LIBRm mmsm of cmmm ftmRSlDE -I r>-^ «pt <^ Issii ^<^ WILLIAM SHAKSPERE S Stutio in 1£lijabet()an Hiterature BY BARRETT WENDELL ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT HARVARD COLLEGE NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1909 V . Copyright, 1894, Bt Charles Scribner's Sons. vu^ l-l- .!U Xr^ ■.-h^ South Jena Public NOTE As this book has grown from lectures given, at Harvard College, to classes who were systematically reading the works under discussion, it has been im- possible to avoid the assumption that a text of Shaks- pere is always close at hand. Whoever is familiar with the subject must instantly perceive my constant obligation to the writings of Mr. Dowden and Mr. Furnivall. Just as helpful, though not obvious to the public, have been the manu- script notes on Shakspere kindly lent me by Messrs. Charles Lowell Young and Henry Copley Greene, of Harvard University ; and by Miss M. T. Bennett, of Radcliffe College. The proof-sheets of an admirable essay on John Lyly by my colleague, Mr. George Pierce Baker, unhappily failed to reach me until after this book was printed. B. W. New Castle, N. H., 23 August, 1894 < CONTENTS -♦- Chaptis Paoi I. Introduction 1 11. The Facts of Shakspere's Life 7 III. Literature and the Theatre in England UNTIL 1587 23 rv. The Works of Shakspere 48 V. Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece 51 VI. The Plays of Shakspere, from Titus An- dronicus to the Two Gentlemen of Verona 66 VII. The Plays of Shakspere, from A Mid- summer Night's Dream to Twelfth Night 103 VIII. Shakspere's Sonnets 221 IX. The Plays of Shakspere, from Julius CiESAR to Coriolanus 238 X. Timon of Athens, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre 345 XL The Plays of Shakspere, from Cymbeline to Henry VIII 355 XII. William Shakspere 395 Authorities, etc 427 In^x 4f* »». WILLIAM SHAKSPERE INTRODUCTION The purpose of this study is to present a coherent view of the generally accepted facts concerning the life and the work of Shakspere. Its object, the common one of serious criticism, is so to increase our sympathetic knowledge of what we study that we may enjoy it with fresh intelligence and appreciation. The means by which we shall strive for this end will be a constant efifort to see Shakspere, so far as is possible at this distance of time, as he saw himself. Of one thing we may be certain. To himself Shaks- pere was a very different fact from what he now seems to the English-speaking world. To people of our time he generally presents himself as an isolated, supreme genius. To people of his own time — and he was a man of his own time himself — he was certainly no- thing of the kind ; he was no divine prophet, no superhuman seer, whose utterances should edify and guide posterity ; he was only one of a considerable company of hard-working playwrights, whose work at the moment seemed neitiier more nor less serious 1_ 2 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE than that of any other school of theatrical writers. Nothing but the lapse of time could have demonstrated two or three facts now so commonplace that we are apt to forget they were not always obvious. First of all, the school of literature in which his work belongs — the Elizabethan drama — proves to have been one of the most completely typical phe- nomena in the whole history of the fine arts. It took little more than half a century to emerge from an archaic tradition, to develop into great imaginative vitality, and to decline into a formal tradition, no longer archaic, but if possible less vital than the tra- dition from which it emerged. In this typical liter- ary evolution, again, Shakspere's historical position happens to have been almost exactly central ; some of his work belongs to the earlier period of the Elizabethan drama, much of it to the most intensely vital, some of it to the decline. This fact alone — that in a remarkably typical school of art he is the most comprehensively typical figure — would make him worth serious attention. The third common- place invisible to his contemporaries, however, is so much more important than either of the others that nowadays it obscures them, and indeed ob- scures the whole subject. This most typical writer of our most broadly typical literary school happened to be an artist of first-rate genius. Canting as such a phrase must sound, it has something like a precise meaning. In the fine arts, the man of genius is he who in perception and in expression alike, in thought INTRODUCTIOX 3 and in phrase, instinctively so does his work that his work remains significant after the conditions which actually produced it are past. Throughout the Elizabethan drama there were flashes of genius ; in general, however, the work of the Elizabethan dramatists was so adapted to the conditions of the Elizabethan stage that, after the lapse of three cen- turies, its flashes of genius have faded into the ob- scurity of book-shelves, where they serve now chiefly to lighten the drudgery of men who study the history of literature. In the case of Shakspere, the genius was so strong and permeating that his work, from beginning to end, has survived every vestige of the conditions for which it was made. We are apt now to forget that it was made for any other conditions than those amid which, generation by generation, we find it. If we would sincerely try to see the man as he saw himself, we must resolutely put aside these common- places of posterity. In their stead we must substi- tute the normal commonplaces of human experience. Shakspere, we know, was an Elizabethan playwright ; and we know enough of the Elizabethan drama to form, in the end, a pretty clear conception of the pro- fessional task which was thus constantly before him. By both temperament and profession, too, Shakspere was a creative artist ; and those of us who have had much to do with people who try to create works of art learn to know that in general the artistic temper- ament, great or small, develops according to pretty 4 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE well fixed principles. Our effort to understand Shaks- pere, then, begins to define itself. We shall have done much if we can learn to see in him a man of normal artistic temperament, developing, in spite of its scale, in a normal way, under the known conditions which surrounded the Elizabethan theatre. Such definite study of him as this has been possible only in recent years. Until rather lately one obstacle to it was insurmountable. To study the development of any artist, we must know something of the order in which his works were produced ; and Shakspere's works have generally been presented to us in great chronological confusion. The first collection of his plays, a very carelessly printed folio, appeared in 1623. Here they were roughly classified as come- dies, histories, and tragedies ; under these heads, too, they were arranged in no sort of order. The book opens with the Tempest, for example, which is followed by the Two G-entlemen of Verona; yet nothing is now much better proved than that the Two G-entle- men of Verona is the earlier by above fifteen years. Again, the plays dealing with English history are printed in the order in which the sovereigns they deal with ascended the throne of England ; yet, if we except Henry VIII., which stands by itself, nothing is more certain than that Henry VI. is chronologically the first of the series, and Henry V. the last, with an in- terval of at least nine years between them. The general arrangement of the plays in the first folio, fairly exemplified by these instances, is still followed INTRODUCTION 5 in standard editions of Shakspere. The resulting con- fusion of impression is almost ultimate. During the past century or so, however, scholarship has gone far to reduce this chaos to order. On various grounds, a plausible chronology has arisen. Sixteen of the plays, and all of the poems, were published in quarto during Shakspere's lifetime. Entries in the Stationers' Register — analogous to modern copyright — exist in many cases. Allusions in the works of con- temporary writers are sometimes helpful ; so are allu- sions to contemporary matters in the plays themselves. More subtle, less certain, but surprisingly suggestive chronological evidence has been collected by elaborate analysis of technical style. It has been discovered, for example, that end-stopped verse, and rhyme are far more frequent in Sliakspere's earlier work than in his later, and that what are called light and weak endings to verses occur in constantly increasing proportion during the last six or eight years of his writing. The plays have been grouped accordingly.^ By some means or other, then, and in almost every case by means foreign to the actual substance of the works in question, foreign to the matters they deal with or to the mood in which they deal with them, a conjec- tural date — as a rule provisionally accepted by scholars — has been assigned to every work com- monly ascribed to Shakspere. Reading the plays and the poems in this conjecturally * An adequate discussion of this matter is accessible to everybody in Dowden's Primer of Shakspere, pp 32-46 6 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE chronological order we find in them something far re- moved from the pristine confusion of the standard editions. Once for all, of course, we must admit to ourselves that what results we thus find are not in- contestable. As our chronology is only conjectural, so must be any inferences which we may draw from it. If these inferences be plausible, however, if they help us to find in Shakspere not only the supreme genius of English literature, but also a normal hu- man being, greater than others, but not different in kind, we are fairly warranted in accepting them as a matter of faith. At least we may believe, though we may never assert, that they can help us in our effort to see Shakspere as he saw himself ; and so to under- stand, to appreciate, to enjoy him better than before. Our purpose, then, is to obtain a coherent view of the generally accepted facts concerning the life and the work of Shakspere. To accomplish this, we may best begin by glancing at the known facts of Shakspere's life. Then we shall briefly consider the condition of English literature at the time when his literary ac- tivity began. Then we shall consider in chronological order, and with what detail proves possible, all the works commonly assigned to him. Finally, we shall endeavor to define the resulting impression of his individuality. n THE FACTS OF SHAKSPERE'S LIFE [All the known documents concerning Shakspere are collected in Mr. Halliwell-IMiillips's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. In Mr. F. G. Fleay's Life and Work of Shakespeare is a masterly discussion of them. Dowden's Primer, and Furnivall's Introduction to the Leopold Shalcs- ptre state the facts more compactly. lu none of the authorities is it always easy to separate facts from inferences. If Wilder's Life, Boston, 1893, were a bit more careful iu detail, it would be perhaps the most satisfactory, because the least complicated with conjecture.] On April 26th, 1564, William, son of John Shaks- pere, was baptized at Stratford-on-Avon. John Shaks- pere, the father, had come from the neighboring country to Stratford, where he was engaged in fairly prosperous trade. In 1557 he had married Mary Arden, a woman of social position somewhat better than his ow«. In 1568 he was High Bailiff, or Mayor of Stratford. Until 1577, indeed, the extant records indicate that he was constantly looking up in the world. In that year, they begin to indicate that his circumstances were declining ; in 1578 they show that he had to put a mortgage for £40 on an estate called Asbies. Meanwhile he had become the father of five other children,^ of whom four survived. J Gilbert, b. 1566; Joan, b. L-ieg; Amie, b. 1571, d. 1579; Richard, b. 1573; Edmund, b. l.")80. Two older daughters had died in infancy 8 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Of William Shakspere's youth, then, we may be sure that it began in a well-to-do family of Stratford, increasing in numbers and prosperity ; and that when he was about thirteen years old the prosperity came to an end. On November 28th, 1582, when he was half-way between eighteen and nineteen years old, comes the first record which directly concerns him. A bond was given for his marriage to Anne Hathaway, a woman then in her twenty-sixth year, and of social position in no way better than Shakspere's. On May 26th, 1583, their first child, Susanna, was baptized. What inferences may be drawn from these dates have given rise to much discussion. In all probability they indicate a practice still common among respectable country folk, in America sometimes called " keep- ing company ; " and are interesting cliiefly as they throw light on the manners to which Shakspere was born. On February 2nd, 1585, his twin children, Hamnet and Judith, were baptized. In 1587, there is a record of his sanction, at Stratford, to a proposed arrangement concerning the Asbies mortgage which his father, who was now in prison for debt, had exe- cuted in 1578. This is literally all that is known of his early life at Stratford. Stories of how he went to school, how he saw plays, how he was at Kenilworth when Queen Elizabeth came there in 1575, how he was apprenticed to a local butcher, how he poached in Sir Thomas Lucy's park, have no authority. They are not impossible ; there is nothing to prove them. SIIAKSPERE'S LIFE 9 From the actual facts, however, certain inferences may be drawn. At the age of twenty -three, he was the eldest of the five surviving children of a ruined country tradesman ; he was married to a woman already about thirty, who had borne him three chil- dren ; and he had no recorded means of support. Five years later comes the next reference to him. On September 3d, 1592, Robert Greene, the dramatist, died. His last book, Greek's Groatsworth of Wit; bought ivith a Million of Repentaunce, speaks rather scurrilously of the thcati-es where he had rioted away his life. In the course of it occurs this passage : " Base minded men al tliree of you, if by my miserie ye be not warned: for unto none of you (like me) sought those burres to cleave: those Puppits (I meane) that speake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom tliey al have beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all have beene beholding, shall (were ye in that case that I am now) be both at once of them forsaken? Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, tliat witli liis Tyijevs 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 an absolute Johannes fac totnm, is in his oune conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie. that I might intreate your rare wits to be imployed in more profitable courses: & let these Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions. ... It is pittie 1 Cf. 3 Henri/ VI. Act I. Scene iv. 137. 10 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE men of such rare wits, should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes. . . . For other new commers, I leave them to the mercie of these painted monsters, who ([ doubt not) will drive the best minded to despise them; for the rest its skils not though they make a jeast at them."i From this passage, we may clearly infer that by the middle of 1592, Shakspere was a recognized writer of plays in London, that he was more or less involved in the theatrical squabbles of the time, that The Third Part of King Henry VI. was in existence, and that — at least to the mind of Robert Greene — he had plagiarized. Within the year, Henry Chettle, the publisher of this posthumous diatribe of Greene's, published an apology for it, in the course of which he writes thus : — **With neither of them that did take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never be : The other, ... at that time I did not so much spare, as since I wish I had, . . . because my selfe have seen his demeanor no lesse civill than he exelent in the qualitie he professes: Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that aprooves his Art." * It has been generally inferred that the two persons ^ Shakspere's Centurie of Prayse. Second Edition, London. Nevi Shakspere Society, 1879, p. 2. 