A Study of Shakespeare

Shakespeare is like the entrance to

aces thronged,

of Shakespeare's imagination seems to melt or flow back into the sunrise, do we discern Prospero beside Miranda, Florizel by Perdita, Palamon with Arcite, the same k

ost elemental and prim?val, the most oceanic and Titanic in conception. He deals here with no subtleties as in Hamlet, with no conventions as in Othello: there is no question of "a divided duty" or a problem half insoluble, a matter of country and connection, of family or of race; we look

as laid too heavily to bear; yet in the not utterly infinite or everlasting distance we see beyond them the promise of the morning on which mystery and justice shall be made one; when righteousness and omnipotence at last shall kiss each

nton boys are

us for t

, children of Night everlasting;

conflicting forces, no judgment so much as by casting of lots: far less is there any light of heavenly harmony or of heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from abo

es are the lines of character and event so broadly drawn or so sharply cut. Only the supreme self-command of this one poet could so mould and handle such types as to restrain and prevent their passing from the abnormal into the monstrous: yet even as much as this, at least in all cases but one, it surely has accomplished. In Regan alone would it be, I think, impossible to find a touch or trace of anything less vile than it was devilis

redible, and only therefore adorable. Cloten and Regan, Goneril and Iachimo, have power to stir and embitter the sweetness of their blood. But for the contrast and even the contact of antagonists as abominable as these, the gold of their spirit would be too refined, the lily of their holiness too radiant, the violet of their virtue too sweet. As it is, Shakespeare has gone down perforce among the blackest and the basest things of nature to find anything so eq

e of divine indifference to suffering, of godlike satisfaction and a less than compassionate content, it is not yet perhaps utterly superfluous to insist on the utter fallacy and falsity of their creed who whether in praise or in blame would rank him to his credit or discredit among such poets as on this side at least may be classed rather with Goethe than with Shelley and with Gautier than wit

nised and rebellious compassion, at the oracular cry of Calchas for the innocent blood of Iphigenia. The doom even of Desdemona seems as much less morally intolerable as it is more logically inevitable than the doom of Cordelia. But doubtless the fatalism of Othello is as much darker and harder than that of any third among the plays of Shakespeare, as it is

is in all the prosperous days of his labour and his triumph so utterly and wholly nobler than the self-centred and wayward

envious wrat

actical dramatic poet or playwright at least in lieu of play-writer: while indicating how and wherefore, with all her constructive skill and rhythmic art in action, such genius as hers so differs from the genius of Shakespeare that she undeniably could not have written a Hamlet. Neither could Iago have written an Othello. (From this theorem, by the way, a reasoner or a casuist benighted enough to prefer articulate poets to inarticulate, Shakespeare to Cromwell, a fair Vittoria Colonna to a "foul Circe-Meg?ra," and even such a strategist as Homer to such a strategist as Frederic-William, would not illogically draw such conclusions or infer such corollaries as might result in opinions hardly consonant with the Teutonic-Titanic evangel of the preacher who supplied him with his thesis.) "But what he can do, that he will": and if it be better to make a tragedy than to write one, to act a poem than to sing it, we must allow to Iago a station in the hierarchy of poets very far in advance of his creator's. None of the great inarticulate may more justly claim place and precedence. With all his poetic gift, he has no poetic weakness. Almost any creator but his would have given him some grain of spite or some spark of lust after Desdemona. To Shakespeare's Iago she is no more than is a rhyme to another and articulate poet. {179} His stanza must at any rate and at all costs be polished: to borrow the metaphor used by Mr. Carlyle in apologetic illustration of a royal hero's peculiar system of levying recruits for his colossal brigade. He has w

nest Iago? The rough license of his tongue at once takes warrant from his good soldiership and again gives warrant for his honesty: so that in a double sense it does him yeoman's service, and that twice told. It is pitifully ludicrous to see him staged to the show like a member-and a very inefficient member-of the secret police. But it would seem impossible for actors to understand that he is not a would-be detective, an aspirant for the honours of a Vidocq, a candidate for the laurels of a Vautrin: th

r deform or diminish or modify the dominant features of the destroyer, and we have but the eternal and vulgar figures of jealousy and innocence, newly vamped and veneered and padded and patched up for the stalest purposes of puppetry. As it is, when Coleridge asks "whi

n the present generation such novelties have been unearthed regarding Shakespeare that the reassertion of an old truth may seem to have upon it some glittering reflection from the brazen brightness of a brand-new lie. Have not certain wise men of the east of England-Cantabrigian Magi, led

mplained with a touch of petulance that it was out of place and superfluous in the setting: nay, that it was incongruous with all the circumstances-out of tone and out of harmony and out of keeping with character and tune and time. In other lips indeed than Othello's, at the crowning minute of culminant agony, the rush of imaginative reminiscence which brings back upon his eyes and ears the lightning foam and tideless thunder of the Pontic sea might seem a thing less natural than sublime. But Othello has the passion of a poet closed in as it were and shut up behind the passion of a hero. For all his practical readiness of martial eye and ruling hand in action, he is also in his season "of imagination all com

ches are, and one more potent and more terrible than all witches and all devils at their beck, can we be sure that such traitors have not robbed us of one touch from Shakespeare's hand. The second scene of the play at least bears marks of such handling as the brutal Shakespearean Hector's of the "mangled Myrmidons"; it is too visibly "noseless, handless, hacked and chipped" as it comes to us, crying on Hemings and Condell. And it is in this unlucky scene that unkindly criticism has not unsu

s. Here there is some genuine ground for the generally baseless and delusive opinion of self-complacent sciolism that he who runs may read Shakespeare. These two plays it is hardly worth while to point out by name: all probable readers will know them at once for Macbeth and As You Like It. There can hardly be a single point of incident or of character on which the youngest reader will not find h

ted by the preponderance of national duties, that even the sweet and sublime figure of Portia passing in her "awful loveliness" was but as a profile half caught in the background of an episode, so here on the contrary the whole force of the final impression is not that of a conflict between patrician and plebeian, but solely that of a match of passions played out for life and death between a mother and a son. The partisans of oligarchic or democratic systems may wrangle at their will

r Hugo. As we feel in the marvellous and matchless verses of Zim-Zizimi all the splendour and fragrance and miracle of her mere bodily presence, so from her first imperial dawn on the stage of Shakespeare to the setting of that eastern star behind a pall of undissolving cloud we feel the charm and the terror and the mystery of her absolute and royal soul. Byron wrote once to Moore, with how much truth or sincerity those may guess who would care to know, that his friend's first "confounded book" of thin prurient jingle

right. He has utterly rejected and disdained all occasion of setting her off by means of any lesser foil than all the glory o

univers qui s'of

hant le monde

t stale. Himself a second and a yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid a world, and a world more wonderful than ever, at her feet. He has put aside for her sake all other forms and figures of womanhood; he, father or creator of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of D

death is as a

s, and is

e of his own hand might have boasted herself that the lo

er mod

usion, shall ac

ing up

er, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect mistress, or the perfect ma

ly than he could cope with Cleopatra. And not the Roman Landor himself could see or make us see more clearly than has his fellow provincial of Warwickshire that first imperial nephew of her great first paramour, who was to his actual uncle even such a foil and counterfeit and perverse and prosperous parody as the son of Hortense Beauharnais of Saint-Leu to the son of Letizia Buonaparte of Ajaccio. For Shakespeare too, like L

