of which no +Englishman--he might say, no mortal--outside the Society had ever heard +or dreamed till now. They had discovered the one trustworthy and +indisputable method, so easy and so simple that it must now seem +wonderful it should never have been discovered before, by which to pluck +out the heart of the poet's mystery and detect the secret of his touch; +the study of Shakespeare by rule of thumb. Every man, woman, and child +born with five fingers on each hand was henceforward better qualified as +a 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 incompatibility with +any conceivable scheme of metre or principle of rhythm--it was not +exclusively on this precious and unanswerable test that they relied. +Within the Society as well as without, the pretensions of those who would +acknowledge no other means of deciding on debated questions had been +refuted and repelled. What were the other means of investigation and +verification in which not less than in the metrical test they were +accustomed to put their faith, and by which they doubted not to attain in +the future even more remarkable results than their researches had as yet +achieved, the debate just concluded, in common with every other for which +they ever had met or ever were likely to meet, would amply suffice to +show. By such processes as had been applied on this as on all occasions +to the text of Shakespeare's works and the traditions of his life, they +trusted in a very few years to subvert all theories which had hitherto +been held and extirpate all ideas which had hitherto been cherished on +the subject: and having thus cleared the ground for his advent, to +discover for the admiration of the world, as the name of their Society +implied, a New Shakespeare. The first step towards this end must of +course be the demolition of the old one; and he would venture to say they +had already made a good beginning in that direction. They had disproved +or they would disprove the claim of Shakespeare to the sole authorship of +_Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Hamlet_, and _Othello_; they had +established or they would establish the fact of his partnership in +_Locrine, Mucedorus, The Birth of Merlin, Dr. Dodipoll_, and _Sir Giles +Goosecap_. They had with them the incomparable critics of Germany; men +whose knowledge and judgment on all questions of English literature were +as far beyond the reach of their English followers as the freedom and +enlightenment enjoyed by the subjects of a military empire were beyond +the reach of the citizens of a democratic republic. They had established +and affiliated to their own primitive body or church various branch +societies or sects, in England and elsewhere, devoted to the pursuit of +the same end by the same means and method of study as had just been +exemplified in the transactions of the present meeting. Still there +remained much to be done; in witness of which he proposed to lay before +them at their next meeting, by way of inauguration under a happy omen of +their new year's work, the complete body of evidence by means of which he +was prepared to demonstrate that some considerable portion, if not the +greater part, of the remaining plays hitherto assigned to Shakespeare was +due to the collaboration of a contemporary actor and playwright, well +known by name, but hitherto insufficiently appreciated; Robert Armin, the +author of _A Nest of Ninnies_. + + + +ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS. + + +The humble but hard-working journeyman of letters who was charged with +the honourable duty of reporting the transactions at the last meeting of +the Newest Shakespeare Society on the auspicious occasion of its first +anniversary, April 1st, has received sundry more or less voluminous +communications from various gentlemen whose papers were then read or +announced, pointing out with more or less acrimonious commentary the +matters on which it seems to them severally that they have cause to +complain of imperfection or inaccuracy in his conscientious and +painstaking report. Anxious above all things to secure for himself such +credit as may be due to the modest merit of scrupulous fidelity, he +desires to lay before the public so much of the corrections conveyed in +their respective letters of reclamation as may be necessary to complete +or to rectify the first draught of their propositions as conveyed in his +former summary. On the present occasion, however, he must confine +himself to forwarding the rectifications supplied by two of the members +who took a leading part in the debate of April 1st. + +The necessarily condensed report of Mr. A.'s paper on _A Midsummer +Night's Dream_ may make the reasoning put forward by that gentleman +liable to the misconception of a hasty reader. The omission of various +qualifying phrases has left his argument without such explanation, his +statements without such reservation, as he had been careful to supply. He +did not say in so many words that he had been disposed to