2 Centurie of Pra;/se, p. 4. SHAKSPERE'S LIFE 11 thus alluded to are the graceless Marlowe and the excellent Shakspere. On April 18th, 1593, about a week before his twenty- ninth birthday, Vknus and Adonis, his first published work,^ was entered in the Stationers' Register. During the same year it was published in quarto, with Shaks- perc's name, by one Field, who was Stratford-born. It proved highly popular ; there were eleven quarto edi- tions before 1630, and more than twenty allusions to it during Shakspcre's life-time have been discovered. On February 6th, 1594, A noble Roman history of Ti/tus Andronicus was entered in the Stationers' Register, with no mention of Shakspcre's name ; it was published, thus anonymously, in 1600. On May 9th, 1594, the Rape of Luerece was entered ; and it was published within the year. From the terms of the dedication, compared with those in the dedication of Venus and Adonis? it has been inferred that Shaks- pere had meanwhile become personally known to his patron, the Earl of Southampton. The poem, though popular, was less so than Venus and Adonis ; there were six quartos before 1624. At Christmas time, 1594, the " servauntes to the Lord Chamberlayne " acted twice at court ; and Shaks- pere is mentioned as one of the members to whom payment for these performances was made. Mr. Fleay ^ shows reason to believe that he had belonged * And is not this the whole meaninc: of the much-discussed phrase in the dedication, " the first heir of my invention " ? 2 See p. 51. « Life, pp. 8, 94. 12 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE to this company, under various patrons, since 1587, in whicli case he must have acted at court before; but this is the first distinct mention of his name. At Christmas-tide, 1594, " A comedy of Errors (like unto Plautus his Menoechmi ") was played at Gray's Inn. Clearly, by this time Shakspere was estaljlished in liis profession. Just how he became so there is no record ; the tales of his holding horses at the theatre- door, and so on, rest on no valid authority. So far, then, the records show Shakspere first as a probably imprudent and needy youth, saddled with a family at twenty -three ; and secondly, at thirty, as a fairly established theatrical man in London. In view of these facts, the next records ^ are significant. A conveyance of land at Stratford, dated January 26th, 1596, describes John Shakspere, the father, as "yeoman." In the Heralds' College, a draft grant of arms to this same John Shakspere, dated October 20th, 1596, describes him as a " gentleman." From the fact that this implied return of prosperity to the family has no other apparent source than the growing prosperity of the dramatist, it has been inferred that, like any other normal Englishman, Shakspere wished to inherit arms and to found a family. If so, another record, of the same year, is doubly pathetic ; on August 11th, his only son, Hamnet, was buried at Stratford, in the twelfth year of his age. The record of Shakspere's material prosperity, how- ever, continues. In Easter Term, 1597, he bought ^ Leopold Shakspere, p. ciii. SHAKSPEKE'S LIFE 13 New Place, a mansion and grounds in Stratford, for X60; thereby becoming a landed proprietor. During the same year appeared the first quarto editions of his plays : namely, Romeo and Juliet in a very imperfect state and probably pirated, Richard II., and Richard III. ; his name, however, did not appear on any of the titlepages. Another indication of j)rosperity is that in November his father filed a bill in Chancery to recover the Asbies estate which he had mortgaged nine- teen years before. At Christmas time Lovers Labour 's Lost was played before the Queen at Whitehall. In 1598 this play was published, with Shakspere's name ; so was the First Part of Henry IV. ; so were fresh quartos of Richard II. and Richard III. ; and the Merchant of Venice was both entered in the Stationers' Register and published. In this year, too, a fragment of old correspondence gives us a glimpse of Shakspere. On the 24th of Jan- uary one Abraham Sturley, a Stratford man, wrote to his kinsman Richard Quiney, who had gone to London on business, as follows : — **Our countrinian, Mr Shaksper, is willinge to disburse rfome mouie upon some od yarde land or other at. Shotterie . . . (Ur father) thinketh it a veri fitt patterue to move him to deale in the matter of our tithes. Bi the instruc- ciou u can give him thearof, and bi the frends he can make therefore, we thinke it a fair marke for him to shoote att, and not unpossible to hitt." Eight months later, on the 25th of October, Quiney wrote thus: — 14 WILLIAM SIIAKSPERE " To ray loveinge good ffrend & countreymann Mr. Wm. Shackspere. ... I am bolde of you as of a ffrende, crave- inge yowr helpe with xxx li uppon Mr, Bushells and my securytee, or Mr. Myttons with me. . . . Yow shall ffrende me much in helping me out of all the debettes I owe in London, I thancke God, and much quiet my mynde, which wolde not be indebeted." Some word of this letter seems to have been sent to Sturley, for on the 4th of November, Sturley wrote to Quiney, acknowledging ''ur letter of the 25 of October . . . which imported that our countriman Mr. Wm. Shak. would procure us monie, which I will like of as I shall heare when and wheare and howe; and I prai Jet not go that occasion if it mai sort to our indifferent condicions." Later still, Richard Quiney's father wrote his son on the subject in person, perhaps a shade less confidently : — ^ '' Yff yow bargen with Wm. Sha. ... or receve money therefor, bring 3 oure money homme that yow may." Whatever these transactions were, Shakspere seems by this time to have presented himself to his fellow- townsmen at Stratford as a well-to-do man, and possi- bly a useful friend at court. In 1598, furthermore, Shakspere acted in Ben Jon- son's Every Man in his Humour. But the most notable fact of the year for us is the publication of Francis Meres's Falladis Tamia} In this book, which ^ Or Wit's Treasury. SHAKSPERE'S LIFE 15 was entered in the Stationers' Register on September 7th, Shakspere is mentioned at least six times ^ as among the best of English authors. The most cele- brated and familiar of these passages is the following, so obviously helpful in fixing the chronology of Shaks- pere's plays : — "As the soule of Euphorhus was thought to live in Pythagoras : so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus siTid Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c. '*As Plaidus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines ? so Shakespeare among y" English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witnes his Getleme of Verona, his Errors, his Love labors lost, his Love labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, & his Merchant of Venice : for Tragedy his Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry the Jf. King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet. "As Epius Stolo said, that the Muses would speake with Plautus tongue, if they would speak Latin : so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeares fine filed phrase, if they would speake English." ^ At thirty-four, then, Shakspere had pretty clearly established himself as a poet, as a dramatist, and as an actor ; and, in the opinion of Stratford people, as a well-to-do, influential man of business and land- holder. ' Centurie of Prayse, 21-23. ) 16 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE In these characters the records maintain him with little change for above ten years to come. In 1599 two of his Sonnets, and three poems from Love's La- hour '« Lost, appeared in a volume called the Passionate Pilgrim, ascribed at the time to him, but otherwise probably spurious. In 1609 appeared the quarto of the Sonnets as we have them. To pass from poems to plays, in 1599 appeared a fairly complete quarto of Romeo and Juliet. In 1600, As You Like It, Henry V., Much Ado About Noticing, the Second Part of Henry IV., the Midsummer NighVs Dream, and the Merchant of Venice were en- tered in the Stationers' Register, and all of these except As You Like It were published in quarto, — Henry V. without his name ; in the same year appeared anonymously the first extant quarto of Titus Andro- nicus. In 1602, Twelfth Night was acted; the Merry Wives of Windsor was entered and published ; and in the same year were entered the First and Second Parts of Henry VI. and the Revenge of Hamlet. This is believed to be the version which appeared in quarto in 1603 ; the full text of Hamlet appeared in 1604. In 1607 King Lear was entered " as yt was played before the Kinges Majestic at Whitehall uppon St Stephens night at Christmas last." In the following year it appeared in two separate quartos, on the title- pages of which Shakspere's name is printed with very marked conspicuousness. In 1608, too, Pericles and Anthony ^ Cleopatra were entered. In 1609 Troylus ^ Cressida was entered and twice published ; and SHAKSPEKE'S LIFE 17 Pericles, too, twice api)eared in quarto. This was the year, we may remember, in which the Sonnets ap- ))eared. From this time on, althougli a number of the foregoing plays were reprinted during his lifetime, no new work of his is known to have been either entered or printed until after his death ; and the only one which appeared before the folio of 1623 was Othello, entered in 1621, and published in 1622. From these facts it would appear that his popularity as a dramatist was at its height in 1600 ; and that at least his activity diminished after 1609. To pass from his works to his acting, he became, in 1599, a partner in the Globe Theatre, then just erected ; and his company performed at court during Christmas- tide, in 1699, 1600, and 1602. It has been inferred by Mr. Fleay * that their absence from court in 1601 was connected with Essex's rebellion. It is possible that the play concerning Richard II., performed on the eve of that insurrection, was Shakspere's ; if so, the Queen probably had reason to withhold her favor from him and his associates ; but the matter is all conjectural. Queen Elizabeth died on March 24th, 1603. On ]\Iay 19th, King James granted a license to Shakspere and others by name, to perform plays and to be called the King's Players. The company in question gave sev- eral plays at court each year until 1609 ; and in 1604, on the occasion of the King's entry into London, Shakspere, along with the other players, was granted four yards and a half of red cloth. During the years 1 L>fe, 143-1-14 18 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE in question, then, he was professionally at the height of his prosperity. The records of his private afTairs maintain this conclusion. In 1600 he brought an action for £1 against a certain John Clayton, and won it ; in 1602 he bought one hundred and seven acres of land neai* Stratford, as well as other real property in the town •, in 1604 there came another small action, and some large and small purchases of land. The records, in short, show him constantly and punctiliously thrifty ; and as early as the purchase of 1602 he was legally described as " Wm. Shakespere of Stratford-uppon-Avon, gen- tleman." This description occurs a few months after he became the head of his family ; for on September 8th, 1601, the year of the Essex conspiracy, his father was buried. In 1605, his fellow-player, Augustine Piiillips, bequeathed him "a thirty-shilling piece in gold." On June 25th, 1607, Shakspcre's elder daugh- ter, Susanna, then twenty-four years old, was married to Dr. John Hall, a physician of Stratford; on Feb- ruary 21st, 1608, Elizabeth Hall, his grandchild, was baptized. Two months before, his youngest brother, Edmund, " a player," had died in London, and had been buried in S. Saviour's, Southwark. On Septem- ber 9th, 1608, Shakspere's mother was buried at Stratford ; on October 16th, he stood godfather there to one William Walker. These dry facts tell us something. Throughout the period of his professional prosperity he was demonstrably strengthening his position as a local personage at Stratford ; and the SHAKSPERE'S LIFE 19 chances seem to be that he came thither in person more and more. From this time on, what records touch him person- ally show him chiefly at Stratford. In 1611, to be sure, the surprisingly detailed note-book of Dr. Simon Forman mentions performances of Macbeth, Cymheline, and the Winter's Tale. In 1613, along with some older plays, the Tempest was performed at court : in the same year, when the Globe Theatre was burned, the fire started from a discharge of cannon in a play about Henry VIII., which may have been Shakspere's; and certainly in the same year he bought, and mort- gaged, and leased, a house and shop in Blackfriars, London. What attracts one's attention more, however, is his presence in the country. In 1610 he bought more land from the Combes ; in 1611 he subscribed to a fund for prosecuting in Parliament a bill for good roads ; in 1612, described as " William Shackspeare, of Stratford-uppon-Avon, . . gentleman," he joined in a suit of which the object was to diminish his taxes : in 1614 he received a legacy of £5 from his Strat- ford neighbor, John Combe ; in 1614, too, he was deep in a local controversy about the fencing of com- mons. Meanwhile there is said to be no record directly connecting him with theatrical life after 1609, when his publication ceased. In view of this, the last paragraph of the Dedica- tion of John Webster's White Devil ^ is in a way significant : — » Centurie of Pray se, 100. 