Philip

even lik

at struck for him is in th

f his dark and doomed repentance, or the freedman transfigured by a death more fair than freedom through the glory of the g

, of some certain portions in the mature and authentic work of Shakespeare. "Though it be honest, it is never good" to do so: yet here I cannot choose but speak plainly a

In the second period this gaiety was replaced by the utmost frankness and fullness of humour, as a boy's merry madness by the witty wisdom of a man: but now for a time it would seem as if the good comic qualities of either period were displaced and ousted by mere coarseness and crudity like that of a hard harsh photograph. This ultra-Circean transformation of spirit and brutification of speech we do not find in the lighter interludes of great and perfect tragedy: for the porter in Macbeth makes hardly an exception worth naming. It is when we come upon the singular little group of two or three plays not accurately definable at all but roughly describable as tragi-comedies, or more properly in two cases at least as tragedies docked of their natural end, curtailed of the due catastrophe-it is then that we find for the swift sad bright lightnings of laughter from the lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless disappearance from the st

ll imaginable thought. In all three of them the power of passionate and imaginative eloquence is not only equal in spirit or essence but identical in figure or in form: in those two of them which deal almost as much with speculative intelligence as with poetic action and passion, the tones and methods, types and objects of thought, are also not equal only but identical. An all but absolute brotherhood in thought and style and tone and feeling unit

thed and foul-mouthed effusion of such rank and rancorous personalities as might properly pollute the lips even of some emulous descendant or antiquarian reincarnation of Thersites, on application or even apprehension of a whip cracked in passing over the assembled heads of a pseudocritical and mock-historic society. In either case we moderns at least might haply desire the intervention of a beadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty as ever the son of Laertes applied to the shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon-I am speaking of Shakespeare's Thersites-has no touch of humour in all his currish composition: Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare for such dirty dogs as those of his kind or generation. There is not even what Coleridge with such exquisite happiness defined as being the quintessential property of Swift-"anima Rabel?sii habitans in sicco-the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place." It is the fallen soul of Swift himself at its lowest, dwelling in a place yet drier: the familiar spirit or less than Socratic d?mon of the Dean informing the genius of Shakespeare. And thus for awhile infected and possessed, the divine genius had not power to re-inform and re-create the d?monic spirit by virtue of its own clear essence. This wonderful play, one of the most admirable among all the works of Shakespeare's immeasurable and unfathomable intelligence, as it must always hold its natural high place among the most admired, will always in all probability be also, and as naturally, the least beloved of all. It would be as easy and as profitable a problem

had lately bitten him by the brain-and possibly a cynic himself in a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia-we might conclude as reasonably from consideration of the whole as from examination of the parts more especially and virulently affected: yet how much is here also of hyper-Platonic subtlety and sublimity, of golden and Hybl?an eloquence above the reach and beyond the snap of any cynic's tooth! Shakespeare, as under the gui

ide the naked

forehead with Pr

eponymous hero and the harlotries of the eponymous heroine remove both alike beyond the outer pale of all rational and manly sympathy; though Shakespeare's self may never have exceeded or equalled for subtle and accurate and bitter fidelity the study here given of an utterly light woman, shallow and loose and dissolute in the most

it is incisive and direct: but it will not cover by any manner of means the whole question. The strong and radical objection distinctly brought forward against this play, and strenuously supported by the wisest and the warmest devotee among all the worshippers of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, that the Puritan Angelo is exposed: it is that the Puritan Angelo is unpunished. In the very words of Coleridge, it is that by his pardon and his marriage "the strong indignant claim of justice" is "baffled." The expression is absolutely c

worthy of Shakespeare at his highest: and of this every touch, every line, every incident, every syllable, belongs to pure and simple tragedy. The evasion of a tragic end by the invention and intromission of Mariana has deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity but ingenious evasion of a natural and proper end is usually the distinctive quality which denotes a workman of a very much lower school than the school of Sh

ely, that such ears are commoner than I would fain believe on heads externally or ostensibly human,-has been raised with regard to the first immortal song of Mariana in the moated grange. This question is whether the second verse appended by Fletcher to that divine Shakespearean fragment may not haply have been written by the author of the first. The visible and audible evidence that it cannot is of a kind

d appear to have eyes and ears and nose for nothing else. It is true that somewhat more of humour, touched once and again with subtler hints of deeper truth, is woven into the too realistic weft of these too lifelike scenes than into any of the corresponding parts in Measure for Measure or in Troilus and Cressida; true also that in the hands of imitators, in hands so much weaker than Shakespeare's as were Heywood's or Davenport's (who transplanted this unlovely episode from Pericles into a play of his own), these very scenes or such as they reappear unredeemed by any such relief in all the rank and rampant ugliness of their raw repulsive realism: true, again, that Fletcher has once equalled them in audacity, while stripping off the nakedness of his subject the last ragged a

ce of Tyre? Nothing but this perhaps, that it stands-or rather let me say that it blows and sounds and shines and rings and thunders and lightens as far ahead of all others as the burlesque sea-storm of Rabelais beyond all possible storms of comedy. The recent compiler of a most admirably skilful and most delicately invaluable compendium of Pantagruel or manual by way of guidebook to Rabelais has but too justly taken note of the irrefragable evidence there given that the one prose humourist who is to Aristophanes as the human twin-star Castor to Pollux the divine can never have practically weathered an actual gale; but if I may speak from a single experience of one which a witness long inured to Indian storm as well as Indian battle had never seen matched out of the tropics if ever o

ly rare with him; the recast or repetition in an improved and reinvigorated form of a beautiful image or passage occurring in a previous play. The now only too famous metaphor of "patience on a monument smiling at grief"-too famous we might call it for its own fame-is transfigured as from human beauty to divine, in its transformation to the comparison of Marina's look with that of

t evident and positive traces of a passing touch from the has

equos Tyria so

ve decisively to question the former assertion, and flatly to contradict the latter. The pathetic and magnificent lines in dispute do not occur naturally enough, or at all naturally, among the very poor, flat, creeping verses between which they have been thrust with such o

onging to this last period on which, as they now stand, I trace the indisputable track of another touch than Shakespeare's. But in the two cases remain

as a season when the inexplicable attraction of it was too strong for him to resist the singular temptation to embody in palpable form, to array in dramatic raiment, to invest with imaginative magnificence, the godless ascetic passion of misanthropy, the martyrdom of an atheistic Stylites. Timon is doubtless a man of far nobler type than any monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius: but his immeasurable superiority in spiritual rank to the hermit fathers of the desert serves merely to make him a thought madder and a grain more miserable than the whole Thebaid of Christomaniacs rolled into one. Foolish and fruitless as it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets on the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark dream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine byways of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blind assumption to accept the plain evidence in both

