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APPLETONS' SCHOOL READERS,
CONSISTING OF FIVE BOOKS.
By v.. i i i niT Harms, I, I.. D,. Supt of Schools, St. Louis.
Mil | Andrew [. RtcKOFF. A, M,, Supt. of Instruction,
Cleveland, O, : and Mark BaILGY, A. M.. Instructor in
Elocution, Yale College.
Appletons' Fint Header Child '• «o. 80 p»g«-
Appletone' SoEcnd Reader. !2iuo 1 "
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popularity. During 1S79 a million copies were introduced
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of self-help, self-dependence, the habit of application), exer-
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LITERATURE PRIMERS,
Edited by J. R. Green, M.A.
SHAKSPERE.
1
'a^~^^~^^^m*MKimmmm*immmmmi^*am^^ammmm^mmimM
pterature $rimtrs.
Edited by John Richard Green, M.A.
SHAKSPERE.
BY
EDWARD DOWDENT, LL.D.
PROFESSOR OP ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN,
AUTHOR OF " SHAKSPERE, HIS MIND AND ART J A CRITICAL STUDY,"
NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON AND C^« K^^,
LITERATURE PRIMERS.
SHAKSPERE.
THE ELIZABETHAN DKAMA.
i. England in Shakspere's Youth.— In the
closing years of the sixteenth century the life
of England ran high. The revival of learning had
enriched the national mind with a store of new
ideas and images ; the reformation of religion had
been accomplished, and its fruits were now secure ;
three conspiracies against the Queen's life had re-
cently been foiled, and her rival, the Queen of Scots,
had perished on the scaffold ; the huge attempt of
Spain against the independence of England had been
defeated by the gallantry of English seamen, aided
by the winds of heaven. English adventurers were
exploring untravelled lands and distant oceans ;
English citizens were growing in wealth and im-
portance ; the farmers made the soil give up twice
its former yield ; the nobility, shattered in the long
wars of the Roses, had been created anew, and now
Ithered around the Queen as their centre. (See
r. J. Green's Primer: English Uislory.\ Wssv«ress.
a temper to think Www\ \\fe, -wSsw **■ ***S
d its passions, a vetv Vftvwfc"* *^ XBM= ^; "«&.
ng. They did not turn awaq SioWOns"*
L««S.^* ssSS& -
6 SHAKSPERE. [chap.
despise it in comparison with a heavenly country, as
did many of the finest souls in the Middle Ages ;
they did not, like the writers of the age of Queen
Anne, care only for "the town:" it was man they
cared for, and the whole of manhood — its good and
evil, its greatness and grotesqueness, its laughter and
its tears.
When men cared thus about human life, their
imagination craved living pictures and visions of it.
They liked to represent to themselves men and
women in all passionate and mirthful aspects and
circumstances of life. Sculpture, which the Greeks
so loved, would not have satisfied them, for it is too
simple and too calm ; music would not have been
sufficient, for it is too purely an expression of feelings,
and says too little about actions and events. The
art which suited the temper of their imagination
was the drama. In the drama they saw men and
women, alive, in action, in suffering, changing for
ever from mood to mood, from attitude to attitude ;
they saw these men and women solitary, conversing
with their own hearts — in pairs and in groups, acting
one upon another ; in multitudes, swayed hither and
thither by their leaders.
2. Pre-Shaksperian Drama. — The drama had
been at first connected with the Church. It repre-
sented, both to instruct and to amuse the people,
events of sacred history and of the lives of saints,
or threw into the form of a play some moral allegory,
enlivened by grotesque incidents. Out of this rude
early drama had grown, by the time that Shakspere
began to write, three or four divergent branches.
(a) Allegorical plays — fashionable at Court — were still
written ; but the allegories instead of treating a theme
from Christian morals were in general founded upon
classical mythology, and were often meant as elaborate
compliments to the Queen or some great nobles.
&) 7 here were tragedies, and in some of tYvesfc ete-
Gnts of rea * tragic grandeur existed ; but t\\^ w^
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.
marred by much crudeness and extravagance, by
revelling in coarse horrors of mere violence and blood.
(e) There were comedies, at times not without a por-
tion of true grace and beauty, but often degenerating
into vulgar buffoonery and the antics of a clown.
((/) There were historical plays, in which some of
the patriotic feeling of Englishmen, and their interest
in our national annals, embodied themselves ; but
these too often spread out into a series of loosely
connected scenes ; they lacked unity of subject and
coherence of form. Some of Shakspere's predecessors,
or fellow- pi ay wrights, who made their mark earlier
than he, had given each some gift of his own to
the drama, and helped to bring it forward to the
point at which Shakkpere took it up ; but none of
them was able to raise tragedy, comedy, and history
out of their crudities and puerilities into truly great
and noble forms of art. John Lyly had shown how
a bright and lively dialogue can be written in prose.
George Peete had produced dramatic verse of a sweet
but monotonous melody. A romantic spirit was intro-
duced into English comedy by Robert Greene; over
his poetry breathes the fresh air of English meadows ;
his style is more free, more bright, light, and natural
than that of any preceding dramatic poet. Above all,
much was due to Christopher Mnr/owe. His genius
was essentially of a tragic cast; from his veins the
life-blood of passion had flowed into the drama of
England, and forthwith it lost its timidity, and
conscious of strange new force and fire ; in his
gedieswas first heard upon a public stage that measure
which is the express voice in our poetry of dra natic
feeling — blank verse. (See Mr. Brooke's Primer
English Literature, pp. 74-82.)
3. Theatres and Actors.— The companies of
actors sought protection and patronage fewa. >&«
Queen, or from some grew, -no\>\e, wtA ^kkssiSss^
styled themselves by suc\\ tvaroes. as. " "&* *^^
servants," "the Eatl oS IjcwwsMS** am****-
8 SHAKSPERE. [chap.
Lord Chamberlain's servants." When a command
was given they played at Court for a circle of
aristocratic spectators. More frequently they played
before a mixed audience of high and low in some
inn-yard, or in one of the London theatres. Of
these the first was built by James Burbage (father
of the great actor Richard Burbage, who took the
chief part in several of Shakspere's plays), in the year
1576. It was erected " in the fields," in the parish of
Shoreditch, and was named " The Theatre." Almost
at the same time, and in the same locality, rose a
second theatre, known as "The Curtain," from the
name of the piece of ground upon which it stood.
While the Queen, the Court, and the pleasure-loving
part of the populace favoured and supported the
stage, it was looked on with hostility by devout Puri-
tans, and by the civic authorities, the Lord Mayor
and Corporation of London. The gathering of
crowds led to occasional brawls, in which the London
apprentices did not fail to display their prowess.
Public morality, it was said, suffered through temp-
tations offered by the place and the occasion. In
times of plague, stricken persons and persons who had
but partially recovered, carried infection with them
to the theatres, and so spread the sickness. When
moved thereto, the players dared to satirise eminent
living persons upon the stage. On Sundays folk were
enticed away from the congregation of saints to the
devil's congregation at the playhouse. So argued the
city authorities, and with them some sober-minded
men and women of the Puritan way of thinking. As
a consequence the players were glad to erect their
theatres in some easily accessible place just beyond
the boundary of the Lord Mayor's jurisdiction. To
the theatre " in the fields " the common people could
easily walk ; gentlefolk could ride, and have their
Worses held by some theatrical underling at the door
while the performance was taking pVace. To \W
theatres erected at a Ja.er time on t\\e TtoxiV*vte %
nist
r:
timi
han
S
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.
Southwark, gentlemen would go in one of the boats
plied by the Thames watermen ; the rest would choose
the more circuitous route bv London Bridge.
4. Performance of a Play. — Within the theatre
a miscellaneous crowd assembled. Most commonly
the performance began at three o'clock and lasted
from two to three hours. In the public theatres the
centre of the building was open to the sky and
without seats, only the stage and the gallery being
roofed, and admission to the open space, or "yard,"
cost from one penny or twopence to sixpence, while as
much as a shilling, (wo shillings, or half-a-crown was
given to obtain a place in the best parts of the house.
The private theatres were fully roofed, and during a
performance the interior was lit with torches. Upon
the rush-strewn stage sat young gallants, who drank
and smoked and joked while they waited for the ap-
pearance of the black -robed Prologue. Below, appren-
tices, tradesmen, sailors, and low women crushed and
swayed, cracked nuts, and fought for bitten apples.
If ladies appeared in the "rooms," or boxes, it was
considered correct that they should conceal their faces
behind masks. In due time a flourish of trumpets
announced that the play was to begin, and a flag was
hung out from the top of the building. Upon the
trumpet's third sounding the prologue was delivered,
the curtain divided and drew back, and the actors
were discovered. They appeared in costumes which
were often costly, but which made slight pretension to
historical propriety. Of movable scenery there was
stage was hung with arras, and overhead
blue canopy represented "the heavens." Some-
les when a tragedy was to be enacted the stage-
ingings were black. At the back of the stage was a
balcony which served for many purposes— "it was
inner room, upper room, window, balcony, battlements,
hill-side, Mount Olympus, any \>\3.ce. \svWXtKm^"««*
ipposed to be separated from and above Mc\«. w* 15 * °
- main action." Here Ju\\et a^ca.te.4 V» ^^
SHAASPERE.
[CHAI
and probably here the play-king and play-queen i
Hamkt enacted their parts. A change of scene w
indicated by some suggestive piece of stage furnitu
— a bed to signify a bed-chamber; a table with pe;
upon it to signify a counting-house ; or, more simply,
a board bearing in large letters the name of the place
intended was brought upon the stage. Accordingly,
the dramatist might change the scene as often as h
pleased, or indulge in magnificent description, wither.
fear that a lessee would offer as an objection the ex-
pense of providing suitable scenery. While the play
was going forward the clown would amuse the audience
with extempore joking, not set down by the poet.
SUakspere disliked this traditional mode of providing
sport for the occupants of the yard or pit — the "ground-
lings," as they were called — and his Hamlet, when de-
livering his advice to the players, warns them against
such an abuse in their performance of the tragedy
which he commands them to present. (Act in. Sc. ii.
L. 41.) Between the acts there was dancing and singing,
and at the end of the play the clown put the audience
into good humour before they separated with a jig,
that is, a farcical song accompanied by dancing and
the music of his pipe or tabor. (See Twelfth Night,
end.) Sometimes a short epilogue was delivered.
(As You Like It, and Tempest, end.) Finally the
actors knelt and offered up a prayer for the Queen.
It is important to note that the female parts were
played by boys or young men. The parts of Desde-
mona and Imogen, of Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth
could not be entrusted to a great actress, as they have
been since the Restoration, but were left to the mercy
of some youth with uncracked voice. (See Antony and
Cleopatra, Act V. Sc. ii. L, 220 ; Hamlet, Act II. Sc. ii.
L 4-n ; As You Like It, Epilogue.) A further refine-
ment of art ma demanded from these young actors
when they were required to represent a girl who has
assumed the disguise of male attire, as happens with
SAxispcre's Viola, with Jessica and PotUa, wOk'SaM*
ng
»1
cf
ih.
;
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.
lind, will) Imogen; it was necessary that they should
at once pretend to be and avoid becoming that which
they actually were.
5. Writers of Plays sometimes Actors— In
several instances, though not iu all, the writers of
plays were also actors. Thus they studied their public
from the boards, acquired an instinctive feeling for
what would hit the general taste, and for what would
only perplex or offend, and gained a mastery over
the secrets of stage effect. Certain qualities, it was
found, were indispensable in a play which was in-
tended to give immediate pleasure ; and, on the other
hand, many particulars which would have seemed to
a writer in his closet of essential importance, were
found to be matters of indifference in an acting play
"iat aimed at success rather than scholarly or artistic
ictitude. Attaining what was all-important, the
ioet was careless about much beside, and in some
:es Shakspere does not scruple to use devices for
producing a kind of stage-perspective of time and
space which, if examined without reference to the
purposes of stage effect, seem mere blunders, just as
in some great painting a needful piece of colour, if not
looked at from the right point of view, may appear an
unintelligible blot. The movement and spectacle
upon the stage is never despised by Shakspere. Even
in Hamlet, which has rightly been named a "tragedy
of thought," what an impressive series of appeals to
the senses is made from first lo last — the starlit night
upon the platform at Elsinore, haunted by a majestic
spirit from the grave, succeeded by the brilliancy of
the Danish Court surrounding the sad, black-robed
figure of Prince Hamlet, and so on, past that scene in
which the crazed Ophelia appears singing her snatches
of song and sharing her flowers, to the close, where
the murderers and the murdered man alike fall
leath, and the " quarry cries tmViaNoOt?
6. Plays considered as Vyo^^ .— ^e*-
a play usually sold it to tW fc«s»*. , »*- « fflB '
SHAKSPERE.
to a kind of broker who stood between players and
authors, buying from the one, and selling, so as him-
self to profit by the transaction, to the other. Such
was Philip Henslowe, a dyer, pawnbroker, theatrical
lessee and speculator, who during the years of Shak-
spere's authorship had many dramatic poets in his
pay. His diary still exists, and from it we learn that
the highest price given by him for a play before the
year 1600 was .£3; the lowest sum is ^4; while for an
embroidered velvet cloak no less than ^16 is given,
and £4 \\s. for a pair of hose. After 1600 the price
of a play rose to £20 if the dramatist was one of
repute. Not infrequently the plays, for which such
• moderate prices were given, had been the work of
two or more hands, a sudden demand for a new
play inducing the company to set several authors
to work, in order that time might be gained. Or the
double authorship was the result of a more lasting
alliance between two writers of kindred or comple-
mentary genius, who found that they could be helpful
to one another in this way. Or, again, it arose from
»a later poet going over the work of some earlier
dramatist and recasting bis play, or adding to it cer-
tain scenes which might serve to give it the charm
of at least partial novelty. The theatrical company
having bought the manuscript of a play were naturally
desirous to keen it for their own uses upon the stage,
and were unwilling that it should pass into the hands
of a bookseller, and be published. But the lovers of
the drama liked to be able to buy and read a popular
play; and accordingly piratical publishers tried in
some dishonest way to come at the manuscript. When
that was impossible they sent reporters to the play-
house, who copied down the words as they fell from
the actors' lips, but sometimes so imperfectly that gaps
in the reporters' copies had to be supplied by some
mercenary scribbler, who generally succeeded in spoil-
'ng not only the sound but the sense o( such paswv^a
*» Ac attempted to handle. Such an impetfccX ifc\KK\.
it.] THE LIFE OF SHAKSPERE.
of Hamltt, in an earlier form of the play than that
which it finally assumed, we possess, with passages
stupidly inserted by an unknown hand, or reproduced
from an imperfect recollection of what Shakspere had
written.
CHAPTER II.
THE LIFE OF SHAKSPERE.
7- Stratford. Birth of Shakspere. —
wickshire has been named by Shakspere's
temporary and fellow-poet, Michael Drayton, "the
heart of England." The country around Stratford
presents the perfection of quiet English scenery ; it is
remarkable for its wealth of lovely wild-flowers, for its
deep meadows on each side of the tranquil Avon, and
for its rich, sweet woodlands. The town itself, in
Shakspere's time, numbered about 1400 inhabitants;
a town of scattered timber houses, possessing two
chief buildings— the stately church by the river-side,
and the Guildhall, where companies of players would
at times perform, when the corporation secured their
services. Flood and fire were the chief dangers of the
town. The quiet river often rose angrily in autum
and left disease behind it. The plague, in its course,
did not turn aside from Stratford. Here, and probably
in a low-ceiled room of a house in Henley Street,
William Shakspere was bom, in April, 1564. Upon
what day we cannot be certain ; but upon the 26th he
was baptised ; and there is a tradition that the day of
his death was the anniversary of his birthday. Allow-
ing for the difference hetween old stvle asA tow.,
April 33rd corresponds \vil\\ out i,x4 «\ "'sfcs^.
s. Shakspere's Patw&a&t. — J<*» Ska ^"-i*
father of the future diamuXwX, -Mas. *- -S^v^
)f the
:umn,
)urse,
bably
- SHAKSPERE.
burgess of Stratford. He made and sold gloves,
farmed land, and though he knew not how to write
his name, became an important public person of the
town, tasting ale for his fellow- burgesses, keeping
the Queen's peace, imposing fines upon offenders,
rising in course of time to the honourable posts of
chamberlain, alderman, and high bailiff. He married,
in 1557, Alary Arden, daughter of his landlord, who
had died about a year before, leaving Mary a consider-
able piece of landed property in possession (including
a farm at Ashbies), and one much more valuable in
reversion. TheArdens were Warwickshire yen try since
before the Conquest, and two of the family had held
places of distinction in the household of Henry VII.
The first child and the second of John and Mary Shak-
spere were girls, who died while infants; the third —
their first-bom son — was to live, in spite of the plague
which desolated Stratford during the year of his birth,
and was to write the plays and poems that we know.
Other children followed : a daughter, who survived
William Shakspere, and is remembered in his will ;
another daughter, who died early ; and two sons-
Gilbert, who is said to have lived until the Restoration,
and to have talked as an old man of his great brother's
impersonation of Adam in As You Like [t (but this is
doubtful) ; and Edmund, who became an actor, and
died in London in the year 1607.
9. Schooling and Recreations.— To the Free
t Grammar School of Stratford William Shakspere was
sent, we may be sure, to learn what neither his
father nor his mother could teach. There he was
taught not only English, but some Latin, and perhaps
a little Greek. The amount of Shakspere's classi-
cal learning has been described by his more scholarly
fellow-playwright, Ben Jonson, as " small Latin and
less Greek;" and it is certain that, in using Greek
.ind Latin authors for the purposes of his \itavs, he
weal to translations rather than to the on'igwvAa. "Sw.\.
Ut he had got by heart his Lily's Latin Grammar,
and was acquainted with the rudiments of that lan-
guage is almost certain ; and it has been noticed that
he uses several English words — as, for example, the
continents of rivers for containing banks, quantity lor
value, and others — in senses which would not occur
to one who was absolutely ignorant of Latin. After-
wards — perhaps during his London life- — Shakspere
to have learned something of French, and
possibly also of Italian.
In the first year in which Shakspere could have been
admitted to the Free Grammar School, his father
became chief alderman of Stratford. The corpora-
tion seem to have welcomed the players who occa-
sionally visited the town. Now and again suras of
money are paid by the chamberlain to "the Earl
of Leicester's players," " my Lord of Warwick's
players," and "the Earl of Worcester's players."
The boy, his father's eldest son, may have been
taken to see the entertainments in the Guildhall.
Coventry is not very far distant from Stratford ; and it
is not impossible that Shakspere, as a boy or youth,
may have watched the guilds set up the pageants ii
the streets of that ancient city at the festival of Corpus
Christi ; may have observed Herod with his painted
mask and violent bearing (Hamlet, Act III. Sc.
I* 16), and the "black souls"— the souls of the
damned — in their garb of black and yellow stripes
whom, in Hairy V. (Act II. Sc. hi. L. 42-44), the Ilea
upon Bardolph's fiery nose is compared. In the sum-
mer of 1575 Queen Elizabeth made her famous visit
to Kenilworth, and was entertained by Leicester with 1
splendid and varied ceremonies and spectacles. From
-Stratford it is only a few hours' walk to Kenilworth ;
Shak^pere's father might ride across with the boy
before him. And a celebrated passage in A Mid-
summer Night's Dream (Act II. St. \. Y* \$»-"*»V.
Where Oueron describes to ¥v\ck soto& ^mn^ 1 **^" 1 *^
seen, so accurately depicts some n - *
fen a:
named after his friends Hamnet Sadler and 1;
Most probably during the poet's London life Anne
with his children stayed in Stratford. It was in Strat-
ford, in 1596, that Hamnet, his only son, was buried,
But though Shakspere chose to leave his wife and
children in the country, while he himself was toiling
in the great city, a tradition records that he paid a
yearly visit to his home; there is no doubt that he
toiled with the purpose of returning — as he actually
did — to his native town, there, with his wife and
jhters about him, to spend the later years of his
life. In Shakspere's will the only mention of his wife
occurs in an interlineation, by which is bequeathed to
" my second-best bed with the furniture ; " she
was, however, legally provided for, having as widow
the right of dower in Shakspere's freehold property.
The bequest of a bed was surely not meant as a part-
ing insult from her husband ; we must rather under-
stand it as meant to gratify some womanly attachment
to a piece of household goods, founded, it may be, on
old and tender associations. From the poet's writings
a certain inference can be drawn with regard to his
marriage. In A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act I.
Sc. i. L. 137) mention is made of love " misgraffed in
respect of years," as a cause of trouble in love'e
course ; and in Twelfth Night (Act II. Sc iv. L. 30-
40) may be found a much more noteworthy passage,
kin which the Duke speaks to Viola about the risk a
woman older than her husband runs of losing his
affection. Such evidence as Shakspere's Sonnets
afford points in the same direction. On the other
hand, there is no bitterness, open or covert, against
women in general, or any particular type
women in Shakspere's writings. Even the shrewish
women of some of his early plays, introduced for comic
purposes, are at heart loving and loyal, like Adriana
of 7%s _ Ceme/fy 0/ Errors ; or onU; outrageously
spoilt children, but not incapable of being, recVivmeo..
»ke Katharina in T/ie Taming of the Shrew. ,k
to
an
hi
an
be
di:
ne.
I'u
n.] THE LIFE OF SHAKSPERE. 19
observable, however, that all through his plays Shak-
spere shows a peculiar comprehension of the situation
of a woman who, throwing aside conventional bvit not
real modesty, ventures upon certain greater or less
advances towards the man she loves. From Juliet to
Miranda, a series of Shaksperian heroines could be
named, who share, as it were, in their own wooing,
without once forfeiting their ardent purity of soul.
Upon the whole it seems probable that, while the
union of Shakspere and his wife was not one of the
rare, flawless, married unions, yet it was founded at
first upon strong mutual attraction ; and that, if a.
period of estrangement, slight or serious, intervened,
there was found on both sides substantial worth
enough to make it natural that their lives should
come really together again, and that it should be
indeed good for each to accept things as they were.
i2. Deer -Stealing. Leaves Stratford.—
The immediate cause of Shakspere's departure from
Stratford is thus told circumstantially by Rome, his
first biographer : " He had, by a misfortune common
enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company ; and,
amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of
deer-stealing, engaged him, more than once, in robbing
a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlcote,
near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that
nntletnan, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and
in order to revenge the ill-usage, he made a ballad
upon him. And though this, probably the first, essay
of his poetry be lost, yet it is said to have been so very
bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him,
to that degree, that he was obliged to leave his business
and family ill Warwickshire for some time, and shelter
himself in London." Some of the details of this story
are undoubtedly incorrect, but there is good reason to
believe that a foundation of truth uxw&wV** -fet \vi-
dith'ii. Sir T. Lucy was at\ wRVOtta-'e*- ^wsi'w ^v^
neighbourhood — a member. cA Ya.i\\a«vmV «c* °^ ^^
*~ uitaa party (with which out &wa^>sfc c3Xl -
SHAA'SPERE. [chap.
have been in sympathy), and about the time of this
alleged deer-stealing frolic, was concerned in framing
a bill in Parliament for the preservation of game.
Although he did not possess what is properly a park
at Charlcote, he had deer; Shakspere and his com-
panions may have had a struggle with Sir T.Lucy's
men. A verse of the ballad ascribed to the young
poacher has been traditionally handed down, and in
it the writer puns upon the name Lucy—" O lowsie
Lucy" — in a way sufficiently insulting. It is note-
worthy that in the first scene of The Merry Wives of
Windsor, Justice Shallow is introduced as highly in-
censed against Sir John Fal staff, who has beaten his
men, killed his deer, and broke open his lodge ; the
Shallows, like Shakspere's old antagonist, have " luces"
in their coat-of-arms, and the Welsh parson admirably
misunderstands the word — " the dozen white louses
do become an old coat well." It can hardly be
doubted that when this scene was written, Shakspere
■ grudge against the Lucy family, and in
making them ridiculous before the Queen he may
have had an amused sense that he was now obtaining
> for his boyish lampoon, little dreamed of
when it was originally put into circulation among the
good folk of Stratford.
13. Early Years in London. Greene's Allu-
sion. — From the baptism of his twins, in February,
1584-85, we hear nothing of Shakspere (except the
mention of his name in an action in the Queen's Bench,
brought by his father against John Lambert, who now
held the Ashbies property), until he is spoken of in 1592
as a successful actorand author. The " Queen's Players"
came to Stratford in 1587. Then perhaps it was that
Shakspere decided to leave his native town, and seek
his fortune in the world of I guidon. A story, alleged
to have come from Sir W. Davenant, that Shakspere's
first employment in connection. with the theatre, was
th-it of holding the horses of those w\io came Vs \\\e
&Vi we may dismiss as probably myftneaX. "Wtas
THE LIFE OF SHAKSPERE,
been maintained that a passage in Spenser's Tears of
' : Muses (1590-91}, where the Muse of Comedy
laments that
Our pleasant Willy, ah ! is dead of late,
refers to some temporary cessation of Shakspere from
dramatic authorship ; but the probability is that some-
one else is meant, perhaps John Lily, perhaps the
comic actor, Tarleton, who had but lately died when
Spenser wrote the poem. The first certain reference
to Shakspere which has been discovered is that of the
dramatist Robert Greene in his Greenes Groatsworth
of Wit bought with a Million of Repe?itatue, a pamphlet
written by its unhappy author upon his deathbed, and
published immediately after Greene's death by his
executor, Henry Chet/le. Here the dying playwright,
addressing three of his fellow-authors, who have been
identified with Marlowe, Peele, and Nash (or Lodge),
warns them against putting any trust in players: "Yes,
trust them not : for there is an upstart Crow, beautified
with our feathers, that with his tygers heart wrapt in
a players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast
out a blanke verse as the best of you : and being a
sb$o\\ite Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit th
onely Shake-scene in a country." We have evidence
here that before Greene's death the players had been
turning from him to a rival poet who was also an actor,
who could write a swelling blank verse like Marlowe,
who turned his hand to everything, and made himself
useful in many ways to his company. Him Greene
hated, and he hoped that Marlowe and Nash might
hate him also. The words " beautified with our
feathers," probably mean no more than pranking him-
s an actor in the fine speeches of our plays, but
I he words " tygers heart wrapped in a players hide "
larody a line —
Oil tygets heart wrapt in a. ■Hinwi.Tls.Vi&e—
hich occurs in the True Tragedie of Richard, D***
SffAKSPEKE. four,
York, and is also found in the Third Part of Henry VI.,
this last being a recast, with additions and omissions,
of the True Tragedie. It has been suggested that in
quoting this line Greene reminds his friends that
Shakspere, in the Third Part of Henry /'/..had stolen
from an earlier play of which Greene himself, or Mar-
Ilowe, or both together were authors, and that therefore
for them a peculiar ground of resentment against
Shakspere existed.
14. Chettle's Reference to Shakspere.— Some
Ihree months later, in December, 1592, a pamphlet by
Henry Chcttle appeared, entitled Kind-Harts Dream.
It seems that Marlowe and Shakspere took offence
at passages in Greenes Groaitworih referring to
them. Chettle declares that as for one of them
(Marlowe), while he reverences his learning he has
nothing to answer for, and cares not ever to make his
acquaintance. To Shakspere he offers a liberal apology.
" The other [Shakspere] whome at that time 1 did
not so much spare as since I wish 1 had
I am as sory as if the original! fault had beene my
fault, because my selfe have seene his demeanor no
lesse civil], than he exelent in thequalitie he professes;
besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightnes
of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious
grace in writting, that aprooves his art." The word
" quality," it should be noted, was used in Shakspere's
time with special reference to the actor's profession ;
so that we here possess testimony to Shakspere's worth
as a man, to his excellence in his profession, and to
the friends and fame he had already acquired as a
writer.* If the poet whom Spenser speaks of in his
Colin Clout's Come Home Again, under the name of
Action be Shakspere — and though Colin Clou/was not
published until 1594, there are reasons for thinking
that it may have been written as early as rsgi — it is
interesting to see the " upstart crow " of the envious
* "Eac-liims," in the ijuotatiuiifruniGicUtc.tiiCMiiStYii^Vioft,
<* happy.
I
G
:
&
Greene recognised, by one so much greater than
Greene, as a young eagle in boldness and strength of
'it (Action = ActiW from Arras, an eagle).
And there thuugh las! nut least is Aetion ;
A gentler shepheid may no when be found :
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention,
Doth liki; him.-wli' huui rally sound.
Like himself," that is, like his name Sliake-speare ;
but the reference may be to Drayton, who had written
under the heroic name of Roii'Lir.d.
Southampton and Shakspere.— To the
oung Earl of Southampton, nine years junior to
imself — probably one of those persons of worship
'ho had come forward to vindicate Shakspere from
Greene's cspersions — the poet dedicated, in 1593,
Venus and Adonis, " the first heire of my invention."
It proved a distinguished literary success, and in the
following year, 1594, the Lucrtce appeared, with a
dedication to the same noble person, written, not in
terms of timid appeal, like the earlier dedication,
but in words of strong and confident affection.
"What I have done is yours; what 1 have to do is
yours ; being part of all I have, devoted yours." The
Earl, a generous and high-spirited youth, like those
young men who make bright the early comedies of
ShaSopero, had no doubt warmly recognised Shak-
spere's genius. There is a story, professing to have
:ome from Davenant, which represents Southampton
having at one time given to Shakspere £,\qgo to
go through with a purchase he had a mind to. This
is doubtless an exaggeration ; but that Southampton
was at til i s time a warm and generous friend we may
not doubt, and Shakspere, the scapegrace of his native
town, scoffed at by Greene, one of the despised players,
bound to a way of life utterly distastefuL to him, re-
sponded warmly, and gave up his feewrX'aiiaSBftSte&s**-
delight, fo one who seemed so -Qo\i\e, «n&. ■=» ""Soex^-
"love.
i6. Growing Prosperity. — Ben Jonsm, in his
lines to the memory of Shakspere, addressing him as
" Sweet swan of Avon," speaks of
The first mention we possess of Shakspere by name,
after his arrival in London, occurs in the accounts
of the Treasurer of the Chamber, from which we learn
that he appeared twice with Burbage, as a member
of the Lord Chamberlain's company, before Queen
Elizabeth, in Christmas time, 1593- He was now
rapidly producing his historical plays and earlier
comedies, and was gathering that wealth which he
meant should release him from the servitude of his
profession. He had planned to return in due time
to Stratford, and to live there as a genlleman. In
1596 John Shakspere applied for a grant of coat-
armour, and in the following year the grant was made
by the Garter King-of-Arms. But if Shakspere hoped
to found a family that hope received a blow, and the
father's heart was wounded by the death, in 1596,
of Hamnet, his only son. Still, however, he pursues
his plan, and looks forward to Stratford as his home.
An attempt was made at this time by John Shakspere
and his wife to recover the ancestral fields of Ashbies,
probably without success. In the same year, 1597,
William Shakspere bought, for jQdo, New Place, 1
goodly dwelling in his native town. His interest i:
his country home and his influence in London are re-
cognised in a letter of 1508, still existing, from Master
Abraham Sturley to Richard Quiney (father of Shak-
sperc's future son-in-law). Quiney was in London,
soliciting Lord Burleigh for certain favours to be
conferred on the town of Stratford ; Sturley supposes
that by the friends Mr. Shakspere can make their
mark may be hit. Later in the year was written by
Quiney the only letter addressed to our gieafc ^ow.
which remains to us j its purport is the \rtac\ka\. owe
no'
g
7H2 ZJKfi 0/" SHAKSPERE.
of begging a loan of .£30 ; we may surmise that
Shakspere acceded to his friend's request. He has
property in both Stratford and London ; in the former
we find him a considerable holder of corn and malt ;
in the latter he is assessed on property in the parish
of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, £$ 13J, 41/.