20 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE ** Detraction is the sworne friend to ignorance: Foi mine owne part I have ever truly cherisht my good opinion of other mens worthy Labours, especially of that full and haightned stile of maister Chapman : The labor'd and understanding workes of niaiste^^ Johnson: The no lesse worth}^ composures of the both worthily excellent Maister Beaumont & Maister Fletcher: And lastly (without wrong last to be named) the right happy and copious in- dustry of M.. Shakespeare, M. Decker, & M. Heyivood, wishing what I write may be read by their light: Pro- testing, that, in the strength of mine owne judgement, I know them so worthy, that though I rest silent in my owne worke, yet to most of theirs I dare (without flattery) fix that of Martiall. — non norunt, Haec monumenta mori." Tills was written in 1612. The first play of Chap- man was published in 1598; the first of Heywood, in 1599 ; the first of Jonson and the first of Dekker in 1600; the first of Beaumont and Fletcher in 1607. Webster, probably a greater man than any of these, speaks of them all, in his first words, as traditional models. He groups Shakspere with them ; and Shakspere had certainly begun his work, as a rival of Greene and Peele and Marlowe, years be- fore any of these others except perhaps Dekker. In 1612 he was already, in a way, a tradition. What little more is recorded of him belongs to the year 1616. On January 25th, his will was pre- pared. On February 10th, his younger daughter, Judith, married Thomas Quiney. On March 25th he signed his will. Just one month later, on April 25th, SHAKSPERE'S LIFE 21 1616, "Will. Shakspere, gent.," was buried in the- church of Stratford. All the rest of the story — how he died on his fifty-second birthday, how undue merry-making had something to do with it, how he made a doggerel epitaph for John Combe, and so on — is mere legend. Every known fact we have before us, except per- haps the fact that the editors of the Centurie of Prayse, who are a shade over-eager, have discovered more than a hundred^ allusions to Shakspere between 1592 and 1616. At first sight, the record seems very meagre. On reflection, though, it tells more of a story than at first seems the case. The son of a country trades- man who was beginning to improve his condition, Shakspere, in early youth, met with family misfor- tune, and made at best an imprudent marriage. Until the age of twenty-three, he was still in these circumstances. At twenty-eight he had established himself as an actor, a dramatist, and a poet in Lon- don. At thirty-two he had begun to help his father, and incidentally the family name of Shakspere, back into local consideration. At thirty-four he was a landed proprietor, a person vvho could be useful to country friends visiting London, and — at least in the opinion of Francis Meres — a first-rate literary figure. Till forty-five he maintained his professional position, constantly strengthening himself as a land- ' lucluding those published iu F>efh Allusions : New Shakspere Society, 1886. / 22 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE holder meanwhile. From forty-five to fifty-two, he was a country gentleman of Stratford. Prosaic enough this looks at first sight ; but, to whoever will sympathetically appreciate the motives which have made Englishmen what Englishmen have been, it is not without its heroic side. We have had cant enough about snobbishness. A true-hearted Eng- lishman always wants to die a gentleman if he can ; and here, in the facts of Shakspere's life, we have the record of an Englishman, who, from a position which might easily have lapsed into peasantry, worked his way, in the end, to one of lasting local dignity. Ill LITERATURE AND THE THEATRE IN ENGLAND UNTIL 1587 [The best popular history of English Literature is still Stopford Brooke's Primer. The best popular work on Elizabethan Literature is Saintsbury's ; the best on the early drama is Addington Symonds's Shakspere's Predecessors. More satisfactory than any of these, as far as it goes, is Frederick Ryland's Chronological Outlines of English Litera- ture. For whoever wishes more thorough treatment of the English stage, Mr. A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature is useful ; and Mr. Fleay's Chronicle History of the London Stage, and Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama are very valuable.] From the facts we have just considered, it is clear that in 1587 Shakspere was still at Stratford ; and that by 1592 he was already so established a dram- atist as to be grouped by Robert Greene with Peele and Marlowe. In the next year, 1593, the publica- tion of Venus and Adonis brings him finally before us as a man of letters. The fact that, in 1587, the Earl of Leicester's players, the company with which he was later associated, paid a professional visit to Stratford, has led some people to surmise that when they returned to London they took him along. What- ever the facts were, we cannot be far wrong in as- suming that the state of English Literature in 1587 fairly represents what Shakspere found, just as the 24 AVJLLIAM SIIAKSPERE state of things in 1612 fairly represents what Shaks- pere left. His literary activity, then, his productive period, we mav assume to be limited to twentv-five years, the last sixteen of the reign of Elizabeth and the first nine of the reign of James I. The state of our dramatic lit- erature during this period, and to a great degree that of English poetry, may be adequately studied, for our purposes, in works generally assigned to him. To ap- preciate these, however, we must first glance at the state of English Literature which immediately pre< cedes them. Putting aside Chaucer, who was already as solitary a survival of a time long past as he is to-day, we may broadly say that during the first twenty-nine years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, English Literature contained and produced hardly anything permanent; a few lyrics, like Wyatt's Forget not Yet, or Lyly's Cupid and Campaspe, still to be found in any standard collection, may be said to comprise the whole literature of that period which has survived. In a traditional way, however, certain writers of the time remain familiar ; without knowing quite what their work is like, people in general have a nebulous idea that the work exists, and at least formerly was of some importance. The earliest of these writers do not strictly belong to the time of Elizal)eth at all. Both Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, who are commonly regarded as the pioneers of our modern literature, died in the reign of Henry VHL Their ENGLISH LITEKATURE UNTIL 1587 25 writings, however, remained chiefly in manuscript until 1557, the year before the accession of Elizabeth. In that year, together with a considerable number of lyrics by other and later men, their songs and sonnets were published in Tottel's MiHcellany. With that pul)- lication, modern English. Literature, we may say, first became accessible to the general public. By that time, as a hasty glance at the Miscellan//, will suffice to show, the mov'ement begun fifteen or twenty years before by Wyatt and Surrey had already progressed considerably. Wyatt was a gen- tleman, an ambassador, a statesman ; Surrey, eldest son of the Duke of Norfolk, was a man of the highest rank and fashion. Wyatt, the elder by fourteen years, was by far the more serious character. The fact that nowadays they are commonly grouped together is due not so much to any close personal relation, as to the accident that their works were first printed in the same volume. It is justified his- torically, however, by the relation which their work bears to what precedes and to what follows. These courtiers, these men whose lives were passed in the most distinguished society of their time, found not only the literature, but even the language, of their native England in a state which, compared with the contemporary French or Italian, may fairly be called barbarous. Each alike did his best to imitate or to reproduce in English the civilized literary forms al- ready prevalent on the Continent. Each, for example, translated sonnets of Petrarch ; each made original 26 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE sonnets after the manner of that master ; and Sur- rey, among other things, was the first to use English blank verse, in a careful, and by no means ineffec- tive, translation of two books of the vEneid. Each, in short, made a considerable number of linguistic and metrical experiments ; and neither seems to have thought of publication. Manuscript copies of their verses were multiplied among their private friends. A fashion was started, until at last the ability to play gracefully with words became almost as essential to the equipment of an Elizabethan gen- tleman as the ability to ride or to fence. As a rule, however, these men of fashion followed the example of Wyatt and Surrey to the end. They im- proved the power and the flexibility of the language surprisingly ; but they did not publish. In 1586, for example. Sir Philip Sidney died ; the Arcadia, the first of his published works, did not appear till 1590. As late as 1598, too, we may remember that, accord- ing to Meres, the " sugred sonnets " of Shakespere, who was by no means a man of rank, followed the fashion in being reserved for his private friends. In 1587, then, one may safely say that for above thirty years a certain graceful poetic culture had been the fashion ; that its chief conscious object — so far as it had any — was to civilize a barbarous language ; that it delighted in oddity and novelty, and that it inclined to disdain publication. There was no want of publication, however. The prose books of Roger Ascham, already rather anti- ENGLISH LITERATURE UNTIL 1587 27 qiiatcd, proved that a scholarly man could write very charmingly in English prose. Aschani was tutor to both Lady Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth. He pub- lished a book on archery, and another on education, which are still pleasant to read ; and he intended to write one on cock-fighting, which might have been more amusing than either of the others. Again, Foxe's great Acts ayicl Monuments, traditionally called the Book of Martyrs, was, from 1563, as generally acces- sible as was the early version of the English Bible. Both of these naturally concerned themselves little with literary form ; Foxe was so grimly in earnest that his views still affect the opinion held by English- speai\ing people concerning the Roman Catholic Church. Incidentally, however, he proved with what tremendous effect the English language might be used for serious narrative. There were increasing numbers of translations from the classics, too, of which the most generally remembered now are prob- ably Golding's Ovid and North's Plutarch. There were popular translations, as well, of less serious foreign literature, of which the most familiar in tra- dition is Faynter's Palace of Pleasure, a collection of tales largely from Boccaccio. These translations, from classic tongues or from foreign, were alike in their object of supplying to a people whose curiosity was awakened material that should for the moment have the charm of novelty. Novelty, too, was what gave a charm hardly yet exhausted to those records of ex- ploration and discovery which are best typified by 28 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Hakluyt's Voyages. By these, also, a sentiment of patriotism was alike stimulated and gratified ; a state of things, which, in a less stimulating form, was repro- duced by such historical chronicles as those of Stowe and of Holinshed. Decidedly the most notable publication for the moment, however, was one which in its day was the most popular book in English, and which was subse- quently so completely neglected that for a century or more it was hardly known to be in existence. This was John Lyly's Uuphues, first published in 1579, and four times republished within six years. In 1587, accordingly, its popularity had hardly begun to wane. Professedly a novel, this book has no plot to speak of, and does not pretend to develop character, or either fantastically or plausibly to describe any real or imagi- nary state of life. It does pretend to be aphoristic ; but the aphorisms it formulates are blamelessly ob- vious throughout. In none of the generally essential traits of popular fiction, then, does Euphues show a trace of such excellence as should account for its popularity. The secret of this is to be sought wholly in its formal style. This style, which is said by mod- ern critics to be closely imitated from the Spanish, is probably the most elaborately, fantastically, obvi- ously affected in the English language. To any mod- ern reader, in spite of a certain prettiness of phrase and rhythm, it is persistently and emptily tedious ; to the Elizabethan public, on the other hand, it was clearly, for a good while, completely fascinating. It ENGLISH LITERATURE UNTIL 15b7 29 not only set a formal fashion of expression which was palpable for years in English prose, and is said greatly to have iniiucnced actual conversation ; it gave our language the word "euphuism," which re- mains to this day a generic term for saccharine liter- ary affectation. When what seems mere affectation has such marked effect, it becomes historically im- portant; to understand the period to which it ap- pealed, we must make ourselves somehow feel its charm. In the case of Euphues this is not an easy task : actually to feel its charm is almost impossible. To appreciate wherein its old charm lay, however, is not so hard as at first one fears ; from beginning to end, the book phrases everything — no matter how simple — in the most elaborately unexpected way that Lyly, who was perhaps the most ingenious writer known to English literature, could devise. The only kind of taste to which its far-fetched allusions, its thin juvenile pedantry, its elaborate circumlocutions, its endless balance and alliteration, can appeal is a taste which incessantly craves verbal novelty. Were there no other proof than the popularity of Euphues affords, there would be proof enough that, in 1587, the one thing which the literary and fashionable public of England most admired was a new, palpably clever turn of phrase. If further proof were demanded, however, the next piece of evidence might be Spenser's Shephenrs Cal- endar, and his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey concerning English versifying. These two works, b'O WILLIAM SHAKSPERE exactly contemporary with Uuphues, were almost all that Spenser had as yet published. Not a line of the Faerie Queene, or of the Amoretti, or of the lesser verse by which he is now known, was as yet before the public ; nor was there yet in print a line of either Bacon, Marlowe, Sidney, Drayton, Ralegh, Daniel, Chapman, Hooker, Dekker, Middleton, Hey- wood, or Ben Jonson. Elizabethan Literature, as we now understand the term, was still a thing of the future. To sum up this necessarily hasty review : in 1587, English Literature, which was between forty and fifty years old, consisted in the first place of increas- ingly successful efforts to reduce to literary form a hitherto barbarous language, and in the second, of such technical feats of skill with this new vehicle of expression as were bound by ingenious novelty to please both cultivated and popular fancy. Besides these, to be sure, it contained a fair amount of pass- able translation from classical and foreign authors, and an increasing amount of sometimes dry and sometimes vigorously effective narrative, generally historical. In a word, the curiosity of England was aroused ; whatever, in substance or in form, satisfied curiosity was welcome ; and among the more fashion- able classes this passion for curious novelty took the form of inexhaustible appetite for verbal ingenuity. So much for what was then recognized as litera- ture, — what was circulated in manuscript among people of fashion, and what found its way, either THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 31 directly or surreptitiously, into print. Along with this there was beginning to flourish a distinct school of literature which as yet had hardly been recognized as such. This was the theatre. From time irame« morial something like a popular drama had flourished in England. The earliest form in which we know it is the Miracle Plays, which were popular dramatic presentations, often in startlingly contemporary terms, of Scriptural stories, originally produced by the clergy, and always more or less under church supervision. These were followed by what are called " Moralities," where actors personifying various virtues and vices would go through some very simple dra- matic action, usually enlivened by the pranks of " Iniquity " or some other Vice.