cannot assert with the same confidence in the same accuracy that just so many scenes and no more, just so many speeches and none other, were the work of Shakespeare's or of some other hand. Throughout the first act his presence lightens on us by flashes, as his voice peals out by fits, from behind or above the too meanly decorated altar of tragic or satiric song: in the second it is more sensibly continuous; in the third it is all but utterly eclipse

to be told or reminded, are the two first soliloquies of the Gaoler's Daughter after the release of Palamon, and the scene of the portraits, as we may in a double sense call it, in which Emilia, after weighing against each other in solitude the likenesses of the cousins, receives from her own kinsfolk a full and laboured description of their leading champions on either side. Even setting apart for once and for a moment the sovereign evidence of mere style, we must recognise in this last instance a beautiful and significant example of that loyal and loving

n tone than usual, or possibly we have a survival of some lines' length, not unretouched by Fletcher, from Shakespeare's first sketch for a conclusion of the somewhat calamitous and cumbrous underplot, which in any case was ultimately left for Fletcher to expand into such a shape and bring by such means to such an end as we may safely swear that Shakespeare would never have admitted: then with the entrance and ensuing narrative of Pirithous we have none but Shakespeare before us again, though it be Shakespeare undoubtedly in the rough, and not as he might have chosen to present himself after due revision, with rejection (we may well suppose) of this point and readjustment of that: then upon the arrival of the dying Arcite with his escort there follows a grievous little gap, a flaw but pitifully patched by Fletcher, whom we recognise at wellnigh his worst and weakest in Palamon's appeal to his kinsman for a last word, "if his heart, his worthy, manly heart" (an exact and typical example of Fletcher's tragically prosaic and prosaically tragic dash of incurable

ught co

but loss of

se and reedy wheeze from the scrannel-pipe of a lesser player than Pan. Last of all, in words worthy to be the lates

ng my whole soul and spirit for the last and (if I live long enough) as surely for the first of many thousand

he c

ce of the Swo

nksgiving before the fi

lone or else he of whom the book was written, yet could we not hope that either would have any new thing to tell us of the Tempest, the Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline. And for ourselves, what else could we do but only ring changes on the word beautiful as Celia on the word wonderful in

est at parting. And from one point of view there is even a more heavenly quality perceptible in the light of this than of its two twin stars. In no nook or corner of the island as we leave it is any savour left or any memory lingering of any inexpiable evil. Alonzo is absolved; even Antonio and Sebastian have made no such ineffaceable mark on it by the presence of their pardoned crimes as is made by tho

ect and piteous delight in him. And even in her daughter's embrace it seems hard if his mother should have utterly forgotten the little voice that had only time to tell her just eight words of that ghost story which neither she nor we were ever to hear ended. Any one but Shakespeare would have sought to make pathetic profit out of the child by the easy means of showing him if but once again as changed and stricken to the death for want of his mother and fear for her and hunger and thirst at his little high heart for the sight and touch of her: Shakespeare only could find a better way, a subtler and a deeper chord to strike, by giving

aster Fenton": "nay, which is more," as his friend and champion Mistress Quickly might have added to mine host's commendatory remark, they speak all April and May; because April is in him as naturally as May in her, by just so many years' difference before the Mayday of her birth as went to make up her dead brother's little lot of living breath, which in Beaumont's most lovely and Shakespeare-worthy phrase "was not a life; was but a piece of childhood thrown away." Nor can I be content to find no word of old affection for Autolycus, who lived, as we may not doubt,

espeare as never man wrote, nor ever man may write again; to the everlasting praise and honour and glory of Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter Savage Landor;

possibly have brought the book to a happier end. Here is depth enough with height enough of tragic beauty and passion, terror and love and pity, to approve the presence of the most tragic Master's hand; subtlety enough of sweet and bitter truth to attest the passage of the mightiest and wisest scholar or teacher in the school of the human spirit; beauty with delight enough and glory of life and grace of nature to proclaim the advent of the one omnipotent Maker among all who bear that name. Here above all is the most heavenly triad of human figures that ever even Shakespeare brought together; a diviner three, as it were a living god-garland of the noblest earth-born brothers and loveworthiest heaven-born sister, than the very givers of all grace and happiness to their Grecian worshippers of old time over long before. The passion of Posthumus is noble, and potent the poison of

END

TORICAL PLAY OF

8

ious hand which penned the following sentence; an inscription worthy of perpetual re

hree last pieces are not only unquestionably Shakespeare's, but in my

gely overlooked by the contemporaries of Christopher Marlowe, that "his verses are flowing, but without energy." Strange, but true; too strange, we may reasonably infer, not to be true.

that writer's memory. Sir John Oldcastle is the compound piecework of four minor playwrights, one of them afterwards and otherwise eminent as a poet-Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathaway: a thin sample of poetic patchery cobbled up and stitched together so as to serve its hour for a season without falling to pieces at the first to

worth serious notice-of a wellnigh still-born theory, first dropped in a modest corner of the critical world exactly a hundred and seventeen years ago. Its parent, notwithstanding this perhaps venial indiscretion, was apparently an honest and modest gentleman; and the play itself, which this ingenuous theorist was fain, with

the first mortal to suggest that his newly unearthed treasure might possibly be a windfall from the topless tree of Shakespeare. Being, as I have said, a duly modest and an evidently honest man, he admits "with candour" that there is no jot or tittle of "external evidence" whatsoever to be alleged in support of this gratuitous attribution: but he submits, with some fair show of reason, that there is a certain "resemblance between the style of" Shakespeare's "earlier performances and of the work in question"; and without the slight

igging veins of rhyming mother-wits"; and fitter on the whole to follow this easier and earlier vein of writing, half lyrical in manner and half elegiac, than to brace upon his punier limbs the young giant's newly fashioned buskin of blank verse. The signs of this growing struggle, the traces of this incomplete emancipation, are perceptible throughout in the alternate prevalenc

tor Faustus, and wellnigh throughout the whole scheme and course of The Massacre at Paris. Whatever in King Edward III. is mediocre or worse is evidently such as it is through no passionate or slovenly precipitation of handiwork, but through pure incompetence to do better. The blame of the failure, the shame of the shortcoming, cannot be laid to the account of any momentary excess or default in emotion, of passing exhaustion or excitement, of intermittent impulse and reaction; it is an indication of lifelong and irremediable impotence. And it is further to be noted that by far the least unsucc

lective, begins with the very first audible sound of a man's voice in song, with the very first noticeable stroke of his hand in painting-it is hard to say what amount of tolerable or intolerable work might not or may not be assignable by scholiasts of the future to Byron or to Shelley, to Mr. Tennyson or to Mr. Browning. A time by this rule might come-but I am fain to think better of the Fates-when by comparison of detached words and collation of dismembered phrases the memory of Mr. Tennyson would be weighted and degraded by the ascription of whole volumes of pilfered and diluted verse now current-if not yet submerged-under the name or the pseudonym of the present {237} Viceroy-or Vice-empress is it?-of India. But the obvious truth is this: the voice of Shakespeare's adolescence had

tyle of Shakespeare, and the style may be more accurately definable as a copy of a copy-a study after the manner of Marlowe, not at second hand, but at thi

and decent commonplace: but where the style turns undramatic and runs into mere elegiacs, a likeness becomes perceptible to the first elegiac style of Shakespear

un alone it

take light fro

y-stars that mi

un steal mine o

ve desire!