17. Growing Fame. Meres— But we have
not yet exhausted the information which this year
1598 yields. Now it is that Ben Jonson's first
comedy, Every Man in his Humour, makes its ap-
pearance. TheTe is a tradition that the play was
Drought before the public through the good offices
of Shakspere ; it is certain that he acted in the
play, taking, probably, the part of Knowell. Now,
also (1598), most remarkable testimony to the high
position occupied by Shakspere as a dramatist and as
a narrative and lyrical poet is given in the Palladia
T.iriiia, Wit's Treasury, by Francis Meres, Master
of Arts. The passage in which Meres enumerates
twelve of Shakspere's plays is of the utmost im-
portance in guiding 11s towards a true chronology
of his works, and will afterwards be quoted at length ;
it must also be observed that Meres makes mention of
Shakspere's "sugred sonnets among his private friends."
The earliest editions of plays by Shakspere belong
to this period. In 1597 were printed Richard //. ,
Richard ML, and Romeo and Juliet. Others speedily
followed. It is clear that in several instances die
copies were obtained surreptitiously, and to gain a
sale for plays by other authors unscrupulous printers
ow placed the popular name of Shakspere upon the
tie page. In 1599 a volume of poems, enlitled The
Passionate Pilgrim, was published, and its authorship
;cribed to Shakspere ; Jaggard, the publisher, had
got hold of a few short pieces of Shakspere's, and
added to these liberally from other quaXtexK. '■Nt
know, on the testimony of Heywood, "CwaS. ^o^a^»s*i,
upon occasion of a subseqact* e^usstv ^°^jf^^_
poems falsely ascribed to 'htm, was wsKto&l oW ^
M,
26 SHAKSFEKE. [chap.
iS. Practical Energy. — In 1G01 died at Stratford
John Shakspere. Still his son pursued his plan of
providing himself with a substantial independence
and a home. The play of Hamlet is entered in
Stationers' register in 1602, and in the same year the
creator of Hamlet was living in no dream -world, but
was taking practical possession of this solid earth
■ — purchasing in Hay, for ^320, one hundred and
seven acres in the parish of Old Stratford, his brother
Gilbert receiving the conveyance for him — and later
in the year (the author of Hamlet being now " William
Shakspere, Gentleman ") a second and smaller pro-
perty. His largest purchase was that of the un-
expired term of a lease of the tithes of Stratford,
Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe ; this he
acquired in July, 1605, for the sum of ^440. A
year previously, when perhaps he was writing his
A'i/ig Lear, his care for practical affairs appears by his
bringing an action, in the court of Stratford, against
one Philip Rogers, for £1 15J. iod,, being the price
of malt sold and delivered to him at different times.
Sfaftfcspere seems to have found it possible to carry on
actively and at the same time his life in the ideal, and
his life in the material world.
19. Family Joys and Sorrows.— But although
now styled "gentleman, of Stmt ford- on- A von," he
had not yet left London nor abandoned his pro-
fession. Elizabeth died in 1603; it was noticed at
the time (by Cheltle, who refers to his great con-
temporary under the title of "silver-tongued Mclieert")
that Shakspere lamented the Queen in no ode or
elegy. In May arrived at London her successor,
James I., and within a few days after his arrival a
warrant was issued licensing the theatrical company
to which Shakspere belonged ; his name appears
second in the list of players contained in the warrant
Hvn /orison's SfJeiHits was first acted in the same year,
*6oj. and the name of Shakspere occuo\cs> a. \ta.ce \w
he list of actors. We know notlVvrv^ oS Vi\s Yiswisv^
THE LIFE OF SHJASrLJtiC.
27
he ceased
acted at a later date than this ; but whether he ceased
k.i appeal upon the stage about 1604, or continued to
act for several years later, we cannot say. Nor do
we know when, precisely, he returned to Stratford. In
1607 happiness and sorrow came to him : on June 5,
his eldest and favourite daughter, Susanna, aged
twenty-four, was married to Air. Jii/1/1 Hall, a practising
physician of considerable repute ; then, doubtless,
the poet was with his daughter on her wedding-day.
On the last day of the year his youngest brother,
Edmund, was buried in the church of St. Saviour's,
Southwark. Edmund, was a player attracted, perhaps,
to London by his brother's success ; his age was
twenty-seven. William Shakspere did not apparently
despise the ceremonial part of life, for we find that on
this occasion twenty shillings were paid for " a fore-
noon knell of the great bell." Again, within a few
months, death visited his household ; in September,
1608, Mary S/iaisperc, who had lived to see her son
so famous and wealthy, followed her husband to the
grave. It is not improbable thai Shakspere may have
been present at her deathbed, for a month later he was
at Stratford, and stood sponsor for William Walker,
who is remembered in his will. His mother had not
died without having held in her amis a grandchild
of her son. On February 21, 1607-8 was baptised
a daughter of John and Susanna Hall, whom they
named Elizabeth j she was their only child, and the
only one of his grandchildren whom Shakspere lived
to see.
20. Return to Stratford.— Between the years
1610 and j6ii we have reason to suppose that
Shakspere returned for good to his Stratford home.
The change was great from the streets of London,
the noisy theatres, the brilliant wit-combats at the
Mermaid tavern, to the peaceful retreat, tfc& -^w&si.
whom iie had loved as a Vry — w=w B«ro dfisaN^
—his children and then: \\WXe g«\, "^ *** ™?
running about and talking,, ami, eftcadMs^, vws> -,
quiet fields and hills and brimming river. Still he
retained an interest in London. The Globe Theatre
was perhaps yielding him some of the profits upon
which he lived, and in March, 1613, he bought a
house near Blackfriars Theatre, and leased it to a
tenant for ten years. The death of Richard Shakspcrt
in 1612 left him brothcrless, unless Gilbert still sur-
vived. In the following year, 1613, the Globe Theatre
was destroyed by fire, and probably manuscripts of
Shakspere's plays perished on that occasion. Fire
again may have alarmed, if it did not injure, Shak-
spere in 161 4, for in that year a great conflagration
took place at Stratford, fifty-four houses being burnt
down. At the same time a project was put forward
for the enclosing of some common lands near Stratford.
It touched Shakspere's interests and would have been
an injury to the poor : Shakspere resisted the scheme,
declaring that " he was not able to bear the enclosing
of Welcombe." We must not fail to notice one entry
of the year 1614 in the Stratford Chamberlain's
accounts : " Item : For one quart of sack, and one
quart of clarett wine, given to a preacher at the Newl
Place, xxd." Stratford had been growing puritanical
since the time when Shakspere was a boy, and the
players so often visited the town ; at last the players
were even paid not to perform. Mrs. Hall and her
husband did not forfeit the poet's regard because
they were somewhat puritanically inclined. Perhaps
Shakspere's wife had sought in religion a satisfaction
which her marriage hail not afforded. We can
imagine the great interpreter of life listening with a
grave smile to the whole truth as proclaimed by the
preacher, and recognising as a pleasant foible the
preacher's interest in claret and sherry sack.
Si. Death. — On February ioth, 1616, Shakspere's
younger daughter. Judith, now aged 31, was married
to JXi'v/as Qt/i/iey, a vintner of Stratford, whose father
—a friend of the poet — had been \ugW WW\S o^ ^e
'•» On the 25th of the next month \ie extoAto.
ii.l THE LIFE OF SIIAKSFERE.
his will, which in January had been drawn, and in
another month the world had lost Shakspere. He
died April 23rd, 1616. Ward, the Vicar of Stratford,
noted some fifty years later, "Shakespeare, Drayton,
and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and, it seems,
drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there
contracted." Whether this be history or myth we
cannot assert In his will, while the main bulk of his
property is left to Susanna Hall and her husband,
his daughter Judith, his sister Joan, his godson, his
Stratford friends, and some of his fellow-players :
carefully remembered. Some months after the poet's
death a son was bora to Judith Quiney, whom she
named Shakspere; but he died in his infancy, and
neither of her other sons survived to middle life.
The last living descendant of Shakspere was his grand-
daughter, Elizabeth Ha!!, who married a Mr. Nash,
and, as his wife, entertained for three weeks, at New
Place, Queen Henrietta Maria ; and upon his decease
married Mr. John Barnard, knighted by Charles II.
in 166 1.
22. Portraits.— Shakspere was buried in the parish
church at Stratford. Within a few years after his
death a bust of the poet wa$ erected in the church.
The face was probably modelled from a cast taken
after death. It was originally coloured — the eyes
hazel, the hair and beard auburn. This and the
portrait engraved by Droeshout, which is prefixed t
the First Folio, 1623, are the only certain likenesses
of Shakspere which remain to us. But that known a
the Chandin portrait, though differing i
portant particulars from the other portraits, has by
many persons been considered genuine ; and there
exists a death-mask — named, from a supposed former
owner, the Kemhladt death-mask— which bears the
date 1616, and which may be the ori^wA cffi\fcm
the dead poet's face. It exV\\vrts> a.^oesft.«fc -«-w?^-
et's
she
ife.
M-
iV
e
;
1.
:s
tne
1 to
sses
a as
able proportions, and a face 0^ gre^l. ^«Jw«S
sA-v* 5 !
: grave in
a tare
\vak-
spere's writings is of various kinds : T. Wholly external,
II, Partly external and partly internal. III. Wholl;
internal.
I. Wholly External, (i) The publication ofthi
poems and plays, and entries (either prior to or on
publication) in the registers of the Stationers' Com-
pany. The play or poem may, of course, have been
written long before it was published or entered on the
Stationers' register ; and on the other hand, entries in
the register were sometimes made while a book was in
contemplation or in hand, and before it was actually
written. Setting aside the poems, Venus and Adonis
(entered 1593), and Lucrece (1594), the earliest entry
upon the register of an undoubted play by Shakspere
is that at King Richard II. (August an, 1597). The
last plays to appear in a quarto edition during the
poet's lifetime— I mean in a first quarto edition-
were Troilus and Cressida and Pericles (1609).
(3) Mention of Shakspere's writings in contemporary
books or documents of ascertained date. Thus Man-
ningham, a student of the Middle Temple, notes in
his Diary, Feb. 2, 1601-2, "At our feast wee had
a play called Twelve Night, or What You Will; " and
he goes on to describe Shakspere's comedy,
another Diary, that of Dr. Simon Format, we find
that, on April jo, 1610, he saw, for the first time,
Macbeth, of the plot of which he makes a careful
summary; again, on May 15, 1611, he saw at the
Globe, The Winter's Tale, and again is at pains to
set down the outlines of the story. The burning of
the Globe Theatre, in June, 1613, during a perform-
ance of King Henry VIII., is recorded by three
witnesses. But to this class of evidence no single
contribution is of equal importance with that of the
list of plays given by Meres, in his Palladis Tamia.
li'its Treasury, 1598: "As Plautus and Seneca, asa.
accounted the best for Comtc^ s.w4. Txbjb&j -ass*^
!hv tatioes, so Shakespeate MSO«% ^^SS^flSa.
most excellent in both Yiuds to* \Xve. *s«sr- *=*■ ^
the
in —
irary
d
d
34 S//AJCSPERE.
witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love
labors lost, his Lave labours woitru, his Midsummers
nitfit dream/; and his Merchant of 'Venice ; Tor Tragedy,
his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King
fohn, Titus Andronkus, and his Romeo and Juliet!'
It will be noticed that Meres mentions six plays of
each kind, preserving a balanced symmetry which
he affects. Possibly he made omissions, possibly he
pressed into his list the doubtful Titus, with the object
of equalising the number of tragedies and comedies
named by him. The Love's Labour's Won of Meres's
list is generally believed to have been an earlier form
of Alt's Well that Ends Well ; but some critics have
attempted to identify it with The Taming of the Shrew,
some with Much Ado.
{3) Without express mention of a play of Shakspere,
it may be clearly alluded to, or a quotation be made
from it, or some passage may be imitated by a con-
temporary poet in a work the date of which is known.
In some cases it is naturally difficult to decide whether
Shakspere be the original owner of the thought or ex-
pression, or whether he himself be not the borrower;
and there is the danger to be guarded against of
imagining a connection between two passages which
are really independent. It should be remembered
also that, in the Elizabethan period, writings had
often extensive circulation m manuscript before
they were published. Guarding against these risks
of error, this class of evidence is, however, of con-
siderable importance. When, in Ben Jonson's Ei try
Man Out of His Humour, 1599, we find mention of
'■Justice Silence," we cannot doubt that the second
part of Shakspere's Henry LV, had been already upon
the stage. In Weever's Mirror of Martyrs, 1601,
occur the lines :
Tlie ra.iuj-.liL-ackd multitude were drawne
By Brutus' speech, that Carar was surAi'mom -,
When eloquent .Mark Anionic had showwe
■Wis vertues, who but Brutus then was tomwsT
IV.] CHRONOLOGY OF HIS WRITINGS.
We know of nothing which can have suggested these
lines to Weever, except Shakspere : s Julius Ccesar;
Plutarch no such scene exists. Some of the evidence
under this head, although derived from sources out-
side the works of Shakspere, yet implies an acquaint-
vith passages in those works, and therefore may
be considered as having a doubtful claim to the title,
" Evidence wholly external."
{4) Some information with respect to dates may be
gleaned from the facts that certain companies repre-
sented a play, or that it was produced at a certain
theatre. Thus the statement on the title-page of the
quarto of Romeo ami Juliet, 1597, that it was acted by
" Lord Hunsdon his servants," proves that perform-
ances of that play took place between July 21, 1596,
and April 1597 (seep. 83). The mention by Marston
of "curtain ptauditics" in connection with the same
play would have served (had not other positive
evidence been forthcoming) to afford a presumption
that it was produced at the Curtain Theatre, before
1599, when tha Globe was built ; for, had the Globe
existed when Romeo ami Juliet first appeared, at the
Globe it would probably have been performed.
Such is the evidence for determining the chronology
of Shakspere's plays derived from sources lying outside
the text of the plays themselves. The evidence in which
externaland internal elements are united is of two kinds.
27. II. Evidence partly external partly in-
ternal. — (1) Allusions in the plays to historical events
whose date is known.
Thus, in The Comedy of Errors, there is a punning
allusion (see p. 67) to the civil war in France, which
terminated with the submission of Henri IV. to the
Catholic Church ; the allusion would have had little
point if the civil war were not in actual progress.
Again, in the chorus prefixed to the last
Henry V„ we read the words :
Were now the gcneta\ of 011 graAwes. ««?■«*&»
"in good time he may> ttotft"ViA«B&.
'C' n B rebellion broached w ^ "~
SHAKSPERE.
The reference is to the Earl of Essex, who treat I
Ireland tn April, 1599, and returned in the followinj
September. If the choruses were written for the fi
performance of the play this fixes its date. (See al
"the earthquake," Romeo and Juliet, p. 83, and t
" German Duke," Merry Wives of 'Windsor, p. 104.)
(1) If there be found in a play of Shakspere ;
quotation from, or allusion to, or matter derived from
a book of known date by some other writer, we infer
that Shakspere' s play was later in date than the book
of which use was marie by him. In As Von Like It
we have the couplet (Act III. Sc. ^
The second line is from Marlowe's Hero and Leai
published 1598. Again, in King Lear the names
fiends and other portions of the mad speeches pi
into Edgar's mouth, were derived from Harsnet'
Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, 1 603. Once
more, the description byGonzalo, in The Tempest, of an
imaginary commonwealth (Act If. Sc. i. L. 147-156) is
taken from Montaigne's Essays (Book I, Chap. 30. Of
the Caniballes), translated in 1603, by Florin ; of which
translation a copy exists in the British Museum, having
the name of Shakspere written in it. The circulation
of Elizabethan literature in manuscript should here
again be borne in mind as a caution ; and it is obvious
that while this class of evidence may furnish us with
an upward limit, previous to which we cannot place
Shakspere's play, it tells us nothing with respect to
the downward limit, nor can, by itself, fix the date at
which any play was written.
We come now to evidence
28. III. Wholly Internal.— And here the great
mass of evidence is of a kind which cannot be pre-
cisdy stated, or definitely weighed and measured
aad yet it a not the less real and
CHRONOLOGY OF HIS WRITINGS.
do not need a thermometer to inform
decided changes of temperature in the atmosphere,
so we need no scientific test to make us aware that,
in passing from Levis Labour's Lost to Hamlet, and
from Hamlet to The Tempest, we pass from youth
to manhood, and again from a manhood of trial and
sorrow to the riper manhood of attainment and of
calm. Our general impression results from many
particulars. We are sensible of a change (a) In the
style and diction. In the earliest plays the language
is sometimes as it were a dress put upon the thought
— a dress ornamented with superfluous care ; the idea
is at times hardly sufficient to fill out the language in
which it is put ; in the middle plays {Julius Gesar
serves as an example) there seems a perfect balance
and equality between the thought and its expression.
In the latest plays this balance is disturbed by the
preponderance or excess of the ideas over the means
of giving them utterance. The sentences are close-
packed ; there are " rapid and abrupt turnings ot
thought, so quick that language can hardly follow
fast enough ; impatient activity of intellect and fancy,
which, having once disclosed an idea, cannot wait to
work k orderly out ;" " the Language is sometimes
alive with imagery." (Contrast Two Gentlemen of
Verona, Act II. Sc vii L. 24-3S, and its one sweet
long-drawn-out image, with such a passage as Antony
and Cleopatra, Act V. Sc. ii. L. 82-92.) Under Ihis
head of style may be noticed Shakspere's early conceits,
puns, frequent classical allusions, occasional over-
wrought rhetoric (especially in the historical plays),
all of which gradually disappear or subside. 13ut these
changes really belong to (l>) The growth of Shakspere's
taste and judgment The Duchess of York, in
Jttehard II. (Act V. Sc iii.), pleads with the king for
her son's pardon :
Her husband exclaims :
Speak it In French, king : say pardonnet may.
This execrable line could not possibly have been
written in a play of Shakspere's maturity, (c) In
the structure of the play and grouping of characters
there is, in some of the early plays, a tendency to
formal symmetry, an artificial setting of charact
over against character, and group against group
Antipholus and Dromio against Antipholus and
Dromio ; Proteus and Launce against Valentine and
Speed ; the King of Navarre and his three fellow-
students against the Princess of France and her three
ladies. Afterwards the outline of the play is drawn
with a freer because a firmer hand (d) The chi
rasterisation changes, At first there are bright
clever sketches of character ; sometimes a want o:
delicacyin the conception of female character; some-
times character k subordinate to incident (as in the
Errors), or to dialogue {as in Love's Labour's Lost).
By degrees the characterisation becomes profound
and refined. Instead of a Valentine or Demetrius
we have a Hamlet or an Othello ; instead of a Rosaline,
with her hold repartee, we have an Imogen or a Desde-
Imona. (e) The entire reflective power deepens ; the
poet's knowledge of life becomes wider and more
varied; his feeling with respect to life, more grave
and earnest, for a season, indeed, full of pain and
sorrow ; at the last, gravely tender, earnest, calm, and
harmonious. (/) The imagination, which at first
worked intermittently, leaving, even in the tragedy
of Jfonifo ami Julid, spaces for the fancy to practise
its slight devices in, becomes passionately energetic,
of daring and all-comprehensive power, as in King
Lear, or lofty and sustained, with noble ideality, as
m The Tempest, [g) The sympathy with human
passion and the power of conceiving and dramatically
endcring it in its most massive and moA \oSro«
i
CHRONOLOGY OF HIS U'RITLXGS.
S. 39
he humour
:ly
ih
of
lis
im
I
forms increases. {It) As a Testilt of all this the h
of the dramatist, which was at first comparatively
superficial — an enjoyment of amusing absurdity, i
pleasure in the keen play of wit— becomes full of
grave significance, and works in conjunction with his
(i) Deepening pathos. It is the transition from
I.aunee and Speed to the sorrowful -eyed Fool i
Leaf, (/) Finally, in moral reach, in true justio
i charity, in self-control, in all that indicates forti-
tude of will, the writings of the mature Shakspere
excel, in an extraordinary degree, those of his younger
self.
29. Verse Tests.— But these are things that can-
not be precisely weighed and measured, although they
can be clearly felt. There is, however, one kind of "
ternal evidence respecting the chronology of the plays
which admits of exact scientific estimation.
evidence is found in the several changes which tl
verse of Slwkspere underwent during his entire dramatic
career.
(1) End-stopt and Run-on Verse.— Of these
changes, that which is most comprehensive and
regularly continuous is the transition from unbroken
to interrupted verse. At first Shakspere has his
breaks and pauses at the end of the line — the verse
is " end-stopt ; " gradually he more and more found
pleasure in carrying on the sense from one line
to another without a pause at the end of the line —
the verse is " run on," and the breaks and pauses
occur with great frequency in some part of the line
other than the end. Contrast the following passages,
the first from an early play, The Two Gentlemen
Veroita, the other from a late play. The Tempest.
lys
£
tic
At Pen I cost,
When nil out pageants of AqUgJrt "scie -^V-j 1
Our youth gol m.: w \A^-; t\\t v>f>TOasi&^srt-,
■A in Maiavn yifwl a ^jswft*
g passages,
eat/emeu of
•///•est.
40 SHAKSPERE. [chap.
a
Which served me as fit, by all men's judgments,
As if the garment had been made for me,
Therefore I know she is about my height.
And at that time I made her weep agood,
For I did play a lamentable part.
(Act IV. Sc. iv. L. 163-171.)
Admired Miranda !
Indeed the top of admiration ! worth
What's dearest to the world ! Full many a lady
I have eyed with best regard, and many a time
The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage
Brought my too diligent ear : for several virtues
Have I liked several women ; never any
With so full soul, but some defect in her
Did quarrel with the noblest grace she owed
And put it to the foil.
(Act III. Sc i. L. 37-46.)
That these typical passages really illustrate a great
general change in the structure of Shakspere's verse
appears from the following table, giving "the pro-
portion of run-on lines to end-pause ones in three of
the earliest and three of the latest plays of Shakspere."
EARLIEST PLAYS.
Proportion of unstopt lined
to end-stopt ones.
Love's Labour's Lost . . . . 1 in 18*14
The Comedy of Errors . . . . I ,, 107
The Two Gentlemen of Verona . . 1 „ io*o
LATEST PLAYS.
Proportion of unstopt lines
to end-stopt ones.
The Tempest 1 in 3*02
Cymbeline 1 „ 2*52
The Winter's Tale 1 „ 212
(F. J. Furnivall.)
" The great superiority of the broken structure is
plain, especially for the purposes of dramatic poetry ;
it conduces in a marked degree to variety, vivacity,
and the natural ease of dialogue *," m t\ve exi&-sto$\.
CHRONOLOGY OF HIS WRITINGS.
at ion to
lecessary
3 to the
style there is, moreover, a frequent temptation
"bumbast out" the blank verse with unnecessary
adjectives.
30. (2) Weak endings.— Closely related
change which has now been described, is that which
consists in the appearance in Shakspere's verse of weak
monosyllabic endings. Two degrees of the weak ending
have been distinguished: "On the words which be-
long to the one of these groups the voice can to a
small extent dwell;" the others so precipitate the
reader forward that " we are forced to run them, in
pronunciation no less than in sense, into the closest
connection with the opening words of the succeeding
line." The former have been named " light endings,"
the latter " weak endings." To the former class belong
am, are, be, can, amid; the auxiliaries do, dots, has, had;
I, they, thou, and others ; these may be found as
terminal words in the blank verse of Milton and of
Wordsworth. The latter — the weak endings — are
more fugitive and evanescent in character, includ-
ing such words as and, for, from, if, in, of, or. Now
weak endings hardly appear in Shakspere's early or
middle plays. The Errors and The Two Gentlemen
of Verona do not contain a single light or weak end-
ing ; Midsummer Night's Dream contains one weak
ending ; there is one light ending in 2 Henry IV, ;
two light endings in Henry V. Nor do they come
in by slow degrees at a later period ; " the poet seems
to have thrown himself at once into this new structure
of verse." In Macbeth light endings appear for the
first time in considerable numbers ; weak endings in
considerable numbers for the first time in Antony and
C/
9
1835
«37»
■5 -
I
a "S3
Si
2-SS
2-qo
3-12
3-63
H
li
?
171
I "39
171
236
3-23
"Bis
1!
a
?
3 'S3
4-05
4>7
4"'j
4'83
3-48
6-10
7"i6
Aiiumy and Cleopatra
Curiolanus ....
Perides (Sh's. pari) .
CvillliC-liiK: ....
Winter's Tale . . .
Two Noble Kinsmen
(nan-Fletdierinn part)
Henry VIII. (Sh's. pari)
14
n
78
57
5°
45
(J. K. Ingram.)
It should be noted that commonly a pause occurs
before the weak final monosyllable, after which the
verse, as it were, leaps forward. This structure, as
has been said, gives to the verse something of the
bounding life which Ulysses describes Diomed as
showing in the manner of his gait :
It conduces to liveliness and variety, and so is hardly
appropriate to tragedy of the deeper sort ; but it is
admirably adapted to the romantic drama of Shak-
spere's latest stage, and here alone it appears in a con-
spictious degree. [ See Prof. Ingram's paper on " The
Weak endings of Shakspere," Transactions 0/ N«u
SAaA Sec. 1874.]
& 43
;s.— The
liarities of
7.] CHRONOLOGY OF HIS WRITINGS,
31. (3) Double (or feminine) endings.
next of the indications of date afforded by peculiarities of
metre will be found in the rarer or more frequent occur-
rence of the dissyllabic, or double ending. Statingthe
fact broadly (for there may be some exceptional plays)
if double endings are rare, we may infer that the play
is of early date ; if they are numerous, that the play is
one of Shakspere's middle or later period. Take,
again, two typical passages by way of illustration ;
A league from Epidn.mm.im had we sail'd
Before the always wind-obeying deep
Gave any tragic instance of our harm :
Kut longer dni we not retain much hope ;
For what obscured light the heavens did grant
Did but convey unto our fearful minds
A doubtful warrant of immediate death.
(Comedy ef Errors, Act I. St i. L. 63-69.)
The entire speech of /Egeon, from which this extract
s made, consisting of over seventy lines, contains only
>ne certain double ending, line 46. (In lines 52 and
83, "the other" perhaps = th'other.)
I boarded the king's ship ; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cab | in
I flamed amazement : sometimes I'ld divide
And burn in many places ; on the top | mast,
The yards and bowsprit would 1 linme distinct [ ly,
Then meet and join. Jove's lightning the precurs | ors
O' the dreadful thunderclap more momentar | y
And sight nut-running were not ; the fire and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Ncp | tune
Seem to besiege and make his bold waves Irem | ble.
(The Tempest, Act I. (ic. ii. L. 106-205.)
Here, again, progress towards dramatic freedom,
tnd a gain of ease and variety, aTe evident. The
slight stress which comes upon the tenth syllable of a
k verse can thus be modified by a kind of grace-
note which succeeds it. The fota'm^, ^vgstsa ■&**=■
the percentage of doub\e eucVvti^ *vu vb&wcel *& "SmS*--
Tere's plays :
44 SHAKSPERE. [chap.
Love's Labour's Lost .... 4
Titus Andronicus 5
King John 6
Richard II 1 1 '39
Comedy of Errors 12
Two Gentlemen of Verona . . -15
Merchant of Venice 15
Taming of the Shrew . . . .16
Richard III 18
As You Like It 18
Troilus and Cressida . ... 20
All's Well that Ends Well . . .21
Othello 26
Winter's Tale 31*09
Cymbeline 32
Tempest 33
(Hertzberg.)
32. (4) Rhyme, — Another metrical test of the early
or late place of a play is that founded on the frequent
or rare occurrence of rhyme. In Shakspere's early
comedies there is a very large proportion of rhymed
verse. Thus, in Love's Labours Lost there are about
two rhymed lines to every one line of blank verse.
In The Comedy of Errors there are 380 rhymed lines
to 1 1 50 unrhymed (Fleay). In Shakspere's latest
plays there is little or no rhyme. In The Tempest two
rhymed lines occur; in The Winter's Tale not one.
These are striking facts, but it must not be hastily
inferred that the rhyme test will determine the order
of the intermediate plays as well as it serves to indi-
cate the extreme groups. A difference between this
metrical characteristic and those previously noticed
must be borne in mind, namely, that although a poet
may unconsciously set down a double ending or a
weak ending, or run on a line into that which follows
(this unconscious action serving as an index to the
general growth of his artistic powers), he cannot rhyme
unconsciously. And we can perceive that Shakspere
deliberately employs rhyme for certain definite pur-
poses. It would be an error to condu&e \\\aX. A Mid-
-nosMxar JV/g/rt's Dream preceded Tlu Comedy of
CHRONOLOGY OF HIS WRITINGS,
Errors because it contains a larger proportion of
rhyming lines, until we had first decided whether
special incentives to rhyme did not exist in the case
of that comedy of Fairyland ; and when we meet such
a series of ten lines all rhyming together, as that
put into Titania's mouth (Act III. Sc. i. L. 168^77),
we see that rhyme here is treated with the design of
producing special effects. When it is argued that
Richard II. must be earlier in date than Richard III.,
because it contains a far larger proportion of rhymed
lines, we should consider whether a special reason for
the great predominance of blank verse did not exist
in the case of Richard III. It was written in con-
tinuation of Henry VI., and more than any other
play of Shakspere under the influence of the great
master of blank verse, Marlowe. In Richard II.
Shakspere Is far more independent of external in-
fluence, and he may have been pleased to return to
his early manner of rhymed dialogue after a grand
I experiment in the severer manner of his contemporary.
In so late a play as Othello we see how Shakspere
introduces rhyme to fulfil a special purpose when he
sees lit. Thus in Act I. Sc. iii. L. 301-219, to Bra-
bantio, who has lost his daughter, the Duke offers the
cold comfort of sententious moralising, comfort
wrapped up in little epigrams, each of these epigrams
being a rhymed couplet ; and Brabant io replies ironi-
cally in the same manner. (See also in the same play,
Act II. Sc. i. L. 141-169.) Again, in Troilus and
Cressida, Act IV. Sc v. L. 28-52, where the Greeks
kiss Cressida, there is a flippancy in the speeches
which they would lose if turned from rhyme into blank
verse. Ulysses' vigorous reprobation of Cressida's
conduct, which follows, brings the rhymed passages
to a close. Again, the half-play, whole-earnest
choosing of a husband by Helena in All's Well that
Ends Well, Act II. Sc. iii., twtoti\\>| tj&sAvWa -4wj™a~
In t/ie same play rhyme \s often eravto"^ ^ ^-^^^^
for generalising reflections. \N& aie to^ 1 ^
46 SHAA'SPERE.
consider, in using the rhyme test, not only the numerical
proportions of the rhymed and blank verse parts of a
play, but the quality, the literary merit of the parts.
As Shakspere advanced in mastery of blank verse, it
would be natural that his greatest scenes should more
and more faii into that form. At an earlier time we
might expect to find the happiest expression of his
genius in the rhymed scenes. Statistics with reference
to Shakspere's use of rhyme, and other metrical pecu-
liarities are given in Mr. Fleay's Shakespearian Manual,
pp. 135, 136. These require verification or correction
by a second worker, but are doubtless a valuable
approximation to the truth. It must be observed
that the ratio of rhyme lines to blank-verse lines fails
to indicate the true chronological order of the plays j
if, however, those scenes in which no rhyme occurs
be set aside, results approaching nearer to what are
probably the facts can be obtained ; but for this
method of using the rhyme test no sufficient reason
has been assigned.