^ Then came similar productions, called " Interludes," which differed from the Moralities only in pretending to deal with less abstract personages. The Miracle Plays, which persisted at least well into the Sixteenth Century, were generally performed on large portable stages, wheeled through the streets like the " floats " in a modern procession ; the actors were generally the members of the local guilds, each one of which would traditionally have in charge its own part of the Scrip- ture story and its own travelling stage. The Mo- ralities and Interludes, on the other hand, which * These old Moralities act better than you would suppose. One given verbatim not long ago, though acted by amateurs who were all friends of the audience, had enough dramatic force to hold attention like a good modern play. '32 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE required hardly any stage setting, might be played anywhere — in an inn-yard, in a gentleman's hall, in some open square. While sometimes performed by such occasional actors as always kept charge of the Miracle Plays, the Moralities and Interludes tended to fall into the hands of strolling players and such other half-artistic vagrants as are sure to exist anywhere. The mountebanks whom one may still see here and there, at country fairs or in the train of quack doctors, preserve, with little change, the aspect of things in which the English drama grew. When the classical scholarship of the Renaissance began to declare itself in England, it attempted, as in other countries, to revive something resembling the Roman stage. In Ralph Roister Doister and in G-ammer Giirton^s Needle we have examples of efforts, at once human and scholarly, to civilize the English theatre. In Gorboduc, the first English work In which blank verse is used for dramatic purposes, we have a conscientious effort, on the part of schol- arly people, to produce in English a tragedy which should emulate what were then deemed the divine excellences of Seneca. These efforts, essentially similar to those which until the present century con- trolled the development of the theatre in France, were very pleasing to the learned few ; witness the familiar passage aljout the theatre in Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy. On the other hand, there is little evidence that they ever appealed much to the popular fancy, which certainly persisted in THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 33 enjoying the wholly unscholarly traditions of Mir- acles, Moralities, and Interludes. These permitted in matters theatrical a range of conventional freedom, — a serene disregard of limitations either of time or of place, a bold mixture of high matters and low, serious and comic, spiritual and obscene, — which, to any cultivated taste, was quite as barbarous as were the lintjuistic and metrical crudities reduced to formal civilization by the literary successors of Wyatt and Surrey. For a while it looked as if the theatre of the people would permanently separate itself from aH serious literary tradition. /^ At least from 1576, however, there were regular theatres in London. To a modern mind, though, that very term is misleading. An Elizabethan theatre, a structure adapted to conventions which had arisen among strolling players, was very unlike a theatre of the present day. At least the pit was open to the sky; there was no scenery in the modern sense of the word ; there was no proscenium, no curtain ; and the more fashionable part of the audience sat in chairs on either side of the stage, smoking pipes after tobacco came into fashion, eating fruit, and, if they saw fit, making game of the performance. Tlie actors, meanwhile, invariably male, — for no woman appeared on the English stage until after the Resto- ration, — appeared with what dignity they could be- tween these two groups of spectators ; and whatever the period of the play they were performing, — clas- ^sical, mediaeval, or contemporary, — they always wore 3 34 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE gorgeous clothes of recent fashion, perhaps discarded court finery bought second-hand, and the like. Al- together, the nearest modern approach to the stage conditions of an Elizabethan theatre is to be found in those of the Chinese theatres which may some- times be discovered in the Chinese quarters of American cities. It was for such a stage as this that all the plays of Shakspere were written. Decidedly before 1587, however, this unpromising place had begun to produce plays still of some in- terest, at least historically. Three names of that period are remembered in all histories of English Literature, — the names of Robert Greene, George Peele, and Christopher Marlowe. These men, all under thirty years of age, had all been educated at one of the universities, and were all black sheep. Greene, for example, is known to have deserted his wife, and to have lived with a woman named Ball, whose brother was hanged at Tyburn ; Peele, whether rightly or wrongly, was, almost in his own time, made the hero of a crudely obscene jest-book ; Marlowe was killed at the age of twenty-nine, in a tavern brawl. Yet, by 1587, all three of these men had produced plays of which any reader of Shakspere may form an idea by glancing at Henry VI., Richard III., and Richard II. There is much argument among critics as to whether a considerable part of Henry VI. may not actually have been written by one or more of the three, and as to whether Richard III be not rather Marlowe's work than Shakspere's ; while Richard 11., THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 35 though generally admitted to be Shakspere's own, is undoubtedly written in Marlowe's manner. All three of these men combined good education with graceless lives and active wits. Historically they mark a fusion between the traditions of culture and those of the popular theatre. Far removed as their work is from the pseudo-classic tendency so much admired by Sidney, it is just as far removed from the crudely popular Interludes and Moralities ; and in technical style — in freedom and fluency of verse — it is much better than anything before it. Some of Greene's lyrics are thoroughly good ; at least in David and Bethsabe, Peele's work shows signs of lasting dra- matic merit ; ^ while Marlowe not only made blank verse the permanent vehicle of English tragedy, but actually expressed in dramatic form a profound sense of tragic fact. Tamburlaine, to be sure, the first of Marlowe's tragedies, is assigned to this very year, 1587 ; and is commonly spoken of as if chiefly remarkable for its use of blank verse, finally delivering the stage " from jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits," and for such indubitably bombastic passages as " Holla ! ye pam- per'd jades of Asia ! " ^ In point of fact, however, it is still more notable for real power. This shows itself clearly in occasional passages, like the famous one on beauty : ^ — ^ See particularly the notable scene of the drunken loyal Urias and the perfidious David. 3 Part I. Act IV. sc. iii. a i>art I. Act V. so, ii. 36 WILLIAM SIIAKSPERE " If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And every sweetness that inspir'd their hearts, Their minds, and muses on admired themes ; If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit ; If these had made one poem's period. And all combin'd in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest." Still more clearly, however, the lasting power of Marlowe shows itself in his whole conception even of Tamhurlahu. If we will but accept the conventions, and forget them ; if we will admit the monotony of end-stopped lines and the sonorous bombast which delighted the crude lyric appetite of early Elizabethan playgoers ; if we will only ask ourselves what all this was meant to express, we shall find in Tamhurlaine itself a profound, lasting, noble sense of the great human truth reiterated by the three later plays ^ which Marlowe has left us. Like these, Tamhurlaine expresses, in grandly symbolic terms, the eternal tragedy inherent in the conflict between human aspira- tion and human power. No poet ever felt this more genuinely than Marlowe ; none ever expressed it more firmly or more constantly. By 1587, then, the English stage had already become the seat not only of very animated play-writing, and of charming lyric verse, 1 Dr. Faustus, the Jew of Malt n, and Edward II. THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 37 but actually, though unobserved, of noble philosophic poetry. It is with these men, and other men like them, that Shakspere is grouped by Robert Greene in the Groats- u'orth of Wit, which we remember belongs to 1592, Perhaps even more than tlieirs, however, the dramatic work of John Lyly marks the permanent divergence of English taste from the pseudo-classic principles commended by Sidney. Lyly's Uuphues, as we have seen, was in its day the most popular book in the English language. It appeared in 1579 ; the next year appeared its sequel, Euphues and his England. Like the play-writing roysterers at whom we have just glanced, Lyly was a university man ; unlike them, he seems to have had a strong tendency to respect- able life. For some ten years after the success of Euphues there is evidence that he hung about the court, seeking office or some such advancement ; and during these ten years, his literary work took a dramatic form. Written rather for court pag- eants, or for performance by choir-boys, than for the popular stage, Lyly's plays seem nowadays thin and amateurish ; they quite lack the robust, unconscious carelessness of the regular Elizabethan theatre. Like EiiphueSjhowevev, they are distinctly things of fashion ; as such, they prove that, in theatrical affairs as well as in popular, fashionable taste had taken a definitely romantic turn. While Lyly threw classic form to the winds, caring as little for the unities as the wildest scribbler of Moralities, a thousand allusions and 38 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE turns of thought and phrase prove that he had read pretty deep in the classics, and read for fun. He was romantic in form, then, not for want of knowing better, but as a matter of deliberate taste or policy. As such, too, he was not only persistently euphuistic in style, but he was also constantly experimental in matters of mere stage-business. In his comedies, for example, one finds, for the first time in English, such fan- tastically ingenious plays on words and repartee as nowadays, reaching their acme in Much Ado About Nothing, are commonly thought peculiar to Shakspere. Again, perhaps influenced by the fact that all his players were male, and consequently ill at ease in skirts, he first introduced on the English stage the device so repeatedly used by Shakspere of disguis- ing his heroine as a man. Throughout, in short, with frankly persistent ingenuity, these light, grace- ful, fantastic plays of Lyly's appeal, like the style of JSuphues, to a taste which delights above all else in clever, apparently civilized novelty. Such, in general, was the state of the English stage in 1587. Committed to the still untrammelled freedom of romantic form, it displayed in its fashion- able aspect and in its popular alike every evidence of appealing to an insatiable taste for novelty. The very simplicity of its material conditions, however, combined with the prevalent literary taste of the time to make the actual novelties it offered to its public principally ver- bal. With none of the modern distractions of scenery or of realistic costume, with hardly any mechanical help THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 39 to the temporary illusion which must always be dear to a theatre-going heart, an Elizabethan audience found its attention centred, to a degree now hardly imaginable, on the actual words of the play. While certain con- ventional kinds of drama, then, which may be discussed best in connection with the actual works of Shakspere, were beginning to define themselves, all had in com- mon the trait of a constantly ingenious, experimental phrasing, to be appreciated nowadays only when you can force yourself into the mood of an every-day theatre-goer who should enjoy a new turn of language as heartily as a modern playgoer would enjoy a new popular tune. What now appeals to us in Marlowe's Tamhurlaine is the profound tragic feeling which underlies it ; in its own day what made it popular was the ranting sonorousness of its verse. In all but purely lyric style, clearly enough, the taste of 1587 was still rather childishly crude. With lyric verse the case was different. The fashion of verbal experiment, which had persisted since the time of Wyatt, combined with the thin melody of contemporary music not only to make words do much of the essentially musical work of which modern song- writers are relieved by our enormous musical develop- ment, but also to develop the positive lyric power of the language to a degree which has never been sur- passed. Wyatt himself, we have seen, wrote Forget not Yet; John Lyly wrote Cupid and Campaspe. What delights one in these, and in the hundreds of songs for which wc must here let them be typical, is 40 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE not that they mean much, but that, with indefinable subtlety, they are so exquisitely musical. To such effects as theirs the public of 1587 was sensitive to a degree now hard to imagine ; the purity of a sense of beautv new to a whole nation had not yet been cor- rupted. By 1587, then, the Elizabethan lyric was almost at its best. Fantastic as the statement seems, though, it is probably true that the ultimate secret of lyric beauty — the only permanent effect which Eliza- bethan literature had as yet achieved — is identical with that which made Eupliues so popular. The lyric poet is technically the most ingenious conceiv- able juggler with words. For all their common verbal ingenuity, however, and their common, eager endeavor to carry out the work begun by Wyatt and lastingly to civilize what had seemed a wildly barbarous language, the pure men of letters, for whom Sidney and Lyly may stand representative, differed very widely in private consider- ation from the men of the theatre, such as Greene, or Peele, or Marlowe. As a class the former were respect- able or better ; as a class the latter were disreputable. For the moment fashion favored polite literary effort to a degree unusual in human history ; the theatre, meanwhile, was what the theatre always has been everywhere, — the centre not only of artistic activity, but also of organized vice. We touch here on a delicate matter, which of late it has been the fashion to ignore. By rather deliber- ately ignoring it, however, most modern critics have THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 4J failed to make clear the actual circumstances in which Shakspere found himself when he came to London, Beyond doubt there were good and sturdy men con- nected with the Elizabethan stage, just as good and sturdy people may always be found among stage-folk everywhere. Beyond doubt, the remaining fragments of Elizabethan dramatic writing, even if we throw out of our consideration the works of Shakspere, comprise much, indeed most, of the noblest poetry of their time. Equally beycmd doubt, however, the Elizabethan theatre of 1587 was not a socially respectable place, and Elizabethan theatrical people — the Bohemians of a society where there was no alternative between formal res[)ectability and the full license of profes- sional crime — were very low company. As early as 1579, one Stephen Gosson, then an ardent Puritan, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney an attack on the immorality of poetry and of the stage, under the apt title, the School of Abuse. Sidney, who had not authorized the dedication, evinced his dis- pleasure by coming to the rescue with his Defence oj Poesy. Gosson was certainly scurrilous, and modern critics have usually confmed themselves to this aspect of his work, which they attribute to the fact that he himself had once been little better than one of the wicked ; it is said that he had unsuccessfully tried to write plays. Sidney's Defence remains a beautiful, ele- vated piece of English prose, full of a peculiar quality which faintly suggests what the charm of Sidney's actual personality must have been. For all this, 42 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE however, for all the snarling vulgarity of Gosson and the noble amenity of Sidney, there is an aspect in which Gosson rather than Sidney is in the right. Wherever an organized theatre develops itself, one is sure to find along with this centre of more or less serious art an equally organized centre of moral cor- ruption. Without the Elizabethan theatre, to be sure, we could never have had Shakspere ; yet the very forces which produced Shakspere were producing at the same time a growing state of social degradation. To our minds, at a distance of three hundred years, the Elizabethan theatre seems chiefly the source from which has come to us a noble school of poetry. To Elizabethan Puritans, to the very men whose blood still runs in the veins of New England, the Elizabethan poets were the panders who kept full those schools of vice, the play-houses. Nor can all the patronizing amenity of Sir Philip Sidney, blinding himself like other apologists to what he did not choose to see, blind us to the fact that the evils which Gosson so hatefully attacked were real, lasting, and bound to be the price which any society must pay for the enjoyment of a professional stage. In