tion that ma

ults of his poetic nonage, with its barren overgrowth of unprofitable flowers,-bright point, soft metaphor, and sweet elaborate antithesis-this is as good of its kind as anything between Aristophanes and Horace Smith. Indeed, it may remind us of that parody on the soft, superfluous, flowery and frot

ntess is even gracefuller, and closer to the s

resence, like

arth, and sud

not make our

grace our inwar

iege, is like a

e, and manners

ught; yet in

riches, and fa

golden ore d

decked with na

ere, unfertile,

upper turf of

mes, {239} and p

find this issue

ordure and co

up my all too

d walls no

; but, like a

waste the under

than my terms

lf to stay aw

k) untenable, was not (we must admit) unpardonable. The very oversight perceptible to any eye and painful to any ear not sealed up by stepdame nature from all perception of pleasure or of pain derivable from

arasite to the very touch and action of the master's hand which feeds them unawares from his platter as they fawn; as close as this nameless and short-winded satellite to the gesture and the stroke of Shakespeare's. For this also must be noted; that the resemblance here is but of stray words, of single lines, of separable passages. The whole tone of the

ys first in the field-the genuine and golden harvest-field of Shakespearean criticism, Charles Lamb has cited a passage from Green's Tu Quoque-a comedy miserably misreprinted in Dodsley's Old Plays-on which he observes that "this is so like Shakespeare, that we seem to remember it," being as it is a girl's gentle lamentation over the selfish, exacting, suspicious and trustless love of man, as contrasted with the swift simple surrender of a woman's love at the first heartfelt appeal to her pity-"we seem to remember it," says Lamb, as a speech of Desdemona uttered on a first perception or suspicion of jealousy or alienation in Othello. This lovely passage, if I dare say so in contravention to the authority of Lamb, is indeed as li

ound up yet another couplet which has the very ring in it of Shakespeare's early notes-the c

eit my busine

nd while I at

and courteous euphuism we pass from the first

y trick of his gait, the very note of his accent. But on getting a little more knowledge, such a reader will find the use of it in the perception to which he will have attained that in his early plays, as in his two early poems, the style of Shakespeare was not for the most part distinctively his own. It was that of a crew, a knot of young writers, among whom he found at once both leaders

non omn

versa

's Poetical Rhapsody-their name is Legion, their numbers are numberless. You cannot call them imitators, this man of that, or all of any; they were all of one school, but it was a school without a master or a head. And even so it was with the earliest sect or gathering of dramatic writers in Eng

atter of mere language only. The poet-a very pretty poet in his way, and doubtless capable of gracious work enough in the idyllic or elegiac line of business-shows about as much capacity to grasp and handle the fine intimacies of character and the large issues of circumstance to any tragic or dramatic purpose, as might be expected from an idyllic or elegiac poet who should suddenly assume the buskin of tragedy. Let us suppose that Moschus, for example, on the strength of having written a

t indeed compared with that of many a poem of its age familiar only to special students in our own-I will transcribe a few passages to show how far the wri

Fran?ois Villon under the roof of his Fat Madge, to have succeeded in reconciling the professio

ive his eye i

k her sweet ton

ssion, like inc

on the carriag

die, in his di

shed, even then

eks by some e

he cherry blood

erent fear whe

on their scar

like her o

al, or live thing

n thus counter

sh, 'twas tend

sacred presen

sh, 'twas red

eyes amiss,

pale, 'twas si

elf in prese

ale, it was wi

ss, being a

s, each tagged with an empty verbal antithesis; but taken as a sample of dramatic writing, it is but just bette

author's two chief models were not at their best incapable for awhile u

e fairer far sin

silver every

uent. What a st

of David an

she, he spake-and

s and accent

tter than the S

she-and answer

peak like her?

e wall an angel'

ance to her b

alk of peace, me

to prison; {24

?sar from hi

eautified by

lishness, but

der, but in h

mer but in her

inter but in

the Scots that

l the treasur

cowards that

h and fair a

espeare in his salad days, in his period of poetic pupilage, we have but a very little way to go forward before we come upon indispu

invocate {247}

e hither an

at and futile imitation of Marlowe; not of his great general style alone, bu

ens that eve

ling of their m

ness that inspi

and muses on

venly quintess

mmortal flow

in a mirror,

reaches of

made one po

ned in beauty

e hover in thei

grace, one wond

ds no virtue c

he thin tinkle of their feeble imitator's, yet we cannot choose but catch the

ng hath a poet's

vations of Marlowe. In the speeches that follow there is much pretty verbiage after the general manner of Elizabethan sonnetteers, touched here and there with something of a higher tone; but the whole scene

set down, ho

and how full o

makes me.

e I peruse her

music, or the

ery summer-

unburnt lover

I speak of th

e sings of adu

mpared, is t

sin, would not

rtue sin, sin

ofter than the

ering glass, do

ber:-Like a f

oon; for, writ

ike a glass the

hot reflectio

st, and burns t

rld of descan

oluntary gr

sonnet, elegy, tragedy, comedy, and farce of his period, which bears the same marks of the same date-a date, like our own, of too prolific and imitative production-as we find inscribed on the greater part of his own early work;

te and very dexterous, it is not forcible work: I do not mean by forcible the same as violent, spasmodic, emphatic beyond the modesty of nature; a poet is of course only to be commended, and that heartily, for keeping within this bound; but he is not to be commended for coming short of it. This whole scene is full of mild and temperate beauty, of fanciful yet earnest simp

liction, passio

favour and t

vement and shortcoming, is here complete and exact. Witness the sweet quiet example of idyllic