33. Doggerel, &C— Doggerel verse, sonnets, and
quatrains are not found in plays oflate origin.
Two other tests have been suggested and de-
scribed—the " pause test," by Mr. Spedding (New
Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1S74, p. 26), the
"speech-ending test," by Professor Ingram; but they
remain to be worked out in detail. The pause test
would consist of an analysis of the entire (tincture of
Shakspere's versification at different periods with re-
ference to the distribution of pauses. The speech-
ending test would be founded upon an estimate of the
proportion of speeches in each play which end with a
complete or with a broken line. The broken speech-
ending is that preferred in the later plays ; the speeches
in early plays generally end with a complete line.
CAREER, AND DATES OF PLAYS.
CHAPTER V.
34. Four Periods. — By means of such evidence
as has been described in the last chapter we are
enabled to determine the precise dates of some of
Shakspere's works, in the case of others we can at
least approximate to the dates ; only in a few cases
are we left to conjecture where, within a range of at
most some five or seven years, a drama should be
placed. Thus, if there is uncertainty here and there
in an attempt lo assign dates to each particular
play, there is little or no uncertainty in naming
groups of plays in chronological order, leaving un-
determined the order of the plays within those
groups.
Shakspere's entire career of authorship extends over
twenty years and upwards, beginning about 1588 or
1590, ending about 1612 : ten years and upwards lie
in the 16th century, ten years and upwards in the
17 th. Now the division of the centuries marks roughly
a division in the career of Shakspere. About 1601
his genius began to seek new ways; the histories and
joyous comedies ceased to be created, and the great
series of tragedies was commenced. But each of
the decades, which together make up the years oi
Shakspere's authorship, is itself clearly divisible into
two shorter periods : first, from about 1590101595-96,
years of dramatic apprenticeship and experiment ;
secondly, from about 1595-96 to about 1 600-1601, the
period of the English historical plays and the mirthful,
and joyous comedies ; thiidVj, V(otc\. ibo^. ^ 'iocM
1608, the period of grave ox \>\ttet covntt&sA «»&-
the great tragedies j last, from at>ci\A ^cS. *w» ™*
El
expt
1613, the period of the romantic plays, which are at
once grave and glad, serene and beautiful poems, like
The Tempest and The Winter's Tale. These four
periods may be designated with reference to the class of
works written in each, or with reference to the subjects
of those works, or with reference to the kind of versi-
fication which was characteristic of each period, or
with reference to Shakspere's supposed condition and
state of mind in each. I think the reader will re-
member the following names of the four periods,
which may seem fanciful, yet which perhaps convey
as much true information as any others : I will call the
first period, " In the workshop ; " the second, " In the
world ; " the third, " Out of the depths ; " the fourth,
"On the heights." The significance of these names
will appear as we proceed.
35. Groups of Plays, Pre-Shaksperian
Group. — Now let us go farther, and try to make out
groups of Shakspere's plays in chronological order.
Shakspere began his apprenticeship by re-handling plays
which were not his. Of such work we have examples in
Titus Andronkus and the First Part of Henry VI. ,
plays of blood, bombast, and fire, pre-Shaksperian in
spirit, but showing touches of that hand which even
in its apprentice years was capable of master touches.
These two plays we name (i.) the "pre-Shaksperian
group."
36. Early Comedy. — Next, the young dramatist
went to work on his own account, and began to experi-
ment in different kinds of comedy. Lime's Labour's
Lost is lull of a young man's thought, wit, and satire,
a comedy of oddities, of dialogue carefully elaborated
and pointed (as dialogue in a first original work would
be), and underlying this a young man's theory with
reference to culture and education ; Tht Comedy of
Errors is a comedy of incident, almost a farce ; The
' #f&me» if Pinna is a first and somewhat slight
cxpeii'ment in the same kind of love-comecVj (A sAivA*.
■sper-e aftenvaids created so many ft rin ^Mift
v.] CAREER, Ah'D £>,
examples ; A Midsummer
with the poetry of a young
there is a fine sketch of !
Bottom and his companions we find Shakspere's
richest humorous work of this period, Whether The
Two Gentlemen of Verona or A Midsummer JVighfs
Dream was written first cannot be decided. This
group of four plays we name (ii.) " Early Comedy."
37. Early History. Poems.— While engaged
upon this group Shakspere's powers as a rising
playwright must have been recognised ; before he
had completed it Venus and Adonis was published.
When Chettlc wrote in 1592, Shakspere had already
gained the patronage of powerful friends. It is
probable that while engaged on his early comedies,
Shakspere (continuing to re-handle dramas for the
stage) set about the revision of the old historical
plays, The Contention and The True Tragedy, and *
assisted by Marlowe, one of the original authors
the old plays. Thus came the Second and Third
Parts of Henry VI. 10 be written, and the character
of Richard in those plays was recognised by Shakspere
as so admirable a creation for dramatic purposes, that
he proceeded to a new play, of which he was sole
author, in which Richard should be the principal, one
might almost say the only actor. Richard III. was a
character so essentially Marlowesque, and Shakspere
had been so lately working in conjunction with thai
great poet, that he carried on the Marlowesque spirit
from Henry VI. into his own play. This group of three
plays wt name (iii.) ■■ Karly History," and must add a
second title, " the Marlowe-Shakspere group," finding
in the Second and Third Paris of Henry VI. Marlowe's
presence, and in Richard III. (almost more dominant
than his presence) Marlowe's influence. To this period
belongs the Lucrece.
38. Early Tragedy. — From aw ^mV} ■itoe. t 3«S*--
'- to have. desA^neA. a. \.\&.^&^ '
one of the bloody schoo\ o£ *\e 'gwi-Sfi^s*
he
as
rd
Sf«^>
t
I
SUAXSPMSE.
not one like The Tew of Malta or The Spanish
Tragedy, but in which sorrow and beauty should
blend and become one. Romeo and Juliet may
have been begun or written in a first form at
the same time as some of the early comedies. I
do not think it received its final form until about
1596, but fragments of an earlier date remain in the
play. This, if we set aside Titus Audronicns, 1
Shakspere's first tragedy, It is, in its beauty,
passion, and its defects, characteristically a young
man's achievement, the lyrical tragedy of youth,
love, and of death : it stands by itself, and we na
it (iv.) " Early Tragedy."
39. Middle History. — After the Marlowesque
Richard III., which completes the
historical plays concerned with the fortunes of th(
house of York, Shakspere turned to the closely-
connected subject of the fortunes of the house
Lancaster, and began a new series of historical pla]
with Richard II. He was determined now to ti
his own dramatic methods and manner in h
and so there is much rhyme in Richard II.
the play is of a more complex structure than
Richard III, and the characterisation is more subtle
and more varied. To the same period belongs Ring
John. The advantage taken of a humorous element,
appearing here in the person of Fau Icon bridge, gives
us a foretaste of the blending of comedy with his-
tory, which was afterwards brought to perfection in
Henry IV. We name this group of two plays (v.)
"Middle History."
40. Middle Comedy. — To about the same date
as King John belongs The Merchant of Venice.
stands midway between the early and the later
comedies, and partakes of the characteristics of
both groups. (See p. 91.) We name it (vi.) " Middle
Comedy."
41- Later History. — Having treated Yvstorj
nedy separately, the next step was Vo witta V>
[Idle
ma
tea.
v.] CAREER, AND DATES OF PL.-
Henry IV., Parts I. and II, are the comedy
Falstaff as much as they are the history of the
troublesome times of the king. The Merry Wives
af Windsor may have been sketched at an earlier
date [ it is not impossible that it assumed its present
form at a later date ; but upon the whole the evi-
dence inclines us to place it heTe, Shakspcre hastily
dashing off the prose play to comply with a com-
mand of the Queen, who desired to see FalstafF in
love. (See p. 103.) The date of The Taming of the
Shrew is also uncertain, some critics placing it as
late as 1602-1603 or iater (which seems incredible),
some as early as 1594. In its rough and boisterous
mirth it has affinities with 77m Merry Wives, and
perhaps lies dose to it in the chronological order.
■ Certainty upon this point is fortunately not of great
Importance, for only a portion of The Taming of the
Shim- is by Shakspcre, and that portion, though full
of vigour and high spirits, is as much a farce as a
comedy. In the series of histories Henry V. follows
close upon Hairy IV, Part II. In it Shakspere
pictured his ideal king, and bade farewell, in trumpet
notes, to English history. For convenience here,
I where so little disturbance of the chronological order
is caused, it is well to connect The Merry Wives and
The Shrew with the comedies which follow, and to
bring together the Second wnd Third Parts Hinry IV.
and Henry I'., which group we name (vii.) "Later
History."
4 1. Later Comedy. — A series of comedies follows,
and as the series was started before the histories had
come to an end, so its later plays overlap the sub-
sequent tragedies. It might indeed be desirable to
make the fact prominent, by placing the last three
comedies in a group by themselves, later than Julius
Casar and Hamlet. If, however, the student will beai
in mind that this group imws cm ani qn«c\w^ **«•
tragedies, something win be gj&asA, ta* ^v^^
point of view, by keeping the co\\\e&\es to??'** 15 - ^
will
/A";
SHAKSPERE.
allowing Julius Ccesar and Hamkt to stand near the
great tragedies of later date, with which they may
compared and contrasted.
(a) The earliest of these comedies are, then, TheShrew
and The Merry IP 'ives, somewhat rough and boisterous
plays, written with high spirit, entirely free from the
presence of pain or sorrow. But such rough humour
was not after Shakspere's own heart at this time. The
Merry Wives was a task imposed upon him, which he
executed with a hearty energy ; but still it was not a
work of his own choice. The Shrew also was but
half his own, for lie was forced to preserve the tone
of the farce-like piece upon which he worked. But in
the plays which immediately follow, the true Shak-
sperian comedy reaches its utmost beauty and per-
fection. (//) In Mitch Ado about Nothing, the high spirits
which had given life to The Shrew and The Merry
Wives still play their part, in a more excellent way,
in the creation of the brilliant pair, Beatrice and
Benedick. Everything grows finer, more harmonious,
more sweetly tempered in the pastoral comedy, As
You Like It. But the discontent of a superficial critic
of life, breathing through the glades of Arden, the
melancholy of Jaques, is like the first touch of autumn
wind upon the leaves, which to our sense may have
a pleasant poignancy, yet which foretells the approach
of the sad and barren days. In Twelfth Night this
passes away; and, upon the whole, if there be any
presence of sadness in these beautiful and happy plays,
it is a musical sadness which is resolved into a fuller
harmony of joy. Twelfth Night brings us to the
opening of the 17th century, and now Shakspere began
his great series of tragedies with Julius Casar. Con-
tinuing, however, to trace the comedies, we next come
to three which present a striking contrast to those
which have just been named. (/) All's Well that Ends
//',■// Ha-ics happily, as the title implies, but it is not
bright and sunny play ; it is earnest, awl seneraa '
the strong-willed heroine, -wVio kfc\s
ids
lOt
fed
de;
v.] CAREER, AND DATES OF PLAYS, 5;
earnestness of life and love, though she is noble, has
not the romantic charm of a Viola or a Rosalind. In
Measure for Measure a dark and evil world is pictured,
and out of this emerge the strength and purity of
Isabella, one of Shakspere's highest conceptions of
female character, but, like Helena, deficient in charm.
It is as if Shakspere at this time were writing comedy
when he ought to have been engaged on tragedy, and
creating characters in heroic mould which in comedy
hardly find their fitting places. Deep thoughts on life
and death in Mawir,- foi ~ Mt-tisitre remind us of Hamlet,
and the sin, the soul-searching of Angelo, his abase-
ment and discovery of guilt we scrutinise with a painful
interest. I would place Troilus and Cressida here,
and in it we reach a still greater distance from the
spirit of true comedy. It is the comedy of disillusion.
The young enthusiasm of Troilus is miserably dis-
enchanted. Ulysses has come to accept all the base-
ness of life as part of the nature of things, and as
material to be turned to account by worldly wisdom.
Thersites spews over everything that we had deemed
high and sacred, his foul, yet not all unwarrantable
insults. Cressida is a shalli.Av-hearitd wanton. Having
reached this point, Shakspere could not but cease for
a rime to write comedy.
This series of eight plays we group together, and
name them {viii.) " Later Comedy." But the entire
series of eight divides itself into three smaller groups :
the first — two plays of rough and boisterous mirth ; the
second — three comedies almost purely joyous, romantic
and refined; the third — three comedies, one earnest,
another dark and severe, the last, bitter and ironical.
43- Middle Tragedy.— Shakspere's first tragedy
was a lyrical tragedy of youth, of love, and of death.
When, after completing his series of historical plays
and his joyous comedies, Shakspere again turned
tragic themes, he wrote as a. man cS tMsMK'it \swrafc»
■id as a thinker. In K\s ViStwsva Vc V*&- " w '" v
■aling with the real wot\d,t\\e\NOt\4 <& asNo^
:
i
!
;
.th.
lys
to
WERE.
is two tragedies, Julius Cicsar and Hamlet, lie
tudies the failure in practical affairs of two men,
Brutus and Hamlet, who are called to the perfc
ance of great actions, buf who ore disqualified, the
one for acting wisely, the other for acting ener-
getically. Hamlet and Brutus fail, yet we honour
I them ; they fall as martyrs or victims to duties im-
posed upon them as it were by fate, and which
become burdens too heavy for them to bear. These
IffO tragedies are tragedies of reflection ; Shakspere
is not yet caught up in [he passionate wind of his
own imagination. Everything is thought out and
wrought out deliberately in these two plays. We
name this group (ix.) " Middle Tragedy,"
44. Later Tragedy, — The tragedies of passion
follow. Error and misfortune, or, at worst, weakness
, had ruined the lives of Brutus and
Hamlet. They had not wronged their own souls
by crime. But now passion and crime form the sub-
jects of tragedy, instead of error or the cruelty of
The bonds of life are broken : in Othello, the
5 which unite husband and wife ; in Lear, the
bonds which unite parent and child ; in Macbeth, the
bonds of kinship and of the loyally of the suhject .
Antony, through voluptuous self-indulgence, dissolves
the lionds which bind him to his country, and ceases
to be a Roman ; Coriolanus, through passionate
haughtiness, also turns away from Rome, and even
tries to crush the loyalties and affections which make
him man — tries to lift himself into a proud isolation ;
lastly, Timon actually severs himself, not from his
country merely, but from humanity itself.
" misanthropes, and hates mankind." But he is not
formed for misanthropy, and is slain by his unnatural
hatred. This group of plays we name (x.) " Later
Tragedy."
45- Romances. — The transition from these to
Sbakspere'B h.-t pi.iys is most remarVtilAe. \ ; T(ym. *
tragic pa SS i on which reached its c\\ma.x m Timon
CAREER, AND DATES OF PLAYS.
Athens, we suddenly pass to beauty and serenity; from
the plays concerned with the violent breaking of human
bonds, to a group of plays which are all concerned with
the knitting together of human bonds, the reunion of
parted kindred, the forgiveness of enemies, the atone-
ment for wrong — not by death but by repentance — the
reconciliation of husband with wife, of child with
father, of friend with friend. Pericks is a sketch in
which only a part of the subject of these last plays is
clearly conceived ; it is in some respects like a slighter
and earlier Tempest, in which Lord Cerimon is the
Prospero. It also contains hints afterwards worked
out in The Winter's Tale; the reunion of the Prince
of Tyre and his lost Thaisa is a kind of anticipation
of the re-discovery by Leontes of his wife whom he
had so long believed to be dead. Posthumus's
jealousy, his perception of his error, his sorrow, and
his pardon, may be contrasted with the similar series
of incidents in The Winter's Tale, and the ex-
quisitely impulsive and generous Imogen may be set
over against the grave, statue-like Hermione, whose
forgiveness follows the long years of suffering, endured
with noble fortitude. Prospero is also wronged ; his
enemies are in bis power ; but he has employed his
supernatural ministers to lead them to penitence rather
than to bring them to punishment. He has learned
that " the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance."
In these plays there are two sets of dramatis
persniue : the great sufferers, aged and experienced—
'Pericles, Prospero, Hermione, afterwards Queen
Katherine; and the young and beautiful children in
the brightness of the morning of life — Miranda,
Perdita, Arviragus, and Guiderius ; and Shakspere
seems to render homage to both ; to the great sufferers
for their virtue, and patience, and sc
young men and maidens for their beauty and their joy.
There is a romantic element abovA \.\\ts,e. -vjva.^. "^
all there is the same romatitkmuiem. eKAwS. ^^IS-,
recovered by those to -w\\oto. fcfj w- &.««.-
i
56
SHAKSPERE.
[CHAP.
daughters of Pericles and Leontes, the sons of
Cymbeline and Alonso. In all there is a beautiful
romantic background of sea or mountain. The dramas
have a grave beauty, a sweet serenity, which seem to
render the name " comedies " inappropriate ; we may
smile tenderly, but we never laugh loudly, as we read
them. Let us, then, name this group, consisting of
four plays, (xi.) Romances.
46. Fragments. — There aaly remain the two
(xii.) fragments of Henry VIII. and The Two Noble
Kinsmen. The same spirit appears in these as in the
Romances. In each of these plays the work of
Shakspere is united with that of Fletcher.
47. Summary. — The following table presents the
series of groups in chronological order, as they have
been here made out ; the plays in each group are
arranged in what is supposed to be the true order of
succession ; and the date of each play (ascertained
or conjectured) is affixed.
I. PRE-SHAKSPERIAN GROUr.
( Touched by Shakspere. )
Titus Andronicus (1588-90).
I Henry VI. (1590-91).
2. EARLY COMEDIES.
Love's Labour's Lost (1590).
Comedy of Errors (1591).
Two Gentlemen of Verona
(1592-93).
Midsummer Night's Dream
(1593-94)-
3. MARLOWE- SHAKSPERE
GROUP.
EARLY HISTORY.
2 &' 3 Henry VI. (1591-92).
Hichard 111. (I $93). * '
4. EARLY TRAGEDY.
Romeo and Juliet (? two dates,
1591, 1596-97).
5. MIDDLE HISTORY.
Richard II. (1594).
King John (1595).
6. MIDDLE COMEDY.
Merchant of Venice (1596).
7. LATER HISTORY.
History and Comedy united.
I & 2 Henry IV. (1597-98).
Henry V. (1599).
8. LATER COMEDY.
1 {a) Rough and boisterous Comedy.
Taming of the Shrew V? ISSTH-
Merry Wives £ 159&V
1
■ ■ .
Much Aflij atiuiil Nutliing
As You Lik'. Il
Twelfth Night (]too-i6oi).
■
tiTsWen i- iGm-rtcaJ,
KfBWE (I'lOjJ.
c nrwii^n (? 1603
1607 ?].
JJwtn (1607).
■ ■
Tiiuim (1O07-1608).
■ ' r fun?).
■
Tempest lifioi.
Wmid'a rale (if.io-lt).
iz. fjlal;>ientf>.
■
Tetm and A-i
1 99^-94')
I 5onnetE(? 1593^60$),
(8 Plots of Comedies.— The student will ob-
■ '■■■> arrangement, early, middle, and later
Comedy ; earl)", middle, and later History ; and early,
middle, and later Tragedy. Not only is it well to
view the entire body of Shakspere's plays in the
order of their chronological succession, but also to
trace in chronological order the three separate lines
of Comedy, History, and Tragedy. The group named
Rfwmocs connect themselves, of conn
Comedies : but there is a grave element in them
which is connected with the Tragedies which pre-
ceded them, it has been noticed that the Romances
bawe in common me incidents of reunions, reconcilia-
tions, and the recover)' of lost children
though so remarkable for his power of Cutting
character, is not distinguished among dramatists by
his power of inventing incident. Having fovaA -a.
situation which interested \v\s vaftigina^wi., W "* "
successful on the bUE,e,he yawi4»«A. '"*- ^SS^
f
again, with variations. Thus, in the Early Comedies,
mistakes of identity, disguises, errors, and bewilder-
ments, in various forms, recur as a source of n
ment and material for adventure. In the Later
Comedies, again, it is quite remarkable how Shakspere
(generally in the portions oi" these plays which are
due to his own invention) repeats, with variations, the
incident of a trick or fraud practised upon one who is
a self-lover, and its consequences, grave or gay. Thus
Falstaff is fatuous enough to believe that two English:
matrons are dying of love for him, and is made the!
victim of their merry tricks. Malvolio is made
of by the mischievous Maria taking advantage of his
solemn self-esteem ; Beatrice and Benedick are cun-
ningly entrapped, through their good-natured vanity,
into love for which they had been already predisposed ;
the boastful Parolles is deceived, flouted, and dis-
graced by his fellow-soldiers; and (Shakspere's mood
growing earnest, and his thoughts being set upon deep
questions of character) Angelo, the self-deceiver, by
the craft of the Duke, is discovered painfully to the
eyes of others and to his own heart.
49. First Period. — Returning now from our
more detailed classification, let us glance once more
at the four periods into which we divided Shakspere's
career of authorship. The first, which I named In
workshop, was the period during which Sh.ikspere
was learning his trade as a dramatic craftsman.
Starting at the age of twenty-four or twenty-.six, he
made rapid progress, and cannot but have been'
aware uf this. The works of Shakspere's youth—'
experiments in various directions — are all marked by
the presence of vivacity, cleverness, delight in beauty,
and a quick enjoyment of existence. If
dustrious apprentice, he was also a gay and courageous
S°- Second Period. — As yet, however, he wrote
with small experience of human life ; l\\e esftj yVv^ W
"*ght or fanciful, rather than reaUndmasswe. 'fiui.w
vj CAREER, AND DATES OF PLAYS.
Shakspere's imagination began to lay hold of real life ;
he came to understand the world and the men in it ;
his plays begin to deal in an original and powerful
way with the matter of history. " The compression of
the large and rough matter of history into dramatic
form demanded vigorous exercise of the plastic energy
of the imagination ; and the circumstance that he was
dealing with reality and positive facts of the world,
must have served to make clear to Shakspere that
there was sterner stuff of poetry, material more precious
— even for purposes of art — in actual life, than could
be found in the conceits, and prettinesses, and affecta-
tions which at times led him astray in his earlier
writings." During this period Shakspere's work grows
strong and robust. It was the time when he was
making rapid advance in worldly prosperity, and
accumulating the fortune on which he meant to
retire as a country gentleman. I name the second
period therefore In the world.
51. Third Period— Before it closed Shakspere
had known sorrow : his son was dead ; his father
died probably soon after Shakspere had written his
Twelfth Night ; his friend of the Sonnets had done
him wrong. Whatever the cause may have been,
the fact seems certain that the poet now ceased
to care for tales of mirth and love, for the stir
and movement of historv, for the pomp of war; he
needed to sound, with his imagination, the depths
of the human heart ; to inquire into the darkest
and saddest parts of human life ; to study the great
mystery of eviL The belief in human virtue, indeed,
never deserts him : in Lear there is a Cordelia ; in
Mad'tjh a Banquo ; even Troilus will be the better,
not the worse, for his disenchantment with Cressida ;
and it is because Timon would fain love that he is
driven to hate. Still, during this period, Shakspere's
genius left the bright surface of tf\e •«ot\&.,m\&.-s-s5>-*s-
work in the very heart and cettoe. cA 'Scivosg.. "W^n^
named it Out of the depths.
(jo SHAKSPERE. [chap.
52. Fourth Period. — The tragic gloom and suffer-
ing were not, however, to last for ever. The dark
cloud lightens and rolls away, and the sky appears
purer and tenderer than ever. The impression left
U]x>n the reader by Shakspere's last plays is that,
whatever his trials and sorrows and errors may have
been, he had come forth from them wise, large-hearted,
calm-souled. He seems to have learned the secret of
life, and while taking his share in it, to be yet dis-
engaged from it ; he looks down upon life, its joys, its
griefs, its errors, with a grave tenderness, which is
almost pity. The spirit of these last plays is that of
serenity which results from fortitude, and the recogni-
tion of human frailty ; all of them express a deep
sense of the need of repentance and the duty of forgive-
ness. And they all show a delight in youth and the
loveliness of youthful joy, such as one feels who looks
on these things without possessing or any longer desir-
ing to possess them. Shakspere in this period is most
like his own Prospero. In these " Romances," and
in the " Fragments," a supernatural element is pre-
sent ; man does not strive with circumstance and
with his own passions in darkness ; the gods preside
over our human lives and fortunes, they communicate
with us by vision, by oracles, through the elemental
powers of nature. Shakspere's faith seems to have
been that there is something without and around our
human lives, of which we know little, yet which we
know to be beneficent and divine. And it will be felt
that the name which I have given to this last period —
Shakspere having ascended out of the turmoil and
trouble of action, out of the darkness and tragic mystery,
the places haunted by terror and crime, and by love
contending with these, to a pure and serene elevation
— it will be felt that the name, On the heights, is
neither inappropriate nor fanciful.
oil
tea
■p.
1.1c
HIS PLA YS AND POEMS,
CHAPTER VI.
INTRODUCTIONS TO THE PLAYS AND POEMS.
i. Titus Andronicus (pronounced by the writer
of the play Andron'-I-cus).— The importance of this
tragedy lies in the fact that, if Shakspere wrote it, we
find him as a young man carried away by the influence
of a Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement
similar to that which urged Schiller to write his
Robbers. Titus Andronicus belongs essentially to the
pre-Shakspcrian group of bloody tragedies, of which
Kyd's Spanish Tragedy is the most conspicuous
example. If it is of Shaksperian authorship it may be
viewed as representing the years of crude and violent
youth before he had found his true self; his second
tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, as representing the years
of transition ; and Hamiet, the period of maturity and
adult power.
The external evidence with reference to the author-
ship of Titus is the following : ( r) It is mentioned by
Meres (1598) among other undoubted plays of Shak-
spere. (2) It is printed in the First Folio. (3) Rareus-
croft, who altered the play in 168;, declares that he
had been told "by some anciently conversant with
the stage that it was not his [Shakspere's]." but that
he only gave "some master-touches to one or two of
the principal parts or characters." The great majority
of F.n^lish critics either altogether reject ihe play, upon
the ground that in style and subject it is unlike anv
other work of our dramatist, or accept as true the
tradition of Rttvcnscrc/t, that it was touched by Shak-
_>ere, and no more. "Shakspere's tragedy is never
bloodily sensual ; . . . this cAivy is a. ^c.1 &»»!&&»=*■
Jiouse, and the blood mates, a.Tm^ \.o «!&**. ^f^U
It reeks blood, it smefts cA UcxA,-^^^
i
1
feel lhat we have handled blood— it is so gross." To
attempt to point out certain passages as written by
Shakspere would be unsafe, for we know little of what
the distinguishing features of Shakspere's style were
when he began to write for the stage ; but no lines in
the play have more of a Shaksperian ring than the
following {Act IV. Sc iv. L. 81-S6) :
King, be thy ihi mollis L;n j.^Hons, like thy name.
Is Ihe sun diunm'd lhat gnats ilo fly in it f
The eagk- suffers link- Muls to sing,
And is not careful what they mean thereby,
Knowing that with the shadow of his wings
He Can at pleasure stint their melody.
A play, Titus and Vespasian (mentioned by Hens-
lowe as " tittus and vespacia "), was acted in 1592, and
though itself lost, a translation into German, acted
early in the 17th century by English comedians in
Germany, remains in existence. It is not the play
attributed to Shakspere. Henslowe also mentions a
Titus oiui Andruniais as a new play, acted January 23,
1594 : it is doubtful whether this was the Shak-
sperian play. If it be, and it was then written, the
tragedy is certainly not by Shakspere. It is impos-
sible to believe that in 1594, when Shakspere had
written his Venus ami Adonis and his Lucrece, he could
have dealt so coarsely with details of outrage and un-
natural cruelty as does the author of this tragedy.
Ben Jonson, in the introduction to Bartholomew Fair
(1614), speaks of Titus Aiidranicus, will) Jcroiiime, as
belonging to " twenty-live or thirty years " previously :
this would carry back the date of the play (if it be
of this Titus Andronicus that Jonson speaks) to 1589,
or earlier. That it was a play of that period, and was
touched by Shakspere, we may accept as the opinion
best supported by internal evidence and by the weight
of critical authority.
*■ King Henry VI., Part 1., \s a\«\o« coiv^mVj
*n old play, by one or more authors, w\»k\\, as,
gnt
HIS FLA YS AND POEMS. 63
it in the First Folio, had received touches from the
hand of Shakspere. In Henslowe's diary a Henry VI.
is said to have been acted March 3, 1591-92. It
was extremely popular. Nash in his Picrct Ptmitmt
(1592) alludes to the triumph on the stage of " brave
Talbot " over the French. But we have no reason for
believing that the play which we possess was that
mentioned by Henslowe or that alluded to by Nash.
Greene had, perhaps, a chief hand in this play, and he
may have been assisted by Peele and Marlowe. There
is a general agreement among critics in attributing
to Shakspere the scene (Act II. Sc. iv.) in which the
white and red roses are plucked as emblems of the
rival parties in the state ; perhaps the scene of the
wooing of Margaret by Suffolk (Act V. So. iii. L. 45
and onwards) if not written by Shakspere was touched
by him. The general spirit of the drama belongs to
an older school than the Shaksperian, and it is a
happiness not to have to ascribe to our greatest poet
the crude and hateful handling of the character of
Joan of Arc, excused though to some extent it may
be by the concurrence of view in our old English
chronicles.
3. Love's Labour's Lost, as far as we know, is
whollyof Shakspere's nun invention ; no source of the
plot has been discovered. The play is precisely such
an one as a clever young man might imagine, who had
come lately from the country — with its " daisies pied
and violets blue," its " merry larks," its maidens who
" bleach their summer smocks," its pompous parish
schoolmaster, and its dull constable (a great public
official in his own eyes) — to the town, where he was
surrounded by more brilliant unrealities, and affecta-
tions of dress, of manner, of language, and of ideas.
Love's Labour's Lost is a dramatic plea on behalf of
nature and of common sense against all that is unreal
and affected. It maintains, m 3. ^ BS& -«x\.Vi fe&bisEv,
(lie superiority of life, as a tneassa (A <*°* ia **^.3J|a
books; the superiority of vV\e\M^ ^«bN&- ^ e * w
SHAKSPERE. [chap.
are born over any little world we can construct for
ourselves, and into which we may hedge ourselves by
rule ; and, while maintaining this, it also asserts that
we must not educate ourselves only by what is mirthful
and pleasant in the world, but must recognise its
sorrow, and that we cannot be rightly glad without
being grave and earnest. The King of Navarre, i
three of his lords— one of whom, Berowne, sees through
the seeming splendour of the king's design 1
real folly — resolve to turn their court into a " little
Academe," to seclude themselves from all that is
common and unideal, to devote themselves for three
years to study, fasting much, sleeping little, and for-
swearing the company of ladies : in a word, theyaspin
to establish a little monastery of culture. The scheme,
which looked so graceful while it went no farther than
words, breaks down lamentably when they would n
it real. The king is obliged, by reasons of state, to
receive the Princess of France and her three ladies ;
the vowed scholars — all four of them— fall over head
and ears in love, and an amusing scene of discovery
and confession takes place, in which each in turn
betrays his secret, and is convicted before his equally
guilty fellows, until at last Berowne— who unites good
sense with genius— comes forward to charge with error
their original vows of seclusion, and to justify their
present apostasy. There is much merry mocking of
the lovers by the French girls, and in bright play with
the weapons of words Rosaline is a match for Berowne.