Gosson's time, too, this state of things affected the personal life of theatrical people rather more than usual. They were then just emerging from the condition of strolling players. None of them were yet rich enough to emerge, as Shakspere emerged thirty years later, into a solidly respectable social station. We have seen what sort of life Greene THE THEATRE UNTIL 1587 43 lived, and Peele, and Marlowe. Greene, like Marlowe, died in a public-house, of which the hostess is said t(- have crowned his body with a laurel wreath. Rol licking, reckless, wicked these old playwrights were., for all the beauty of their verse, all the nobility oi their perceptions. They had their public with them, to be sure ; if their plays succeeded, they might prob- ably be better paid than any other men of their time who had only their wits to live by. Once paid, however, they would do little better than riot away their earnings in London taverns. In view of this, a very familiar part of Shakspere's writing seems freshly significant. It was in 1596, we may remember, that John Shakspere, for the first time described as " gentleman," applied for arms ; and in 1597 that Shakspere himself, by the purchase of New Place, first became a landed proprietor. To the latter of these years, at latest, we must attribute the first part of Henry IV., which was entered in the Stationers' Register on February 25th, 1597-98. In Henry IV. occur those vivid scenes concerning Fal- staff and his crew on which our actual knowledge of Elizabethan tavern-life is chiefly based. It was in such a tavern as makes classic the name of Eastcheap that Marlowe met his end ; in just such a place that Greene lived with the sister of Cutting Ball, hanged at Tyburn ; in such a place, too, must have been cracked the bawdy jokes of George Peele. It seems hardly unreasonable, then, to guess that Shakspere's wonderful picture of the cradle of the Elizabethan drama may have been 44 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE made at the moment wlien prosperity at length allowed him to emerge into a more decent way of life. How ever this may be, there can be no doubt that, in 1587, any professional actor must perforce have found him- self in such environment as surrounded Falstaff and Gadshill, and Peto, and Bardolph, and Mistress Quickly. To sum up this cursory view of the state of English Literature and the English stage at the moment when Shakspere's professional life began : Formal Eng- lish Literature, which had begun with the work of Wyatt, had accomplished only three things, all rather slight : it had reduced a barbarous language to something like a civilized form ; it had supplied the newly awakened national curiosity with a good deal of compendious information ; and it had at once stimulated and gratified an excessive appetite for verbal ingenuity, which delighted in the affectations of euphuism, and at the same time relished lyric verse of lasting beauty. Meanwhile, this kind of thing, though highly fashionable, did not pay particu- larly well ; to all appearances not even John Lyly made any money to speak of. The theatre, on the other hand, had developed the popular trifles of stroll- ing players into a fairly established and tolerably lucrative kind of drama, whose vigorously romantic tendency was much to the taste of fashionable and popular audiences alike. In the hands of Marlowe, this drama had already at least once been the vehicle of profound tragic feeling ; yet Marlowe himself was THE TFIEATRE UNTIL 1587 45 popular, not as a great tragic poet, but as a daring verbal and formal innovator. The stage and litera- ture alike, then, were chiefly notable for eager, experi- mental pursuit of novelty. They differed chiefly in the fact that while literature, though respectable, was merely fantastic, the stage, though increasingly human, was very disreputable indeed. Among works attributed to Shakspere, there are several which, genuine or not, are certainly character- istic rather of the period than of the man. In the beginning of what purports to be our study of Shaks- pere himself, then, we shall find ourselves in some degree continuing our study of his time. There, rather than here, seems the best place to consider such phases of literature as appear in his poems, and in the various kinds of drama — comedy, tragedy, and history — which had begun to define themselves on the stage. All we need now remember is that, at the age of twenty three or four, Shakspere found himself, with all his work still to do, in the environment at which we have just glanced. As we study the devel- opment of his work, we shall incidentally glance, too, at certain changes in theatrical conditions. What our study should begin with is simply this environ- ment with which he began. Of the temperament of the man whose active life began under these circumstances we have no record, beyond what we may infer from his work. One very familiar passage in his later writing, however, when taken in connection with a familiar piece of contem- 46 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE porary gossip, seems at least suggestive of the possi- bilities which lay within him. The bit of gossip is a random note preserved in the diary of one John Man- ningham, Barrister-at-Law of the Middle Temple, and of Bradbourne, Kent. Writing in 1602 or 1603, with no more authority than one " Mr. Curie," he tells a story which very possibly is apocryphal, but which certainly indicates in what manner of estimation Shakspere was held after he had been fifteen years at work : ^ — *'Upon a tyme wlieu Burbidge played Kich. 3 there was a Citizen gaene soe farr in liking with him, -that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night unto hir by the name of Ri : the 3. Shakespeare overhearing their conclusion went before, was intertained, and at his game ere Burbedge came. Then message being brought that Bich. the 3** was at the dore', Shakespeare caused returne to be made that William the Conquerour was before Rich, the 3. Sbakespere's name William." The familiar passage from Shakspere's own writ- ing is the 111th sonnet, which was certainly written within a few years of the same date. It gives at least a plausible inner glimpse of a life whose outward aspect might have justified Manningham's gossip : — *' 0, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. 1 Centurie of Prayse, 45. TIIH TIIKATRE UNTIL 1587 47 Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like a dyer's hand: Pity me then, and wish I were renew'd; Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink Potions of eisen 'gainst my strong infection; No bitterness that I will bitter think, Nor double penance, to correct correction. Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye Even that your pity is enough to cure me." ^ Vinegar. IV THE WORKS OF SHAKSPERE From now forth, we shall devote our attention chiefly to the works of Shakspere, in which we shall endeavor constantly to find traces of his artistic individuality. Though, like any technical term of criticism, the phrase sound canting, it has a real meaning. Any artist, in whatever art, whose work deserves serious attention, must either perceive or express the matters with which he deals — or better still both perceive and express them — in a way pecu- liar to himself. The artist's work need not be auto- biographic ; everybody knows, for example, that a most erratic man may write noble poetry, or an estimable young girl produce a novel which shocks her mother. Any work of art, however, must express something which the artist, either in experience or by imagina- tive sympathy, has perceived or known. If in the work of any artist, then, we succeed in defining traits not perceptible in that of others, we succeed, so far as these go, in defining his artistic individuality. The generally accepted works of Shakspere con- sist of two rather long poems, a few short ones not distinguishable from his other lyrics, a collection of sonnets, and thirty-seven five-act plays, if we count THE WORKS OF SHAKSPERE 49 separately the two parts of Henry IV. and the three of Henry VI. These works we shall generally con- sider in what appears to be their chronological order. Partly because the two long poems were undoubtedly his first publications, however, and partly because they are by far the most careful work of his earlier period, — and so the most seriously and consciously expressive, — we shall consider them first. The plays we shall try to arrange in their original order, placing the Sonnets, where they probably belong, in the midst of the dramatic work. In reading this dramatic work, we must never allow ourselves to forget that it is not, like the poems and the sonnets, pure literature, addressed primarily to readers. From beginning to end it was written for an actual stage, at the general condition of which we have already glanced. So far, then, as we try to find the plays expressive of the artistic individ- uality of Shakspere, we must keep in mind that they are not mere writings, but texts intended to be recited by professional actors, under conditions long since obsolete, to popular audiences. Incidentally, then, while studying the work of Shakspere we must find ourselves continually studying the conditions and the development of the Elizabethan stage. For this reason, our first glance at this stage could properly be hasty. As we shall find when we ex- amine the first plays attributed to Shakspere, if not certainly his own, this stage had already begun to develop certain definite kinds of drama, tragic, his- 60 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE toric, and comic. In a way, then, it is a fortunate chance that what seem beyond doubt the earliest of the plays are thought by many critics not to be genuine. From an uncertainty full of historical suggestion, and beyond question full of information concerning his artistic environment when his work began, we can proceed to certainties among which our earlier doubts may help us to define the traits which make Shakspere artistically individual. For our purposes, we may conceive his complete work as grouping itself in four parts. The first in- cludes his poems and the plays from Titus Andronicus to the Two Grentlemen of Verona ; the second includes the plays from the Midsummer Night's Dream to Twelfth Night; between this and the third, as in some degree contemporaneous with both, we shall consider the Sonnets; after them we shall consider the third group of plays, from Julius Ccesar to Corio- lanus ; Timon of Athens, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, as transitional and peculiar, we shall glance at by themselves ; and finally we shall consider the fourth group of plays, from Cymheline to Henry VUL VENUS AND ADONIS, AND THE RAPE OF LUCRECE [Venus and Adonis was entered in the Stationers' Register on April iSth, 1593, by Richard Field, a publisher, who originally came from Stratford. It was puhlished in the same year, with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton, signed " William Shakespeare." In this dedication, of which the terms suggest very slight acquaintance be- tween poet and patron, occurs the familiar passage, " But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a god-father, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest." The poem seems to have been popular. Seven editions were pulilished during Shakspere's life-time, and more than twenty allusions to it before 1616 have been discovered. Its source, to which it does not closely adhere, was probably Golding's translation of Ovid, published in 1567. Concerning its date, we can assert only that it was finished, in its present form, by 1593. The Rape of Lucrece was entered in the Stationers' Register on May 9th, 1594. It was published in the same year, by Richard Field, with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton, from the terms of which it has been inferred that since the publication of Venus and Adonis the poet had had personal intercourse with his patron : " The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end ; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance." Prefixed to the poem is an " Argu- ment," the only known example of Shakspere's non-dramatic prose. Five editions were published before 1616, and the Centurie of Prayse cites fourteen allusions to it meanwhile. Its precise source is not known ; the story, at the time very familiar, occurs in Paynter's Palace of Pleasure. Concerning its date, we can assert only that it seems distinctly to have been subsequent to Venus and Adonis, and that it was finished, in its present form, by 1594.] For our purposes, these two poems may be grouped together. Venus and Adonis, in its own day some- 52 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE what the more popular, still seems the more notable ; in certain aspects the merits of Lucrece are un- doubtedly more respectable. Together, however, these two poems, so nearly of the same period, rep- resent a kind of Elizabethan Literature on which we have not as yet touched ; together they reveal the same sort of artistic mood and power. In dis- cussing them, then, we need not carefully separate them ; and if most of our attention be centred on Venus and Adonis, we may safely assume that what we find true of that is in general terms true also of Lucrece. From what we have already seen of Elizabethan Literature, we have assured ourselves that, at the time when these poems were written, polite literature was highly fashionable, and the stage in doubtful repute. From the recorded facts of Shakspere's life we ven- tured to make some guesses concerning his tempera- ment which might lead us to suppose that, at any given moment, his serious interest would centre in reputable things. It seems reasonable, then, to infer that these poems, in all respects far more careful than his early dramatic writings, represent the kind of thing to which, at least for the moment, he would have preferred to devote himself. If so, he would probably have thought this purely literary work far more important than his better paid, but less elaborate, work for the stage. The kind of pure literature represented by these poems is akin to what we have already considered. VENUS AXD ADONIS, AND LLXRECE 5# From the time of Wyatt and Surrey forward, fashion- able literature had shown the influence of the Re- naissance in two ways. In the first place, starting with Wyatt's sonnets, it had constantly, and with increasing success, tried to imitate and to domesti- cate the formal graces of foreign culture. In the second place, starting perhaps with Surrey's trans- lation of the JEneid, it had tried to inspire itself with the spirit of the classics, — for the moment as fresh to people who cared for literature as to-day, after three centuries of pedantry and editing, they seem stale, — and to reproduce in the native language of England something resembling their effect. To this latter tendency we owe such literature as the poems of Shakspere exemplify. What they attempt is simply to tell, in new and excellent phrase, stories which have survived from classical antiquity. In this respect, as well as in some others, they have many points of likeness to much Italian paint- ing of the preceding century. In each case, the artist — poet or painter — turned to the revived classics with a full appetite for pagan enjoyment ; in each, he endeavored to tell in rich contemporary terms the stories he found there ; in each, the phase of classical literature which appealed to his taste was chiefly the decadent literature of Rome. At first, it would seem as if the great popularity of Ovid were due half to his erotic license, and half to the fact that he wrote easy Latin. On further consideration, the question looks less simple. The liking of Renascent Europe ,54 A\aLLIAM SHAKSPERE for the later classics is very similar to the liking of our grandfathers for the Apollo Belvedere and the Venus de' Medici, for Guido Reni and Carlo Dolce. Freshly awakened artistic perception is apt to prefer the graces of some past