assign this +drama to the author of _The Revenger's Tragedy_ simply on the score of +the affinity discernible between the subjects of the two plays. He is +not prone to self-confidence or to indulgence in paradox. What he did +say was undeniable by any but those who trusted only to their ear, and +refused to correct the conclusions thus arrived at by the help of other +organs which God had given them--their fingers, for example, and their +toes; by means of which a critic of trained and competent scholarship +might with the utmost confidence count up as far as twenty, to the great +profit of all students who were willing to accept his guidance and be +bound by his decision on matters of art and poetry. Only the most +purblind could fail to observe, what only the most perverse could +hesitate to admit, that there was at first sight an obvious connection +between the poison-flower--"purple from love's wound"--squeezed by Oberon +into the eyes of the sleeping Titania and the poison rubbed by Vindice +upon the skull of the murdered Gloriana. No student of Ulrici's +invaluable work would think this a far-fetched reference. That eminent +critic had verified the meaning and detected the allusion underlying many +a passage of Shakespeare in which the connection of moral idea was more +difficult to establish than this. In the fifth act of either play there +was a masque or dramatic show of a sanguinary kind; in the one case the +bloodshed was turned to merry-making, in the other the merry-making was +turned to bloodshed. Oberon's phrase, "till I torment thee for this +injury," might easily be mistaken for a quotation from the part of +Vindice. This explanation, he trusted, would suffice to exonerate his +original view from any charge of haste or rashness; especially as he had +now completely given it up, and adopted one (if possible) more +impregnably based on internal and external evidence. + +Mr. C. was not unnaturally surprised and indignant to find his position +as to Romeo and Lord Burghley barely indicated, and the notice given of +the arguments by which it was supported so docked and curtailed as to +convey a most inadequate conception of their force. Among the chief +points of his argument were these: that the forsaken Rosaline was +evidently intended for the late Queen Mary, during whose reign Cecil had +notoriously conformed to the observances of her creed, though ready on +the accession of Elizabeth to throw it overboard at a day's notice; (it +was not to be overlooked that the friar on first hearing the announcement +of this change of faith is made earnestly to remonstrate, prefacing his +reproaches with an invocation of two sacred names--an invocation peculiar +to Catholics;) that the resemblance between old Capulet and Henry VIII. +is obvious to the most careless reader; his oath of "God's bread!" +immediately followed by the avowal "it makes me mad" is an unmistakable +allusion to the passions excited by the eucharistic controversy; his +violence towards Juliet at the end of the third act at once suggests the +alienation of her father's heart from the daughter of Anne Boleyn; the +self-congratulation on her own "stainless" condition as a virgin +expressed by Juliet in soliloquy (Act iii. Sc. 2) while in the act of +awaiting her bridegroom conveys a furtive stroke of satire at the similar +vaunt of Elizabeth when likewise meditating marriage and preparing to +receive a suitor from the hostile house of Valois. It must be +unnecessary to point out the resemblance or rather the identity between +the character and fortune of Paris and the character and fortune of +Essex, whose fate had been foreseen and whose end prefigured by the poet +with almost prophetic sagacity. To the far-reaching eye of Shakespeare +it must have seemed natural and inevitable that Paris (Essex) should fall +by the hand of Romeo (Burghley) immediately before the monument of the +Capulets where their common mistress was interred alive--immediately, +that is, 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 one already buried with her fathers, though yet living in a +state of suspended animation under the influence of a deadly narcotic +potion administered by the friends of Romeo--by the partisans, that is, +of the Cecilian policy. The Nurse was not less evidently designed to +represent the Established Church. Allusions to the marriage of the +clergy are profusely scattered through her speeches. Her deceased +husband was probably meant for Sir Thomas More--"a merry man" to the last +moment of his existence--who might well be supposed by a slight poetic +license to have foreseen in the infancy of Elizabeth her future +backsliding and fall from the straight path "when she came to age." The +passing expression of tenderness with which the Nurse refers to his +memory--"God be with his soul!"