When the mirth is at its highest come tidings that the
father of the princess is dead. The comedy will not
end with weddings ; love's labour is lost ; the king is
dismissed to a twelvemonth's absence and testing of
his love ; and Berowne, the mocker, in the same in-
terval before marriage, must make his jests, if he can,
for sick folk in an hospital, and so learn the graver side
of iife. Thus, with its apparent lightness, there is a
serious spirit underlying (lie play, bul the BlifeiK* is &
se, andsiir, and sparkle. It is a comedy ot li'vAc^
vu] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. 6;
rather than of incident, and in the persons
Adriano de Armado, a fantastical Spaniard, of Sir
Nathaniel the curate, and of Holofernes the school-
master, are caricatured various Elizabethan absurdities
of speech, pseudo-refinement, and pseudo-learning.
The braggart soldier and the pedant are characters
well known in Italian comedy, and perhaps it was
from that quarter that the hint came to Shakspere,
which stirred his imaginaiion to create these ridiculous
figures. Holofernes, some persons have supposed to
be a satirical sketch of an individual— John Florio,
author of an Italian dictionary; but Shakspere did
not in any ascertained instances satirise individual
persons, and there is little evidence in this case to
warrant the supposition. The fifth act winds up with
a. pair of songs in the most genuine country style,
rustic yet graceful, such songs as the milkmaids of
Isaac Walton might sing. After the daintinesses, and
pomposities, and affectations, come these fresh rural
ditties. The play contains nothing which serves to
ascertain its precise date, but it certainly belongs to
Shakspere's earliest dramatic period. The first quarto
was printed in 1598 (probably in the spring of the
year 1598-99) " as it was presented before her High-
ness [Queen Elizabeth] this last Christmas [probably
the Christmas of 1598], Newly corrected and aug-
mented." Two traces of the alterations from the
original play may still be observed. In Act V. Sc. ii.,
the lines 827-832 ought not to appear, being almost
certainly the fragment of the play in its first form,
which was afterwards worked out in the lines 833-879.
Similarly in Berowne's great speech, Act IV. Sc iii.,
the lines 296-317 contain passages which are repeated
or altered in the lines which follow, 318-354, and
obviously some of the lines of the original version
have here been retained through a mistake.
4. The Comedy of Errotaa&«&^«t*^«ofe^B. :
cical play. Its sources of \a\YgYA« \\a i\a\o«.**^
the situations and incidents, \\ax4V^ M.^'S^^ "*
:. The spectator of the piny is called on to
ch that is improbable and all but impossible,
I Midsummer Night's Dream, for the sake i
play of imagination, and because the world pictured
by the poet is a fairy-world of romantic beauty and
grotesqueness, but for the sake of mere fun and
laughter-stirring surprises. So cleverly, however, are
the incidents and persons entangled and disentangled,
so rapidly does surprise follow surprise, that we are
given no time to raise difficulties and offer objections.
The subject of the comedy is the same as that of the
Memechmi of Plautus— mistakes of identity arising from
the likeness of twin-born children. How Shakspere
made acquaintance with Plautus we are not certain ;
possibly through William Warner's translation of the
Mnnec/iiiii, seen in manuscript before its publication
in 1595 ; more probably through an earlier play, not
now extant, perhaps that one which was acted in 1576
at Hampton Court, under the name of The Historic
of Error. The hint for Act III. Sc. L, where An-
tipholus of Ephesus is shut out from his own house
I while his brother and wife are at dinner within, seems
to have been taken from the Amphitruo of Plautus,
where Jupiter, the supposed Amphitruo, lakes posses-
sion of the house of the real Amphitruo, and beguiles
its mistress. To the twins of the Menachmi are added,
by Shakspere, their servants, a second pair of brothers,
the twins Promio. This does not make the im-
probability of the whole seem greater, but rather the
reverse ; for the fun is doubled, and where so much is
incredible we are carried away and have no wish but
to yield ourselves up to belief in the incredible for
the time being, so as to enter thoroughly into the jest.
Shakspere added other characters — the Duke Solinus
(when he can he always introduces a duke), -'Kgeon,
.Balthazar, Angelo, the Abbess, and I.uciana, and he
alters the character of the married brother, Anttpholus,
from the repulsive Menaechmus of P\a.\A\i5, \v\\\\ \n\\oto
■w can have little sympathy, into a, person \v\10 afcVwfc
isfers from
vi.] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS.
is not base and vicious. The scene he transfers
Epidamnum to Ephesus, that city which had an evil
repute for its roguery, licentiousness, and magical
practices, a city in which such errors might be sup-
posed to be the result of sorcery and witchcraft. (See
Act I. Sc, ii. L. 97-102.) To Shakspere belongs
wholly the serious background, from which the farcical
incidents stand out in relief— the story of the Syracusan
merchant who almost forfeits his life in the search for
his lost children, and finally recovers both the lost ones
and his own liberty. There is a fine passage, full of
pathos, and almost in Shakspere's later dramatic man-
ner, where the old man, a prisoner before the duke,
finds that his son does not recognise his face, nor re-
member his voice (Act V, Sc. i. L. 295-322); but
such passages, in which character or human passion
rather than incident chiefly interests us, are rare,
the twins Antipholus are indistinguishable in pei
and costume, so there is little or no attempt made
discriminate their characters ; the Dromios are or
a pair of jesters, alike and equally serviceable for
receiving bard knocks and returning witty answers.
But Adrians, the jealous wife, has some individuality ;
she is more than an excuse for ridiculous accidents ;
Shakspere takes some interest in doing her dramatic
justice; her shrewish temper is that of a woman who
loves her husband, and who would persecute him into
loving only her. The date of the play cannot be
exactly determined, but it is certainly one of the very
earliest plays. " In what part of her body stands . . . .
France?" asks Antipholus of Syracuse, questioning
Dromio about the kitchen- wench, who is so large
and round that she has been compared lo a globe;
snd Dromio answers: " In her forehead, armed and
reverted, making war against her heir," (Act III. Sc ii.
L. 125-27.) France was in a state of civil war,
fighting for and against her heir, Hjiwlv \M .., fe*&.
AagBst, 1589, until shattYy \w.tate. V\a taiow^^.
in February, 1594. In 1591 Yvewv vaase»*& "***
assion
: As
)erson
ide to
1 only
Ip fnr
-
assistance of troops from England, commanded
the Earl of Essex.
_. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, though
parts slightly worked out, exhibits an advance on the
preceding comedies. The Errors was a clever tangle
of diverting incidents, with a few passages of lyric
beauty, and one of almost tragic pathos ; Love's
Labours Lust was a play of glittering and elaborate
dialogue. In The ZW Gentlemen of Verona Shak-
apere struck into a new path, which he was to pursue
wilh admirable results ; it is his earliest comedy in
which a romantic love-story is told in dramatic form.
Here first Shakspcrc records the tender and passionate
history of a woman's heart, and the adventures to
which love may prompt her. Julia {who is like a
Crayon sketch of Juliet, conceived in a way suitable
to comedy instead of tragedy) is the first of that
charming group of children of Shakspere's imagi-
nation which includes Viola, Portia, Rosalind, and
Imogen — women who assume, under some constraint
of fortune, the disguise of male attire, and who, while
submitting to their transformation, forfeit none of the
grace, the modesty, the sensitive delicacy, or the
pretty wilfulness oi their sex Launce, accompanied
I by his immortal dog, leads the train of Shaksperet
humorous clowns: his rich, grotesque humanity is
"worth all the bright, fantastic interludes of Boyet
and Adriano, Costard and Holofernes," worth all the
" dancing doggerel or broad-witted prose of either
Dromio." The play contains a number of sketches,
from which Sliakspere afterwards worked out finished
pictures. (See p. 91, Merchant of Venice.) The charac-
ters are clearly conceived, and contrasted with almost
too obvious a design: the faithful Valentine is set
over against the faithless Proteus ; the bright and
clever Silvia is s.t over against the tender and ardent
'////.■/.,- the down Speed, notable as a verbal wit and
n'bbler, is set over against the bunUHWU LwUKA.
HIS PLA YS AND POEMS.
The general theme of the play we may define as
and friendship, with their mutual relations.
denouement in Act V., if written by Shaltspere ir
form we now have it, is a very crude piece of v
Proteus' sudden repentance, Valentine's sudden aban-
donment to him of Silvia, under an impulse of extra-
vagant friendship (" all that was mine in Silvia I give
thee;" Act V. Sc. iv. L. 83), and Silvia's silence :md
passiveness whilst disposed of from lover to lover,
are, even for the fifth act of a comedy, strangely
unreal and ill-contrived. Can it be that this fifth
act has reached us in an imperfect form, and that
some speeches between Silvia and Valentine have
dropped out ? The date of the play cannot be
definitely fixed ; but its place among the comedies
is probably after Love's Labour's Lost, and before
A Midsummer Night's Dream. The language and
verse are characterised by an even sweetness ; rhymed
lines and doggerel verses are lessening in number;
the blank verse is written with careful regularity. It
is as if Shakspcre were giving up his early licences
of versification, were aiming at a more refined style
(which occasionally became a little tame), but being
still a novice in the art of writing blank verse, were
timid, and failed to write it with the freedom and
"happy valiancy" which distinguish his later manner.
The story of The Two Gentlemen of Verona is identical
in many particulars with The Story of the Shepherdess
Felismena, in the Spanish pastoral romance, Diana,
by George of Montemayor ; but though manuscript
translations of the Diana existed at an earlier date,
> translation was published before that of Yonge,
1598. The story had probably been dramatised
before Shakspere's play, for we read in the accounts
of the revels of The History of Felix ami Philomena,
acted before her Highness in 15S4. Valentine's con-
senting to become captain of the toUtes. V«s> \*ss^.
d with a somewhat sTOwVAi'm^vieT^m^^^-S^
Arcadia, but the coincidences are slight, and it
be doubted that Shakspere had here any thought
the Arcadia.
6. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a strai
and beautiful web, woven delicately by a youtl
poet's fancy. What is perhaps most remarkable
the play is the harmonious blending in it of '
different elements. It is as if threads of silken
dour were run together in its texture with a y;
liempen homespun, and both these with lines of d<
gossamer and filaments drawn from the moonbe;
In North's Plutarch, or in Chaucer's Kni-hl's ',
Shakspere may have found the figures of Theseus
his Amazonian bride ; from Chaucer also ( Wife
Bath's Tale), may have come the figure of the
queen (though not her name. Titania), and the s
of Pyramus and Thisbe (see Chaucer's Legend of Gt
Women) ; this last, however, was perhaps taken from
Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Oberon,
the fairy-king, had recently appeared in Greene's play
The Scottish History of James IV; Puck, under his
name of Robin < looJfelli >\\; was a roguish sprite, well
known in English fairy-lore. Finally, in Montemayor's
Diana, which Shakspere had made acquaintance with
before The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written,
occur some incidents which may have suggested tht
magic effects of the flower-juice laid upon the sleepinj
lovers' lids. Taking a little from this quarter and
little from that, Shakspere created out of such slight
materials his marvellous Dream. The marriage of
Duke Theseus and Hippolyta— who are classical in
name only, being in reality romantic mediarva] figures
— surrounds the whole, as it were, with a magnificent
frame. Theseus is Shakspere's early ideal of a heroic
warrior and man of action. His life is one of splendid
achievement and of joy ; his love is a kind of happy
■■■kiory, his marriage a triumph. From early morninj
irAen his hounds — themselves heroic cveataTes-
t&e valley with their "musical confus\on," ™u\
!
vi.] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS.
night, when the Athenian clowns end their "very
tragical mirth," with a Bergomask dance, Theseus
displays his joyous energy and the graciousness of
power. In contrast with him and his warrior bride,
the figures of the young lovers look slight and grace-
ful, and their love-perplexities and errors are seen to
be among the minor and remediable afflictions of the
world. Shakspere was not interested in making much
distinction of character between Demetrius and
Lysander, they are little more than a first lover and
a second lover. Nor is Helena distinguishable from
Hermia by much else than that in person she is the
taller of the two and the gentler in disposition. Where
there are so many contrasts, the play can admit, and
perhaps needs, some uniformities. The mirth of the
> lovers' part of A Midsummer Night's Dream turns
chiefly upon incidents, and therefore, as with the
brothers Anlipholus in The Comedy of Errors, dif-
ferences of character are not made prominent. Here,
as in the Errors, there are entanglements and cross-
purposes. The one play has indeed been named
" the mistakes of a day," and the other " the mistakes
of a night : " but the difference lies deeper than such
names intimate; for in the Errors the confusion is
external to the mind, here it is internal ; in the Errors
the feelings of the actors remain constant, but the
persons towards whom they are directed take the place,
unobserved, one of another ; here the persons remain
constant, but their feelings of love, indifference, or
dislike arc at the mercy of mischief making accident.
(It may be noticed that in The Comedy of Errors there
is a passage (Act II. Sc. ti. L. 190-204) which looks
as if when Shakspere wrote it he were already thinking
of his fairy-world in A Midsummer Nights Dream, of
the pranks of Robin Coodfellow, and of Bottom's
transformation to an ass.
As the two extremes of exquisite dfi,\\«.<^ , c?. Ssaasfe^
elegance, and, on the ov\er. Y«n\&,
^ who was married in 1590. But these
dates are, the one too late, the other too early. The
V. Sc. i. L. 52-53)
ning For the death
have been thought to refer to Robert Greene's miser-
able death (159?) ; it is much more likely, if they
contain an allusion to anything contemporary, that the
reference is to S]>enser's poem Tilt 7>ars of 'Ae Muses
r 1 59 1 ). A passage (Act 11. Sc. i. L. 'SS-nS) in
which Titania describes the recent ill seasons, wintry
•UiiniiTs, flood and fog, would very aptly correspond
-rs-ous years 1593 and 1594. Perhaps we
f incline towards 1594 as the date of the play. It
a large proportion of rhyming lines ; but the
■r of the ['lay naturally calls for this. Such a
ssionof rhymes repeating a single sound, as occur
t Act III. Sc L L. 168-177, arid *<* IV Sc. i.
- 90-97, evidently are introduced with a special pur-
The play has the gaiety, the 1 an ci fulness, and
the want of either deep thought or passion which we
"it expect in an early drama.
rly acted before Elizabeth. The praise
"single blessedness" (Act 1. Sc 1. 1- 74-78) may
; lieen designed 10 please the ears of tin
■ .r.m's vision (Act II. Sc A. \„ \^-\*>%\
tircmed W fee ■■
74
SSAK
Elizabeth. It was supposed by Warburton that by
"the mermaid on a dolphin's back" was meant Mary
Queen of Scots (the dauphins wife), and by the
" stars," the English nobles who fell in her quarrel.
It has been shown, howeveT, that a mermaid t
dolphin's back, and shooting fires, actually formed part
of the Kenilworth festivities with which Leicester
entertained Elizabeth, when aiming at his mistress'
hand, and which Shakspere as a boy may have wit-
nessed. Elizabeth escaped heart-whole, but Lettice,
wife of the Earl of Essex, was at that time falsely
loved by Leicester, and she it has been suggested—
perhaps over-ingeniously— may be " the little western
flower."
The action of the play is comprised within three
days, ending at twelve o'clock on the night of May-
day. The notes of time given in the opening lines
of the play are inconsistent with this statement, I
the inconsistency is Shakspere's own.
Two quarto editions, of which the second was p
balily pirated, "civ issued in the year 1600.
7. King Henry VI., Parts II. and III., are r<
casts of two older p&y*— The J^rst Part of the Con
tetitum, Ac. (published 1594), and The True T> _ "
Richard Duke of Yorke, &c (published 1595). About
3241 lines of these old plays reappear cither in tY.
or in an altered form in 2 and $ /fairy /'/..what «
nearly one-half of the Henry VI. (2736 lines) being
altogether new. No question in Shakspere scholarship
is luvi.- perplexing ami difficult titan that of the author
ship of these four connected historical dramas.
It is impossible here to enter into this discussion,
but the chief rival theories must be briefly stated :
{1) Shakspere was author of the four plays : th(
opinion of Knight, and almost certaKiVj f
neous.
(-') Greene and Peele were the autiioK ot theoVA
Pteys; Shakspere the reviser, teUuiVna \»*is«»
II
Vl-I HIS PLA YS AND POEMS. 75
of his predecessor's work, altering portions, and
adding passages of his own, — (Mat. 1 ink.)
(3) Marlowe, Greene, Shakspere {and perhaps
Peele), were the authors of the old plays;
Shakspere alone the reviser, and the portions
common to the old plays, and 2 and 3 Hairy
VI. were Shakspere's contributions to the
original dramas, which he now reclaimed for
his own use. — (R. Grant White.)
(4) Marlowe and Greene {and possibly Peele) the
authors of the old plays ; Shakspere and Mar-
lowe the revisers, working as collaborateurs. —
(Miss Jane Lee.)
The third and fourth of these theories may he said
to have driven the first and second off the field ; and
it will he seen that the two questions in dispute are
the following : Had Shakspere a hand in the old
plays ? and, Had Marlowe a hand not only in the
old plays, but also as reviser in the new ?
Marlowe's hand is certainly visible in both the old
plays and in some of the passages which appear for
the first time in Henry VI (see, for a striking example,
iHemy VI, Act IV.Sc.i.L.1-11). Shakspere and the
" Dead Shepherd " whom he alludes to in As You Like
It, were then fellow- workers, and if rivals, their rivalry
was noble. But in truth, at this time Marlowe, by
virtue of his prestige, and because he had found his
proper genius while Shakspere was still feeling after
his true direction, would be the superior, and the
degree of independence of spirit shown in .Shakspere's
work, although he is under the influence of Marlowe,
i, interesting and remarkable. It is not easy to attri-
bute the humorous Jack Cade scenes in The First Part
of the Contention to any other writer t.Hs,w SfoatwB^i»ft.\
"he be excluded from a. skrewte '$«^,*»wi , wsaaS.
ascribed to Greene. " S^eaton*. ViWftSSq? "aS**
■ ■■■* Lee, "in The Contention sm& True Tr t a ^%„e*r
aracters of King HenryVUC^*^^ 3 " 1 * 1 *^
SHAKSPERE.
[but many of York's speeches, she adds, must have been
written by Greene], "Suffolk, the two Cliffords" [and
Richard] " are drawn by Marlowe ; but I say this with
the reservation, that in certain scenes written by Greene
the parts of these characters were written by Greent
also. .... Turning next from Marlowe's characters ti
the characters of Greenes — Duke Humphrey I believe
to be in a measure his, and also the Duchess Eleanor
Clarence, Edward IV., . . . Elizabeth, ... Sir John
Hume " [and Jack Cade].
The Culluwing |u-iivi.iuib;il illusion of work is made by ll
same critic S. ami M. stand for Shaken •<-:■ ami Miulinvc, ll
revisers; Af. G. and P. (in italics) siaml for Marlowe, Green ,
and Prele, the supposed authors of T/ie Contention and 7™.
Tragttlic. The table shows in detail how the revision w»i
effected. Thus "Act I. Sc. L S., Af. and G." means that ii
this scene Shakspere was revising lliu n™t of Marlowe a
Greene ; "Act IV. Sc. x. S. mid M., G." means that '
Shakspere anil Marlmiv winv ivvisinj; \hc work of Greene.
Htmy VI. Part II.— Act I. Sc. i. S., M. and G. ; Sc. ii. S
C, ; Sc. iii. S., G. ami ,!/. ; Sc. iv. S., G. Act II. Sc. i. S., C
Se. ii. S., At. and (?) G. j .Sc. iii. S. and I?) M., G. ; Sc iv. !
(,'. Act III. Sc. i. S. H nd(?) M., Af. m: <7. ; Sc ii. S. and N
M.andG.; Sc. iii. S.,jl/. Act. IV. Sc i. M„ G. ; Sc ii "
' i. S., G. ; Sc. v. unrevised, G. ; Sc. vi., rii., viii., ix. S,
,c. x, S. and M., G. Att V. Sc. i. M. and S., Af. and (?) C
Sc ii. M. and S., G. and At. ; Sc. iii. S., G. and M.
Mrm VI. Part ///.—Act I. Sc i. S., M. ; Sc ii. M.,
Sc. iii. unrevisefl, M. ; Sc iv. S., Af. and (?) (7. Act II. Sc. i.
M. and (?) S., //. a*/ I?) (7. ; Sc ii. (?) M., Af. C. and (?) "
1 " ind M„ Af. ; Sc iv. M., C. ; Sc. v. S. and (?)
M., At, and G. Act III. Sc. i. S., G. ; Sc ii.
G. and If) At ; Sc iii. (?) M., (7. and {!) P. Act IV. Sc i.
C. i Sc. ii. M„ .!/. ; Sc iii. B., Jf. ; Se. iv- S., (7. ; Sc. v. \
(?) 6". ; Sc. vi., vii. S., (7. ; Sc. viii. S.. I?) Act v. ~
G. and (?) P. ; Sc ii. S., Af. and G. : Sc. iii. M.,
S., G. and (?) P. : Sc. v., vi. S., M. ; "
"The Tfo'rrf /W Shaksfcre Society, 1876.]
8. King Richard III., because, among other
alleged reasons, it exhibits so much smaller a propor-
tion of rhyme than King Richard II, is held by some
critics to be the later of the two in the chronological
order; but here Shakspere was working, though not
in the presence, yet under the influence and in the
manner of the great master of dramatic blank verse,
Marlowe. Richard III. carries on with the highest
energy, and we may suppose, after brief delay on
Shakspere's part, the subject of the fortunes of the
house of York from the point where it was dropped in
3 Henry VI. It would hardly be possible that Shak-
spere should subsequently continue to write in a manner
so Marlowesque as that at Richard III.; he was nut
yet in comedy or tragedy delivered from rhyme.
What more natural than that he should pass in
Richard II. to a manner, perhaps inferior in some
respects, but more his own, more varied, more subtle,
•*nd marked by finer, If less forcible vWwMAvnWvvm;
■AZ&tg-J&rAardfJI, can hardly beiMsr in dale tinsftivfi.
_, SJ '^spere waa indebted little, if a* til, to ft* <**
i*my .7%, zhj£ Tragcdte of Richard lit., V*& < ettjfafcj
e same siib-
%.} HIS PLAYS ASD POEMS.
not al all to Dr. Ledge's Latin play upon the B
A highly popular subject with Elizabethan
audiences this was— the fall of the Yorkist usurper,
and the accession of the first Tudor king as champion
of justice. Shakspere's play was printed in quarto in
seven editions between 1597 and 1630. His mate-
rials the dramatist found in Holinshed and Hall.
■ unt gives two views of Richard's
character; one, in the portion of history previous 10
the death of Edward IV., in which Richard is painted
1 colours not so deeply, so diabolically black; and
the second, in which he appears as he does in Shak-
■ play. This second and darker representation
of Richard was derived by Holinshed from Sir T.
More's History of Edward V- and Ridiard III., and
More had himself probably derived it from Cardinal
Morton, chancellor of Henry VII. and the enemy of
Richard.
The entire play may be said to be the exhibition of
the one central character of Riuhard ; all subordinate
( are created that be ma}- wreak his will upon
them. This is quite in the manner of Marlowe. Like
Mariowe also is the fierce energy of the centra] cha-
racter, imrcmpered by moral restraints, the heaping up
of violent deeds, the absence of all reserve or mvstery
in the characterisation, the broad and bold touches,
the demoniac force and intensity of the "hole. There
is something sublime and terrible in so great and fierce
a human energy as that of Richard, concentrated
within one withered and distorted body. This is the
evil offspring and flower of the long and cruel civil
wars— this distorted creature, a hater and scomer of
man, an absolute cynic, loveless and alone, disregard-
ing all human bonds and human affections, yet full of
intellect, of fire, of power. The figure of Queen
Margaret, prophesying destruction to her adversaries,
and bitterly rejoicing in the fulfilment of her pro-
is introduced without YvK\w\t&^3a™^\s*L.'-isi
a manner most impressive,, Tn& ^cc\»»x&2&£&.
ny
im
.o
ed
!or
ed
no
1*
B ,1
of civil war are at last atoned for, and the evil which
culminates in Richard falls with Richard from its
bad eminence. The loveless solitude, haunted by
terrible visions of his victims, on the night before his
last battle, almost overmasters his resolution ; but the
stir and movement of the morning reanimates him, and
he dies in a paroxysm of the rage of battle. Richmond
conquers as the representative of the cause of God.
The Folio (1G23} text of this play differs in many
small points, and in some important particulars, from
that of the Quartos which all follow the first Quarto,
1597. Whether the Folio gives the text as corrected
by Shakspere himself, or as altered by an inferior
hand from a copy previously corrected and augment ei"
by Shakspere, is a question in dispute. (See Ntno
Shaksf-ere Society's Transactions, 1875-76.)
9. Venus and Adonis was entered in the Stationei
Company register on April 18, 1593, and was published
the same year. The poem at once became popular,
and before the close of 1603 it had been reprinted
no fewer than six times. " As the soule of Euphorbus,"
wrote Meres in his Wits Treasury (1598), "was
thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweete wiitle soule
of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shake-
speare ; witnes his Venus and Admts, his Lucrea, his
sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &e." Ovk
had told the story of the love of Venus for Adonis,
and the death of the beautiful hunter by a wild boar';
tusk : the coldness of Adonis, his boyish disdain c
love, was an invention of later times ■ and it is in
later form that Shakspere imagines the subject.
Metamorphoses of Ovid had been translated into
English verse by Arthur Golding (1567), and Shak-
spere, if not now, was certainly at a later date
acquainted with this translation. A speech of Pro-
spero in T/ie Tempest (Act V. Sc. i.\ Vgtca«B%—
i'e rives of hill*, brooks, standing \aVcs, a.tv4 gio-Jts
-suggested by a passage of Go\4m?> Ovv&-, \*»
I.J
HIS FLA YS AND POEMS,
Shakspere's treatment of the subject of the Ve.
Adonis has less in common with Ovid than
short poem by a contemporary writer of sonnets and
lyrical poems, Henry Constable, which appeared in a
collection of verse published in 1600, under the name
of England's Helicon. It is uncertain which of the
two poems, Constable's or Shakspere's, was ihe earlier
written.
When Venus and Adonis appeared Shakspere was
twenty-nine years of age ; the Earl of Southampton,
to whom it was dedicated, was not yet twenty.
the dedication the poet speaks of these " unpolisht
lines" as "the first heire of my invention." ""
Shakspere mean by this that Venus and Adonis
written before any of his plays, or before any plays
that were strictly original — his own "im
does he, setting plays altogether apart, which were
not looked upon as literature, in a high sense of the
word, call it his first poem because he had written
no earlier narrative or lyrical verse ? We cannot be
sure. It is possible, but not likely, that he may
have written this poem before he left Stratford, and
have brought it up with him to London. More pro-
bably it was written in London, and perhaps not long
before its publication. The year 1593, in which the
poem appeared, was a year of plague ; the London
theatres were closed : it may be that Shakspere, idle
in London, or having returned for a while to Stratford,
then wrote the poem. Whenever written, it was elabo-
rated with peculiar care. The subject of the poem is
sensual, but with Shakspere it becomes rather a study
or analysis of passion and the objects of passion, than
in itself passionate. Without being dramatic, the
poem contains the materials for dramatic poetry, set
forth at large. The descriptions of English landscape
and country life are numerous, and give a spirit of
breezy life and health to portions of the poem which
could ill afford to lose anything, \ba*. vs feraSa. ^A-
and
SNAKSPEKE.
10. Lucrece was entered in the Stationers' regisl
May 9, 1594, and was published the same year. Li
the Venus and Adonis, it is dedicated to the Earl
Southampton, having been perhaps the " graver labour'
promised m the dedication of the Venus and Adonis
The two poems resemble one anothi
respects, especially in the detailed descriptive styli
which draws out at length the particulars of
an incident, or an emotion. The poem of later dal
however, exhibits far less immaturity than does t'
" first heire " of Shakspere's invention. Part of tl
may be due to the fact that the subject is deeper
more passionate : instead of the enamoured Veni
we have here the pure and noble Lucretia ; inste;
I of the boy Adonis, the powerful figure of the e 1
Tarquin. The versification is freer and bolder;
the Venus and Adonis the stanza was one of six lira
consisting of a rhymed quatrain followed by a couplet
here a fifth line is introduced between the q
and couplet, rhyming with lines two and four,
structure tends to encourage more variety in the a
ment of pauses, and may perhaps, in some degree,
explain the fact that run-on lines are much more
frequent in the Lucrece than in the Yarns and Adonis.
The proportion of the run-on lines in the Lucrece is 1 in
io-8r, in Venus and Adonis 1 in 25-40. (Furnivall)
The Zutrece was a poem highly admired byShaksju-rt-'s
contemporaries, and was several times republished,
though less often than the Venus. The story of
Lucretia is told by Livy and Ovid, and was versifit
by Cower, and again related in Paynter's Paiace
Pleasure, 1567.
1 r. Romeo and Juliet. — The story of the unhappy
lovers of Verona, as a supposed historical occurrence,
is referred to the year 1303; but no account of it
exists of an earlier date than that of Lul^i da Porto,
about ifjo, A tale in sonic rejects sivmVit "\s s« lewfc
m ^^MtemftBofXenophon otEpbesus, nwfeA
l**es* romance writer ; and one essenmW; tt* bM
of
led
Now
died
was
pany
desigi
i.] JUS PLA YS AND POEMS.
narrating the adventures of Marietta and Gianozza of
Siena, is found in a collection of tales by Masuccio of
Salerno, 1476 ; but Da Porto first names Romeo and
Giulietta, and makes them children of the rival _
Veronese houses. The story quickly acquired an'
European celebrity. Altering the name and some par-
ticulars, Adrian Sevin relates it (about r542) for his
French patroness; Gherardo Boldiero turns k into
verse for his readers at Venice. Eandello, partly re-
casting the narrative, recounts it once more in his Italian
collection of novels, 1554; and five years later Pierre
Botsteau, probably assisted by Belleforest, translates
Bandello's Italian into French, and again recasts the
story (1559). In three years more it touches English
soil. Arthur Brooke in 1562 produced his long
metrical version, founded upon Boisteau's novel, and
a prose translation of Boisteau's Histoire de Detix
Amans, appeared in Paynter's Palace of Pleasure, 1567.
We have here reached Shaispere's sources : Paynter
he probably consulted; in nearly all essentials he
follows the Roman and Juliet of Brooke. It must be
noted, however, that Brooke speaks of having seen
" the same argument lately set forth on stage "-
probably the English stage ; it is therefore possible
that Shakspere may have had before him s
English tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, of which no frag-
ment remains with us. Resemblances between passages
of Shakspere 's tragedy and passages of Grota's Italian
tragedy of Hadriana are probably due to accident.
The precise date of Sbakspere's play is uncertain.
In 1597 it was published in quarto, "as it hath been
often (with great applause plaid publiquely by the
right Honourable the L [ord] of Hunsdon his servants."