decadence to the simple, pure beauty of really great periods. Such final culture as can separate good from bad, cleaving only to what is best, is the fruit of prolonged critical earnest- ness. What these poems of Shakspere, and the others of their kind, first evince, then, is a state of culture alive to the delights of past civilization, but too young to be soundly critical. Choosing their subjects, accordingly, not from the grander myths of Greece, but from the later ones of Rome, the Elizabethan narrators of classic story pro- ceeded to treat them in a spirit very different from what generally prevails nowadays. A contemporary of our own who should choose to relate anew some familiar classic tradition would be apt to infuse into it, if he could, some new significance, somewhat as Goethe infused permanent philosophic meaning into the mediaeval legend of Faust. The object of the Elizabethan narrative poet, on the other hand, like that of the Italian painters, was simply to tell the story as effectively as he could. He bothered himself little about what it might signify ; he permitted him- self the utmost freedom of phrase and accessory ; as a rule, he never thought of employing any but contem- porary terms. Like his own stage, he dressed his characters in the actual fashions of his own day ; if VENUS AND ADONIS, AND LUCRECE 55 he made them splendid and attractive, he had done his work. "What originality he might show was al' most wholly a matter of phrase. His plot he frankly borrowed ; his style was his own, and the more ingen- iously novel he could make it, the better. Like the other writers of the early Elizabethan period, he proves ultimately to have been an enthusiastic verbal juggler. To understand Shakspere's poems, then, we must train ourselves to consider them as, in all probability, little else than elaborate feats of phrase-making. This does not mean that they are necessarily empty. A line or two from Lucrece, chosen quite at random, will serve to illustrate the real state of things : — " For men have marble, women waxen, minds, ^ And therefore are they Ibrm'd as marble will." ^ ^ Here is clearly a general truth about human nature, expressed with considerable felicity ; and that is the aspect in which any modern reader would consider it. Here too, though, and equally plainly, is an allitera- tive, euphuistic antithesis between the hardness of marble and the softness of wax, resulting in a meta- phor probably fresher three hundred years ago than it seems to day, but even then far-fetched ; and that is the aspect in which the Elizabethan reader would have been apt to see it. What he would have relished is the subtle alliteration on m and w, the obvious anti- thesis, and the slight remoteness of the metaphor ; so 1 Lucrece, 1240. 56 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE far as he was concerned, the fact that the lines com- pactly express a general truth would have seemed, if meritorious at all, only incidentally so. We touch here on a state of things now rarely understood ; it is more than probable that the lasting felicity of much Elizabethan poetry, and so of Shakspere's own, is largely accidental. Words and ideas are not easily extricable ; whoever plays with either is sure to do something with the other. Nowadays it is the fashion to disdain verbal ingenuity, to look always rather at the thought than at the phrase ; in Shakspere's time this state of things was completely reversed. As surely as our own thinkers sometimes blunder upon phrases, though, the Elizabethan phrase-makers — by Shakspere's time far more skilful in their art than our modern thinkers in their cogitations — oftener and oftener managed incidentally to say something final. In deciding that the poems of Shakspere show him to be chiefly an enthusiastic, careful maker of phrases, and so incidentally of aphorisms, we declare him to have been, in temper and in method, Elizabethan ; we do not individualize him. Our object throughout this study, however, is if possible to see him as an indi- vidual. To do this we may best compare his work with other work of the same period. The comparison is obviously at hand. In 1593, the year when Venus and Adonis appeared, Marlowe was killed. He left unfinished a poem called Hero and Leander, subse- quently concluded by Chapman. By comparing Mar- lowe's poem with the poems of Shakspere, we may VENUS AND ADONIS, AND LUCRECE 57 get some notion of Shakspere's literary individuality. What we have seen so far is true not only of Shaks- pere, but of Marlowe too, and generally of their con- temporaries ; what we shall try to see now is sometl^ng more definite. The effect of Marlowe's Hero and Leander is very distinct. Frankly erotic in motive, thoroughly sen- suous in both conception and phrase, it never seems corrupt. Beyond doubt it is a nudity ; but it is among the few nudities in English Literature which one groups instinctively with the grand, unconscious nudi- ties of painting or sculpture. Conscienceless it seems, impulsive, full of half -fantastic but constant imagina- tion, unthinkingly pagan, — above all else, in its own way normal. One accepts it, one delights in it, one does not forget it, and one is not a bit the worse for the memory, in thought or in conduct. Equally distinct is the effect of Venus and Adonis, whose motive resembles that of Hero and Leander enough to make it the better of Shakspere's poems for this comparison. No more erotic, rather less eensuous in both conception and phrase, it some- how seems, for all its many graver passages, more impure. It is such a nudity as suggests rather the painting of modern Paris than that of Titian's A^'enice. It is not conscienceless, not swiftly impulsive, not quite pagan, — above all, not quite normal. If one think only of its detail, it is sometimes altogether delightful and admirable ; if one think of it as a whole, — particularly at austere moments, — one be- 58 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE gins to wonder whether an ideal Shakspere, in maturer life, ought not to have been a bit ashamed of it. Surely, one feels, the man who wrote this knew per- fectly well the difference between good and evil, and did not write accordingly. It is hard to realize that such a contrast of lit- erary effect must come largely from differences in style ; yet obviously this is the fact. One chief dis- tinction between Marlowe's poem and Shakspere's is clearly that in the one case a number of words were chosen and put together by one man, and in the other by another. The cause of their notable differences, then, may confidently be sought in specific comparison of detail ; if we can discover this cause we shall have discovered something which clearly distinguishes Shakspere from Marlowe, and so helps us toward a notion of his individuality. The first lines of Venus and Adonis describe sunrise : — " Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek'd Aflonis hied him to the chase; Hunting he l»ved, but l»ve he laugh'd te scern." In Hero and Leander there is a similar description of the same time of day ^ : — " Now had the Morn espied her lover's steeds ; Whereat she starts, puts on her purple weeds, And, red for anger that he stay'd so long, All headlong throws herself the clouds among." ^ Second Sestiad. VENUS AND ADONIS, AND LUCRECE 59 In both descriptions there is conventional mytho- logical allusion, in both the figurative language refers to the purple hue often perceptible at dawn ; yet de- spite this similarity, the difference of effect is almost as marked as that of the poems they come from. This difference is not all due to the greater compact- ness of Shakspere, who tells in two lines as much as Marlowe tells in four ; it is due stl^^ore to the fact that of Shakspere's four lincs^^^Bit the second might, in real life, be literall}^^^Pf while all four lines of Marlowe deal with pure mythological fancy. The contrast thus indicated persists throughout. Here is Marlowe's description of Hero's costume : ^ " The outside of her garments were of lawn, The lining, purple silk, with gilt stars drawn; Her wide sleeves green, and border'd with a grove Where Venus in her naked glory strove To please the careless and disdainful eyes 01" proud Adonis, that before her lies ; Her kirtJe blue, whereon was many a stain, Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain. Upon her head she ware a myrtle wreath. From whence her veil reach'd to the ground beneath : Her veil was artificial flowers and leaves. Whose workmanship both man and beast deceives." Compare with this Shakspere's description of the horse of Adonis "^ — in Shakspere's poem, we may remember, no one is quite so thoroughly clothed as Hero : — * First Sestiad. * Line 295 seq. 60 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE "Round-hoofd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long, Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide, High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong, Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide: Look, what a horse should have he did not lack, Save a proud rider on so proud a back." Again, compare the similes and the action and the generalizations in the passages which follow. Here is Marlowe's desci^Jjj^j^of the first meeting of Hero and Leander : — ii^^jj^i o: oii^Wer " It lies not in ou^pWer to love or hate, For will in us is over-rul'd by fate. When two are stript, long ere the course begin, We wish that one should lose, the other win ; And one especially do we affect Of two gold ingots, like in each respect : The reason no man knows ; let it suffice What we behold is censur'd by our eyes. Where both deliberate, the love is slight : Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight ?* He kneel'd ; but unto her devoutly pray'd : Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said, * Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him ; * And, as she spake those words, came somewhat near him." And here is Shakspere's description of the last meet- ing ^ of Venus and Adonis. Having caught sight of him wounded, ••As the snail, whose tender horns being hit, Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain, And there, all smotber'd up, in shade doth sit, Long after fearing to creep forth again ; ^ Cited, we remember, in As You Like It, III. v. 83. » Lines 1033-1068. VENUS AND ADONIS, AND LLX'RECE 61 So, at his bloody view, her eyes are fled Into the deep dark cabins of her head." • • • • • • [Then] " beiny ojjen'd, threw unwilling light Upon the wide wound that the boar had trench'd In his soft flank ; whose wonted lily white With purple tears, that his wound wept, was drench'd : No flower was nigh, no grass, herb, leaf, or weed, But stole his blood and seeiu'd with him to bleed. 'Upon his hurt she looks so steadfy That her sight dazzling makes th^^^^Vseem three ; And then she reprehends her man^B^ye, That makes more gashes where no breach should be : His face seems twain, each several limb is doubled ; For oft the eye mistakes, the brain being troubled." iii^^eye These examples are more than enough to indi- cate both the precise difference in the effect of the two poems, and its cause. From beginning to end, Marlowe is not literal, not concrete ; he never makes you feel as if what he described were actually happening in any real world. From begin- ning to end, on the other hand, Sliakspere is con- stantly, minutely true to nature. While the action of Hero and Leander occurs in some romantic no- where, inhabited by people whose costume, if dcs- cribable, is quite unimaginable, the action of Venus and Adonis occurs in Elizabethan England, where men know the points of horses. The absence from Mar- lowe's poem of all pretence to reality saves it from apparent corruption ; in Shakspere's poem, incessant suggestions of reality produce the contrary effect. 62 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE A very brief comparison of detail will show the technical means by which this difference is made ap- parent. Take two lines from Marlowe — one a simile, the other a generalization — and place beside them two lines of similar import from Shakspere : — ♦' When two are stript, loug ere the course begin," writes Marlowe ; ** Or as tha^^^^vhose tender horns being hit,** writes Shakspci^^^R\Iarlowe's line, only one word — stript — is concrete" enough to suggest a vivid visual image ; in Shakspere's line, there are four words — snail, tender, horns, and hit — each of which is as vividly concrete as the most vivid word of Marlowe's. Again, " Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight ? " writes Marlowe ; " For oft the eye mistakes, the brain being troubled," writes Shakspere. In Marlowe's generalization, the words are simply general throughout ; in Shakspere's, they are so concrete as to amount to a plain statement of physiological fact. This distinguishing trait — that, to a remarkable degree, Shakspere's words stand for actual con- cepts — pervades not only Venus and Adonis, but also Lucrece. It is more palpable in the former poem only because its effect there is so start- lingly different from that produced by Marlowe's more nebulous vocabulary. It pervades not only the VENUS AND ADONIS, AND LLX'RECE 63 poems, but the plays, too ; beyond reasonable doubt it is the trait which distinguishes Shakspere not only among his contemporaries but from almost any other English writer. At first sight, this concreteness of phrase seems to indicate extreme intensity of conscious thought, on which conclusion have been based many worship- ping expositions of the almost divine wisdom and philosophy of Shakspere. The^onclusion cannot be denied ; it may, however, be i^sonably questioned even to the point of growing doubt as to whether Shakspere himself, the Elizabethan playwright, could have had much realizing sense of his own philosophy and wisdom. As we have seen, the literary fashion of his time delighted above all things else in fresh, in- genious turns of phrase ; in Shakspere's work, accord- ingly, fresh, ingenious turns of ])hrase abound. As we have seen, too, one cannot combine words and phrases without also combining ideas; when languasre grows definite, words and thoughts combine inextricably. Such a phenomenon as Shakspere's style, then, may well proceed from a cause surprisingly remote from conscious intensity of thought ; it may indicate noth- ing more than a constitutional habit of mind by which words and concepts are instinctively allied with un- usual firmness. We all know palpable differences in the habitual alliances of word and concept among our own friends ; we know, too, that these differences, which often make uneducated or thoughtless people appear to advantage, are a matter not so much of train- 64 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE ing, as of temperament. Of course the felicities of phrase, and the incidental wisdom, which come from such natural marriages of words and concepts are not absolutely thoughtless ; but the diffei^ence between them and the feebler expressions of people whose natural style lacks precision is often that while the latter involve acute consciousness of thought, the former involve little more than alert consciousness of phrase. Take care of your words, if your words naturally stand for real concepts, and your thoughts will take care of themselves. Given such a natural habit of mind as this in a healthy human being, given too the immense skill in phrase-making which per- vaded the literary atmosphere of Shakspere's time, given an eager effort on Shakspere's part to make phrases which should compare with the best of them, and very surely the result you would expect is just such a style as distinguishes Venus and Adonis and Lucre ce. To dwell on this trait of style, even at the risk of tedium, has been well worth our while. Palpable throughout Shakspere's work, it is nowhere more easily demonstrable than here, in the poems which were clearly the most painstaking productions of his early artistic life ; for in the poems, admi- rable as they so often are in phrase, one can find