--implies at once the respect in which the +name of the martyr Chancellor was still generally held, and the lingering +remains of Catholic tradition which still made a prayer for the dead rise +naturally to Anglican lips. On the other hand, the strife between +Anglicans and Puritans, the struggle of episcopalian with Calvinistic +reformers, was quite as plainly typified in the quarrel between the Nurse +and Mercutio, in which the Martin Marprelate controversy was first +unmistakably represented on the stage. The "saucy merchant, that was so +full of his ropery," with his ridicule of the "stale" practice of Lenten +fasting and abstinence, his contempt for "a Lenten pie," and his +preference for a flesh diet as "very good meat in Lent," is clearly a +disciple of Calvin; and the impotence of the Nurse, however scandalised +at the nakedness of his ribald profanity, to protect herself against it +by appeal to reason or tradition, is dwelt upon with an emphasis +sufficient to indicate the secret tendency of the poet's own sympathies +and convictions. In Romeo's attempt at conciliation, and his poor excuse +for Mercutio (which yet the Nurse, an emblem of the temporising and +accommodating pliancy of episcopalian Protestantism, shows herself only +too ready to accept as valid) as "one that God hath made, for himself to +mar,"--the allusion here is evidently to the democratic and revolutionary +tendencies of the doctrine of Knox and Calvin, with its ultimate +developments of individualism and private judgment--we recognise the note +of Burghley's lifelong policy and its endeavour to fuse the Protestant or +Puritan party with the state Church of the Tudors as by law established. +The distaste of Elizabeth's bishops for such advances, their flutter of +apprehension at the daring and their burst of indignation at the +insolence of the Calvinists, are significantly expressed in terms which +seem to hint at a possible return for help and protection to the shelter +of the older faith and the support of its partisans. "An 'a speak +anything against me, I'll take him down an 'a were lustier than he is, +and twenty such Jacks;" (the allusion here is again obvious, to the +baptismal name of John Calvin and John Knox, if not also to the popular +byword of Jack Presbyter;) "and if I cannot," (here the sense of +insecurity and dependence on foreign help or secular power becomes +transparent) "I'll find those that shall." She disclaims communion with +the Protestant Churches of the continent, with Amsterdam or 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's the fairer face"; we +may take this to be a symbol of the form of episcopal consecration still +retained in the Anglican Church as a cover for its separation from +Catholicism), is undoubtedly meant for Whitgift, Archbishop of +Canterbury; the name Peter, as applied to a menial who will stand by and +suffer every knave to use the Church at his pleasure, but is ready to +draw as soon as another man if only he may be sure of having the secular +arm of the law on his side, implies a bitter sarcasm on the intruding +official of state then established by law as occupant of a see divorced +from its connection with that of the apostle. The sense of instability +natural to an institution which is compelled to rely for support on +ministers who are themselves dependent on the state whose pay they draw +for power to strike a blow in self-defence could hardly be better +expressed than by the solemn and piteous, almost agonised asseveration; +"Now, afore God, I am so vexed, that every part about me quivers." To +Shakespeare, it cannot be doubted, the impending dissolution or +dislocation of the Anglican system in "every part" by civil war and +religious discord must even then have been but too ominously evident. + +If further confirmation could be needed of the underlying significance of +allusion traceable throughout this play, it might amply be supplied by +fresh reference to the first scene in which the Nurse makes her +appearance on the stage, and is checked by Lady Capulet in the full tide +of affectionate regret for her lost husband. We can well imagine Anne +Boleyn cutting short the regrets of some indiscreet courtier for Sir +Thomas More in the very words of the text; + + Enough of this; I pray thee, hold thy peace. + +The "parlous knock" which left so big a lump upon the brow of the infant +Juliet is evidently an allusion to the declaration of Elizabeth's +illegitimacy while yet in her cradle. The seal 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 forsake Romeo +for Paris indicates the bias of the hierarchy in favour of Essex--"a +lovely gentleman"--rather than of the ultra-Protestant policy of +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 had been +enabled to verify within the limits of a single play. They would suffice +to give an idea of the process by which, when applied in detail to every +one of Shakespeare's plays, he trusted to establish the secret history +and import of each, not less than the general sequence and significance +of all. Further instalments of this work would probably be issued in the +forthcoming or future Transactions of the Newest Shakespeare Society; and +it was