Now the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Lord Hunsdon,
died July 22, 1596; his son, George Lord rlimskt.,
was appointed Chamberiam Vn N^A, ^-WV "^ s * ssts =-
July, (596, or after Apri\, i^yi, •&*. Sb«2&C«*> ^?C &
- my would have been sljleiXrs *«■ tookVw«« ^^
-'Tiiation, " the Lord Cb.ara\iet\w^ sOT1 * '
s
I
SMAKSl'ERE.
during the interval tliey would be described
title-page of the quarto. The Nurse's mention of the
earthquake (Act I. Sc. iii. L. 23), " Tis since the earth-
quake now eleven years," has been referred to
giving the date, 1591, a memorable earthquake, fell in
London, having occurred eleven years previously, in
1580 ; but, while professing an infallibly accurate recol-
lection, the garrulous old woman blunders sadly about
her dates, so that even if an actual English earthquake
were alluded to, the point of the jest may have been
in the inaccuracy of the reference. Several lines in
Romeo's speech in presence of Juliet in the tomb
(Act V. Sc iii. L. 74-120) seem written with a haunt-
ing recollection of passages in Daniel's Complainte
Resawnmlt (1592). The internal evidence favours the
opinion that this tragedy was an early work of the
poet, and that it was subsequently revised and en-
larged. There is much rhyme, and much of this is in
the form of alternate rhyme; the forced playing upon
words, and the overstrained conceits (see, for example,
Act I. Sc iii. 81-92) point to an early date. If, how-
ever, rhymed verse be present in large quantity, the
quality of the scenes chiefly written in blank verse is
far higher than that of the rhyming passages. We may
perhaps accept the opinion that Romeo ami Juliet was
begun, and in part written, as early as 1591, and that
it assumed its final form about 1597. The first
quarto, already mentioned (1597), is a pirated edition,
" made up partly from copies of portions of the
original play, partly from recollection and from notes
taken during the performance." The second quarto,
1599, is described on the title-page as "newly-corrected,
augmented, and amended." This perhaps exaggerates
the fact ; but here we obtain a true representation 1
the play, and comparing this with the earlier text,
appeals that the play " underwent revision, received
some slight augmentation, and in some few places
must have been entirely rewritten."
jRmh* a/t/f Jtt/ict, apart from its mtrmsAC \jcwiVj
i
i
:.
HIS PIA YS AND POEMS.
is of deep interest when viewed as Shakspere's first
tragedy, and as a work which probably occupied his
thoughts, from time to time, during a series of years.
It is a young man's tragedy, in which Youth and Love
are brought face to face with Hatred and Death,
There are some lines in A Midsummer Night's Dreai
in which the poet compares " the course of true love
to that of lightning in midnight.
And ere a man lialh power lo say, Behold,
The jaws of darkness do devour it op :
So quick bi-igln thing:* come 10 confusion.
It is thus that love is conceived in Romeo and Julie!
— it is sudden, it is intensely bright for a moment, and
then it is swallowed up in darkness. The action is
accelerated by Shakspere to the utmost, the four or
five months of Brooke's poem being reduced to as
many days. On Sunday the lovers meet, next da;
they are made one in marriage, on Tuesday mornii
at dawn they part, and they are finally reunited in thi
tomb on the night of Thursday. Shakspere does not
close the tragedy with Juliet's death : as he has shown
in the first scene the hatred of the houses through
the comic quarrel ^f the servants, thereby introducing
the causes which produce the tragic issue, so in the
last scene he shows us the houses sorrowfully recon-
ciled over the dead bodies of a son and a daughter.
Romeo's nature is prone to enthusiastic feeling, and,
as it were, vaguely trembling in the direction of love
before he sees Juliet; to meet her gives form and
fixity to his vague emotion. Shakspere, following
Brooke's poem, has introduced Romeo as yielding
himself to a fanciful, boy's love of the disdainful
beauty, Rosaline ; and some of the love-conceits and
love- hyperbole of the first act are intended as the
conventional amorous dialect of the period. To
Juliet — a girl of fourteen — love comes as a thing
previously unknown ; it is at once terrible and blissful
(see Act II. Sc ii L. ii6-\ioy,s^fcT\^^,^«<^' , «>"-' s
and sorrow, and trial, from a cV&&toMj ■a.V«w--*wi
■st
lis
rs.
ve
:h.
as
s
he
85 SNAKSPERE.
After Shakspere has exalted their enthusiastic joy and
rapture to the highest point, he suddenly casts it down.
I Romeo is at first completely unmanned; but Juliet
exhibits a noble fortitude and self-command. The
scene of the parting of husband and wife at dawn is a
fitting pendant to the scene in the moonlit garden,
where the confession of their love is made; the one
scene wrought out of divinely-mingled love and joy,
the other of divinely-mingled love and sorrow. When
Romeo leaves his young wife, the marriage with Paris
is pressed upon her by the hot-tempered old Capulet,
by her mother, and by her gross-hearted Nurse. Juliet
is henceforth in a solitude almost as deep as that of
her tomb. The circumstance of bringing Paris at .toss
Romeo in the churchyard, with his death before the
tomb, is of Shakspere's invention. Paris comes strewing
flowers for the lost Juliet — Romeo comes to find her
• and to die. Paris scatters his blossoms with one of
those graceful love-speeches, in the form of a rhymed
sextet, which flowed from Romeo's lips in Act I.—
Romeo's speech is in earnest and plain blank verse,
for he has now dropped all unrealities and pretti-
nesaes. In Luigi da Porto, in Ijandello, and in a
modern version of Shakspere 's play by ll.irrirk, Juliet
awakes from her sleep while Romeo still lives ; Shak-
spere's treatment of this scene as to this particular
is the same as that of Brooke and Paynter.
Mercutio and the Nurse arc almost creations of
Shakspere. Brooke had described Mercutio as " a
lion among maidens," and speaks of his " ice-cold
hand ; " but it was the dramatist who drew at full-
length the figure of this brilliant being, who though
with wit running beyond what is becoming, and effer-
vescent animal spirits, yet acts as a guardian of
Romeo, and is .ilivays a gallant gentleman. He dies
Arcing a jest through his bodily ang^'wYi, \j\i\. \\e Avis
on Kongo's behalf: the scene darkens as Vis ^\k&
o'snppears. The Nurse is a coarse, VindYy, ^amAews,
con *9««ntiaJ old body, with vul^ai fa&ob, ^ a
'!■]
fflS FLAVS AND POEMS.
S;
vulgarised air of rank ; she is on terras of long-
standing familiarity wiili her master, her mistress, and
Juliet, and takes all manner of liberties with them ;
but love has made Juliet a woman, and independent
of her old foster-mother. Friar Laurence, gathering
his simples and moralising to himself, is a centre of
tranquillity in the midst of turmoil and passion; but
it may be doubted that his counsels of moderation,
■ and amiable scheming to reconcile the houses through
Romeo's marriage with Juliet, contain more real wis-
dom than do the passionate dictates of the lovers'
hearts.
The scene is essentially Italian : the burning noons
of July in the Italian city inflame the blood of the
street quarrelers ; the voluptuous moonlit nights are
only like a softer day. And the characters are Italian,
with their lyrical ardour, their southern Impetuosity of
passion, and the southern forms and colour of their
speech.
■ 12. King; Richard II. appeared in quarto, i _
In 1608 a third edition was published "With new
additions of the Parliament Scene and the deposing of
King Richard," that is to say, with the added lines
154-318 in Act IV. Sc. i. It is probable that
these lines were written as part of the original play,
but relating as they did to the deposition of a king,
Iliad been omitted for fear of giving offence at a time
when the Pope and Catholic princes were exhorting
her subjects to dethrone Elizabeth. Line 321 —
A woeful pageant have we here beheld —
which is found in the first quarto, seems to refer
to the deposition. A play upon this subject ■
actually used for a political purpose in the year
1601, having been played on the afetvaacso. , 'os5kss»
the revolt of Essex, by crtdet tf Sw CSBq 'Wei-w^,-^-
adherent 0/ the Earl. 'Y\wt tfe'*^ ^^^^^v/U
is very unlikely. Anothet R\ch*r& II. ^*j„\j
the Globe Theatre, iGti,^ \».Saswm. *«*
neither was it — as Forman's description of it makes
evident — the play of Shakspere. The date of Richard
II. is not ascertained, but it has been assigned, with an
appearance of probability, to the year 1593 or 1594.
Whether it preceded or followed Richard III. is a
question in dispute. It is the inferior scenes in this
play which contain most rhymed verse ; the drama-
tist exhibits, as in Romeo ami Julie!, mastery over
blank verse, but is not yet free from the ten-
dency to fall back into rhyme. Upon the whole,
Richard II. bears closer affinity to King John than to
any other of Shakspere's plays. Marlowe's genius,
however, still exercises an influence over Shakspere,
the Edward II. of the earlier poet haunting Shak-
spere's imagination while he was fashioning his
Richard II.
Having in Richard III. (if, as I believe, it preceded
the present play) brought the civil wars of England
to an issue and an end, Shaksjjere turned back to
the reign of the earlier Richard, whose deposition led
the way to the disputed succession and the conflicts of
half a century later. The interest of the play centres
in two connected things— the personal contrast be-
tween the falling and the rising kings, and the
political action of each; the misgovern ruent of the
one inviting and almost justifying the usurpation of
the other. At the outset, Shakspere fixes the attention
upon the murder of the King's uncle, the Duke of
Gloucester, who was said by Mowbray to have died
in his custody at Calais, but who was not unreasonably
believed to have been put to death by Richard's order.
Bolingbroke in striking at Mowbray was striking at
P Richard, and a dark deed of violence is brought into
notice as the starting-point of the events which led to
-Kichanl's fa)). Jhit he has not only done violence to
oae of his own house, he has wronged the \eo\Ae at
■n.ithnd Hi* upstart favourites, his Warfs. cbartsra,
Uth V.'PS of the realm, are so many bVwra y^** 4
J " G of his country, and, as has been obaerre4.
BIS PLAYS ,IXD I V.I MS,
.lght forward
the national aspect of the quarrel is brought ft
by Hereford's proud assertion of his nationality, and
by Gaunt's magnificent eulogy of England. But
Shaksperc — although no zealot on behalf of the divine
right of kings — does not applaud usurpation as the
means of destroying a tyranny ; from tbe Bishop of
Carlisle's lips proceeds a prophecy of the future
horrors of civil war which must ensue from the
violent dethronement of the king.
Richard, although possessed of a certain regal
charm, and power of attaching tender natures to him-
self, is deficient in all that is sterling and real in
manhood. He is self-indulgent, has much superficial
sensitiveness, loves to contemplate, in a romantic way,
whatever is pathetic or passionate in life, possesses
a kind of rhetorical imagination, and has abundant
command of delicate and gleaming words. His will
is nerveless, he is incapable of consistency of feeling,
incapable of strenuous action. Bolingbroke, on the
other hand, who pushes Richard from the throne, is a
man framed for such materia! success as waits on
personal ambition. He is not, like his son Henry V.,
filled with high enthusiasm and sacred force derived
from the powers of heaven and of earth. All Boling-
broke's strength and craft are his own. His is a
resolute gaze which sees his object far off, and he has
persistency and energy of will to carry him forward
without faltering. He is not cruel, but shrinks from
no deed that is needful to his purpose because the
deed is cruel. His faculties are strong and well-knit.
There is no finer contrast in Shakspere's historical
plays than that between the figures of the formidable
king of deeds, and the romantic king of hectic
feelings and brilliant words.
Coincidences have been tjomteA ««&. \*S»«^
Mdiant II and Daniel's Civil Wars, -k& .rfsSws^
'S95-- if either borrowed ftomttve. ovVex,^^**^ 3 *
"-as probably Daniel.
*3-
King John departs fariJcws *"*°- VXv
c
■
90 SHAKSPERE.
history than any other of Shakspere's liisloric.il plays.
He here follows for the most part not Hotinshed, but an
old play in two parts, which appealed in 1591, entitled
The Troublesome Raigne of King Jo/in of England. He
follows it, however, not in the close way in which he
had previously worked when writing 2 and 3 /fairy VI. ;
the main incidents are the same, but Shakspere elevates
and almost recreates the characters ; for the most elo-
quent and poetical passages no original is to be found
in the old play. The character of the king grows
more darkly treacherous in Shakspere's hands : barely
a hint of the earlier author suggested the scene, so
powerful and so subtle, in which John insinuates to
Hubert his murderous desires; the boyish innocence
of Arthur, and the pathos of his life, become real and
living as they are dealt with by the imagination of
Shakspere ; Constance is no longer a fierce and am-
bitious virago, but a passionate sorrowing mother ;
Faulconbridge is ennobled by a manly tenderness
and a purer patriotism. Shakspere depicts, with true
English spirit, the ambition, the political greed, the
faithlessness, the sophistry of the court of Rome;
but he wholly omits a ribald scene of the old play,
in which the licentiousness of monasteries is exposed
to ridicule.
As to the date of King John, all we can assert with
confidence is that it lies somewhere between the
early histories Henry VI., Parts I, //, and III, with
Richard Iff., and the group of later histories, the
trilogy consisting of 1 and 2 Henry IV. and Henry V.
Thus in the historical series it is brought close to
Richard If. Neither play contains prose, but the
treatment of Faulconbridge's part shows more approach
to the alliance of a humorous or comic element with
history (which becomes complete in Henry IV.) than
does anything in the play of Richard II. King John
and Richard II have the common characteristic of
containing very inferior dramatic work, side by side
■"/' work of a high and djfficuAt kind. Tfte. ""
vl ] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS.
point of difference with respect to form is that
Richard II. contains a much larger proportion of
rlmm-d verse, and on the whole we shall perhaps not
err in regarding Richard II. as the earlier of the two.
Magna Charta, and the struggle of the nobles in
England for their rights and those of the people,
do not attract Shakspere away from what is more
susceptible of dramatic treatment — the deeds and the
passions of individual actors in history, A mother's
grief for her lost boy seems to him a more poetical
theme than regulations respecting aids and scutages.
It is the shame and weakness of the reign of the royal
malefactor, John — himself represented as a weak and
dastardly usurper — rather than what makes it politically
illustrious, on which Shakspere dwells. A strong breath
of patriotism, nevertheless, breathes through the play,
and this fills and buoys up, amid all disasters, the
spirit of Cceur de Lion's bastard son. The play con-
tains three large and splendidly-drawn figures : the
king, basest of all kings of England in Shakspere's
eyes, no strong malefactor, like Richard III., but
capable of all treason, and of ei'ery degrading sub-
mission ; Constance, who is the embodiment of a
mother's violent passions of love and grief, yet weak
will) the weakness of her sex ; and Paul con bridge, the
typical Englishman, with his courage, his tenderness,
his frankness, his contempt for unreality and affec-
tation, his national pride. Among these and the
other forces of the play, Arthur moves with a pathetic
beauty, gentleness, and innocence, as a lamb among
wolves and lions.
The Merchant of Venice we place by itself,
midway between the group of Shakspere's early come-
dies and that more brilliant group of comedies wbldh
clusters about the year 1600. With the early comedies it
is allied by the frequent rhymes, the occasional doggerel
verse, and the numerous classical alblsifUtt. tas»KiS«Si
mid Xcrissa resemble Launce a»A"\ja£eXS».
«*."*■ i^«feS
' Kerfere with the exhibition cA Wt v*KM\
95
Gentlemen of Verona, reappears, treated in a far deeper
and more refined manner in the present play.
The distinction of Portia among the women of Shak-
spere is the union in her nature of high intellectual
powers and decision of will with a heart full of ardour
and of susceptibility to romantic feelings. She has
herself never known trouble or sorrow, but prosperity
has left her generous and quick in sympathy. Her
noble use of wealth and joyous life, surrounded with
flowers and fountains and marble statues and music,
stands in contrast over against the hard, sad, and
contracted life of Shylock, one of a persecuted tribe,
absorbed in one or two narrowing and intense passions
— the love of the money-bags he clutches and yet fails
to keep, and his hatred of the man who had scorned
his tribe, insulted his creed, and diminished his gains.
Yet Shylock is not like Marlowe's Jew, Barabas,
preternatural monster. Wolf-like as his revenge sho>
him, we pity his joyless, solitary life ; and when, ring!
round in the trial scene with hostile force, he stani
firm upon his foothold of the law, there is something
sublime in his tenacity of passion and resolve. Bui
we feel that it is right that this evil strength should be
utterly crushed and quelled, and when Shylock leaves
the court a broken man, we know it is needful that
this should be so.
The choosing of the caskets shows us Portia, who
will strictly interpret the law of Venice for Shylock
and Antonio, loyally abiding by the provisions whicl
her father has laid down in her own case. /
Bassanio is ennobled in our eyes by his choice ;
the gold, silver, and lead of the caskets, with their
several inscriptions, are a test of true lovers. Bassanio
does not come as a needy adventurer to choose the
golden casket, or to "gain," or "get" anything, but in
the true spirit of self-abandoning love " to give," not
to get, " and hazard all he hath ; " and having dared ta
give all he gains all. (See. tfwi so»&gOBK» «». "^
■ho
>ck
ich
,nd
for
ieir
SIIAK'SPERE. [chap.
The lyrical boy-andgirl love of Lorenzo and
Jessica brings out by contrast trie grave and glad
earnestness of Portia's love and Rassanio's. Jessica
has not a thought of loyalty to her father — nor is it to
be expected. The lyrical passages between Lorenzo
and Jessica in the moonlit garden (Act V. Sc. i.) end-
ing with the praise of music, contrast with Portia's
generalising reflections (the wake of thought still
undulating after her great intellectual effort at the trial),
suggested by the light seen and music heard as she
approaches her house, and by her failing to receive
any pleasure from the music which Lorenzo has so
eloquently praised.
The comedy must end mirthfully. After the real
straggle and the strain of interest respecting Antonio's
fate, we pass on to the playful differences about the
rings ; from the court of justice at Venice we are
carried to the luminous night in the gardens of Bel-
mont. Even Antonio's ships must not be lost; a
moment of happiness after trouble cannot be too
perfect.
The date of the play is uncertain. In Philip
Henslowe's Diary mention is made, under the date
August 3$, 1594, of the "Venesyon comedy;" this
may have been Shnk.spere's play, but more probably
it was not. The Merchant of Venice is mentioned by
Meres, 1598, and it was entered at Stationers' Hall 1"
the same year, though not printed until 1600. Perha]
1596 is as likely a date as we can fix upon. Tr
precise year matters little if it be remembered that the
play occupies an intermediate place between the early
and the middle group of comedies.
15 King Henry IV., Parts I. and II., may 1
considered as one play in ten acts. It is probable thi
Shakspere went on with little delay, or none, from tl
first part to its continuation in the second. Both were
written before the entry of the first in the Stationers
register, Feb 2$, 1597-98; for the tvXvj shows th
t/ic name of the fot knight, who otv^vadXYj a\i\«i
HIS FLA YS AND POEMS.
n both parts under the name of Oldcastle, had been
already altered to Falstaff. Meres makes mention of
Henry IV. ; and Ben Jonson, in Every Alan nut of H:s
Humour (1599). alludes to Justice Silence, one of the
characters of the Second Part of Shakspere's play.
The materials upon which Shakspere worked in
Ihnry IV., Parts I. and II, and Henry V., were ob-
tained from Holinshed, and from an old play, full of
vulgar mirth, and acted before 1588, The Famous
Victories of Henry V. A Sir John Oldcastle appears
in this play as one of the Prince's wild companions.
That Snakspere adopted the name is evident from
allusions of subsequent writers, from the circumstance
that in the quarto of r6oo the name tWis left by
mistake prefixed to a speech of Falstaff, and from
Henry's punning name for the fat knight (Part I. Act I.
"--48), "myoldlad of thecastle." FalstalT, more-
s said to have been " page to Thomas Mowbray,
Duke of Norfolk" (Part II. Act III. Sc. ii. L. sS), which
the historical Oldcastle was in point of fact. This his-
torical Oldcastle is better known as Lord Cobham, the
xillard martyr. Shakspere changed the name because
he did not wish wantonly to offend the Protestant
party, nor gratify the Roman Catholics (see Epilogue
to Part II.). A Sir John Fastolfe had figured in the
French wars of Henry VI. 's reign, and was introduced
s playing a cowardly part in i Henry VI. That he
also was a Lollard appears not to have been suspected,
1 tradition may have lingered of his conne
a certain Boar's Head Tavern, of which Fastolfe
s actually owner. By a slight modification of the
lame this Fastolfe of history became the more illus-
tous Falstaff of the dramatist's invention.
Both parts of Henry IV. consist of a comedy
history fused together. The hero of the
i the royal Bolingbroke, the hero of the
ither is FalstalT, while Prince Henry passes to and
fro between the history and vVe. ca\wa&^, s
as the bond which unites t\\e. Vwo. "^«oa ^
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VI.]
HIS PLAYS AXD 1'0/iMS.
kept from waste and ruin a trite stif, with which his
comrades had small acquaintance, and who now
helped Shakspere to understand the nature of the
wild Prince and his scapegrace adventures?
FalataU is everything in little, or rather everything
in much; for, is he not a tun of flesh? English
literature knows no humorous creation to set beside
FalstafT j and to find his equal — yet his opposite — we
must turn to the gaunt figure of the romantic knight
of La Mancha, in whose person Cervantes smiled
away pathetically the chivalry of the Middle Ages
from out our modem world. FalstafT exercises upon
the reader of these plays much the same fasci-
nation which he exercised upon the Prince. We
know him to be a gross-bodied, self-indulgent old
sinner, devoid of moral sense and of self-respect, and
yet we cannot part with him. We cannot live in this
mixed world without humour, and Fal staff is humour
maintaining its mastery against all antagonisms. When
worsted in an encounter, then he shows himself most
victorious ; when escape seems least possible, then by
his sleight he is in a moment most at large. We admit,
however, the necessity of his utter banishment from
Henry, when Henry enters upon the grave responsi-
bilities of kingship. Still we have a tender thought
for Sir John in his exile from London taverns. And
at the last, when be fumbles with the sheets, and
plays with Rowers, when " a' went away, an it had been
uiy christom child," we bid him adieu with a tear that
s not forbid a smile.
The historical period represented by i Henry IV.
lates from the battle of Holmedon Hill, Sept. 14,
1402, to the battle of Shrewsbury, July 21,
2 Hnry IV, continues the history to the king's death
and the accession of Henry V., 1413.
16. King Henry V. is not mentioned by Meres,
and Lhe reference in the chorus of Act V. to Essex ii
Ireland (see p. 35), and in \.\\e Yidvweit \»
wooden O," i.e. the GVobe TaaiVce., 'ckSX ^
ioo SHAKSPERE. [chap.
make it probable that 1599 was the date of its pro-
duction. A pirated imperfect quarto appeared in the
following year. In this play Shakspere bade farewell
in trumpet tones to the history of England. It was a
fitting climax to the great series of works which told of
the sorrow and the glory of his country, embodying as
it did the purest patriotism of the days of Elizabeth.
With Agincourt and a King Henry V. we can rest
content, assured that all greatness and good are possible
for a loyal people ; we care no longer to search the
dim reports
Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.
And as the noblest glories of England are presented
in this play, so it presents Shakspere's ideal of active,
practical, heroic manhood. If Hamlet exhibits the
dangers and weakness of the contemplative nature,
and Prospero, its calm and its conquest, Henry
exhibits the utmost greatness which the active nature
can attain. He is not an astute politician like his
father : having put everything upon a sound sub-
stantial basis he need not strain anxious eyes of fore-
sight, to discern and provide for contingencies arising
out of doubtful deeds; for all that naturally comes
within its range he has an unerring eye. A devotion
to great objects outside of self fills him with a force
of glorious enthusiasm. Hence his religious spirit
and his humility or modesty — he feels that the
strength he wields comes not from any clever disposi-
tion of forces due to his own prudence, but streams
into him and through him from his people, his
country, his cause, his God. He can be terrible to
traitors, and his sternness is without a touch of per-
sonal revenge. In the midst of danger he can feel so
free from petty heart-eating cares as to enjoy a piece
m of honest, soldierly mirth. His wooing is as plain,
*Jhwk, and true as are his acts of p\ex\\ He unites
.Ground himself in loyal service the )amt\§ T\aUoTtf&YVk&s
Vt.] IflS PLAYS AXD POEMS.
of his father's time — Englishmen, Scotchmen, Welsh-
men, Irishmen, all are at Henry's side at Agincourt.
Having presented his ideal of English kinghood,
Shakspere could turn aside from history. In this play
no character except Henry greatly interested Shak-
spere, unless it be the Welsh Fluellen, whom he loves
(as Scott loved the Baron of Eradwardine) for his
real simplicity underlying his apparatus of learning,
and his touching faith ill the theory of warfare.
17. The Taming of the Shrew is first found
the folio, 1623, but it is in some way closely connected
with a play publisher! in 1594, and hearing the almost
identical title, The Taming of a Shreiv. We cannot
accept Pope's opinion that both plays are by Shak-
spere, nor agree with another critic who ingeniously
maintained that the earlier printed play was Ac Inter
written, being suggested by Shakspere's comedy of
the Shrew. The play in the folio is certainly an
enlargement and alteration of The Taming of a Shrew,
and it only remains to ask, was Shakspere the sole
reviser and adapter, or did his task consist of adding
and altering certain scenes, so as to Tender yet more
amusing and successful an enlarged version of the
play of 1594, already made by some unknown hand ?
This last seems upon the whole the opinion best sup-
ported by the internal evidence. In The Taming «f
the Shrew we may distinguish three parts: (1) The
humorous Induction, in which Sly, the drunken
tinker, is the chief person ; (z) A comedy of character,
the Shrew and her tamer, Petruchio, being the hero
and heroine ; (3) A comedy of intrigue — the story of
Bianca and her rival lovers. Now the old play of
A Shrew contains, in a rude form, the scenes of the
Induction, and the chief scenes in which 1'ctn.idiio
and Katharina (named by the original writer Ferando
and Kate) appear; but nothing in this old play
corresponds with the intrigues of Bianca's disguised
lovers. It is, however, in lYie scews, TOra.«w&. -*s^-
tnese intrigues that ShaYs-pe^ Va.-rA vi. *>»»*■ ***
1
parent. It may be said that Shakspere's genius goes
in and out with the person of Katharina. We would
therefore conjecturally assign the intrigue-comedy,-
which is founded upon Gaseoigne's Snf/oses, a tran
lation of Ariosto's Gii Suppositi — lo the adapter of the
old play, reserving for Shakspere a title to those
scenes — in the main enlarged from the play of A
Shrew — in which Katbaiina, Fetruchio, and Grumio
are speakers. Turning this statement into figures, we
find that Shakspere's part of The Taming vf the Shrew
>is comprised in the following portions : Induction ;
Act II. Sc. I L. 169-326 ; Act III. Sc ii. L. 1-125,
and 151-241 ; Act IV. Sc. i.; Act IV. Sc ul; Act IV.
Sc. v. ; Act V. Sc. ii. L, 1-180. Such a division, it
must be borne in mind, is no more than a conjecture,
but it seems to be suggested and fairly indicated by
the style of the several parts of the comedy.
» However this may be, it is clear that Shakspere
cared little for the other characters in comparison with
Sly, Katharina, and Petruchio. Sly is of the family of
Sancho Pan/-a, gross and materialistic in his tastes and
habits, but withal so good-humoured and self-contented
that we would fain leave him mi vexed by higher ideas
or aspirations ; all the pains taken to delude him into
the notion that he is a lord will not make him essen-
tially other than " old Sly's son, of Burton Heath,"
who lias run up so long a score with the fat ale-wife of
Wincct The Katharina and Petruchio scenes border
upon the farcical, but Shakspere's interest in the
characters of the Shrew and her tamer keep these
scenes from passing into downright farce. Katharina
with all her indulged wilfulness and violence of temper
has no evil in her ; in her home-enclosure she se
a formidable creature ; but when caught away by the
tempest of Petmchio's masculine force, the compara-
tive weakness of her sex shows itself; she, who has
strength of her own, and has ascertained its limits,
y.-in recognise superior strength, and once subdued she
& the least rebellious of subjects. VeWuchio au ' '
IUS PLAYS AND POEMS.
assumed part " with complete presence of n
untired animal spirits, and without a particle of ill-
humour ■ from beginning to end." The play is full o "
energy and bustling movement.
Widely separated dates have been assigned for The
Tamingof the Shreie, from 1504.10 1606. The best
portions are in the manner of Shakspere's comedies of
the second period ; and attributing the Bianca intrigue-
comedy to a writer intcrmi.ili.Tte between the author of
the play of A Shrew and Shakspere, there is no diffi-
culty in supposing that the Shakspere scenes were
written about 1597- The same spirit in which The
Merry Wives of Windsor was created was here em-
ployed by Shakspere to furnish his theatrical company
with this enlarged version of a popular comedy.