'st me say that I

my beauty, take

I do prize it

ue, take it i

tore by giving

t it will th

st take away

thy beauty tha

e it painted, I

ss myself to

, it is solder

oth; for like

sunshine of my

mayst lend it m

asy may my int

y, and yet

body, palac

r, and yet r

bower, her co

el, pure, divi

d her house, my

r soul, and m

aint and intermittent resemblance to Shakespeare is more frequently noticeable than elsewhere. {252} A student of imperfect memory but not of defective intuition might pardonably assign such couplets, on hearing them cited, to the master-hand itself; but such a student

sage which does actually recall by its wording a famous

lip or counter

ord: and will y

ason 'gainst th

image in fo

ur allegiance

g marriage'

reater honour

g is of a y

arried: your

ng Adam on

onoured for

him anointe

ink himself of the famous passage in Measure for Me

re as

that hath from

ady made,

tness, that do c

s that a

in which the matured poet retouches and completes the sketch of his earlier years-composes an oil painting, as it were, from the hints and suggestions of a water-colour sketch long since designed and long since half forgotten-is essentially different from the mere verbal and literal trick of repetition which sciolists might think to detect in the present instance. Again we must needs fall back on the inevitable and indefinable test of style; a test which could be of no avail if we were foolish enough to appeal to scholiasts and their

spite against women has here effectually and finally shown himself powerless to handle the simplest elements of masculine passion, of manly character and instinct; so in this less important case we feel that the writer, having ventured on such a subject as the compulsory temptation of a daughter by a father, who has been entrapped into so shameful an undertaking through the treacherous exaction of an equivocal promise unw

l I enter on this

her child; for w

uch a suit sed

Salisbury;-sha

nd; and where is

endship such end

hter, nor my de

ick, as thou

ey from the c

housed my spi

age to thee

ise; but the verses following are of the flattest order of commo

mora

men misdo, t

t is compelled to fall back for support and illustration to a

in his glory h

gaze on him t

eyesight, look

drop of poiso

astures can

t lose its

if not ad nauseam. Let us take but one

tural besiege!

ped the dang

imes worse invi

to Shakespeare; {256} besiege, as a noun

ans to stain

pt the autho

ndalous and v

gh the branche

ath encompass

ugh the lepro

rn dam enven

e sin a passp

dangerous re

trict forbiddi

very canon t

hame or penan

, if his too b

so, before

or in his gr

hou speak'st as I w

I unsay my

e grave is m

lluted clos

n, the greater

bad, that he s

mote, flyin

eater substan

ummer's day do

rrion that it

lows made with

ten times ag

mitted in a

ed, done b

subornation:

nd the beaut

reater scorn u

reader of something better read elsewhere; a common case en

eld of reason

ory, daughter,

hows worst in

s darker by the

ter smell far w

ory that inc

treble by t

th my blessing

nvert to a mo

rt'st from hono

tion of bed-blot

low thee:-And when

y soul in endl

know were in circulation about the time of this play's first appearance among Shakespeare's "private friends"; in other words, which enjoyed such a kind of public privacy or private publicity as one or two among the most eminent English poets of our own day have occasionally chosen for some part of their work, to screen it for awhile as under the shelter and the shade of crep

g at all events a marked advance upon the scene which I have already stigmatised as a failure-that which attempts to render the interview between Warwick and the King. It is hardly, however, I should say, above the highest reach of Greene or

in his close

w not, but he

er, none should

lisbury, and he

l, look undern

ike sagacity of Audley leads him at once as by intuition to the inferen

then someth

n's characteristically cautious conclusion at sight of the milita

surmise-forgi

cture's rash

tate some dan

ses-"in good time," as most readers will say. His brief interview

sovereign all my

thou wert a wit

emperor g

ld it were

accorded to your

, she hath not: Bu

e and duty to m

but one is none:-W

liege, levied tho

r charge, and br

ose foot trudge hen

heir discharge

ook upon the

n

ountess' min

, the emperor:

hat's in

leave him t

DERBY an

he heart's abundanc

mperor: And in

imperato

I to

ling vassal,

or displeasur

earliest manner than we can trace in any other passage of the play. But how much of Shakes

age to C?sar (as the King is pleased to style himself) from "the more than Cleopatra's match" (as he designates the Countess), to intim

s, that thunders

tender Cupi

w it brawls with h

hundering parch

ch it to condu

conduct sweet

som of a he

se it as my

him, from a

ld, and dear c

ddess and a

ummer learn to

in the brace

hink it an u

ven with such

Exit Lo

hat I have re

ne; and these s

rch of penet

be my arrows

e as the vant

my sweet'st {2

s, she wins

e herself; and

rm the wanton

eyes as judgme

lovèd glory

to be), and "retires to the door." The following scene

e boy. O, how hi

, corrects my

art, and chides

ich enough i

here: and bases

check itsel

oy, wh

ssembled, my dea

uds of all our

s in France; a

ction from y

do I see in

sage; those his

tly {262a} on me

inst themselve

; and men, lik

themselves even

silks of wav

limit of fair

rthrown? and

little mansi

armour of e

er kings. And

, and be my e

.-Come, boy, f

colours sweep t

he approach of the Counte

e it goes! that v

aptive France;

and the peers

nd revel with thy fr

but black; and

o my mind ho

countess hithe

ase away these

both to heaven and

e, to hack and

race in an

of all rari

Adam till thi

OWICK with t

put thy hand

e, riot, waste;

while, and leave me

er who might never have gone over the text on which I had to comment, exceeded in no small degree the limits I had intended to impose u

soul's playfello

ore than heave

ion in thy b

ction in the sense of offer or proposal ha

er on his blessin

thou shalt

, dear my li

, my dearest lov

ht, and render {26

g for wrong, and en

see your maj

lingness, my

te, nor no res

p, but that y

and awe thes

iscontent t

uld not I'll

yourself rem

en your highness

fair countess, an

eir lives that sta

ave choked up,

hose live

y thrice lo

d Salisbury my

ave that tit

t bestow but b

sition {264a} is

your desire: I

you to exec

you to attem

nk you love

make good what

thy husband and t

art by far t

ander not so

asy current

ugh a helly spou

Sestos where

'll do more; you'l

bloods that keep

sband and your

y makes them guil

vidence that t

ict I their jud

ured beauty! mor

eat star-chambe

l sessions c

l, we both shall

s my fair love?

be dissolved: {266}

rd, great king,

dost; I'll part a

will yield m

e do hang my w

ne, and with it

e to find her

other I'll de

fast asleep w

one, then I'll

t its brevity. The King of course abjures his purpose, and of course compares the Countess with Lucretia to the disadvantage of the Roman matron; summons

mony and keeping with all that has gone before. Edward alone survives as nominal protagonist; but this survival-assuredly not of the fittest-is merely the survival of the shadow of a name. Anything more pitifully crude and feeble, more helplessly inartistic and incompos

by Charles Knight; who, though no professed critic or esoteric expert in Shakespearean letters, approved himself by dint of sheer honesty and conscien

er than such stale pot-pourri as the following is to be gathered up in thin sprinklings fro

o (sic) of King

irst, far off

ere a grove of

, their gloriou

ensigns wrought

dow full of s

aked bosom o

regard, as may be seen, for grammar and for sense in the construction of his periods. The narr

its place in the play, immediately after the preceding sea-piece: but relieved by such wealth of pleasantry as marks the f

t, is it quarter-d

bag and ba

ter-day? ay, and qu

u

bose; yet in this Sham Shakespearean scene of our present poeticule's I have

emples with

rned with la

d "laurel" as an adjective and epithet of victory which thus confronts us in the

your

ictory, and

d before

the prince to win his spurs unaided, and earn the first-fruits of his fame single-handed against the heaviest odds; but the forcible feebleness of a m

agnanimity between the Duke of Burgundy and his former fellow-student, whose refusal to break his parole as a prisoner extorts