confidently expected that the final monument of his research when +thoroughly completed and illustrated by copious appendices, would prove +as worthy as any work of mere English scholarship could hope to be of a +place beside the inestimable commentaries of Gervinus, Ulrici, and the +Polypseudocriticopantodapomorosophisticometricoglossematographicomaniacal +Company for the Confusion of Shakespeare and Diffusion of Verbiage +(Unlimited). + +CHIMAERA BOMBINANS IN VACUO. + + +NOTE. + + +Mindful of the good old apologue regarding "the squeak of the real pig," +I think it here worth while to certify the reader of little faith, that +the more incredibly impudent absurdities above cited are not so much or +so often the freaks of parody or the fancies of burlesque as select +excerpts and transcripts of printed and published utterances from the +"pink soft litter" of a living brood--from the reports of an actual +Society, issued in an abridged and doubtless an emasculated form through +the columns of a weekly newspaper. One final and unapproachable +instance, one transcendant and pyramidal example of classical taste and +of critical scholarship, I did not venture to impair by transference from +those columns and transplantation into these pages among humbler +specimens of minor monstrosity. Let it stand here once more on record as +"a good jest for ever"--or rather as the best and therefore as the worst, +as the worst and therefore as the best, of all possible bad jests ever to +be cracked between this and the crack of doom. Sophocles, said a learned +member, was the proper parallel to Shakespeare among the ancient +tragedians: AEschylus--hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth!--_AEschylus +was only a Marlowe_. + +The hand which here transcribes this most transcendant utterance has +written before now many lines in verse and in prose to the honour and +glory of Christopher Marlowe: it has never--be the humble avowal thus +blushingly recorded--it has never set down as the writer's opinion that +he was only an AEschylus. In other words, it has never registered as my +deliberate and judicial verdict the finding that he was only the equal of +the greatest among all tragic and all prophetic poets; of the man who +combined all the light of the Greeks with all the fire of the Hebrews; +who varied at his will the revelation of the single gift of Isaiah with +the display of the mightiest among the manifold gifts of Shakespeare. + + + + +Footnotes. + + +{30} Reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his beautiful and valuable edition of +Greene's works. + +{33} One thing is certain: that damnable last scene at which the gorge +rises even to remember it is in execution as unlike the crudest phase of +Shakespeare's style 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 tolerably good verse. + +{42} It is not the least of Lord Macaulay's offences against art that he +should have contributed the temporary weight of his influence as a critic +to the support of so ignorant and absurd a tradition of criticism as that +which classes the great writer here mentioned with the brutal if "brawny" +Wycherley--a classification almost to be paralleled with that which in +the days of our fathers saw fit to couple together the names of Balzac +and of Sue. Any competent critic will always recognise in _The Way of +the World_ one of the glories, in _The Country Wife_ one of the +disgraces, of dramatic and of English literature. The stains discernible +on the masterpiece of Congreve are trivial and conventional; the mere +conception of the other man's work displays a mind so prurient and +leprous, uncovers such an unfathomable and unimaginable beastliness of +imagination, that in the present age at least he would probably have +figured as a virtuous journalist and professional rebuker of poetic vice +or artistic aberration. + +{63} Since this passage first went to press, I have received from Dr. +Grosart the most happy news that he has procured a perfect copy of this +precious volume, and will shortly add it to his occasional issues of +golden waifs and strays forgotten by the ebb-tide of time. Not even the +disinterment of Robert Chester's "glorified" poem, with its appended +jewels of verse from Shakespeare's very hand and from others only less +great than Shakespeare's, all now at last reset in their strange original +framework, was a gift of greater price than this. + +{89} Compare with Beaumont's admirable farce of Bessus the wretched +imitation of it attempted after his death in the _Nice Valour_ of +Fletcher; whose proper genius was neither for pure tragedy nor broad +farce, but for high comedy and heroic romance--a field of his own +invention; witness _Monsieur Thomas_ and _The Knight of Malta_: while +Beaumont has approved himself in tragedy all but the worthiest disciple +of Shakespeare, in farce beyond all comparison the aptest pupil of +Jonson. He could give us no _Fox_ or _Alchemist_; but the inventor of +Bessus and Calianax was worthy of the