It should be noted that the comedy of The Shrew is
a play within a play, and there is no provision, such
as is found in the older Shrew, for disposing of Sly at
the end of the fifth act. The jest of bewildering a
poor man into the idea that he is rich and great is
found in the Arabian Nights ; such a jest is attributed
to Philip the Good of Burgundy, and the story is given
in a collection of Tales compiled by R. Edwards, and
printed in 1570. Fletcher wrote a humorous con-
tinuation of Shakspere's play, entitled The Woman's
Prise, or the Tamer Tamed, in which Petruchio re-
appears.
iS. The Merry Wives of Windsor is an offshoot
from the zom
Usury V. is the direct continuation of the history. Dennis, in 1702, reports a tradition that this play was written in fourteen days, by order of the Queen ; and Rowe adds : "she was so well pleased with that admirable character of Faistaff, in the two parts of Henry IV., that she commanded him to continue it for one play more, and to show him in love." This may have been the cause why Shakspere does not fulfil the promise made in the Epilogue of Henry I V., that. ¥i&to£ 3w*S>fii. ^t-ssjs*^- with Henry V. in France-, Ywft, vb&er&i ^ : great deeds of the victor of Agincourt there would be small room for a Falstaff. The choice of Windsor as the scene, and the compliments to the owner of Windsor Castle, and to the wearers of the Order of the Garter, suggest that the play was meant especially for the ears of Elizabeth and her courtiers. An early sketch of The M:'ny Wives was published in quarto, 1602 : some touches in the play, as given in the folio, were evidently made after the accession of James I. (1603); the word "council" is altered to "king" (Actl. Sc. LI.. 113); ''these knights will hack," exclaims Mrs. Page (Act Il.Sc.i. L. 52), and the allusion to James's too liberal creation of knights in 1 604 was probably appreci- ated. Some critics have held that the first sketch of The Merry Wives was written as early as 1 592. A German duke is spoken of by Bardolph as about to visit Windsor, and his gentlemen ride off with nunc host of the Garter's horses unpaid for. In the early sketch (Act IV. Sc. v. of the revised play), instead of " cousin- germans," where Evans puns upon the words cozen and German, occurs the strange " cosen garmombles." Now, Count Frederick of Mompelgard had visited England and accompanied the Queen to Windsor, Aug. 1592 ; and in the passport which he received for his journey back to the Continent, we read that he shall be furnished with post-horses, and shall pay nothing for the same. Next year the Count became Duke of Wirt em berg, iind in 1595 lie craved that, in I accordance with a promise given, Elizabeth would confer upon him the Order of the Garter, which Eliza- beth, 00 various pretexts, declined. " Garmombles" ob- viously reverses the true name " Mompelgard;" but the inference that the date of the play is 1591, because it refers to the visit of the Germans, is unwarrantable, for such an event would be remembered, and the more so because of the Duke's subsequent unavailing attempt to obtain the honour of the Garter. If we try to make oul exact relations between tr. aracters of T/te Merry FriiwiafidtWfiax&fcctaxttti vi.] HIS PLAYS AK'D POEMS. 105 as they appear in the historical plays, we shall fail. The comedy has a certain independence of the his- tories, and cannot be pieced on to them in any way : the persons are the same and not the same. Mrs. Quickly, servant of Dr. Cains, has a different history from the Mrs. Quickly of the Boar's Head Tavern. At what period in Falstaffs career he pursued the Windsor wives we cannot make out for certain. Nor is he conceived in quite the same manner as the Falstaff of Henry IV. Here the knight is fatuous, his genius deserts him ; the never-defeated hangs his head before two country dames ; the buck- basket, the drench of Thames water, the blows of Ford's cudgel, are reprisals too coarse upon the most inimitable of jesters. Yet the play is indeed a merry one, with well-contrived incidents and abundance of plain broad mirth. A country air breathes over the whole — for which the Gloucestershire scenes of 2 Henry IV. had prepared us. "The outdoor character that pervades The Merry Wives and As Yen Like It gives to them their tone of buoyancy and enjoyment, their true holiday feeling." Nowhere else has Shakspcre represented English middle-class life in the country, and he has here done it with a vigorous, healthy pleasure. It is not, however, a poetical play, unless comely English maidenhood, in the person of pretty Anne Page, lend it something of poetry. There is a propriety in the fact that this comedy is written almost altogether in prose. The blunders of the French doctor and of the Welsh parson in speaking English are rather an elementary form of fun, such as may suit a somewhat rustic subject ; but Sir Hugh Evans, apart from his blunders, is good company. The merry wives themselves are a delightful pair, with t" their sly laughing looks, their apple-red cheeks, their brows the lines whereon look more like the work of mirth than years." And Slender, most brainless of youths, most incapable of VcNCW, ia tew Sra* ■sSsa.'sS. the laugh at him which pieSq Nssna ^^sjt \sssas,W»i* SIIAA'SPEKE. when alone. Altogether, if we can accept Falstafi discomfitures, it is a sunny play to laugh at if not The following; sources have been pointed out as exhibiting some points of resemblance to the incidents of The Merry Wives, and as possibly supplying hints t:j Shakspere : Two tales from Le tredtri piacevoli iiotle, by Straparola, and the altered version of one of these to be found in Tarlton's /faces out of Pur- gatorie (1590) ; the tale of Bucciolo and Pietro Paulo ■ from the Pecorone of Ser Giovanni Fiorcntino ; finally, The Fishwife's Tale of Brainford, from Westward for Smelts. 19- Much Ado about Nothing was entered on the Stationers' register, August 23, 1600, and a well- printed quarto edition appeared in ihe same year. The play is not mentioned by Meres, 159S, and we may assume that it was written at some time in the interval between 1 598 and 1600. For the graver portion of the play — the Claudio and Hero story — Shakspere had an original, perhaps Belleforest's translation in his Jlistoires Tragii/ues of Bandello's 22nd Novella. The story of Ariodante and Genevra 111 AlioBto'a Orlando Furioso (canto v.) is sub- stantially the same. This episode had been trans- lated twice into English before Harington's complete translation of the Orlando Furioso appeared in 1591 ; and it had formed the subject of a play acted before the Queen 1581-83; the story was also told, in a somewhat altered form, by Spenser, Faerie Quee»e,'ii. 4. No original has been found for the merrier portion of the play, and Benedick and Beatrice were probably creations of Shakspere. It has indeed been pointed out that at about the same date the German dramatist Jacob Ayrer, in his comedy of The Beautiful I'hatihia, connected the story from Bandello with a comic underplot; but the resetnblances between Ayrcr's comic underplot and Shakspere 's loves of Beatrice and ■Benedick are probably accidental. ■ vi.] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. Afitc/i Ado about Nothing was popular on the stage in Shakspere's day, and has sustained its reputation. Its variety, ranging from almost burlesque to almost tragedy, and from the euphuistic speech of courtiers to the blundering verbosity of clowns, has contributed to the success of the play. The chief persons, Hero and Claudio, Beatrice and Benedick, are contrasted pairs. Hero's character is kept subdued and quiet in tone, to throw out the force and colour of the character of Beatrice ; she is gentle, affectionate, tender, and if playful, playful in a gentle way. If our interest in Hero were made very strong, the pain of her unmerited shame and suffering would be too keen. And Claudio is far from being a lover like Romeo ; his wooing is done by proxy, and he does not sink under the anguish of Hero's disgrace and supposed death. Don John, the villain of the piece, is a melancholy egoist, who looks sourly on all the world, and has a special grudge against his brother's young favourite Claudio. The chief force of Shakspere in the play comes out in the >cmei loice oc snaKspere in ine piay comes out in tne characters of Benedick and Beatrice. They have not a touch of misanthropy, nor of sentimentality, but are thoroughly healthy and hearty human creatures; at ir. of eg first a little too much self-pleased, but framed by-and-by to be entirely pleased with one another. The thoughts of each from the first are preoccupied with the other, but neither will put self-esteem to the hazard of a rebuke by making the first advances in love ; it only needs, however, that this danger should be removed for the pair to admit the fact that nature has made them over against one another — as their significant names suggest — for man and wife. The flouting of Benedick by Beatrice reminds us of scenes between an earlier pair of lovers, Rosaline and Berowne, in Love's Labour's Lest. The trick which is played upon the lovers to bring them together is one of those frauds practised upon self-love which appear in several of the comedies of this period. Hva wtSjJwCT "-a ™. cgoht except in a superficial Y,-aq. "Swans* 'Sa SS^ SBAKSPEXE. [a with generous indignation against the wrongers of li , and she inspires Benedick to become (not without a touch of humorous self-consciousness) chan, pion of the cause. Dogberry and Verges, as well t Beatrice and Benedick, are creations of Shakspe The blundering watchmen of the time are a i fun with several Elizabethan playwrights ; but Dof berry and goodman Verges are the princes of blundt ing and incapable officials. It is a charming inco gniity to find, while Leonato rages and Benedick offer his challenge, that the solemn ass Dogberry is the one to unravel the tangled threads of their fate. Friar Francis is a near spiritual kinsman of Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet. 20. As You Like It was entered on the Stationer register together with Hairy V., Much Ado 1 Nothing, and Jonson's Every Man in His Hum* " to be staied," i.e. not printed ; the date is August 4 but the year is not mentioned. The previous entry i; dated May 27, 1600, and as the other plays wen printed in 1600 and tool, we infer that the Augi was that of the year 1600. The comedy is not 1 tbned by Meres. Aline, " Who ever loved that low not at first sight?" is quoted (Act III. Sc v. L. 8a) from Marlowe's Hero and Leander, which was pub- lished in 1598. We may set down Ihe following year, 1599, as the probable date of the creation of this charming comedy. The story is taken from Thomas Lodge's prose tale, Rosalynde, Eup/tucs Golden Lcgaeie, first printed in 1590, and a passage in Lodge's dedication probably suggested to Shakspere the name of his play. Lodge, who wrote this tale on his voyage to the Canaries, founded it in part on the Cook's Tale of Gamelyn, wrongly ascribed to Chaucer, and inserted in some editions as one of the Canterbury Tales. In parts of bis weak the dramatist follows the story-teller closely, but there are some Important differences. The heroic names Orlando, Oliver, and Sir RowVmd mc 4\wt to su( rer hi of Tc wb VI.] HIS PLA YS A AD POEMS. icg Shakspere. It was a thought of Shakspere to make the rightful and the usurping dukes, as in The Tempest, brothers. In Lodge's novel the girl-friends pass in the forest for lady and page, in Shakspere, for brother and sister. Shakspere omits the incident of Aliena's rescue from robbers by her future husband ; love at first sight was natural in Arden, but a band of robbers would have marred the tranquillity of the scene. To Shakspere we owe the creation of the characters of Jaques, Touchstone, and Audrey. Written perhaps immediately after Henry V, f the play presents a striking contrast with that high-pitched historical drama. It is as if Shakspere's imagination craved repose and refreshment after the life of courts and camps. We are still on French soil, but instead of the sound of the shock of battle at Agincourt, we hear the waving forest boughs, and the forest-streams of Arden, where " they fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the Golden World." There is an open-air feeling about this play, as there is about Th( Merry Wives of Windsor-, but in The Merry Wives all the surroundings are English and real, here they belong to a land of romance. For the Renaissance, that age of vast energy, national enterprise, religious strife, and court intrigue, pastoral or idyllic poetry possessed a peculiar charm ; the quiet and innocence of a poetical Arcadia was a solace to a life of highly-wrought ambi- tion and aspiration. "Sweet are the uses of adversity," moralises the banished Duke, and external, material adversity has come to him, to Rosalind, and to Orlando ; but if fortune is harsh, nature— both external nature and human character — is sound and sweet, and of real suffering there is none in the play. All that is evil remains in the society which the denizens of the forest "lave left behind ; and both seriously, in the characters if the usurping Duke and Oliver, and playfully, through Touchstone's mockery of court foUvs., i «y<.\k.\wc\ cso what is evil and artificial m WX3A3 \s sw^sS*-* 1 - " SJIAA'SrERE. [CHAP. contrast with the woodland lift : yet Shakspere never falls into the conventional pastoral manner. Orlando is an ideal of youthful strength, beauty, and noble innocence of heart ; and Rosalind's bright, tender womanhood seems but to grow more exquisitely feminine in the male attire which she has assumed in self-defence. Her feelings are almost as quick and fine as those of Imogen (she has not, like Imogei known fear and sorrow), and she uses her wit an bright play of intellect as a protection against her ow ■ eager and vivid emotions. Possessed of a delighted consciousness of power to confer happiness, she can dally with disguises, and make what is most serious to her at the same time possess the charm of an exquisite frolic The melancholy Jaques is charged by the Duke with having been a libertine ; he has certainly tasted I all manner of experiences, but not very earnestly pursued either good or evil. He is a sentimentalist, and in some degree a superficial cynic Yet the Duke loves his company, and at the last can ill part with him, when to try one newer experience Jaques will join the Duke's brother, who has put on a religious life. Jaques is not a bad-hearted egoist, like Don John, but he is a perfectly idle seeker for new sensa- tions and an observer of his own feelings ; he is weary of all that he has found, and especially professes to despise the artificial society, which yet he never really escapes from, as the others do. His wisdom is half foolery, as Touchstone's foolery is half wisdom. Touchstone is the daintiest fool of die comedies, and when we compare him with the clowns of The Comedy of Errors or The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we perceive how Shakspere's humour has grown in refinement. 3r. The Passionate Pilgrim was published by William Jaggard, in 1599- It was a piratical book- seller's venture, and although the popular name of Sbak- s/.h.tv was put upon the tit&pBge die little volume really ■ansisted of a collection from several oxftVots. t.\«\* HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. tion has already been made of the fact that Shalcspere, as Hey wood tells us, was much offended when Jaggaid, in 1612, republished the volume, with added poems of Hey wood, and with Shakspere's name upon the title- page : a cancel of the title-page thereupon was made, and one printed without any author's name. After the fifteenth poem of the original collection occurs a second title — Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music. The following table shows, as far as has been ascer- tained, how the volume was made up (the references je to the Globe Shakspert) : I. It. Shakspere's Sonnets, 138 and 144 (with various read- ings, those of the Sennets the true or the later read- ings)- IIL Longavi lie's son net to Matin in Levi's Labour's Lest (Act IV. Se. iii. I. 60-73). IV. (?) Shakspere's (on ilie snivel of I'emis and Adonis). V. From Love's Labour's Los! (Act IV. St. ii. 1- 109- 1*2). VI. (?) Shakspere s (on the subject of I inns and Adonis). VIL (?) Shakspere's. V11I. Probably by Richard Barn lie Id, in whose Poems in Divers Humors, 1598, it had hist appeared. IX. (?) Shaks[X't..'.i((m the subject of Venus and Adonis). X. Probably not Shakspere's. XI. Probably by Ikirilnilumew firiilin, in whose Fidessa more Chaste than Kindt. 151)6, il hail appeared with various readings (on the subject of J 'eiius and Adonis). Xtt. Perhaps Shakspere's. XIII. Probably by the same writer as X. XIV. Probably not Shakspere's. XV. Probably not Shakspere's. Xvi. Certainly not Shakspere's. XVII. Dumain s poem to Kate in Love's Labour's Lost (Act IV. Sc tii. L. 101-120). XVIII. From Weelkes's Madrigals, 1597. XIX. (?( Possibly Shakspere's. XX. By Marlowe (j;iven here imperfectly), Ijrat's Answer (also Jefetlive here) i- amiWiied i<. Sir VY. Ksle-h. Xxi. By Richard Hartifield, from his Poems in Divers Humors, 1598. 22. The Phcenix and the Tii-rt-Nfe -«3a-^ra*feS s one of the additional poems \o Ctexd'!, 1-*n 1 E I Martyr, or Rosalind's Complaint, 1601, with Shak- spere's name appended. That it is his seems in a high degree doubtful. 23. The Sonnets of Shakspere suggest, perhaps, the most difficult questions in Shaksperian criticism. In 1609 appeared these poems in a quarto (published almost certainly without the author's sanction), which also contained A Lover's Complaint. The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, dedicated them " To the onlie be- getter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H." Does "begetter" mean the person who inspired them and so brought them into existence, or only the obtainer of the Sonnets for Thorpe ? Probably the former. And who is Mr. W. H. ? It is clear from sonnet 135 that the christian -name of Shakspere's friend to whom the first 126 sonnets were addressed was William. But what William? There is not even an approach to cer- tainty in any answer offered to this question. Some have supposed that W. H. is a blind to conceal and yet express the initials H. W. f i.e. Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, Shakspere's patron. Others hold that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (to whom, together with his brother, the first folio was dedicated), is here addressed. When were the Sonnets written ? We know that Meres in 1598 spoke of Shakspere's "sugred sonnets among his private friends," and that in 1599 two (138 and 144) were printed in The Passionate Pilgrim. Some, if we were to judge by their style, seem to belong to the time when Romeo and Juliet was written. Others — as, for example, 66-74 — echo the sadder tone which is heard in Hamlet and Measure J«r Measure. The writing of the Sonnets certainly ex- tended over a considerable period of time, at least three years (see 104), and perhaps a longer period. They all lie, I believe, somewhere between 1595 and The Sfrmett consist of two series, ihe first from 1 to '<*" (The Envoy, 126, consisting ot tvc&ve \m«s. "m. aba loss the vi.] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. couplets), addressed ta a young man ; the other, 154, addressed to or referring to a woman. But both series allude to events which connect the two persons with one another and with Shakspere. The young friend, whom Shakspere loved with a fond idolatry, was beautiful, clever, rich in the gifts of fortune, of high rank. The woman was of stained character, false to her husband, the reverse of beautiful, dark-eyed, pale-faced, a musician, possessed of a strange power of attraction. To her fascination Shak- spere yielded himself, and in his absence she laid her snares for Shakspere's friend and won him. Hence a coldness, estrangement, and, for some time, a complete severance between Shakspere and his friend, after a time followed by acknowledgment of faults on both sides, and a complete reconciliation. So the Sonnets must be interpreted if we accept the natural sense they seem to bear. But several persons have held that they are either altogether of an ideal nature or allegorical, or were written in part by Shakspere not for himself but for the use of others. The natural sense, however, is, I am convinced, the true one. The Sonnets from 1 to 126 form, allowing for a few possible breaks, a continuous series. In the early Sonnets the poet urges his friend to marry, that, his beauty surviving in his children, he may conquer Time and Decay. But if he refuses this, then Verse — the poetry of Shakspere— must make war upon Time, and confer immortality upon his friend's loveli- ness (15-19},* Many of the poems are written in absence (s6, 17, a8, &c). All Shakspere's griefs and made good to him by joy in his friend 1*9-31). The wrong done by "Will" to Shakspere is ;hen spoken of (33), for which some " salve " is offered (34) ; the salve is worthless, but Shakspere will try to forgive. We trace the gradual growth of distrust on * The figures are meant not to mark division? or gwj&tA '.c by strik^^s^^^^*^™^*^^ SHAXSPEXB. [chap. each side (58), until a melancholy settles down upon the heart of Shakspere (66). Still he loves his friend, and tries to think him pure and true. Then a new trouble arises : his friend is favouring a rival poet of great learning and skill (76-86). This rival poet has, with some show of evidence, been conjectured to be George Chapman, the translator of Homer. Shakspere bida his friend " Farewell " (87) ; let him hate Shakspere if he will. He ceases to address poems to him; but after an interval of silence begins once more to sing (100, 101, res, &c). He sees his friend again and finds him still beautiful. There is a reconciliation (104, 105, 107). Explanations and confessions are made. Love is restored, stronger than ever (119), for now it has passed through trial and sorrow ; it is founded not on interested motives (124), nor, as formerly, on the attraction of youth and beauty, but (is inward of the heart {125). And thus, gravely and happily, the Sonnets to his friend conclude. The reader who chooses to investigate the second series of Sennets— those to Shakspere's dark mistress — will meet with little difficulty in understanding them. Perhaps 153, 154, which seem to be two experiments in verse on the same subject, ought to be placed apart from the rest. Having introduced the Sonnets here, as the appear- ance of two of the series in T/m Passionate Pilgrim suggested, we now return to the comedies ; and the Sonnets may be considered to have been viewed from a mid-point in the period of their composition, from which their retrospective and prospective significance may become apparent. 24- Twelfth Night, we learn from Manningham's Diary, was acted at the Middle Temple, February 2, 1601-1602. Sieevens supposed that " the new map, with the augmentation of the Indies" spoken of by Maria (Act III. Sc. ii. L. 86), had reference lo the map ir L/nschoten's Foyages, 1598. The date of the play v probably 1600-1601. ■J.] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS, ch like The Manningham writes of the play : " Much 1 Comedy of Errors or Memchmi in Flautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni." There are two Italian plays of an earlier date than Twelfth Night, entitled Gl' Inganni {The Cheats), containing incidents in some degree resembling those of Shakspere's comedy, and in that by Gonzaga, the sister who assumes male attire, producing thereby con- fusion of identity with her brother, is named Cesare (Shakspere's Cesario). But a third Italian play, Gl' Iiigantiati, presents a still closer resemblance to Twelfth Night, and in its poetical induction, // Saaijido, occurs the name MakvJti (Malvulio). The story' is told in Bandello's novel (ii. 36), and was translated by Belleforest into French, in Histoires Tragiqiies. Whether Shakspere consulted any Italian source or not, he had doubtless before him the version of the story (from Cinthb's Hecatomilhi) by Barnabe Rich— the Historie of Apolonius and Silla in Rkhe His Farewell to Militant Profession (1581) — and this, in the main, he followed. The characters of Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Fabian, the clown Feste, and Maria, with the part they play in the comedy, are creations of Shakspere. No comedy of Shakspere's unites such abounding mirth and fine satire, with the charm of a poetical romance. It is the summing up of the several ad- mirable qualities which appear in the joyous comedies, of which it forms the last. An edge is put on the roystering humour of Sir Tuby by the sharp waiting- ma id wit of Maria, which saves it from becoming an aimless rollicking. Sir Andrew is a Slender grown adult in brainlessness, and who lias forgotten that he is not as richly endowed by nature as by fortune ; and yet he is visited by a glimmering suspicion that others may think he is an ass, which obliges him to air his incapacity and give it im- portance. Feste, the cIonto, \s> \ess. s^si-a*. "^^ Touchstone, but more vetsauie, tea tosMw^a^* S//AKSPERE. fool, and more actively a lover of jest and waggery. Among this abandoned crew of topers and drolls sialics the solemn "yellow-legged stork" Malvolio. His sense of self-importance has diffused itself over all the details of life, so that the whole of human existence, as he would have it, must become as (pompous and as exemplary as the manners of my lady's steward. The cruelty of his deception and disillusion is in proportion to the greatness of his distempered self-esteem. The Duke Orsino is infected with the lover's melan- choly, which is fantastical and nice. He nurses his love and dailies with it, and tries to yield up all his consciousness to it, as to a delicious sensation ; and therefore his love is not quite earnest or deep ; it is like the colour in an opal ; and the loss of Olivia is but the loss of a fair vision, which is replaced by one as fair and more real. Olivia has not the love- languor of the Duke, but her resolved sorrow for her lost brother, so soon forgotten in a stronger feeling, shows a little of the same unreality of self-conscious emotion which we perceive in the Duke's love ; she is of a nature harmonious and refined, but is too much a child of wealth and ease to win away our chief interest from the heroine of the play. Viola is like a heightened portrait of the Julia of Tlu Two Gentlemen of Verona, enriched with lovely colour and placed among more poetical surroundings. She has not the pretty sauciness of Rosalind in her disguise, but owns a heart as tender, swect-natured, and sound- natured as even Rosalind's. The mirth of the play belongs to other actors than Viola; her occasional playfulness falls back into her deep tenderness and is lost in it. It has been suggested (see Hunter: New Illus- trations of Shakespeare, vol. i. p. 380) that Shakspere ridicules, in the scene between the clown, as Sir Topas, and Malvolio, the exorcisms by Puritan ministers, in the case of a family named 3ft8X<&] St] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. 117 (1596-99), and that the difficult word Strachy (Act II. Sc v. L. 45) was a hint to the audience to expect subsequent allusion to the Starchy affair. But all this is highly doubtful. 35. Julius Csesar was produced as early as 1601; so we infer from the passage quoted p. 34, from Wee ver's Mirror of Martyrs. In Drayton's Barons' War, 1603, occurs a passage which closely resembles some lines of the speech of Antony over Brutus' body (last scene of the play). The style of the versification, the diction, the characterisation, all bear out the opinion that 1600 or 1601 is the date of Julius Casar. The historical materials of the play were found by the dramatist in the lives of Csesar, of Brutus, and of Antony, as given in North's translation of Plutarch. Hints for the speeches of Brutus and Antony seem to have been obtained from Apipian' Civil Wars, B. II. ch. 137-147, translated int English in 1578. Everything is wrought out in the play with gTeat care and completeness ; it is well planned and well proportioned ; there is no tempcstuousness of passion, and no artistic mystery. The style is full, but not overburdened with thought or imagery ; this is one of the most perfect of Shakspere's plays ; greater tragedies are less perfect, perhaps for the very reason that they try to grasp greater, more terrible, or more piteous themes. In King Henry V. Shakspere had represented a great and heroic man of action. In the serious plays, which come next in chronological order, Julius Casar and Hamlet, the poet represents two men who were forced to act — to act in public affairs, and affairs of life and death — yet who were singularly disqualified for playing the part of men of action. Hamlet can- not act because his moral energy is sapped by a kind of scepticism and sterile despair about life, because his own ideas are more to \\\m \!kwr. ^l^,\*-' ;sk&k - ba will is diseased, fttulw^ &oe^ n3.,'w*- ,Iie ' BS * D n ad l's ito n8 SHAKSPERE. [chap. as an idealist and theoriser might, with no eye for the actual bearing of facts, and no sense of the true importance of persons. Intellectual doctrines and moral ideals rule the life of Brutus : and his life is most noble, high, and stainless, but his public action is a series of practical mistakes. Yet even while he errs we admire him, for all his errors are those of a pure and lofty spirit. He fails to see how full of power Antony is. because Antony loves pleasure, and is not a Stoic, like himself; he addresses calm argu- ments to the excited Roman mob: he spares the life of Antony and allows him to address the people ; he advises ill in military matters. All the practical gifts, insight and tact, which Brutus lackss. are pos- sessed by Cassius ; but of Brutus's moral purity, veneration of ideals, disinterestedness, and freedom from unworthy personal motive, Cassius possesses litde. And the moral power of Brutus has in it something magisterial, which enables it to oversway the practical judgment of Cassius. In his wife — Cato*s daughter, Portia — Brutus has found one who is equal to and worthy of himself. Shakspere has shown her as per- fectly a woman — sensitive, finely-tempered, tender — vet a woman who bv her devotion to moral ideals might stand beside such a father and such a husband. And Brutus, with all his Stoicism, is gentle and tender : he can strike down Caesar if Caesar be a tvrant, but he cannot roughly rouse a sleeping boy ^Act IV. Sc iiL L. 270). Antony is a man of genius, with many splendid and some generous qualities, but self- indulgent, pleasure-loving, and a daring adventurer, rather than a great leader of the State. The character of Caesar is conceived in a curious and almost irritating manner. Shakspere ^as passages in other plays show) was certainly not i^norun: of the greatness of one of the world's greatest men. Rut here it is his weaknesses that are insisted on. He is /ailing in body and mind, influenced by si:pcr$ti- tion, yields to flatterv, thinks of YutiyscVv 3.* staKxX !■] HIS PLAYS .-/.¥/> 1'0I:MS. bcl: 5' per tin superhuman, has lost some of his insight into ch; cter, and his sureness and swiftness of action. Vet play is rightly named Julin s Gmir. His bodily ence is weal;, but his spirit rules throughout the lay, and rises after his death in all its might, towering iver the little band of conspirators, who at length " before the spirit of C&'sar as it ranges for revenge. 6. Hamlet represents the mid period of the growth if Shakspere's genius, when comedy and history ceased to be adequate for the expression of his deeper ihoughts and sadder feelings about life, and when he was entering upon his great series of tragic writings. In July, 1602, the printer Roberts entered in the Sta- tioners' register, " The Revenge of Hamlett, Prince of Denmark, as y' latelie was acted by the Lord Chamberlain his servantes," and in the next year the play was printed. The true relation of this first quarto of Hamlet to the second quarto, published in 1604 — "newly imprinted, and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was "—is a matter in dispute. It is believed by some critics that the quarto of 1603 is merely an imperfect report of the play as we find it in the edition of the year after ; but there are some material differences which cannot thus be explained. In the earlier quarto, instead of Polonhis and Reynaldo, we find the names Corambis and M ontano ; the order of certain scenes varies from that of the later quarto; " the madness of Hamlet is much more pronounced, and the Queen's innocence of her husband's murder much more explicitly stated." We are forced to lieve either that the earlier quarto contains portions an old play by some other writer than Shakspere- opinion adopted on apparently insufficient grounds some recent editors— or that tt represents perfectly Shakspere's first draught of the play, and that the difference between it and the second quartt is due to Shakspere's revision of his own work. This last opinion seems to be the true wi&,Vn&- "!»&■ value of any comparison bftttreeiv "flw& V*« ( ^* s " _ " to ■ns ds nd ■to rk. feci 120 SHAKSPERE. [chap. with a view to understand Shakspere's manner of rehandling his work, is greatly diminished by the fact that numerous gaps of the imperfect report given in the earlier quarto seem to have been filled in by a stupid stage hack. That an old play on the subject of Hamlet existed there can be no doubt ; it is referred to in 1589 (perhaps in 15S7) by Nash, in his Epistle prefixed to Greene's Menaphen, and again in 1596, by Lodge (JFit's J/iserie and the World's Jfadnesse), where he alludes to u the visard of the Ghosf which cried so miserablv at the Theator, like an oister wife, ' Hamlet, reuenge.' " A German play on the subject of Hamlet exists, which is sup- posed to have been acted by English players in Germany in 1603 ; the name Corambus appears in it ; and it is possible that portions of the old pre- Shaksperian drama are contained in the German Hamlet.* The old play may have been one of the bloody tragedies of revenge among which we find Titus Andronieus and The Spanish Tragedy^ and it would be characteristic of Shakspere that he should refine the motives and spirit of the drama, so as to make the duty of vengeance laid upon Hamlet a painful burden which he is hardly able to support. One additional point must be noted with reference to the date of the play. In Act II. Sc ii. L. 346, Rosencrantz explains that the tragedians of the city* are compelled to travel on account of an "inhibition" which is caused by " the late innovation/' What does this mean ? Does it allude to the Order in Council of June, 1600, limiting the number of playhouses about London to two, an order not carried out until the dutv of enforcing it was urged upon the justices of Middle- sex and Surrey, December 31, 160 1? Or shall we understand u the innovation " as referring to the licence given January 1 603-1 604, to the children of the Queen's Revels to play at the Blackfriars Theatre — a building belonging to the company of which Shakspere *ras a member? The licence to itae cfm\di^iv ^5>l ^Yvoaw ip (' : : vi.] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. 121 Rosencrantz speaks depreciatingly) would act as an inhibition to the company of adult actors whose place they occupied. Beside the old play of Hamlet, Shakspere had probably before him the prose Hystorie of Hambkl (though no edition exists earlier than 1608), translated from Belleforest's Histoires Tragiqtics. The story had been told some hundreds of years previously, in the Hhtoria Danica of Saxo Gram mat icna (ab. 1180-1208). The Hamlet of the Hystorie, after a fierce revenge, becomes King of Denmark, marries two wives, and finally dies in battle. No play of Sliakspere's has had a higher power of interesting spectators and readers, and none has given rise to a greater variety of conflicting interpretations. It has been rightly named a tragedy of thought, and in this respect, as well as others, takes its place beside Julius Cesar. Neither Brutus nor Hamlet is the victim of an overmastering passion as are the chief persons of the later tragedies — eg. Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus. The burden of a terrible duty is laid upon each of them, and neither is fitted for bearing such a burden. Brutus is disqualified for action by his moral idealism, his student-like habits, his capacity for dealing with abstractions rather than with men and things. Hamlet is disqualified for action by his excess of the reflective tendency, and by his unstable will, which alternates between complete inactivity and fits of excited energy. Naturally sensitive, he re- ceives a painful shock from the hasty second marriage (of his mother; already the springs of faith and joy in his nature are embittered ; then follows the terrible discovery of his father's murder, with the injunction laid upon him to revenge the crime ; upon this again follow the repulses which he receives from Ophelia. A deep melancholy lays hold of his spirit, and all of life grows dark and sad to his vision. Although hating his father's murderer, he IvjsfeWWMN." on ha revenge.. He is aware fcaX, Ve. ?» 1 ar.»". >::r , .v,-.r.,"iri". iv >:.i;s T\in:; :r r*.»f?.L their., panhr T ■•»■-■.-•. ■ ■-.-." !■»■_»-•«■■■ %■■•-. | » i- *.- C~~ ! •"."'■ I" i*. T""i»» C^l" i '■K