es the dialogue between the Black Prince and Audley on the verge of battle, is relieved by this one last touch of qua

much more mighty

this power ha

as these my

andful of so

orld-and call

, and {269} qui

d to count th

would confo

housand mill

is no more i

squadrons and

nd us, and o

wer: When we

t, his head, have

but one self i

many, Audley

it all but one

far to go tel

l the steps, it

infinite tha

now'st, we call

France, one kin

no more kings;

puissant legi

ne: Then appr

one is fa

rit smacking rather of the schools than of the field. The first six lines or so might pass muster as the e

tous collapse. We find in the rest of this scene nothing be

milkwhite mess

learning in this

he adolescent style of Shakespeare, and which happens to find itself as

give a penn

lfpenny to sh

ly well worded; indeed the force of elegant commonpla

ised and bent w

ms forepast

1} in thine h

rried man in

oos me as a

nswer to this

is all as com

ice, the other

instant we

and hunt th

then we blow,

ly we fall;

body, so we

for death, why

it, why do

er have put by the mouth of any but a farcical mask a query so pr

r, with fear

ear to seize o

t, then no re

w the limit

have been reminded of a passage in the transc

ou art dea

bour'st by thy

n'st toward

s blown by the same breath which in time gained power to fill th

o necessary extract. We may just observe as examples of style the play on words between the fli

hid the airy

noon a nig

king and dis

to its own level. à tout seigneur tout honneur; the author deserves some dole of moderate approbation fo

t if any reader believes them to be the possible work of the same hand which set before all men's eyes for all time

cession for the burgesses of Calais. We know how Shakespeare on the like occasion was wont to transmute into golden verse the silver speech supplied to him by North's version of Amyot's Plutarch. {273} With the text of Lord Berners before him, the author of King Edward III. has given us for the gold of Froissart not even adulterated copper, but unadulterated lead. Incredible as it may seem to readers of the h

and our conclusion is simply this: that if any man of common reading, common modesty, common judgment, and common sense, can be found to maintain the theory of Shakespeare's possible partnership in the composition of this play, such a man will assuredly admit that the only discernible

O

ave recourse in self-defence either to the blackguard's loaded bludgeon of personalities or to the dastard's sheathed dagger of disguise. I have reviled no man's person: I have outraged no man's privacy. When I have found myself misled either by imperfection of knowledge or of memory, or by too much confidence in a generally trustworthy guide, I have silently corrected the misquotation or readily repaired the error. To the successive and representative heroes of the undying Dunciad I h

E FIRST ANNIVERSARY SESSION OF

or of The Revenger's Tragedy; and he had drawn up in support of this theory a series of parallel passages extracted from the speeches of Vindice in that drama and of Oberon in the present play. He pointed out however that the character of Puck could hardly have been the work of any English poet but the author of Bussy

was not thinking rather of Love's Labour's Lost?), Mr. A. cited the well-known scene in which Oberon discourses with Puck on matters concerning Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabe

they would all defer. He could prove by a tabulated statement that the words "to" and "from" occurred on an average from seven to nine times in every play of Chapman; whereas in the play under c

e extreme difficulty, he might almost say the utter impossibility, of discovering a single point of likeness between the two characters. This would naturally be the first precaution taken by a poor player who designed to attack an all-powerful Minister. But more direct light was thrown upon the subject by a passage in which "that kind of fruit that maids c

of his bounty. That this poet was the author of Romeo and Juliet could no longer be a matter of doubt, as he was confident they would all agree with him on hearing that a living poet of note had positively assured him of the fact; adding that he

esent Society. He (Mr. D.) was confident that not another syllable could be necessary to expose that person to the contempt of all present. He proceeded, however, with the kind encouragement of the Chairman, to indulge at that editor's expense in sundry personalities both "loose and humorous," which being totally unfit for publication here are reserved for a private issue of "Loose and Humorous Papers" to be edited, with a running marginal commentary or illustrative and explanatory version of the utmost possible fullness, {279} by the Founder and another member of the Society. To these it might possibly be undesirable for them to attract the notice of the outside world. Reverting therefore to his first subject from various references to the presumed private character, habits, gait, appearance, and bearing of the gentleman in question, Mr. D. observed that the ascription of a share in the Taming of the Shrew to William Haughton

for puns on his own Christian name, as in his 135th, 136th, and 143rd sonnets. It must now be but too evident to the meanest intelligence-to the meanest intelligence, he repeated; for to such only did he or would he then and there or ever or anywhere address himself-(loud applause) that the graceless author, more utterly lost to all sense of shame than any Don Juan or other typical libertine of fi

that thou mayst

ffidence, the pitiful modesty, the contemptible deficiency in common assurance, with which the suggestion of Shakespeare's partnership in this play had generally been put forward and backed up. The tragedy of Arden of Feversham was indeed connected with Shakespeare-and that, as he should proceed to show, only too intimately; but Shakespeare was not connected with it-that is, in the capacity of its author. In what capacity would be but too evident when he mentioned the names of the two leading ruffians concerned in the murder of the principal character-Black Will and Shakebag. The single original of these two characters he need scarcely pause to point out. It would be observed that a double precaution had been taken against any charge of libel or personal attack which might be brought against the author and supported by the all-powerful court influence of Shakespeare's two principal patrons, the Earls of Essex and Southampton. Two figures were substituted for one, and the unmistakable name of Will Shakebag was cut in half and divided between them. Care had moreover been taken to disguise the person by altering the complexion of the individual aimed at. That the actual Shakespeare was a fair man they had the evidence of the coloured bust at Stratford. Could any capable and fair-minded man-he would appeal to their justly honoured Founder-require further evidence as to the original of Black Will Shakebag? Another important character in the play was Black Will's accomplice and Arden's servant-Michael, after whom the play had also at one time been called Murderous Michael. The single fact that Shakespeare and Drayton were both of them Warwickshire men would suff

, that without some personal allusion it must have been as unintelligib1e to the audience as it had hitherto been to the commentators. His conjecture was confirmed, and the whole subject illustrated with a new light, by the well-known line in one of the Sonnets, in which the poet describes himself as "made lame by Fortune's dearest spite": a line of which the inner meaning and personal application had also by a remarkable chance been reserved for him (Mr. E.) to discover. There could be no doubt that we had here a clue to the origin of the physical infirmity referred to; an accident which must have befallen Shakespeare in early life while acting at the Fortune theatre, and consequently before his connection with a rival company; a fact of grave importance till now unverified. The epithet "dearest," like so much else in the Sonnets, was evidently susceptible of a double interpretation. The first and most natural explanation of the term would at once suggest

ngth by means of the weak-ending test, the light-ending test, the double-ending test, the triple-ending test, the heavy-monosyllabic-eleventh-syllable-of-the-double-ending test, the run-on-line test, and the central-pause test. Of the partnership of other poets in the play he was able to adduce a simpler but not less cogent proof. A member of their Committee said to an objector lately: "To me, there are the handwritings

od in a state of deathlike stupor. On recovering from this total and unaccountable suspension of all his faculties, he found the speaker