esteem and affection returned to +him by the creator of Morose and Rabbi Busy. + +{92} A desperate attempt has been made to support the metrical argument +in favour of Fletcher's authorship by the production of a list in which +such words as _slavery, emperor, pitying, difference_, and even +_Christians_, were actually registered as trisyllabic terminations. To +such unimaginable shifts are critics of the finger-counting or syllabic +school inevitably and fatally reduced in the effort to establish by rule +of thumb even so much as may seem verifiable by that rule in the province +of poetical criticism. Prosody is at best no more than the skeleton of +verse, as verse is the body of poetry; while the gain of such painful +labourers in a field they know not how to till is not even a skeleton of +worthless or irrelevant fact, but the shadow of such a skeleton reflected +in water. It would seem that critics who hear only through their fingers +have not even fingers to hear with. + +{108} "La dynastie du bon sens, inauguree dans Panurge, continuee dans +Sancho Panca, tourne a mal et avorte dans Falstaff." (_William +Shakespeare_, deuxieme partie, livre premier, ch. ii,) + +{125} Possibly some readers may agree with my second thoughts, in +thinking that one exception may here be made and some surprise be here +expressed at Shakespeare's rejection of Sly's memorable query--"When will +the fool come again, Sim?" It is true that he could well 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 own Sly'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) +the author quotes a passage from "the induction to _A Warning for Fair +Women_, 1599 (to which Shakespeare most assuredly contributed)." It will +be seen that I do not shrink from admitting the full weight of authority +which can be thrown into the scale against my own opinion. To such an +assertion from the insolent organs of pretentious ignorance I should be +content with the simple rejoinder that Shakespeare most assuredly did +nothing whatever of the sort; but to return such an answer in the present +case would be to write myself down--and that in company to which I should +most emphatically object--as something very decidedly more--and +worse--than an ass. + +{137} Not for the first and probably not for the last time I turn, with +all confidence as with all reverence, for illustration and confirmation +of my own words, to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and +long lamented fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final +estimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in the +intellectual force of Honore de Balzac could only have been taken by the +inevitable intuition and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles +Baudelaire. Nothing could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the +distinction indicated in my text between unimaginative realism and +imaginative reality. + +"I have many a time been astonished that to pass for an observer should +be Balzac's great popular title to fame. To me it had always seemed that +it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. All +his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated himself. +All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the highest of +the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in his _Human +Comedy_ are 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 them to 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 outer +world presented themselves to his mind's eye in strong relief and with a +telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures; he +has blackened their shadows and intensified their lights. Besides, his +prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to see +everything, to bring everything to sight, to guess everything, to make +others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly the +principal lines, so as to preserve the perspective of the whole. He +reminds me sometimes of those etchers who are never satisfied with the +biting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines the main +scratches of the plate. From this astonishing natural disposition of +mind wonderful results have been produced. But this disposition is +generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More properly speaking, it is +exactly his great distinctive duality. But who can boast of being so +happily gifted, and of being able to apply a method which may permit him +to invest--and that with a sure hand--what is purely trivial with +splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? Now, he who does not, +to speak the truth, does no great thing." + +Nor was any very great thing done by the author of _A Warning for Fair +Women_. + +{141} I do not know or remember in the whole radiant range of +Elizabethan drama more than one parallel tribute to that paid in this +play by an English poet to the yet foreign art of painting, through the +eloquent mouth of this enthusiastic villain of genius, whom we