ultimately little else than admirably conscientious phrase-making. Shakspere tells his stories with typi- cal Elizabethan ingenuity ; incidentally he infuses them with a permeating sense of fact, astonishingly VENUS AND ADONIS, AND LUCRECE 65 (Jilferent from tlie untrammelled imagination of Mar- lowe ; yet plausibly, if not certainly, this effect is trace- able to the instinctive habit of a mind in which the natural alliance of words and concepts was uniquely close. Here, then, we have the trait which, above all others, defines the artistic individuality of Shakspere. To him, beyond any other writer of English, words and thoughts seemed naturally identical. VI THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE, FROM TITUS ANDRONI- CUS TO THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA I. Titus Andronicus [A Noble Roman Historye of Tytus Andronicus was entered in the Stationers' Register on February 6th, 1593-94. La 1598, Meres mentioned Titus Andronicus as among Shakspere's tragedies. The play, virtually in its present form, was published in quarto, without Shakspere's name, in 1600. There was another anonymous quarto in 1611. Besides Meres's allusion to it, the Centurie of Prayse cites two others during Shakspere's lifetime, neither of which mentions his name. The second of these is in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, which appeared in 1614 : " Hee that will sweare Jeronimo ^ or Androni- cus are the best playes, yet shall passe unexcepted at, heere, as a man whose Judgement shewes it is constant, and hath stood still, these five and twentie, or thirtie yeeres." From this, as well as from its general archaism, the inference has been drawn that the play belongs, at latest, to 1589. As Shakspere was not in London before 1587, then, a rea- sonable conjectural date for it is 1588. Its precise source is unknown. The story seems to have been familiar. Possibly tlie play, as we have it, is a retouched version of an older play called Titus and Vespasian, of which a German adapta- tion exists. The genuineness of Titus Andronicus has been much questioned, on the ground that it is unworthy of Shakspere; the arguments in its favor rest on Meres's allusion, and on the fact that it was included in the folio of 1623. If Shakspere's, it is probably his earliest work.] The frequent doubt as to the genuineness of Titus Andronicus gains color from the place where the play is generally printed. In most editions of Shaks- ^ Le., Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, circ. 1588. TITUS ANDRONICUS 67 pere it occurs between Coriolanus and Romeo and Juliet. Thus placed, it seems little more than a mon- strous tissue of absurdities, — a thing of which no author who wrote such tragedies as the others could conceivably have been guilty. Read by itself, however, particularly at a moment when one is not prepossessed by Shakspere's greater work, it does not seem so bad. Crude as it is in general conception and construction, free as it is from any vigorous strokes of character, it has, here and there, a rhetorical strength and impulse which sweep you on unexpectedly. In the opening scene, for ex- ample, where Andronicus commits to the tomb the bodies of his sons,^ who have fallen in battle, his half- lyric lament has real beauty : — " In peace and honour rest you here, my sons ; Rome's readiest champions, repose you here in rest, Secure from worldly chances and mishaps I Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells. Here grow no damned grudges ; here are no storms, No noise, but silence and eternal sleep: In peace and honour rest you here, my sons ! " Or again, when Lavinia is brought to him, maimed and ravished, his speech,^ whoever wrote it, has a rude power of its own : — " It was my deer ; and he that wounded her Hath hurt me more than had he kill'd me dead: For now I stand as one upon a rock Environ'd with a wilderness of sea, Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave, 1 I. i. 150 seq. 2 m ;. 91 ggq. 68 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Expecting ever when some envious surge Will in his brinish bowels swallow him. • ■•••• Had I but seen thy picture in this plight, It would have madded me: what shall I do, Now I behold thy lively body so ] Thou hast no hands, to wipe away thy tears ; Nor tongue, to tell me who hath martyr'd thee: Thy husband he is dead; and for his death Thy brothers are condemn'd, and dead by this. Look, Marcus ! ah, son Lucius, look on her ! When I did name her brothers, then fresh tears Stood on her cheeks, as doth the honey-dew Upon a gather'd lily, almost wither'd." "Whatever else this is, and there is plenty like it in Titus Andronicus, it is good, sonorous rant. As sonorously ranting, then, whether Shakspere's or not, the play is a typical example of English tra- gedy at the moment when Shakspere's theatrical life began. If, in his earlier months of work, he tried his hand at tragedy at all, he certainly must have tried it at this kind of thing ; for in substance, as well as in style, Titus Andronicus typifies the early Eliza- bethan tragedy of blood. The object of this, like that of cheap modern newspapers, was to excite crude emotion by heaping up physical horrors. The penny dreadfuls of our own time preserve the type perenni- ally ; something of the sort always persists in theatres of the lower sort ; and it is perhaps noteworthy that the titles, and in some degree the style, of these mod- ern monstrosities preserve one of the most marked traits of Elizabethan English, — extravagant allitera- TITUS ANDRONICUS 69 tion. Not only in extravagance of alliterative horrors, but also in serene disregard of historic fact, the lower literature of our own time preserves the old type. Both traits appear, too, in the romantic fancies of young children who take to literature. There has lately been in existence, for example, an appalling melodrama on the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, writ- ten at the age of ten by an American youth, wherein Charles IX., Catherine de' Medici, and Coligny figured along with a very heroic Adrien de Bourbon, who assassinated Charles, and, serenely ascending the throne, proceeded to govern France according to the liberal principles generally held axiomatic in the United States. It took no more liberty with French history than Titus Andro7iicus takes with Roman ; and both plays are of the same school. In a way, such stuff seems hardly worth serious attention. At the very moment to which we have attributed Titus Andronicus^ however, Marlowe was certainly developing the traditional tragedy of blood into a form which remains grandly if unequally signifi- cant in the Jeio of Malta. Less than twenty years later, this same school of literature had produced Hamlet and Othello, and King Lear, and Macbeth. Even in them, many of its traits persist. Like their crude prototypes, they appeal to the taste prevalent in all Elizabethan audiences for excessive bloodshed, and stentorian rant. Until we understand that there is an aspect in which these great tragedies and this grotesque Titus AndronicuH may rationally be grouped together, we shall not understand the Elizabethan theatre. 70 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Whether Shakspere's or not, then, Titus Andronieus deserves a passing glance in any serious study of Shakspere. If his, as many of the soundest critics are disposed to believe, it deserves more ; for, at least in the fact that it differs little from any conventional drama of its time, it throws light on his artistic char- acter. Marlowe and Shakspere were just of an age. The year before that to which we have attributed Titus Andronieus^ Marlowe had produced in Tambur- laine not only a popular play but a great tragic poem ; in 1588, he produced another, the Jew of Malta. Whatever Marlowe touched, from the beginning, he instantly transformed into something better. Shaks- pere, meanwhile, if this play be his, contented himself with frankly imitative, conventional stage-craft. II. Henry YI. [The First and Second Parts of Henry VI., together with Titus Andronieus, were entered iu the Stationers' Register, on April 19th, 1602, as transferred from Thomas Millington to Thomas Pavier. There is no specific mention of the Third Part until November 8th, 1 623, when it was entered for publication in the folio. In their present form, all three parts first appeared in the folio of 1623. No other version of the First Part is known. The Second Part is obviously a version of The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, entered on March 1 2th, 1593-94, and published by Millington in the same year. The Third Part is a similar version of The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, etc., published by Millington in 159,5. Both of these quartos were repub- lished in 1600. In none of these entries or publications, prior to 1623, is there any mention of Shakspere's name. Greene's allusion in 1592 is the only contemporary one directly connecting any of these plays with Shakspere. Nash, in the same year, alluded to the popularity of Talbot on the stage. HENRY VI 71 The question of the authorship of all these plays, as well as of the relation of the quartos to the folio, has been much disputed.^ The weight of opinion seems to favor the supposition that Greene, Peele, Kyd, and Marlowe had a hand in them, and that so far as Shalispere touched them it was by way of collaboration, interpolation, or revision. Wiioever wrote them, they are clearly conventional examples of Elizabethan chronicle-history, based for the most part on the chroni- cles of Ilolinshed, Hall, and Stowe. Their obvious crudities, as well as metrical tests, place them early; a reasonable conjecture might put them from 1590 to 1592.J Titus Andronicus, we found, whether Shakspere's or not, throws light on the dramatic environment in which his work began. In Henri/ VI., which for our purposes we may consider as a single play, we shall find a similar state of things ; this three-part drama certainly makes clear two facts still new to us con- cerning the Elizabethan stage. The first is that, at least among the earlier playwrights, collaboration was habitual ; the second is that chronicle-history — a kind of thing which has long been theatrically obsolete — is probably the most characteristic type of play pro- duced by that stage. These matters we may well glance at before attending in detail to Henry VI. Collaboration has always been more common in dramatic literature than in other kinds. One reason for this lies in the obvious difference between a play written for acting, and a book or what else addressed solely to readers. The author of a book can address ^ See, for example, Miss .J. Lee's paper in the New Shakspere Society's Transactions for 1876; and Fleay's discussion in the Lift and Works, pp. 255-283. 72 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE his public, vrith no other intervention than that of printers and proof-readers, over whom, if he choose, he may exercise constant control. A play, on the other hand, can be put before the public, at least in the form which the author intends, only by the intervention of a number of trained performers ; each of them, moreover, must not only intervene in all the visible complexity of his own personality, but he must furthermore be conditioned in his methods of expressing the author's meaning by the elaborate physical and mechanical circumstances of a theatre. A dramatic author, then, needs not only the equip- ment of an ordinary man of letters — grasp of sub- ject and mastery of literary style — but also a knowledge of the resources and limits of the actual stage closely akin to the knowledge of the orchestra essential to a skilful composer of music. For this reason, few men of letters pure and simple have ever succeeded in writing an actable play ; and those who have succeeded prove often to have done so only with the help of presumably humbler collaborators inti- mately familiar with the theatre. When any school of dramatic literature is thoroughly developed, to be sure, as the Elizabethan drama became in Shakspere's time, or as the French has been in our own, theatrical people, and literary too, sometimes be- came accomplished enough to take the full burden of authorship on themselves. Even then, however, — as the mere mention of Beaumont and Fletcher, or a glance at the collected works of any modern French HENRY VI 73 dramatist, will suggest, — collaboration is at least frequent ; while in such an early stage of dramatic literature as prevailed when Shakspere's work began, collaboration will generally be the rule. The stage for which Shakspere wrote, in fact, was a true stage, where i)lays were rated successful in accordance with their power of drawing audiences. Whoever suggested a touch in a play which should increase its power of attraction was welcome to any manager; and if four or five men working together made a play more attractive than one man working by himself, so much the better. As literature, of course, the play would probably suffer ; but even to this day no successful manager troubles himself much about the merely literary aspect of plays which draw. It is more than probable, then, that like any other professional playwright of his time Shakspere began his work, and learned his trade, either by actual col- laboration with more practised men, or by retouching plays which for one reason or another they had aban- doned. The result of some such process would surely resemble Henry VI. Just how such collaboration took place or resulted, of course, we cannot assert. In a familiar passage of Henry VI., however, there is a line which we may rea- sonably guess to be an example. Greene, we remem- ber, in his Groatsworth of Wit, strengthened his abuse of Shakspere ^ by parodying a line from the tirade of the captured Duke of York against the triumphant 1 See p. 9. 