d have no difficulty in proving to the satisfaction of all capable and fair-minded men. In the first an

ll to virtuous D

these are more v

rtuous means I m

ain), honesty, Cassio (again), jealousy, jealous (used as a trisyllable in the verse of Shakespeare's time), company (two consecutive lines with the triple ending), Cassio (again), conscience, petition, ability, importunity, conversation, marriage, dungeon, mandragora,

pleased

e with a

y fourth budding manner, with, too, various other points already to

urk of Cypru

t so long as

isentangle the early love-play from the latter work in which Iago was principally concerned. There was at least fifteen years' growth between them, the steps of which could he traced in the poet's intermediate plays by any one who chose to work carefully enough at them. Set any of the speeches addressed in the Shakespeare part of the last act by Othello to Desdemona beside the consolatory address of the Duke to Brabantio, and see the difference of the rh

r's Lost, iv

ove is black 1. "An

ebo

hat is not 2. "Your s

." fair than

ck is the 3. "How

ell." witt

y lady's 4. "If she

cked." have

she born 5. "A meas

fair." black O

black to 6. "For I

e her

her are 7. "Begri

sweepers

that they were so was worth one straw? When therefore by the introduction of the Iago episode Shakespeare in his later days had with the assistance of three fellow-poets completed the unfinished work of his youth, the junction thus effected of the Brabantio part of the play with this Iago underplot supplied them with an e

ly be assigned to Shakespeare, he had of course at once surrendered his own former opinion, well grounded as it had hitherto seemed to be on the most solid of all possible foundations. At their next meeting he would show cause for attributing to Ben Jonson not only the soliloquies usually but inconsiderately quoted as Shakespeare's, but the entire original conception of the character of the Prince of Denmark. The resemblance of this character to that of Volpone in The Fox and to that of Face in The Alchemist could not possibly escape the notice of the most cursory reader. The principle of disguise was the same in each case, whether the end in view were simply personal profit, or (as in the c

ed on all hands to have represented himself in the character of Prospero ("it was mine art that let thee out"). Mr. I. would afterwards read a paper on the evidence for Shakespeare's whole or part authorship of a dozen or so of the least known plays of his time, which, besides having various words and phrases in common with his acknowledged works, were obviously too bad to be attributed to any other known writer of the period. Eminent among these was the tragedy of Andromana, or the Merchant's Wife, long since rejected from the list of Shirley's works as unworthy of that poet's hand. Unquestionably it was so; not less unworthy than A Larum for London of Marlowe's. The consequent inference that it must needs be the work of the new Shakespeare's was surely no less cogent in this than in the former case. The allusion occurring

ll hug suspicion

user. (Andromana

owal put by Shakespeare

did wis

r. (King Richard I

the sam

band comes home

the Rialto to Iberia was of a piece with the discovery of a sea-coast in Bohemia. In the same scene Androm

stand and ou

u will h

ary to disguise his plagiarism in the other by an inversion of sexes between the tw

ht with far

hoals of sir

of Errors, Ac

ren, for

evidence for identity of authorship as diversi

ai

more validit

cene 3, the very same words wer

val

e state, more

n flies t

ai

ve killed a

art of King Henry I

nder of yours with fire any t

ing informed how heavy are the odd

; the honour i

is confida

er is th

ne of the same act t

ard the p

. .

er by a th

? or could any member suppose that in the subsequent remark of the same military confidant, "I smell a rat, sir," there was merely a fortuitous

ene a captain obser

tered rogues shou

comparison to the final proof which he had yet to lay before them. He need not remind them that in the opinion of their illustrious German teachers, the first men to discover and reveal to his unworthy countrymen the very existence of the new Shakespeare, the authenticity of any play ascribed to the possibly too prolific pen of that poet was invariably to be determined in the last resort by consideration of its demerits. No English critic, therefore, who felt himself worthy to have been born a German, would venture to question the postulate on which all sound principles of criticism with regard to this subject must infallibly be founded: that, given any play of unknown or doubtful authorship, the worse it was, the likelier was it to be Shakespeare's. (This proposition was received with every sign of unanimous assent.) Now, on this gro

rd better qualified as a critic than any poet or scholar of time past. But it was not, whatever outsiders might pretend to think, exclusively on the verse-test, as it had facetiously been called on account of its total incompatibility with any conceivable scheme of metre or principle of rhythm-it was not exclusively on this precious and unanswerable test that they relied. Within the Society as well as without, the pretensions of those who would acknowledge no other means of deciding on debated questions had been refuted and repelled. What were the other means of investigation and verification in which not less than in the metrical test they were accustomed to put their faith, and by which they doubted not to attain in the future even more remarkable results than their researches had as yet achieved, the debate just concluded, in common with every other for which they ever had met or ever were likely to meet, would amply suffice to show. By such processes as had been applied on this as on all occasions to the text of Shakespeare's works and the traditions of his life, they trusted in a very few years to subvert all theories which had hitherto been held and extirpate all ideas which had hitherto been cherished on the subject: and having thus cleared the ground for his advent, to discover for the admiration of the world, as the name of their Society implied, a New Shakespeare. The first step towards this end must of course be the demolition of the old one; and he would venture to say they h

S AND CO

nting out with more or less acrimonious commentary the matters on which it seems to them severally that they have cause to complain of imperfection or inaccuracy in his conscientious and painstaking report. Anxious above all things to secure for himself such credit as may be due to the modest merit of scrupulous fidelity, he desires to lay before the public so muc

f other organs which God had given them-their fingers, for example, and their toes; by means of which a critic of trained and competent scholarship might with the utmost confidence count up as far as twenty, to the great profit of all students who were willing to accept his guidance and be bound by his decision on matters of art and poetry. Only the most purblind could fail to observe, what only the most perverse could hesitate to admit, that there was at first sight an obvious connection between the poison-flower-"purple from love's wound"-squeezed by Oberon into the eyes of the sleeping Titania and the poison rubbed by Vindice upon the skull of the murdered Gloriana. No student of Ulrici's invaluable work would think this a far-fetched reference. That

ended animation under the influence of a deadly narcotic potion administered by the friends of Romeo-by the partisans, that is, of the Cecilian policy. The Nurse was not less evidently designed to represent the Established Church. Allusions to the marriage of the clergy are profusely scattered through her speeches. Her deceased husband was probably meant for Sir Thomas More-"a merry man" to the last moment of his existence-who might well be supposed by a slight poetic license to have foreseen in the infancy of Elizabeth her future backsliding and fall from the straight path "when she came to age." The passing expression of tenderness with which the Nurse refers to his memory-"God be with his soul!"-implies at once the respect in which the name of the martyr Chancellor was still generally held, and the lingering remains of Catholic tradition which still made a prayer for the dead rise naturally to Anglican lips. On the other hand, the strife between Anglicans and Puritans, the struggle of episcopalian with Calvinistic reformers, was quite as plainly typified in the quarrel between the Nurse and Mercutio, in which the Martin Marprelate controversy was first unmistakably represented on the stage. The "saucy merchant, that was so full of his ropery," with his ridicule of the "stale" practice of Lenten fasting and abstinence, his contempt for "a Lenten pie," and his preference for a flesh diet as "very good meat in Lent," is clearly a disciple of Calvin; and the impotence of the Nurse, however scandalised at the nakedness of his ribald profanity, to protect herself against it by appeal to reason or tradition, is dwelt upon with an emphasis sufficient to indicate the secret tendency of the poet's own sympathies and convictions. In Romeo's attempt at conciliation, and his poor excuse for Mercutio (which yet the Nurse, an emblem of the temporising and accommodating pliancy of episcopalian Protestantism, shows herself only too ready to accept as valid) as "one that God hath made, for himself to mar,"-the allusion here is evidently to the democratic and revolutionary tendencies of the doctrine of Knox and Calvin, with its ultimate developments of individualism and private judgment-we recognise the note of Burghley's lifelong policy and i