might +regard as a more genuinely Titianic sort of Wainwright. The parallel +passage is that most lovely and fervid of all imaginative panegyrics on +this art, extracted by Lamb from the comedy of _Doctor Dodipoll_; which +saw the light or twilight of publication just eight years later than +_Arden of Feversham_. + +{154} I remember to have somewhere at some time fallen in with some +remark by some commentator to some such effect as this: that it would be +somewhat difficult to excuse the unwomanly violence of this demand. +Doubtless it would. And doubtless it would be somewhat more than +difficult to extenuate the unmaidenly indelicacy of Jeanne Darc. + +{179} What would at least be partly lust in another man is all but +purely hatred in Iago. + + Now I do love her too: + Not out of absolute lust, (though, peradventure, + I stand accountant for as great a sin) + But partly led to diet my revenge. + +For "partly" read "wholly," and for "peradventure" read "assuredly," and +the incarnate father of lies, made manifest in the flesh, here speaks all +but all the truth for once, to himself alone. + +{205} I add the proof in a footnote, so as to take up no more than a +small necessary space of my text with the establishment of a fact which +yet can 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 the +remarkable musical feat of turning a nightingale's note into a sparrow's. +The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a jest compared to +the mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands of Fletcher: who thereby +reduced the close of the first verse into agreement if not into +accordance with the close of his own. This appended verse, 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 their help +convince himself of the difference in metre here. But not only does the +last line, with unsolicited and literally superfluous liberality, offer +us a syllable over measure; the words are such as absolutely to defy +antiphonal repetition or reverberation of the three last in either line. +Let us therefore, like good scriptural scholars, according equally to the +letter and the spirit of the text, render unto Fletcher the things which +be Fletcher's, and unto Shakespeare the things which be Shakespeare's. + +{210} It is worth remark that in a still older sample of an older and +ruder form of play than can have been the very earliest mould in which +the pristine or pre-Shakespearean model of _Pericles_ was cast, the part +of Chorus here assigned to Gower was filled by a representative of his +fellow-poet Lydgate. + +{217} Except perhaps one little word of due praise for the pretty +imitation or recollection of his dead friend Beaumont rather than of +Shakespeare, in the description of the crazed girl whose "careless +tresses a wreath of bullrush rounded" where she sat playing with flowers +for emblems at a game of love and sorrow--but liker in all else to +Bellario by another fountain-side than to Ophelia by the brook of death. + +{220} On the 17th of September, 1864. + +{232} The once too celebrated crime which in this play was exhibited on +the public stage with the forcible fidelity of a wellnigh brutal realism +took 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 AEschylus. + +{237} Written in 1879. + +{239} Capell has altered this to "proud perfumes"; marking the change in +a note, with the scrupulous honesty which would seem to have usually +distinguished him from more daring and more famous editors. + +{245a} The feeble archaic inversion in this line is one among many small +signs which all together suffice, if not to throw back the date of this +play to the years immediately preceding the advent of Marlowe or the full +influence of his genius and example, yet certainly to mark it as an +instance of survival from that period of incomposite and inadequate +workmanship in verse. + +{245b} Or than this play to a genuine work of Shakespeare's. "Brick to +coral"--these three words describe exactly the difference in tone and +shade of literary colour. + +{246} Here for the first time we come upon a verse not unworthy of +Marlowe himself--a verse in spirit as in cadence recalling the deep +oceanic reverberations of his "mighty line," profound and just and simple +and single as a note of the music of the sea. But it would be hard if a +devout and studious disciple were never to catch one passing tone of his +master's habitual accent.