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All's Well that Ends Well.— Among the plays of Shakspere mentioned by Mercs in his Palladis Tarm'a (1598} occurs the name of Zone's Labour's It'on. This has been identified by some critics with The Taming of the Shrew.', by some with Much Ado about Nothing. But the weight of authority inclines to the opinion that under this title Meres spoke of the play known to us as All's Well that Ends Well. It seems not improbable that All's Well, as we possess it in the first folio— and no earlier edition exists— is a rehandling, very thoroughly carried out, of an earlier version of the comedy. Coleridge believed that two styles were discernible in it ; there is certainly a larger proportion of rhyming lines in All's Well than in any other play completed after the year 1600 ; and the following rhyming passages have been pointed out as fragments retained from the earlier version : Act I. Sc. i. L. 231-244 ; Act I. Sc. iii. L. 134-142; Act II. Sc. i. L. 133-213; Act II. Sc. iii L. 78-m and 132-151; Act III. Sc iv. L. 4-17; Act IV. Sc. iii. L. 252-260; Act V. Sc. iii. L. 61-72 and 325-340. It is, however, far from certain that any portion of the play is of early origin, and assigning conjecturally the date about 1602 as that of the completion of the whole, we may view it as belonging to the later group of ihe second cycle of Sliakspere's comedies, not so early, therefore, as Twelfth Night or As Yen Like H, and certainly earlier than Measure for Measure. The story of Helena and Bertram was found by Shakspere in Paynter's Palace of Pleasure (1566), I'aynter having translated it from the Decameron of Boccaccio {Novel 9. Third day). Shakspere added the characters of the Countess, La feu, Parolles, and the Clown. What interested the pae.i'=. W^tttA Boccaccio's story was evidcTitYj tt\i ^os&fsa.saA'^OT ;o T t, I - SffAA'SPERE. of the heroine. In Boccaccio, Giletta, the physician's daughter, is inferior in rank to the young Count, Beltramo, but she is rich. Shakspere's Helena is of humbler birth than his Bertram, and she is also poor. Vet poor, and comparatively low-born, she aspires to be the young Count's wife, she pursues him to Paris, and wins him against his will. To show Helena thus reversing in a measure the ordinary relations of man and woman, and yet to show her neither self-seeking nor unwomanly, was the task which the dramatist attempted. On the one hand he insists much on Bertram's youth, and gives him the faults and vices of youth, making the reader or spectator of the play feel that his hero has great need of such a finely-tempered, right-willed and loyal nature to stand by his side as that of Helena. On the other hand he shows us Helena's enthusiastic attachment to Bertram, her fears and cares on his behalf, her adhesion to him rather than to herself, when her husband seems to set their interests in opposition to one another, until we come to feel that the imperious need which makes Helena overstep social conventions is the need of perfect to the man she loves. When she chooses him her words are : I Jure n Me and ,„j ... Inlo your guiding power. Bertram's beauty and courage must bear part of the blame of Helena's loving him better than he de- serves. With the youthful desire for independence which makes him break away from her, she can intelligently sympathise. In the last Act she appears — when he has entangled himself in falsehood and shame — to save him, and rescue him from Ins baser self. We feel that when he has at last really found Helena, he is safe, and all ends well. Parolies, the incarnation of bragging meanness, is ilie coonterioii of Helena — she, &e doer of virtuous deeds; he, the. utteisi ot\am awi t) HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. swelling words; she, all brave womanliness; he, too cowardly for manhood. To be delivered from the false friend to whom he adheres, and to be brought into union with the true wife whom he rejects— this is what Bertram needs. Parolles has been compared to FalstafT, but they ought rather to be contrasted _ Sir John is a man of genius, with real wit and power of fascination, and no ridicule can destroy him, but the exposure of Parolles makes him dwindle into hi native pitifulness. The Countess is a charming crea- tion of Shakspere ; in no play, unless it be some of his latest romantic dramas, is old age made more beautiful and dignified. The heroine who is the centre of All's Well thai Ends Well, it will be seen, is singularly clear in judg- ment and strong in will. If the play was completed about the same time that Hamlet reached its final form, the writer could hardly fail to be sensible of the contrast between the hero of his tragedy, so unfitted for action, so irresolute of purpose, and the heroine of his comedy, who always sees the right thing to do, and who always does it, however dangerous, doubtful, or difficult it may be. 28. Measure for Measure is one of the darkest and most painful of the comedies of Shakspere, but its darkness is lit by the central figure of Isabella, with her white passion of purity and of indignation against sin. " The wit seems to foam and sparkle up from a fountain of bitterness the humour is made pungent with sarcasm." This play deals with deep things of our humanity— with righteousness and charity, with self-deceit, and moral weakness and strength, even with life and death themselves. All that is soft, melodious, romantic has disappeared from the style ; it shows a fearless vigour, penetrating imagination, and much intellectual force and boldness. The date of the play is uncertain. Two passages (Act I. Sc. i. L. 68-73, a ™l \0. W&fc-w.V. ifc,--^ have been conjectured to coittaut " a. cava'&i ■»?3«j«i SHAKSPERE. •r King James I.'s stately and ungracious demeanour n his entry into England ;" and possibly the revival i 1604 of a statute, ivliirh punished with death any divorced person who married again while his or her former husband or wife was living, may have added point to one chief incident in the play. Shakspere took the story from Whetstone's play Promos and Cassandra (1578), and the prose telling of the tale by the same author in his lleptameron of Civil Discourses (158;). Whetstone's original was a story in the Hecatomithi, of Giraldi Cinthio. Shak- spere alters some of the incidents, making the Duke present in disguise throughout, preserving the honour of the heroine, and introducing the character of Mariana to take her wifely place by Angelo as a substitute for Isabella, as in Ail's Well that Ends Well Helena took the place of the widow's daughter, Diana. This play, like The Merchant of Venice, is remark- able for its great pleading scenes ; and to Portia's ardour and intellectual force Isabella adds a noble severity of character, a devotion to an ideal of r tude and purity, and a religious enthusiasm. in Vienna, " where corruption boils and bubbles," appears this figure of virginal strength and uprightness; at the last she is to preside over the sinful city, and perhaps to save it : She is almost "a thing ensky'd and sainted," yet she returns from the cloister to the world, there ti her place as wife and Duchess. Angelo, at the outset, though he must be conscious of the wrong he has done to his betrothed, is more self-deceived than a deceiver. He does not know his own heart, and is severe against others in his imagined superiority to every possible temptation. A terrible abyss is opened *t him in the cv/I passion of Vis own totalis. Ttae vi.] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. unmasking of the self-deceiver here is n happy comedies, a piece of the mirth of the play ; it is painful and stern. The Duke acts throughout as a kind of overruling providence ; he has the wisdom of the serpent, which he uses for good ends, and he looks through life with a steady gaze, which results in a justice and even tenderness (although tender- ness united with severity) towards others. Claudio is made chiefly to be saved by his sister, but he has a grace of youth, and a clinging enjoyment of life and love, which interest us in him sufficiently for pity, if not for admiration. The minor characters possess each his characteristic feature, but are less important individually than as representatives of the wide-spread social corruption and degradation which surround the chief characters, and form the soil on which they move and the air they breathe. " We never througl out the play get into the free open joyous atmosphere, so invigorating in other works of Shakspere ; the o\ pressive gloom of the prison, the foul breath of the house of shame, are only exchanged for the chilly damp of conventual walls, or the oppressive retire- ment of the monastery." In a happier world we might turn away from Isabella, but here she is light, strength, and salvation. 29. Troilus and Cressida appeared in two quarto editions in the year i6og ; on the title-page of the earlier of the two it is stated to have been acted at the Globe ; the later contains a singular preface in which the play is spoken of as " never stal'tl with the stage, never clapper-claw 'd with the palmes of the vulgar," and as having been published against the will of " the grand possessors." Perhaps the play was printed at first for the use of the theatre, and with the inten- tion of being published after having been represented, and that the printers, against the known wish of the proprietors of Shakspere 's manuscript, anticipated the first representation and issued, fttt. ppaSus, - '"" attractive announcement ftiaX \t "«»» «=>■ hey igh- ere, op- ' t i ] t n- d, ae fe*, uS SHAKSPERE. novelty. The editors of the folio, after having decided that Troilus and Cressida should follow Romeo and Juliet among the tragedies, changed their minds, apparently uncertain how the play should be classed, and plated it between the Histories and Tragedies; this led to the cancelling of a leaf, and the filling up of a blank space left by the alteration, with the Prologue to Troilus and Cressida — a prologue which is believed by several critics not to have come from Shak spare's hand. There is extreme uncertainty with respect to the date of the play. Dekker and Chettle were engaged in 1599 upon a play on this subject, and, from an entry in the Stationers' register, February 7, 1602- 1603, it appears that a Troilus and Cressida had been acted by Shakspere's company, the Lord Cham- berlain's Servants. Was this Shakspere's play? We »are thrown back upon internal evidence to decide this question, and the internal evidence is itself of a conflicting kind, and has led to opposite conclu- sions. The massive worldly wisdom of Ulysses argues, it is supposed, in favour of a hue date, and the general tone of the play has been compared with that of Timon of Athens. The fact that it does nol contain a single weak ending, and only six light endings, is. however, almost decisive evidence against our placing it after either Timon or Macbeth ; and the other metrics] characteristics are considered, by the most careful student of this class of evidence in the case of the present play (Hertzberg), to point to a date about 1603. Other authorities place it as late as 1608 or 1 (109 ; while a third theory (that of Verplanck and Grant White) attempts to solve the difficulties by supposing that it was first written in 1603, and revised and en- larged shortly before the publication of the quarto. Parts of the play — notably the last battle of Hector — appear not to be by Shakspere. The interpretation of the play itself is as difficult as the ascertainment of the external facts of its history. Wa\\ *Ut' teaaon, and in what spirit did Shaksgere *fte vi.] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. stTange comedy ? All the Greek heroes wr against Troy are pitilessly exposed to ridicule ; Helen and Cressida are light, sensual, and heartless, for whose sake it seems infatuated folly to strike a blow ; Troilus is an enthusiastic young fool ; and even Hector, though valiant and generous, spends his life in a cause which he knows to be unprofitable, if n< evil. All this is seen and said by Thersites, whosi mind is made up of the scum of the foulness human life. But can Shakspere's view of things ha been the same as that of Thersites? The central theme, the young love and faith Troilus given to one who was false and fickle, and his discovery of his error, lends its colour to the whole play. It is the comedy of disillusion. And as Troilus passed through the illusion of his first love for woman, so by middle life the world itself often appears like one that has not kept her promises, and who is a poor deceiver. We come to see the seamy side of life ; and from this mood of disillusion it is a deliverance to pass on even to a dark and tragic view of life, to which beauty and virtue reappear, even though human weakness or human vice may do them bitter wrong. Now such a mood of contemptuous depreciation of life may have come over Shakspere, and spoilt him, at that time, for a writer of comedy. But for Isabella we should find the coming on of this mood in Afeasure for Measure ; there is perhaps a touch of it in Hamlel. At this time Troilus and Cressida may have been written, and soon afterwards Shakspere, rousing himself to a deeper inquest into things, may have passed on to his great series of tragedies. Let us call this, then, the comedy of disillusion, and certainly, wherever we place it, we must notice a striking resemblance in its spirit and structure to Timon of Athens. Timon has a lax benevolence and shallow trust in the goodness of men ; he is undeceived, and bitterly turns away from the whole human, wee., in a rage of disappointment. ^n *C»s. "sasoa ^*j\> AJdbiadtiS is, in like manner, vnotv^eA. V^ *6s«-' s * s " ijo SHAKSPERE. [chap. but he takes his injuries firmly, like a man of action and experience, and sets about the subduing of his base antagonists. Apemantus, again, is the dog-like reviler of men, knowing
, act upon the widest theatre, and attain their ilvite extremes. The story of Lear and his daughters s found by Shakspere in Molinshed, and he may have ien a few hints from an old play, The True Chronicle T istory of King Leir, Stc, In both Holinshed's version and that of the True Chronicle, the army of Lear and his French allies is victorious ; Lear is 1 stated in his kingdom; but Holinshed relates how, after Lear's death, her sisters' sons warred against Cordelia, and took her prisoner, when "being ian of a manly courage and despairing to recover :rty," she slew herself. The story is also told by iggins in The Mirror for Magistrates ; by Spenser IfiUfit Queene, II. x. 27-32), from whom Shakspere adopted the form of the name " Cordelia ;" and in ballad (printed in Percy's Relh/iiei) probably later i date than Shakspere's play. With, tV\e &«>v}
. Dec. 26. 1606. The play was printed in quarto in 1608. "An upward limit of date is supplied by the publication of Harsnet's Declaration of Potish Im- postures, 1603. to which Shakspere was indebted for the names of many of the devils in Edgar's speeches.** It has been suggested that Gloucester's mention of €i late eclipses in the sun and moon " ( Act I. Sc. ii. L. 1 1 2) refers to the great eclipse of the sun, October, 1605, preceded within a month by an eclipse of the moon, and that the words which follow shortly after the mention of eclipses, "machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us dis- quietly to our graves.*" had special point if delivered on the stage while the Gunpowder Plot of Nov. 5, 1605, was fresh in men's minds. Shakspere cares little to give the opening incidents of his play a look of prosaic, historical probability. The spectator or reader is asked, as it were, to grant the dramatist certain data, and then to observe what the i main nation can make of them. Good and evil in this play are clearly severed from one another — (more so than in Macbeth or in Othello) — and at the last, goodness, if we judge merely by external for- tune, would seem to be, if not defeated, at least not triumphant Shakspere has dared, while pay- ing little regard to mere historical verisimilitude, to represent the most solemn and awful mysteries of life as they actually are, without attempting to offer a ready-made explanation of them. Cox&eVui &\ft* strangled in prison ; yet we know that hex devo^on <& - HIS PLAYS AA'D POEMS. love was not misspent. Lear expires in an agony of grief ; but he has been delivered from his pride and passionate wilfulness : he has found that instead of being a master, at whose nod all things must bow, he is weak and helpless, ;i sport even of the wind and the rain ; his ignorance of true love, and pleasure in false professions of love, have given place to an agonised dinging to the love which is real, deep, and tranquil because of its fulness. Lear is the greatest sufferer in Sbatspere's plays ; though so old, he has strength which makes him a subject for prolonged and vast agony; and patience is unknown to him. The elements seem to have conspired against him with his unnatural daughters ; the upheaval of the moral world, and the rage of tempest in the air seem to be parts of the same gigantic convulsion. In the midst of this tempest wanders unhoused the white-haired Lear while his fool — most pathetic of all the minor cha- racters of Shakspere — jests half-wildly, half-coherently, half-bit terly, half-tender] y, and always with a sad re membrance of the happier past. The poor boy's heart has been sore ever since his " young mistress went to France." If Cordelia is pure love, tender and faithful, and Kent is unmingled loyalty, the monsters Goneril and Regan are gorgons rather than women, such as Shak- spere has nowhere else conceived. The aspect of Goneril can almost turn to stone ; in Regan's tongue there is a viperous hiss. Goneril is the more formid- able, because the more incapable of any hatred which is not solid and four-square. Regan acts under her siski's influence, bui has an eager venomousness of her own. The story of Gloucester enlarges the basis of the tragedy. Lear's affliction is no mere private incident ; there is a breaking of the bonds of nature and society all around us. Hut Gloucester is suffering for a former sin of self-indulgence, Lear is "more sinned against than sinning." Yet Glouca^tt ^e, gramed a death which is Y\a\( yyjfci. "Srfe. ^JSs\«cfs^ serves as a measure of the \\\i^e,t affivciatv <& ■Cfc.^^*™^ SUA KSPERE. [CHAR Edgar and Edmund are a contrasted pair — both are men of penetration, energy, and skill, one on the side of evil, the other on the side of good. Edgar's virtue is active, enduring, and full of device ; he rises at last to be the justiciary who brings his evil brother sternly to punishment Everywhere throughout the play Shakspere's imaginative daring impresses us. Nothing in poetry is bolder or more wonderful than the scene on the night of the tempest in the hovel where tht It'mg, whose intellect has now given way, is in ( with Edgar, assuming madness, the Fool, with his forced pathetic mirth, and Kent. The text of the quarto differs considerably from that of the folio ; but the opinion that the later text — that of the folio — exhibits a revision of his own work by Shakspere is not supported by sufficient evidence. "The folio was printed from an independent t script, and its text is on the whole much superior to that of the quartos. Each, however, supplies paste which are wanting in the other." Scene iii. of Act IV. is not found in the folio. 32. Macbeth was seen acted at the Globe by I Forman — who gives a detailed sketch of the play — on April 20, 1610. But the characteristics of versifica- tion forbid us to place it after Pericles and Antony and Cleopatra, or very near The Tempest. Light endings begin to appear in considerable number in Macbeth (twenty-one is the precise number), but of weak endings it contains only two. Upon the whole, the internal evidence supports the opinion of Malone, that the play was written about 1606. The words in Macbeth's vision of the kings (Act IV. Sc. i. L, izo), J refer to the union of the two kingdoms under James I. James had revived the practice of touching for the %4 evil, described Act IV. Sc. iii. L. 140-159. "/fere's a farmer that hang'd himsetf oti Orxt «*.- ■tation of plenty •■ (Act II. Sc. iU. L. 5} rcwj \\avt UTS PZA KS Aim POEMS. reference to the unusually low price of wheat and autumn of 1606. "Here's an equivo- cator that could swear in both scales against cither scale ; who committed treason enough for God's sake yet could not equivocate to heaven " (Act II. Sc Hi. L_ 9) has been supposed to allude to the doctrine of equivocation, avowed by Henry Garnet, Superior of the order of Jesuits in England, on his trial for the Gun- powder Treason, March 28, 1606, and to his perjury on that occasion. In 1611 the ghost of Banquo was jestingly alluded to in Beaumont and Fletcher's A'rugM oj the Burning Pestle. The materials for his play Shakspere found in Holinshed's Chronicle, connecting the portion which treats of Duncan and Macbeth with Holinshed's account of the murder of King Duffe by Donwald. The appearance of Banquo's ghost and the sleep- walking of Lady Macbeth appear to be inventions of the dramatist Thomas Middleton's play of The Witch, discovered in MS. in 1779, contains many points of resemblance to Mcubcth, The Cambridge editors, Messrs. Clark and Wright, are of opinion that Macbeth was inter- polated with passages by a second author — not im- probably by Middlet on— after Shakspere's death, or after he had ceased to be connected with the theatre ; the interpolator expanded the parts assigned to the weird sisters and introduced a new character, Hecate. The following passages are pointed out as the supposed interpolations: Act I. Sc ii., iii. I.. 1—37; Act II. Sc i. I.. 61, iii. (Porter's pan) Act HI. Sc v. ; Act IV. Sc. i. L. 39-47 and 125-132, iii. L. 140-159; Act V, (?) ii., v. L. 47-50, viiL L. 32-33 (" Before my body I throw my warlike shield ") and 35-75. This theory of interpolation must be considered as in a high degree doubtful, and in particular the Porter's part shows the hand of Shakspere. As to Middleton's The Witch, it was probably of later date t
t, from Antony's careless magnificence of strengih, and the beauty, the arts, and endless variety of Cleopatra. Yet, though the tragedy has all the glow and colour of iental magnificence, it remains true at heart to the moral laws which govern human life. Tt*. mot^n; ti\ Measure by the Egyptian Quee-ft a.tA Vet \rS3ssssk t,afterai], a failure, even from t\w fwA- TVt^^^ true confi between I inspires tf SHAKSI'ERE. [chap. ! confidence, no steadfast strength of love possible i Antony and his " serpent of old Nile." Each inspires the other with a mastering spirit of fascination, but Antony knows not the moment when Cleopatra may be faithless to him, and Cleopatra weaves her endless snares to retain her power over Antony. The great Roman soldier gradually loses his energy, his judg- ment, and even his joy in life ; at last, the despair of spent forces settles down upon him, and it is only out of despair that he snatches strength enough to fight fiercely when driven to bay. He is the ruin of Cleo- patra's magic. Upon Cleopatra herself the genius of Shakspere has been lavished. She is the most wonderful of his creations of women, formed of the greatest number of elements — apparently conflict- ing elements, yet united by the mystery of life. "To heap up together all that is most unsubstan- tial, frivolous, vain, contemptible, and variable, till the worthlessness be lost ill the magnitude, and a sense of the sublime spring from the very elements of littleness : to do this belonged only to Shakspere, that worker of miracles." While creating, with so much imaginative ardour, his Cleopatra, Shakspere yet stands away from her, and, in a manner, criticises her. Enobarbus, who sees through every wile and guile of the Queen, is, as it were, a chorus to the play, .< looker-on at the game ; he stands clear of the golden haze which makes up the atmosphere around Cleo- patra ; and yet he is not a mere critic or commentator (Shakspere never permitting the presence of a person in his drama who is not a true portion of it). Enobarbus himself is under the influence of the charm of Antony, I and slays himself because he has wronged his master. The figures of Antony and the Queen are ennobled tad elevated by the strong power of attraction, even of devotion, which they exert over those about them — Antony over Enobarbus, Cleopatra over her atten- •Imr.*. (.'harm tan and Jras, s-f- Coriolanus was written about L&cA t i "a the metrical characteristics. The \ ■r.] II IS PLAYS AND POEMS. Mr test puts it next after Antony and Cleopatra, and it is probable that such is its actual place in the chro- nological order. Shakspere in his North's Plutarch found another subject for tragedy. Having rendered into art the history of the ruin of a noble nature through voluptuous self-indulgence, he went to represent the ruin of a noble nature through haughtiness and pride. From Egypt, with splendours, its glow, its revels, its moral licence, we pass back to austere republican Rome. The majestic figure of Volumnia is Shakspere's ideal of the Roman matron. The gentle "Virgilia is the most dutiful and tenderly loyal of wives, and her friend Valeria— (ho\ remote from the free-tongued girls of Cleopatra) — i The moon of Remit, (liable as lilt icicle That's curdied by the frost from purest snow And hongs on Dian's temple. But, although free from voluptuousness, the con- dition of Rome is not strong and sound. There is political division between the patricians and plebeians. Shakspere regards the people as an overgrown child with good and kindly instincts; owning a basis of untutored common-sense, but capable of being led astray by its leaders ; possessi.'il of little judgment and no reasoning powers, and without capacity for self- restraint. It is not for the people that Shakspere in this jilay reserves his scorn, hut for their tribunes, the demagogues, who mislead and pervert them — a pair of political foxes. Although nobler types of individual character are to he found among the patricians than the plebeians, the dramatist is not blind to the patri- cian vices, and indeed the whole tragedy turns upon the existence and the influence of these. Coriolanus is by nature of a kindly and generous disposition, but he inherits the aristocratical tradition, and his kind- liness strictly limits itself to the circle which includes those of his own rank and class. For bis, -sw*!e«x Vse. has a veneration approaching to *rats!tNS^ \ Vt \s> CSS ^I tent to be a subordinate undet C**SBH6»\ «* ^ old Menenius he has an almost filial regard ; but the people are " slaves," " curs," "minnows." His haughti- ness becomes towering, because his personal pride, which in itself is great, is built up over a solid and high- reared pride of class. When he is banished his bitter- ness arises not only from his sense of the contemptible nature of the adversaries to whom he is forced to yield, but from the additional sense that he has been deserted by his own class, " the dastard nobles." He would henceforward, if possible, be himself alone, standing As if a man were author of himself And knew no other kin. And it is in this spirit o! revolt against the bonds of society and of nature that he advances against his native city. But his haughtiness cannot really place him above nature. In the presence of his wife, his §boy, and his mother, the strong man gives way, and is restored once more to human love. And so his fate comes upon him. To the last something of his pride remains, and the immediate occasion of his death is an outbreak of that sudden passion, springing from his self-esteem, which had already often and grievously wronged him. ► Menenius Agrippa is like an earlier Gonzalo of TIte Tempest, an incarnation of humorous common-sense ; he has for Coriolanus a fatherly care, regards him with a fatherly admiration, and would if possible save him from himself. 35. Timon of Athens is, beyond reasonable doubt, only in part the work of Shakspere. Whether PShakspere worked upon materials furnished by an older play, or whether he left his play a fragment to be completed by another hand, is uncertain : former supposition is perhaps the correct one, and the older writer may possibly have been George li'ilkins. There is a substantial agreement among «a*/ ^ est cnc ' cs as to u ' ,iat portions of the. \i\wj ate bfatspere's and what are not. The foUo-wm;, aavj ^ HIS PLA YS AND POEMS. be distinguished, with some confidence, as the non- Shatspenac parts : Act I. Sc. i. L. 189-240, 258-273 (or ? from entrance of Apemantus to end of scene), ii. (certainly); Act II. Sc. ii. L. 45-124; all Act III., except Sc. vi. L. 9S-115; Act IV. Sc. ii. L, 30-50, (r)iill ^-.-tfz, 399-41 itW-S-tti 4;t V (?) Sc. 1. I,. i.-59, 11., 111. I heru is no external evidence which helps to deter- mine the date at which Shakspere wrote his part of the play ; but it was probably later than Macbeth and earlier than Perkks. The year 1607 is a date which cannot be far astray. The sources from which Shakspere derived an ac- quaintance with the story of Timon were Paynter's Palace of Pleasure, a passage in Plutarch's Life of Mark Antony, and, in particular, a dialogue of Lucian, But if Shakspere worked upon an older play, it may have been through it that he obtained the materials which appear to come from Lucian. Another play on the subject of Timon existed in 1600, which has been edited by Dyce. It was, in the opinion of Dyce, intended for an academic audience, and there is no evidence suf- ficient to prove that it had been seen by Shakspere. Although only a fragment, Shakspere's part of the play is written with the highest dramatic energy. Nothing is more intense than the conception and ren- dering of Timon's feelings when he turns in hatred from the evil world. The rich Lord Timon has lived in a rose-coloured misl of pleasant delusions. The conferring of favours has been with him a mode of kindly self-indulgence, and he has assumed that every- one is as liberal -hearted and of as easy generosity as he is himself. Out of his pleasant dream he wakes to find the baseness, the selfishness, and ingratitude of the world. And he passes violently over from his former lax philanthropy to a fierce hatred of mankind. The practical Alcibiades sets at once about righting the wrongs which he has suffered. But Tinvao. ca.^ only rage and then die. l&T^ftTSTO^vta*o*i*«p«a* a ' of a pomble nobleness in Kim-, Ve cmnw* wyXcew&seft- ' SHAKSPERE, himself, as Alcibiades can, to the harsh and pollut i[' the world ; yet the rage also proceeds from a weakness of nature. The dog-like Apemantus accepts, well-contented, the evil which Alcibiades would punish, and from which Timon flies. He barks and snarls, but does not really suffer. The play is painful one, unrelieved by the presence of beauty c human worth, except such worth as Timon 's steward possesses, and this his master blinded by his fierce misanthropy, has no eyes to see. 36. Pericles is the first of the group of plays which I have named Romances. Shakspere's portion of the play has something of the slightness of a preliminary sketch. The first two acts are evidently by another writer than Shakspere, and probably the scenes in Act IV. (Sc ii., v., and vi), so revolting to our moral feeling, are also to be assigned away from him, remains (Acts III., IV., V., omitting the scenes just mentioned), is the pure and charming romance 1 " Marina the sea-born child of Pericles, her loss, and the recovery of both child and mother by the afflicted Prince. Whether Shakspere worked upon the founda- tion of an earlier play, or whether the non-Shaksperia: parts of Pericks were additions made to what he had written, we cannot say with certainty. It is suppc by some critics that three hands can be distinguished : that of a general reviser who wrote the first two acts and Gower's choruses — possibly the dramatist George Wilkins ; that of a second writer who contributed the offensive scenes of Act IV. ; and, thirdly, the hand of Shakspere. Pericks was entered in the Stationers' register, 1608, by the bookseller Blount, and was pub- lished with a very ill-arranged text the next year (1609) by another bookseller, who had, it is believed, surrep- titiously obtained his copy. It was not included among the plays given in the first or second folios, but .i/>/M.<;tn.d, with six added plays, in the third folio, '663- The story upon which Pericla is founded is given in Laurence Twine's Patltrnt of Painfull (1602) — itself a reprint o( an cotVj Tratei ■: ] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. 145 1 from the French ; given also in Gower's Con- fessio Amantis, and originally written about the fifth or sixth century f of our era, in Greek. In all these earlier forms of the tale the name of the prince or king of Tyre is Apollonius, not Pericles, Both Twine and Gower appear to have been made use of by the writers of Pericles, and the debt to Gower is acknowledged by his introduction as the "presenter" of the play. It should be noted that in 1608, probably immediately after the production of the play, appeared a novel by George Wilkins, The Painful/ Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which once more tells the story in prose, the version in this instance being in great measure founded upon the play, of which Wilkins him- self is conjectured to have been one of the authors. The drama as a whole is singularly undramatic. It entirely lacks unity of action, and the prominent figures of the opening scenes quickly drop out of the play. A main part of the story is briefly told in rhymed verse by the presenter, Gower, or is set forth in dumb show. But Shakspere's portion is one and indivisible. It opens on shipboard with a tempest, and in Shak- spere's later play of storm and wreck he has not attempted to rival the earlier treatment of the subject. "No poetry of shipwreck and the sea," a living poet writes, " has ever equalled the great scene of Pericles \ no such note of music was ever" struck out of the clash and contention of tempestuous elements.'' Milton, when writing Lyciiias, the elegy upon his drowned friend, remembered this scene, and one line in particular — Anil humming water shall o'erwheta thy corpse. To this rage of storm succeeds the hush of Cerimon's tudious chamber, in which the wife of Pericles, tossed ishore by the waves, wakens ivonderingly from her trance to the sound of melancholy music. Cerimon, who is master of the secrets of nature, who is liberal in his " learned charity," who helil ifc c\w k Virtue And cunning wcte ex\4o»-TO>«v\a ^%etf.« TJuin nobleness ami riches. 146 SHAKSPL is like a first sludy for Prospero. In the fifth ; Marina, so named from her birth at sea, has grown b • the age of fourteen years, and is, as it were, a sister o Miranda and Perdila (note in each case the signifi- cant name). She, like Perdita, is a child lost by her parents, and, like Perdita, we see her flower-like with her flowers — only these flowers of Marina a a merrymaking, but a grave. The melancholy i Peri Id is a clear-obscure of sadness, not a gloom < cloudy remorse like that of Leontes. His meetii_ I (rich his lost Matina is like an anticipation of the scene in which Cymbeline recovers his sons and daughter ; but the scene in Perida is filled with & Tatar, keener passion of joy. And again, the mar- vellous meeting between Leontes and Hermione is anticipated by the union of Pericles and his Thaisa. Thus Pericles containing the motives of much that w;is worked out more fully in later dramas, maybe said to bear to ihe Romances somewhat of the s: relation which The Two Gentlemen of Verona bears to the comedies of love which succeeded it in Shak- I spore's second dramatic period. *7. Cymbeline interweaves with a fragment of British history taken from Holinshed, a story from Boccaccio's Dteamer m (9th Novel of znd 1 'ay), the Gtfnevn of the Italian novel corresponding to Shak- spcrc's Imogen. The story is told in a tract called Westward for Smelts, 1620 (stated by Steevens and Malone to have been published as early as 1603); but Shakapere appears in some way, directly t directly, lo have made acquaintance with it as given by Boccaccio, It i* 1 singular circumstance that in the 1600 quarto edition of Mueh jtdo about Nothing, :■!. opening stage direction runs: "Enter Leonato [and] Innogen his wife;" bat no speech is assigned . comedy to Innogen, nor does her name re- Here Imogen is wife to Leotmtus Posthumus. ¥%e names of the two princes Shskspen found, as the king's name, in HoVinshed •, V& fee I*** Us of their having been Stolen, nni <&*« V& VI.] IKS PLAYS AMD POEMS. 