erence to the first scene in which the Nurse makes her appearance on the stage, and is checked by Lady Capulet in the full tide of affectionate regret for

; I pray thee,

uliet is evidently an allusion to the declaration of Elizabeth's illegitim

er may well be said

ias of the hierarchy in favour of Essex-"a lovely gentleman"-rather than of the ultra-Protestant

than the general sequence and significance of all. Further instalments of this work would probably be issued in the forthcoming or future Transactions of the Newest Shakespeare Society; and it was confidently expected that the final monument of his research when thoroughly completed and illustrated by copious app

OMBINANS

O

rts of an actual Society, issued in an abridged and doubtless an emasculated form through the columns of a weekly newspaper. One final and unapproachable instance, one transcendant and pyramidal example of classical taste and of critical scholarship, I did not venture to impair by transference from those columns and transplantation into these pages among humbler specimens of minor monstrosity. Let it s

never set down as the writer's opinion that he was only an ?schylus. In other words, it has never registered as my deliberate and judicial verdict the finding that he was only the equal of the greatest among all tragic and all propheti

tno

t in his beautiful and valua

xecution as unlike the crudest phase of Shakespeare's style as in conception it is unlike the idlest bir

ralleled with that which in the days of our fathers saw fit to couple together the names of Balzac and of Sue. Any competent critic will always recognise in The Way of the World one of the glories, in The Country Wife one of the disgraces, of dramatic and of English literature. The stains discernible on the masterpiece of Congreve are

to his occasional issues of golden waifs and strays forgotten by the ebb-tide of time. Not even the disinterment of Robert Chester's "glorified" poem, with its appended jewels of ve

igh comedy and heroic romance-a field of his own invention; witness Monsieur Thomas and The Knight of Malta: while Beaumont has approved himself in tragedy all but the worthiest disciple of Shakespeare, in farce beyon

fts are critics of the finger-counting or syllabic school inevitably and fatally reduced in the effort to establish by rule of thumb even so much as may seem verifiable by that rule in the province of poetical criticism. Prosody is at best no more than the skeleton of verse, as verse is the body

uée dans Sancho Pan?a, tourne à mal et avorte dans Falstaff."

Shakespeare's rejection of Sly's memorable query-"When will the fool come again, Sim?" It is true that he could well afford to spare it, as what could

ibuted)." It will be seen that I do not shrink from admitting the full weight of authority which can be thrown into the scale against my own opinion. To such an assertion from the insolent organs of pretentious ignorance I should be content with the simple rejoind

nd long lamented fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of Honoré de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitab

ery one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all the beings of the outer world presented themselves to his mind's eye in strong relief and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their lights. Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to see everything, to bring everything to sight, to guess everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly the principal lines, so as to preserve the perspective of the whole.

ing done by the author of

, through the eloquent mouth of this enthusiastic villain of genius, whom we might regard as a more genuinely Titianic sort of Wainwright. The parallel passage is that most lovely and fervid

ct as this: that it would be somewhat difficult to excuse the unwomanly violence of this demand. Doubtless it wo

partly lust in another man is

o love

ute lust, (thoug

untant for a

led to diet

ly," and the incarnate father of lies, made manifest in the fles

f my text with the establishment of a fact which yet can seem insignificant to no mortal who

isses br

g ag

ve, but sea

d in

of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a jest compared to the mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands of Fletcher: who thereby reduced the close of the

et my poor

ose icy cha

uous liberality, offer us a syllable over measure; the words are such as absolutely to defy antiphonal repetition or reverberation of the three last in either line. Let us therefore, like goo

e been the very earliest mould in which the pristine or pre-Shakespearean model of Pericles was cast,

akespeare, in the description of the crazed girl whose "careless tresses a wreath of bullrush rounded" where she sat playing with flowers

17th of Sep

idelity of a wellnigh brutal realism took actual place on the private stage of fact in the year 1604. Four y

ritten

ge in a note, with the scrupulous honesty which would seem to have

ck the date of this play to the years immediately preceding the advent of Marlowe or the full influence of his genius and exa

re's. "Brick to coral"-these three words describe exact

note of the music of the sea. But it would be hard if a devout and studious disciple were never to catch one passing tone of his master's habitual accent.-It may be worth while to observe that we find here the same modulatio

u in my face? I

ms: mine arms

m me, and I'll

hast the power

power to

sage, taken from the crudest and feeblest work of Mar

rrence in a single play of Shakespeare's, and

of Tamburlaine the

r is constantly used as a dissyllable; another no

an word, though doubtless once used by Shakes

d Shakespeare, and not to "the new Shakspere"; a novus homo with whom I have no acquaintance, and with whom (if we may judge of a great-or a little-unknown after the app

sweet'st we shou

ccurs but once in

it, he wistly

ard II. Ac

invocate and endamagement, a mere απαξ λεyομενον can carry n

re as the equivalent of Bretagne; once only, in

Shakespeare's, though not (I believe) unused on occasion

s unnecessarily altered by

lar misuse of a word never so

is your desire: If

or literary lackey of Prince Leopold. Hence I gathered the edifying assurance that this aspirant to the honours of literature in livery had been reminded of my humbler attempts in literature without a livery by the congenial music of certain four-footed fellow-critics and fellow-lodgers of his own in the neighbourhood of Hampstead Heath. Especially and most naturally had their native woodnotes wild recalled to the listening biped (whom partial nature had so far distinguished from the herd) the deep astonishment and the due disgust with which he had discovered the unintelligible fact that to men so ignorant of music or the laws of music in verse as my presumptuous and pitiable self the test of metrical harmony lay not in an appeal to the fingers but o

sm, not altogether out of Shakespeare's earli

rd "is" for the word "and" would rectif

here is but on

n-Shakes

ys rather than his use of Hall and Holinshed in the composition of his English histories, becau

hose mission it is to make manifest that no burlesque invention of mere man's device can improve upon the inexhaustible capaci

f the Society's Report, where it appeared as "foulness." To prevent

s, si les enfants qu'on fait se faisaient pas l'oreille? But the flower of rhetoric here gathered was beyond the reach of