--It may be worth while to observe that we find +here the same modulation of verse--common enough since then, but new to +the patient auditors of _Gorboduc_ and _Locrine_--which we find in the +finest passage of Marlowe's imperfect play of _Dido_, completed by Nash +after the young Master's untimely death. + + Why star'st thou in my face? If thou wilt stay, + Leap in my arms: mine arms are open wide: + If not--turn from me, and I'll turn from thee; + For though thou hast the power to say farewell, + I have not power to stay thee. + +But we may look long in vain for the like of this passage, taken from the +crudest and feeblest work of Marlowe, in the wide and wordy expanse of +_King Edward III_. + +{247} A pre-Shakespearean word of single occurrence in a single play 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 used +as a dissyllable; another note of archaic debility or insufficiency in +metre. + +{255} Yet another essentially non-Shakespearean word, though doubtless +once used 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 homo_ with whom I have no acquaintance, and with +whom (if we may judge of a great--or a little--unknown after the +appearance and the bearing of those who select him as a social sponsor +for themselves and their literary catechumens) I can most sincerely +assert that I desire to have none. + +{261} Surely, for _sweet'st_ we should read _swift'st_. + +{262a} This word occurs but once in Shakespeare's plays-- + + And speaking it, he wistly looked on me; + + (_King Richard II_. Act v. Sc. 4.) + +and in such a case, as in the previous instances of the words _invocate_ +and _endamagement_, a mere [Greek text] can carry no weight of 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 contemporary with his earlier years. + +{263b} This word was perhaps unnecessarily altered by our good Capell to +"tender." + +{264a} Yet another and a singular misuse of a word never so used or +misused by Shakespeare. + +{264b} Qu. Why, so is your desire: If that the law, etc.? + +{264c} _Sic_. I should once have thought it impossible that any mortal +ear could endure the shock of this unspeakable and incomparable verse, +and find in the passage which contains it an echo or a trace of the +"music, wit, and oracle" of Shakespeare. But in those days I had yet to +learn what manner of ears are pricked up to listen "when rank Thersites +opes his mastiff jaws" in criticism of Homer or of Shakespeare. In a +corner of the preface to an edition of "Shakspere" which bears on its +title-page the name (correctly spelt) of Queen Victoria's youngest son +prefixed to the name I have just transcribed, a small pellet of dry dirt +was flung upwards at me from behind by the "able editor" thus irritably +impatient to figure in public as the volunteer valet or literary lackey +of Prince Leopold. Hence I gathered the edifying assurance that this +aspirant to the honours of literature in livery had been reminded of my +humbler attempts in literature without a livery by the congenial music of +certain four-footed fellow-critics and fellow-lodgers of his own in the +neighbourhood of Hampstead Heath. Especially and most naturally had +their native woodnotes wild recalled to the listening biped (whom partial +nature had so far distinguished from the herd) the deep astonishment and +the due disgust with which he had discovered the unintelligible fact that +to men so ignorant of music or the laws of music in verse as my +presumptuous and pitiable self the test of metrical harmony lay not in an +appeal to the fingers but only in an appeal to the ear--"the ear which +he" (that is, which the present writer) "makes so much of--AND WHICH +SHOULD BE LONG TO MEASURE SHAKSPERE." Here then the great Sham +Shakespearean secret is out at last. Had I but known in time my lifelong +error in thinking that a capacity to estimate the refinements of word- +music was not to be gauged by length of ear, by hairiness of ear, or by +thickness of ear, but by delicacy of ear alone, I should as soon have +thought of measuring my own poor human organs against those of the +patriarch or leader of the herd as of questioning his indisputable right +to lay down the law to all who agree with his great fundamental +theorem--that the longest ear is the most competent to judge of metre. +_Habemus confitentem asinum_. + +{266} A Latin pun, or rather a punning Latinism, not altogether out of +Shakespeare's earliest 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 +composition of his Roman plays rather than his use of Hall and Holinshed +in the composition of his English histories, because Froissart is a model +more properly to be set against Plutarch than against Holinshed or Hall. + +{278} This brilliant idea has since been borrowed from the Chairman--and +that without acknowledgment--by one of those worthies whose mission it is +to make manifest that no burlesque invention of mere man's device can +improve upon the inexhaustible capacities of Nature as shown in the +production and perfection of the type irreverently described by Dryden as +'God Almighty's fool.' + +{279} This word was incomprehensibly misprinted in the first issue of +the Society's Report, where it appeared as "foulness." To prevent +misapprehension, the whole staff of printers was at once discharged. + +{291} When the learned member made use of this remarkable phrase he +probably had in his mind the suggestive query of Agnes, _si les enfants +qu'on fait se faisaient pas l'oreille_? But the flower of rhetoric here +gathered was beyond the reach of Arnolphe's innocent ward. 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