147 among the mountains of Wales, appeal to have been invented by the dramatist. Dr. Forman records in his MS. Booke of Plaies am! Notes thereof, that he saw Cymbeline acted ; but he gives no date. His book, however, belongs to the years 1610-1611, and the metrical and other internal evidence point to that time as about the period when the drama must have been written. It is loosely constructed, and some passages possess little dramatic intensity. Several critics have questioned whether the vision of Posthumus (Act V. Sc iv.) is of Shakspere's authorship, and it is certainly poorly con- ceived and written. Nevertheless, the play is one of singular charm, and contains ill Imogen one of the loveliest of Shakspere's creations of female character. " Posthumus and Imogen " would be a titter name for the play than Cymbeline. The weak king, governed by his strong-minded, ambitious wife, has but a small share in the action ; it is designed that the heroine shall have no true father, no friend or pro- tector for a time, except her faithful servant, Pisanio. His children — royal in nature — inherit none of the king's weakness. The Queen transmits to her son only her evil disposition, with none of her force of intellect. Cloten is the aristocrat fool, thick-witted, violent, with the coarse conceit of a high-bom boor. Imogen has the incredible bad taste to prefer to him "a poor and worthy gentleman," endowed with beautiful gifts of nature, and possessed of all the culture of his time. But Posthumus, with his plain British understanding, parted from his wife, is no match for the craft and cunning of Italy. His faith in Imogen is of a half-romantic kind, unconfirmed by calm and deep acquaintance with her heart : that faith is not subtly poisoned, like the love of Othello, but sud- denly, in one brief and desperate encounter, over- thrown. His jealousy is not heroic, like Othello's; it shows something of grossness, uxnrcrcAq •& v n» \s»kk self. In due time pen vtcouaX usmm SoesT'to 'waStO***- noWer nature reasserts. itseU, W&&\» fe& ( m»^ v SQ5saRiei SBAKSPBRS. of parent and lost children, the erring husband i; I to the quick-beating, joyous heart of his wife. Except grandeur and majesty, which were reserved for Hermione and Queen Katherine, everything that can make a woman lovely is given by the poet to : quick and exquisite feelings, brightness of intellect, delicate imagination, energy to hate evil, and to right what is wrong, scorn for what i rude, culture, dainty womanly accomplishments, the gift of song, a capacity for exquisite happiness, and no less sensitiveness to the sharpness of sorrow, a power Of quick recovery from disaster when the warmth of love breathes upon her once more, beauty of a typi Which is noble and refined. And her lost brother im gallant youths, bred happily far from the court, : mldj where their generous instincts and love of free- dom and activity find innocent if insufficient modes I of gratification. As in all the works of this period, an open-air feeling pervades a great part of the drama ; nature, itself joyous and free, ministers to what i beautiful, simple, or heroic in man, while yet by Shak- sjiere nature alone is never anywhere conceived as -.111:11 i.ni in satisfy the heart or the imagination of a human being. With reconciliation and reunion this, like the oilier Romances, closes. Even Iachimo — I kind of less absolutely evil Iago, suitable to comedy instead of tragedy — must repent and be forgiven. 38. The Tempest was probably written late in »!he year 1 f> 1 o. A few months previously had appeared ,111 account ttf the wreck of Sir George Somers' ship in a tempest olT the Bermudas, entitled A Disari'ery of I!,,- Bemudts, tthttwist called the lie of Diveh, &*c., written by Silvester Jourdan. Shakspere (Act I. Sc. ii. L. 339) makes mention of "the still-vexed Ber- moothea. Several points of resemblance render it I le thai Shakspen in writing the play had Jour- tiomfc 'i.ut before him. (See preface to Clarendon ■ . //n'r>n of r/tt Tnnfest, pp. 6, i .1 Add to this, th.u m /;,//,,„/„,. <■;,-,.,., K .' s /•.uui.'il,', aaSh&spetc Aces 1 bU fl/v/sSs Tub (acted i6n1, the dnwoaJoft *««» - ] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. 149 • aside from it in one important particular — Perdita is not cast adrift at sea in a rudderless boat. Why? Probably because Shakspere had already made m this incident in The Tempest. In the Inductioi Jonson's Barthalomau Fair, 1614, there is what se an allusion to Shakspere's Caliban of The Tempest: " If there be never a Servant-monster i' the Fayre who can helpe it, he sayes ; nor a nest of Antiques ? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries" The upward limit of date is fixed by a passage {Act II. Sc. i. L. 147-157) in which Gon^alo describes his imaginary commonwealth, borrowed from Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays, published 1603. The striking resemblance of Shakspere's lines begin- ning "The cloud-capt towers" (Act IV. Sc. i. L. 153) to a passage in the Earl of .Stirling's Tragedie of Darius (Edinburgh 1603, London 1604) should also be noted. Beyond the suggestions obtained from Jourdan's tract no source of the story of die play can be pointed out Mention was made by the poet Collins of a tale called Aurelio and Isabella containing the same inci- dents, hut Collins was in this point mistaken ; he may, however, have seen some other Italian story which re- sembled The Tempest. The name Setebos (Sycorax's god, Act I. Sc ii L. 373), and perhaps other names of persons, Shakspere found in Eden's History of Tim-dile, 1577. In the absence of evidence as to a source of the play, the most interesting and im- portant fact in connection with the subject is that the German dramatist Jacob Ayrer, who died in 1605, was author of a play, Die schbne Sidea, the plot of which has so much in common with the plot of The Tempest that it has been supposed that they must have had the same original (see Clarendon Press edition of Tht Tempest, preface, p. 13). In both appear a magician, hia otiYj &a»^ft.<«, -as^ ,J3 ^ ndam spirit; in both, Xhe. wcv cS. Ns& * WM ^* B , >uies the magician's prisoner, \o» a»at^' Vi * sso -' fe SHAA'SPERE. tiered powerless by magic, and he is made the bearer of logs for his mistress ; in both the story ends with reconciliation and the happiness of the lovers. English actors were in Ayrer's town, Niirnberg, in 1604 and 1606; in 1613, English actors performed in German a Sttlai. Possibly Shakspere, through some company acting in Germany, may have received an account of Ayrer's play. The Tempest, although far from lacking dramatic or human interest, has something in its spirit of the nature of a clear and solemn vision. It expresses Shakspere's highest and serenest view ofbfe, Pros- pero, the great enchanter, is altogether the opposite of vulgar magician. With command over the ele- mental powers, which study has brought to him, he possesses moral grandeur, and a command over himself, in spite of occasional fits of involuntary abstraction and of intellectual impatience ; lie looks down on life, and sees through it, yet will not refuse to take r part in it. In Shakspere's early play of supernatum agencies — A Midsummer Night's Dream — the "hum mortals" were made the sport of the frolic-loving elves ; here the supernatural powers attend on and obey their ruler, man. It has been suggested that Prospero, the great enchanter, is Shakspere himself, and that when he breaks his staff, drowns his book, and dismisses his airy spirits, going back to the duties of his dukedom, Shakspere was thinking of his c resigning of his powers of imaginative enchantment, Ihts parting from the theatre, where his attendant spirits had played their parts, and his return to Strat- ford. The persons in this play, while remaining real and living, are conceived in a more abstract way, more as types than those in any other work of Shakspere. 1'ruspero is the highest wisdom and moral attainment ; (Jonzato is humorous common-sense incarnated ; that is meanest and most deSjAeaJefe tresis in t n-retched conspirators ; Miranda, whose X su ggest wonder, is almost HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. framed in the purest and simplest type of v hood, yet made substantial by contrast with Ariel, who is an unbodied joy, too much a creature of light and air to know human affection or human sorrow ; Caliban (the name formed from cannibal) stands at the other extreme, with all the elements in him — appetites, intellect, even imagination — out of which man emerges into early civilisation, but with a moral nature that is still gross and malignant. Over all presides Prospero like a providence. And the spirit of reconciliation, of forgiveness, harmonising the contentions of men, appears in The Tempest in the same noble manner that it appears in The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and Henry VIII. {See Mr. Brooke's Primer: English Literature, pp. 86, 87.) Shakspere seems in this play, among other things, I to consider the question : What is true freedom ? Ariel, incapable of human bonds, pants for liberty ; Caliban sings his drunken song of freedom, and con- spires to throw off the yoke of Prospero's rule ; but Ferdinand, the lover, finds true freedom in service to her he loves ; and Prospero, resigning his magic powers, finds it in the law of human duty. The conception of Caliban, it may be noted, had occurred to Shakspere when he wrote Troilus and Cressida (Act III. Sc. iii. L. 264). The action of The Tempest is comprised within three hours. _« Tempest is comprised « 39. The Winter's Tale was seen at the Globe on May 15, 1611, by Dr. Forman, and is described in his MS. Booke of Plates and Notes thereof. The versi- fication is that of Shakspere's latest group of plays ; no five-measure lines are rhymed; run-on lines and double endings are numerous. The tone and feeling of The Winter's Tate place it in the same period with The Tempest and Cymbeline ; its breezy air is surely that which blew over Warwickshire fields upon Shak- spere now returned to Stratford ; its country lads and lasses, and their junketings., Me v\vsr ■« ' " oel had in a happy raHkitHliwe&Vfli***?** 51 * 2 ' is perhaps the last complete ^3 ttx&«M6KS4«« I 151 SIfAA'SPEKE. [chap Like the romantic pastoral of Shakspere's mid-periot of authorship, As You like It, this comedy is foundec upon the tale of an early contemporary of the poet— upon Greene's Pandosto, or, as it was afterwards named, Vemstus and Knoiiia, first published in 1588. The idea of introducing Time as a chorus comes from Greene, and all the principal characters, Paulina and the incomparable rogue Autolyci if to prove his right to deal as he pleased * clramatic unity of lime, Shakspere includes all the incidents of 754* Tempest within the period of three hours, while the spectator of The Winter's Tale see Perdita first as a babe, and afterwards as a maiden t sixteen about to become a wife. In Greene's talt Bellaria, whom Shakspere has named Hermione, dies upon hearing of the loss of her son ; in Shakspere's play she lives to be reunited to her repentant husband. After his manner, Shakspere drives forward to what
" i>pedding's conjecture i " It was not vwwkmaN m VI.] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. 155 days, when a play was wanted in a hurry, to set t> three, or even four hands, at work upon it; and the occasion of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage {Feb- ruary, 1612-1613) mav ver > r likely have suggested the production of a play representing the marriage of Henry VIII. and Anne Bullen I should con- jecture that Shakspere had conceived the idea of a great historical drama on the subject of Henry VIII., which would have included the divorce of Katharine, the fall of Wolsey, the rise of Cranmer, the coronation of Anne Bullen, and the final separation of the English from the Romish Church, which being the one great historical event of the reign, would naturally be chosen as the focus of poetic interest ; that he had proceeded in the execution of this idea as far, perhaps, as the third act when finding that his fellows of the Globe were in distress for a new play to honour the marriage of the Lady Elizabeth with, he thought that his half-finished work might help them, and ac- cordingly handed them his mauuscript to make what they could of it ; that they put it into ihc hands of Fletcher (already in high repute as a popular and expeditious playwright), who, finding the original dtisi^n not very suitable to the occasion, and utterly beyond his capacity, expanded the three acts into five, by interspersing scenes of show and magnificence, and passages of description and long poetical conversations, in which his strength lay .... and so turned out a splendid ' historical masque or show-play,' which was, no doubt, very popular then, as it has been ever since." There are three great figures in the play tLarly and strongly conceived by Shakspere; The King, Queen Katharine, and Cardinal Wolsey. The Queen is one of the noble, long -enduring sufferers, just-minded, disinterested, truly charitable, who give their moral gravity and grandeur to Shakspere's last plays. She has clear-sighted penetration to see through the Car- dinal's cunning practice, aad &\
««^ "^ IS6 SIIAA'SPEKE. [ch, indulgent ; but Shakspere will hardly allow us to judgf Henry sternly. He is a lordly figure, with a i\" abounding strength of nature, a self-confidence, ease and mastery of life, a power of effortless sway, and seems born to pass on in triumph over those who have fallen and are afflicted. Wolsey is drawn superb power : ambition, fraud, vindictiveness, have made him their own, yet cannot quite ruin a natui possessed of noble qualities. It is hard at first t refuse to Shakspere the authorship of Wolsey's famoi soliloquy in which he bids his greatness farewell (Act III, Sc ii. L. 350-372), but it is certainly Fletcher's, and when one has perceived this, one per ceives also that it was an error ever to suppose i written in Shakspere's manner. The scene in whir' the vision appears to the dying Queen is also Fletcher's, and in his highest style. We can see from the plaj that if Shakspere had returned at the age of fifty t< the historical drama, the works written then would have been greater in moral grandeur than those « from his thirtieth to his thirty-fifth years. Henry VIII., as the verse tests show, was probably written after Winter's Tale, 1611, and it must 1 ' course have been written before June 1613. name All is True, under which it was acted in year, is referred to in the prologue to the play. Of doubtful plays two may be noticed : 41, Doubtful Plays.— (i.) The TtmNobleKim was printed in quarto, 1634, on the title-page of whicl edition the play is stated to have been written by " admirable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fk-trluT and Mr. William Shakspeare." One feels upon reading 11 that there are certainly two authors. Fletcher's hand is present beyond any doubt ; and if the second writer were not Shakspere, we have to ask wonderingly ; Who could he have been ? Who could have written in a manner which is so like the manner of Cymbelint, except the author of Cymbelinel i\. division of the pl.iy- between the two writers was made \>\ Wi. \W6t- son ' chiefly upon grounds furnished tyj V\\e &5kwwk» I.] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. 157 of style. The following portions were ass igned by him to Shakspere : Act I., except parts of Sc ii., which was either written by Shakspere and Fletcher in con- junction, or by Fletcher, and revised by Shakspere ; Act If. Sc. i. ; Act III. Sc. i., ii. ; Act IV. Sc. Hi. ; Act V. (except Sc. ii). This division was subse- quently confirmed by Mr. Fleay's application of the double-ending test, hy Mr. Funiivall's application of the stopped-Hne test, and by Professor Ingram's appli- cation of the weak-ending test. It must be noted, however, that while the evidence of the presence of two hands in the play is convincing, the most com- petent critics hesitate to make the assertion that either of the writers was Shakspere. The following figures exhibit the results of the verse test : Light endings, Shakspere 's part, 1 in 21; Fletcher's, 1 in 445 ; weak endings, Shakspere's part, 1 in 32, Flet- cher's, 1 in 1426. Unstopped lines, Shakspere's part, 1 in i'i ; Fletcher's, 1 in 5-26. Double endings, Shakspere's part, 1 in 34 ; Fletcher's, 1 in 1*9. In the main the division made by Professor Spalding in his Letter on Shakspere's Authorship of Two Nobie Kinsmen (reprinted by the New Shakspere Society, 1876), and by Mr. Liltledale in his admirable edition of the play (New Shakspere Society, 1876) agrees with that of" Mr. Hickson. The Shakspere portions of the play will repay a careful study. The characterisation may be faint, but there are animated pieces of dialogue, magnificent single speeches, and remarkable Shaksperian turns of expression and imagery. The story is derived from Chaucer's Knightes Tale. The underplot of Fletcher, made up of indecency and of trash in about equal I'nijini-iiiiNs, is bin slightly connected with the nobler p or 1 ion of the drama, Shakspere's portion was probably written before his latest fragment — that of Henry VIII. He was at this time abandoning dra- matic authorship, and seems \.o Va^e. \y«xv "««sSK*fe thai Ffetcher should be the \wm \o V\s ^smns-- Oi.) Edward III.— Uba»\»«&^tfi&.' , "1 w * S!& ■ i$S SHAASPERE. that, in this play, the episode of King Edward's attempt upon the honour of the Countess of Salis- ■ bury — nobly repulsed by her — is by Shakspere, . from the entrance of the King, Act I. Sc. ii. to end of Act II. The play was entered in the Stationers' register, Dec. t, 1505, and was published in the follow- ing year. If, therefore, any portion was from Shakspere's hand, it is of early date. The question of Shak- spere's authorship of the episode must be said to remain up to the present in doubt. Edward 11/. is reprinted in the Tauchnitz edition of Doubtful Plays of Shakespeare. (Si'.) Other plays which have been ascribed lo I Shakspere are Fair Emm, Georgc-a-Green, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Arden of Eti'ersham, Miuedorus, The Birth of Merlin, 'Lanun for London, Warning for Eair Women. Add the list from the Third Folio (p. 30). If any one of these has any claim to be considered, even in part, Shakspere's, it is the York- shire Tragedy. 1. 1616 to 1642. — During Shakspere's life he was upon the whole the most steadily popular pl.iywH-lii of his time ; but for awhile the slighter sentiment and the novel plots of Beaumont and Fletcher may have proved more attractive with the public. Ben Jonson, who survived Sfaakspete for many years, gathered about him a school of younger writers, and though never a great favourite with the people, ma looked" Up to as a master by those who cared more for vigorous thought and a scholarly style than for human passion and imaginative truth. The ymWicaUon, howver, of tiro folio editions of Shaispeie's y\i\s wVAvm wajl "'"each other, proves the intewst E$& v.vYmv, \ CHAPTER VII. SHAKSPERE FROM 1616 TO 1877. I.] HIS PLAYS AND POEMS. T an age ub- hat ;ed his md 'orka ench ipere rous. his writings; and prefixed to the second folio is an enthusiastic tribute from a young poet, whose homage was alone worth that of a multitude — the first pub- lished verses of John Milton. We know also that whom Milton did not honour — Charles I. — agreed with Milton in honouring Shakspere, and that his plays were frequently represented at St. James's Whitehall. . The Restoration Period. — The civil wars and the victory of Puritanism were, of course, un- favourable to the culture of dramatic poetry. In 1642 the theatres were closed, and they remained so until the latter end of the year 1659. During Charles II.'s reign there were two currents of feeling with reference to Shakspere and the Elizabethan drama; it was ii possible to deny the power and attraction of the works of the greatest English dramatic poet, but French tastes had begun to prevail, and much in Shaksper appeared antiquated, rude, inartistic, almost barbarous. Davenant, who was not unwilling to be supposed a natural son of Shakspere, revived the great tragedies and some of the comedies and histories! Killigrew's new theatre opened with Henry IV.; the wonderful actor Betterton appeared as Hamlet in the first play of Shakspere represented after the Restoration, and (actresses now taking the female parts) Mrs. Betterton played with her husband, for her Ophelia hints I were received from Davenant, drawn from his memory of the boy-Ophelias of an earlier time ; but her most celebrated Shaksperian character was Lady Macbeth. There is abundant evidence of Shakspere's popularity after the Restoration ; it now, however, began to be thought needful to reform Shakspere to suit the taste of a refined and ingenious public. The attractions of spectacle and music were added to those of dramatic poetry. Dryden and Davenant altered The Tanpesi into The Enchanted Island, with song and show, w\.0*. new characters ridiculous^ out
v " bis emendations are \n *v& %ya«. « U;t)M 1616 TO iS;;. :han eighteenth century literature, not in the Elizabethai spirit. Theobald, the first hero of Pope's Dundad, " poor piddling Tibbaldl" is infinitely a better editor than Pope ; if he amended the text often arbitrarily, on the other hand he first collated in anything like a scholarly manner the early copies of the plays. To his ingenuity as an emendator we owe the celebrated "'a babbled of green fields," in the passage which tells of Falstaff's death. The merit of Theobald's edition, 1733, was recognised, and it sold largely. Hanmer's edition, remarkable like Pope's for its ex- ternal splendour, followed in 1744, and three years later appeared that of Warburton. VVarbtirton was learned, but arrogant, and treats Shakspere with the con temp tuousness a harsh schoolmaster might exhibit toward a naughty urchin. 4. Garrick.— Such were Hie editions of the i half of the last century. The second half was a pericx of laborious scholarship and of industrious t niter everything which could throw light on Shakspere's life or illustrate his writings. Between the two periods rose suddenly to eminence the great actor David Garrick. The immediate successors of Betterton were Booth, famous for his Othello, his rival Wilks, who played Hamlet, and Cibber, who appeared as his own Richard 1 1 1., as lago, and as Cardinal Wolsi y. October 19, 1741. at the theatre in Goodman's Fields, a young actor played for the first time Richard I" In a few weeks Garrick had become famous. following year in Ireland, the hot summer and the younf actor between them, produced what was named " Garrick Fever." "That young man," said Pope, " never had his equal as an actor, and will never have a rival." In September, 1769, he assisted at a jubilee held in honour of Shakspere at Stratford -on- A von. The Garrick fever had resulted in a Shakspere fever. Yet Garrick, it must be confessed, took unwarraMaMot liberties with the language anA v\\e ^>\q\s> «A *Mt\N»>v-. himsdf confessing that, his a&s$(B&ia * Ha.ukt «*» '■ the most impudent thing Vie, tfKSC ivi' 1 ! first Si '"ields. dllL The t6z SBAXSPSSS. 5. Shakspere Scholarship, 1750- 1800. — The editions of the second half of the eighteenth century, begin with that of Dr. Johnson, 1765. Johnson saw some of the substantial excellencies of Shakspere, but his strong common sense was of a prosaic kind, and he often takes Shakspere to task for offences which only touch such prosaic common sense. As a moralist he was especially shocked at Shakspere's not rewarding virtue and punishing vice in the persons of his dramas with an orthodox regularity. Capell's edition in 1768, his "Notes and Various Readings," and his "School of Shakspere," were the labours of love of a very learned man, who obscured his merits by a strange and contorted style of writing. The work of Johnson »was nnited with that of Steevens, five years later; Steevens was acute, witty, and sometimes brilliant, but conceited, utterly devoid of reverence for Shakspere, ami without a true feeling for poetry. His adversary, Malone, was duller, but more industrious, more honest, and less vain. Steevens published a reprint of the quartos (1766), and Six Old Plays the originals on which Shakspere founded some of his dramas, in 1779. Malone 's first edition appeared in 1790 ; it contained his own notes with those of his predecessors; and in 1803, 1813, and 1S21, followed Variorum Editions, the last of these, called Boswe/I's Malone, being the most complete. Malone, unfortunately, had a very imperfect ear for verse. »6. Ireland. —Volumes of notes and criticism, of which perhaps the best known is Farmer's Essay on the I 'x,triiin« of Shaksptrt, became numerous in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the last decade of that century Shakspere scholars were startled by the announcement of the discovery of Shakspere autographs, letters, conundrums, confes- sion of faith, and what not, of inestimable literary value; finally, a drama by Shakspere — Vortfern —-was rcirr/icojni'ng.and was brought u\hjt\ ftie &n$jbta "Jifi/e. The discoverer was a ^twmg, wvasv name* Many people b&wreo. far. wftsS* Samuel Irelai 0* rem pgei vii.] W6W I6ifi TO 1877. the Ireland discoveries, as many had believed in those of Chatterton ; but Malone attacked tlie imposture, and Ireland himself soon after made and published his Confessions. 7. Mrs. Siddons. Kemble. Kean. — To Gar- rick's Shy lock at Drury Lane, 1775, Portia was played by mi actress announced simply as "a young lady." The young lady was the greatest of English tragic actresses, Sarah Siddons, who, with her brothers, John and Charles Kemble, sustained the glory of the Shafcsperian drama upon the English stage until after 1810. Great and passionate parts were nobly rendered by Mrs. Siddons. John Kemble excelled chiefly in characters that are lofty and dignified ; the Roman plays especially suited him ; but his Wolsey, his Hamlet, his Macbeth, and his Lear were also great and admirable impersonations. In 1814, three years before Kemble's retirement, Edmund Kean played to a thin attendance at Drury Ijine the part of Shylock • the applause was overwhelming. It was nearly twenty years later, when struggling to get through the part of Othello, his head sunk on the shoulder of his son, who played Iago, and he was borne away to his deathbed. Kean was the greatest tragic actor of our century; he was truly inspired, intense, passionate, and even in his faults there was something of genius. S. Shakspere Study, 1800-1877.— A new era in the criticism of Shaksjicre was inaugurated by the lectures of S. T. Coleridge, 1814 : this was the criticism of genius, of reverence, and of love. Unhappily, Coleridge'* tectum have come down to us only in fragmentary forms. Charles Lamb and Hazlitt had led the way to such criticism, and others have followed in the steps of Coleridge. Nor has the nineteenth centurv been deficient in textual scholar- ship. The editions of Sioger, Collier, Knight, H.illiwtll, Dyce, and Staunton, and the admirable Cambridge edition, have shown fee &ctc!wso. **. =- l:s ^- I ngush scholars, xo xVc -««e*s> ^ w« *?^ OF late years AmeiYca Vas v&Vw *» aSsswa. SHAKSPERE. [chap. share in such studies. The editions of Hudson and of Grant White, and the magnificent Variorum Edition of Furness, now ill process erf publication, lake their place beside the best work of English Shakspere students. From 1841 onwards for about ten years, the Shakspere Society (of England) issued annually a series of valuable publications illustrative of Shaks- pere's life and works. In 1853 Mr. Collier made the public aware of an astounding discovery — that in a copy of the Second Folio put chased by him some three years previously, existed a multitude of manuscript corrections, written, it might be supposed, in the first half of the seventeenth century, by a frequenter of the theatres, who had possessed the volume. A selection from these manuscript corrections was published by Mr. Collier, and they were commonly esteemed of high value ; but, although the question is still supposed by some persons to be an open one, the most competent authorities are of opinion that the correction* are in reality a modern fabrication by some person possessed of considerable scholarship in Elizabethan literature. In 1874 the New Shakspere Society was founded by the indefatigable English scholar, Mr. F. J. Fur- nival] ; it has already done work of high value, and invites all persons interested in the writings of our chief poet to join its ranks. The tendency of recent inquiries has been towards the chronological study of the works of Shakspere, ami characteristics of his versification have been examined by the Rev. F. G. Eleay, Professor Ingram, and other scholars, with a view to obtaining a clue to discover the order in which the plays followed one another in noint of time. 9. Shakspere Study in France and Ger- many. — France and Germany have joined vigorously in the study of Shakspere. The greatest Frenchman of tetters of the last century, Voltaire, spoke of Shakspere as an intoxicated barbarian. The greatest bring poet of Francs, Victor Hugo, Vim ce\tAsrafced oft • ere '" a volume of eulogy almost vhw$m&S*A, " «yodicions, but always the wnting a& a. msa <& vii. ] FROM 161S TO 1S77. 163 genius. His son completed a translation into French of Shakspere's works. The great Lessing first taught Germany to honour our poet. Goethe followed with his remarkable criticism of Hamlet in his Wit helm Master . Schiller's admiration of Sh.tkspere was more passionate than Goethe's, and iralike that of Goethi did not decline with advancing years. About thi same time that Coleridge was lecturing in our country A. W. Schlegel delivered at Vienna his lectures on Dramatic Art, approaching Shakspere in a spirit of en- thusiastic admiration not less than that of Coleridge. The translation of Shakspere called Schlegel's and Tieck's (though not in fact wholly their work) is pro- bably the best translation of Shakspere into any foreign language. In more recent time the admirable edition of Delius, the well-known commentaries of Ulrici and Gervinus, the lectures of Kreyssig, the essays by Hertzberg, and above all, the Shakspere Lexicon of Schmidt have been the most valuable contributions of Germany to Shakspere literature. The German Shak- spere Society has published its twelfth annual volume (1877). A reaction against the so-called " Shakspere mania" has produced the clever anti-Shakspere-mania criticism of Riimelin {SAakspeare Stwiien) and a less able work by the poet Benedix. But Shakspere's popularity continues undiminished, and in the thea- trical season 1875-76 over four hundred Shakspei representations were given upon the German stage. 10. Contemporary Actors. — Foreign act< Signor Salvini and Signor Rossi, have recently inti preted great Shaksperian characters to English spec- tators, delivering the poetry of Shakspere through translations into Italian ; and once again an English Shakspere actor of distinction has appeared in the person of Mr, Irving. More than three hundred years after Shakspere's birth, his fame seems still in its "great morning." ie, he ry I :er- APPENDIX. BOOKS USEFUL TO STUDENTS OF 5HAKSPERE. Text.— The Globe Shakespeare; The Cambridge Shakespeare (giving the readings of quartos, folios, &c.} ; Booth's reprint of the First Folio, or that pub- lished by Chatto and Windus ; The Leopold Shakspere (giving the text of Delius, the best German textual Editions with Notes, — The Variorum edition of 1S21 (Boswell's Ma/one) zi vols. ; the editions of Dyce, Staunton, Knight, and Collier ; R, Grant White's edition (Boston, 1872, text follows First Folio); Delius's Siiaksperis Werkt (English text, German notes) ; Furness's Variorum Shakspere: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, published; single plays in Clarendon Press edition, edited by Mr. W. A. Wright. Lexicons, &C. — Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon (invaluable) ; Mrs. Cowden Clarke's Concordance to the Plays ; Mrs. Furness's Concordance to the Poems ; Dyce's Glossary (last volume of his edition of Shake- speare) ; Nares' Glossary. Grammar, Versification, &c— Abbott's Shake- spearian Grammar ; W, Sidney Walker's Criticisms on SAakespeare,axit& Shakespeare's Versification; Bathurst's Changes in Shakespeare's Versification ; Eilis's Early English Pronunciation, with spci.it reference to Chaucer and Shakespeare, Part III. Sources. — Hazlitt's Shahperit Library, Courte- nay's Commentaries on the Historical Plays ; Skottowe's Sigh's/care' s Life, &c ; Simrock, Die Quelien des *5%a£%Afarr. Commentaries. — Gervinus's Commentaries ^JvJi nd laborious) i Don-den's Shakspcrt ; Mi Mind a ' APPENDIX. 167 Art, attempts to trace the growth of Shakspere's genius and character through his works, studied chronologically ; Hudson's Shakspeare; his Lift, Art, and Characters, criticises twuity-five of the chief plays (Ginn, Boston, U.S.); Fumivall's Jtitroduction to the Leopold Shakspere ; Coleridge's Shakspeare Notes ; Mrs. Jameson's Characteristics of Women, on Shak- spere's female characters ; Hazlitt's Characters in Shakspere's Plays ; Kreyssig's Verkmnfm iiber Shake- speare, and his smaller Shakespeare-P'ra^en {the best German literary criticism on Shakspere is that of Kreyssig)j Ulrici's Shakes ft, ire's Dramatische Kunst is highly esteemed in Germany, and has been trans- lated ; but Ulrici reads ideas and philosophy of his own into Shakspere. Hertzberg's prefaces to some plays in the German Shakspere Society's edition of Schlegel and Tieck's translation of Shakspere are valuable with reference to characteristics of versifica- tion. The same Society has published twelve annual volumes (Jahrbikhcr) containing many articles of interest. Fleay's Shakespeare Manual may be found useful, if read with care to distinguish the writer's theories from ascertained facts. The New Shakspere Society has published Transactions containing papers of value, reprints of early quartos, and Elizabethan works which illustrate Shakspere. {Publishers for the Society, Triibner and Co., London.) Shakspere's Life. — Various works of Mr. Halli- well. For a convenient summary of the facts see S. Neil's Shakespeare; a Critical Biography. On Stratford, see Wise's Shakespeare ; his Birthplace and its Neighbourhood. For details about the Shakspere and Arden families {and also with respect to the persons of Shakspere's historical plays) see Mr. G. R. French's Shakspeareana Genealogica. IN SC Introdm Chemiai Phyaics PRIMERS IS SCIENCE, HISTORY, AND LITERATURE. Fleiiblc doth, 4S 'JUS. Astronomy.. J N. Likirteb. Botany J I) Hoohek Loy-t- W.3. JBVONS. Bwwj .. >te...FniNKMN TiT- Eeonoms„.ff. S. ■ephy, ..Ueohge Gboie. LITERATURE PRIMERS. Edited hj- J. R. GKKKN, M. A. i Grammar. K. Studies in Bryant 1 32- < E. Dowdzn. (Olkrrs in firfnraliort.) *.e primers is to convey Information in wish a . .( limli iiiii!»i-il.l.. rim) in(,Ti-!ii!ir i" htj vonuii dlsclplino thi'ir miium «? K.inc rL.-m i.> =,; i ■ :-- ■-■ "ii'p Tin' vrrnidcntp nliiqh llliit-rriilc iL-iii l-ill- APPLETONS' SCHOOL READERS, Coimsling of Five Books. VI. T. IHRittS, U. D., i J. RH'KOFF, k. L, «M RAILEY. A. I, APPLETONS' FIRST READER.. . .UiilJ's Qmrlo, Ml) jiascs APPLETONS' SECOND READKU line, 11! « APPLETONS' THIRD READER lino, ill " APPLETONS' HilitTII READER lino, Hi « APPLETONS' FHTH READER Lino, 411 " renin vowel suiimit. ■ ..■ ■■■, i -;„ ili:i L ., vsi.Nf ii«» well arranged forth* JHI[iilV |HV|.;ir.il!". I.y i:ii:i- 1 1 .-.,, -|i:il lie -bull lusrii the ereat leasoua ii[ »if]L'. lit] ji, n'ir-i)i'rii'iii]i !.!■■. rlif- hahii .if !i;.i-.]i.',jin.]]i. uierrlson thai doTtlop a practical command of correcl (.rnir- of vs|.n>-Hi<.ii, jii-nl lttersry lasle, close crtikal power nf liiuujjlit, mid ability In Interpret ttiv riitirr inclining ultha language of others. THE AUTHORS. The. hlvh mn It whtch the author* linn' nil Allied In tin- fdiiraliuTisl --III! I'Sji.-L-icFl ' mliji-fi "f iviiIIh- Iiiih ri'rrfvrd .. 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