74 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Queen Margaret. Here is the passage,^ which occurs both ill the True Tragedy and in the folio : — " Thou art as opposite to every good As the Antipodes are unto us, Or as the south to the septentrion. tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide ! How couldst thou drain the life-blood of the child ? " etc. The italicized line was imitated in 1600 by one Nich- olson,^ from which fact, as well as from Greene's allusion and its own inherent rant, one may reasonably infer that it was thought effective. Now a glance at the passage where it occurs will show that the sense would be complete without it ; and what is more, that the line differs both in concreteness of conception and in general sound from the two lines immediately pre- ceding, which are much in the manner of Greene himself. If Shakspere, touching up an old tirade of Greene's, had introduced — for pure ranting effect — • a stray line of his own, we might have expected just such a result as is before us. The example, of course, is completely hypothetical ; it will serve, however, to suggest what Elizabethan collaboration was. Collaborative, beyond doubt, though just where and how we can never be sure, Henry VI. is still more significant to us as an example of chronicle-history, a kind of drama peculiar to the Elizabethan stage. The object of chronicle-history distinctly differed from any which we now recognize as legitimately theatrical 1 3 Henry VI. I. iv. 134-138. * Centurie of Pray se, 33. HENRY VI 75 The tragedy of blood, as we have seen, was after all only an extravagant kind of juvenile sensationalism, whose object was to thrill an audience ; the object of Elizabethan comedy, to which we shall come later, was the perennial object of comedy, — to amuse. The ob- ject of chronicle-historv , on the other hand, though of course even this kind of play had to be incidentally interesting, was to teach a generally illiterate public the facts of national historv. As a rule, the lower classes of the time could not read. Even when they could, the history of England was not conveniently accessible ; it was rather crudely digested in certain folio volumes, heavy in every sense of the word, and expensive. At the same time, im- memorial dramatic traditions which survived from the miracle plays made the stage a normal vehicle of popular instruction, while the state of public affairs — when Mary Stuart was lately beheaded and the Armada still more lately dispersed — stimulated patriotic en- thusiasm and curiosity. To tiiis demand the theatre re- sponded by producing a series of plays, from various hands, which together comprised pretty nearly the whole of English history. The most familiar of the series, of course, are the plays of Shakspere ; but to go no further, there were an Edivard I. by Peele, an admirable Edivard II. by Marlowe, and an Edward III. sometimes thought Shakspere's own, to prepare the way for Richard II. Throughout the series — in Shakspere's work as elsewhere — the writer of chronicle-history conceived 76 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE his business in a way now foreign to anything theatri- caL He did not trouble himself to compose a play in the modern sense of the word ; there was no ques- tion of formally developed plot or situation. He simply went to Holinshed or some other conventional authority, read the narrative sufficiently for his pur- poses, selected — with disregard of detail, chronologic and other — what seemed to him theatrically effective, and translated his selections into blank verse dialogue. Incidentally, to be sure, as chronicle-history strength- ened, particularly in the hands of Marlowe and Shaks- pere, there grew up in it some very vital characters. We may best understand Richard III. or Hotspur, how- ever, if we realize that, from the dramatist's point of view, their very vitality is a part of his effort to trans- late into vivid theatrical terms a patriotic story which he found in ponderous, lifeless narrative. Translation, then, rather than creation, even the most serious writer of chronicle-history must have thought his task. If he succeeded in translating Holinshed, or Hall, or Stowe, into a form which should entertain an audience while informing them, he did all he tried to do. When we consider the chronicle-histories as origi- nally meant to be anything more than translations from narrative into presentably dramatic terms, we fail to understand them. So mucli is clear. Less clear, but equally true, is the fact that an Elizabethan dramatist at work on tragedy, comedy, or romance, really re- garded his task as identical with his obvious task when he wrote chronicle-history. He never invented his HENRY VI 77 plot, if he could help himself; except in presenting his material more effectively than it had been presented by others, he never, for a moment, considered himself bound, as modern writers of plays or fiction apparently consider themselves bound, to be original. He turned to novels, to poems, to stories, to old plays, as directly as to chronicles. When he found anything to his pur- pose he took it and used it, with as little qualm of conscience as a modern man of science would feel in availing himself of another's published investigation. Whatever the origin of his plot — history, novel, poem, story, old play — the dramatist treated it not as a creator, but as a translator. So to Henry VI. As one generally reads it, — after Henry V., a chronicle-history far riper in form, — it seems grotesquely archaic. Approached by itself, however, it proves more powerful than one expects. To appreciate it, one must read fast, one must make an effort not to notice but to accept the obsolete con- ventions of a theatre which, with no more sense of oddity than Kingsley felt in making Hypatia speak English, compressed into less than eight thousand lines of bombastic dialogue forty-nine years of English history. After all, these conventions, though obsolete, are not actually more absurd than many of our own. We can learn, if we will, not only to accept, but to for- get them ; and then, by placing ourselves so far as we can iu the mood of an Elizabethan playgoer, we may get even from Henry VI. an impression of grand his- torical movement. The times the play deals with 78 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE were stirring and turbulent. Historic forces, of one and another kind, were beyond the control of any in- dividual ; and in Henry VL, after a while, one begins to feel them, in all their maddening, tragic confusion. One feels, too, one hardly knows how, the lapse of time, the growth and the change which years bring. Strangely, unexpectedly, one finds even in this crudely collaborative old play the stuff of which real history is made. An accident which helps this effect is that, as a mere piece of literature, the Second Part is distinctly better than the First, and the Third nearly maintains the level of the Second. In the total effect, then, the comparative crudity of the First makes it seem long past. Even this First Part, though, has a force of its own. Take the very opening. After the extremely human courtship of Henry V., which closes the pre- ceding play, the consecutive and ranting laments uttered by four uncles of the infant Henry VI., — " Hung be the heavens with black I " and so on — seem very absurd. We must remember, however, that they follow the conventions of a stage very different from ours, and that Henry V. comes about halfway between. If, remembering this, and remembering, too, the keen lyric appetite of the Elizabethan public, we liken these laments to those of the modern lyric stage, we see them in a different light. Sung in con- cert, with impressive music, they might still make a fine operatic quartette. Then, immediately, the tone HENRY VI 79 of these half-lyric speeches changes. Instantly comes the discord of quarrel,— a quarrel which is to end, after half a century of bloodshed, in the death of the un- happy Henry. This example typifies a fact which we must keep constantly in mind. At least in its earlier period, the Elizabethan stage tried constantly to pro- duce, by purely dramatic means, effects which would now be reserved for the opera. Without understand- ing this, we cannot quite understand what a play like Henry VI. means. Appreciating the operatic nature of the ranting declamation throughout, and of such half-lyric passages as this opening quartette, we can begin to feel what power the play has. In the Second Part, for all its neglect of the great dramatic possibilities inherent in the adulterous love of Suffolk and the Queen, there are two passages better than anything in the others. Both of these, in the folio version, seem at least Shaksperean, if not cer- tainly Shakspere's. The first is the death-scene of Cardinal Beaufort ; the second is the rebellion of Jack Cade. In the death-scene ^ we have a wonderfully vivid picture of dying delirium, from which we would not spare a word. In the Contention there is a mere sketch of it, which would seem wholly like a careless abridgment but for the change in a single line. In the Contention, the speech which stands for the famous " Comb down his hair; look, look ! it stands upright, Like lime-twigs set to catch my winged soul," etc., 1 2 Henry VI. III. iii. 80 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE is followed directly by a speech of Salisbury, — " See, how the pangs of death do gripe his heart." In the folio, Beaufort's delirium is followed by a fer- vent prayer for him by the King, who is interrupted by Salisbury thus : — " See, how the paugs of death do make him grin ! " That change — from " do gripe his heart " to " do make him grin " — may not be a deliberate change by Shakspere's hand, but surely nothing could be more like one. It has just the added concreteness of phrase, just the enormous gain in vividness, which distin- guishes his style from any other. Shaksperean, too, seem all the Cade scenes,^ though clearly they existed in the Contention^ and doubtless those that played your clowns spoke more than was set down for them. Though it be virtually in the Contention^ however, the reasoning of the rioter who maintains Cade to be a legitimate Mortimer seems too like Shakspere's fun not to be his. Cade, we remem- ber, declared that his princely father had been stolen in infancy and apprenticed to a bricklayer : the rioter confirms him ^ : — " Sir, he made a chimney in my father's house, and the bricks are alive at this day to testify it; therefore deny it not." What makes the scenes seem Shaksperean, however, is not so much any matter of detail as the general 1 2 Henry VI. IV. ii.-viii. 2 2 Henry VI. IV. ii. 156. HENRY VI 81 temper whicli pervades them. Cade's mob, though far more lightly treated, is essentially the mob ot" Julius Ccesar and of Coriolanus. In an earlier, simpler form, it expresses what by and by we shall see to be a dis tinct trait of Shakspere. His personal convictions, of course, we can never know ; as an artist, however, he was consistent throughout in his contempt — here laughing, but later serious — for the headless rabble : wherefore, very properly, Shakspere is nowadays taken to task by virtuous critics of a democratic turn. In the Third Part of Henry VI. there are no passages so indubitably effective as those at which we have just glanced. As one reads the play hastily, however, one feels in it more than in the two others a definite tendency. From the opening (luartette of lament breaking into discord, the First Part and the Second have been full of turbulent, confused disintegration. Here at last, in the Third Part, things good and evil, order and chaos, begin at last to range themselves ; and slowly but surely defining itself as the embodi- ment of all the evil, we feel the personality of Gloster. The Third Part of Henry VI. tends straight to Richard III. In the Richard III. of our modern stage, indeed, some of the earlier scenes are actually taken directly from Henry VI. Our discussion of Richard III.., however, must come later. For our present purposes we have traced the early chronicle-history far enough. Whatever part Shakspere had in Henry VL, we have found the play, like Titus Andronicus, suggestive of the en- 6 -^ 82 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE vironment in which Shakspere's work began. It has helped, then, to define our notion of the Elizabethan stage. Essentially collaborative rather than individual, frankly translative rather than creative in method, designed quite as much to inform as to divert, often more than half lyric in mood, the chronicle-history is the most typical kind of Elizabethan drama. As- suming its conventions, we may find in Henry VI. much that is permanently admirable, and some touches which seem too good for any hand but Shakspere's. What part he had in it, however, must remain doubt- ful. The real light it surely throws on his individu- ality amounts only to this : like Titus Andronicus, if either play be in any degree genuine, it shows him in his beginning frankly imitative and conventional. His work is the work of a man patiently mastering the technicalities of his art, not of one who instantly impresses whatever he touches with that trait now- adays so much admired, — originality. III. Love's Labour's Lost. [Love's Labour's Lost was published in quarto, in 1598. On the title- page we are informed that this version was " presented before her Highness this last Christmas," and is " newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere." It is mentioned by Meres ; and the Centurie oj Prayse cites a slightly doubtful allusion to it in 1594. The source of the plot is unknown. The weight of opinion makes this the earliest play unquestionably assigned to Shakspere. It is conjectured from internal evidence to have been written as early as 1589 or 1590, but to have been revised in 1597 for the performance at court mentioned on the titlepage.J i LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 83 In its present form, Lovers Labour^ s Lo%t is puzzling. There seems no reasonable doubt that it is a very early play, carefully revised for performance at court at a time when Shakspcre had completely mastered his art. Just what is old in it and what new we have no certain means of judging; yet for our study of Shakspere's development we wish to consider not the revised play, but the original. While of course we can never be sure, however, we may reasonably guess that the correction and augmentation of 1597 was chiefly a matter of mere style, — a conclusion in which we are supported by the fact that out of some 1600 lines of verse nearly 1100 are rhymed. The shallowness of character throughout, too, and the obviously excessive ingenuity of plot and situation, as well as of phrase, are unlike Shakspere's later work. Assuming, then, that in general character Love's Labour 's Lost is con- temporary with the First Part of Henry VI., but that in detail it is often seven or eight years later, we are warranted, for the moment, in neglecting matters of detail, and in considering the play very generally. Thus considered, it groups itself immediately with Titus Andronicus and Henry VL Disregarding the mere matter of style, — where Shakspere's concreteness of phrase appears throughout, — we find it essentially not an original work, but a vigorous comedy in the then fashionable manner of John Lyly. Lyly's come- dies, and this too, are really dramatic phases of the Renascent mood which started, not in the translations of Surrey, but in the Sonnets of Wyatt. Beginning with a powerful effort to civilize the forms of a bar- 84 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE barous language, this movement, in little more than fifty years, had resulted in a literature which at once stimulated and gratified an insatiable appetite for graceful verbal novelty. In Love's Labour 's Lost we have a capital example of this, running now and again into frank, good-natured burlesque of itself. Graceful as they are, these frothy, overwrought fantasies of phrase and character are nowadays puzzling; it is hard to realize quite how they could ever have been popular on the stage. To appreciate this, we may conveniently recall a fact we detected in Henry VI. What seemed there mere bombast took on another aspect when we considered it not as primarily dramatic, but rather as operatic. On the Elizabethan stage, we found, mere turns of language and half-lyric cadences were conventionally used to express moods which in our own time would certainly prefer the completely lyric form of operatic compositions. Looked at in this light. Love's Labour '« Lost grows more intelligible. In conception and in style alike, it expresses a state of artistic feeling which would now express itself in polite comic opera ; its endless rhymes and metrical oddities, its quips and cranks, are really not theatrical at all ; like Lyly's over-ingenious turns of phrase, they are the airs, the duets, the trios, the concerted pieces of a stage not yet fully operatic only for want of adequate development in the art of music. Nor is Love's La- bour's Lost operatic only in detail : like modern comic opera, such essentially lyric work as this has no pro- found meaning ; its object is just to delight, to amuse ; LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 85 whoever searches for significance in such literature misunderstands it. The excessive ingenuity of Love's Labour'' s Lost, which often makes it hard to read, makes it all the more worth the attention of whoever should minutely study Elizabethan style. The scope with which, in its final form, it at once exemplifies and burlesques the literary fashions and affectations of its day, is astonish- ing. The deliberate cuj)huism of Armado,^ the son- neteering of the King and his courtiers,^ the pedantry of the schoolmaster and the curate,^ the repartee of the Princess and her ladies,* the pertness of the boy Moth,^ the blunders of the clowns,^ the outworn, but at the time not yet outstripped conventions of the Masque of the Worthies," the permanent freshness of the clos- ing song, the lyric ingenuity of every page, — all these, in their bewildering confusion, typically express the temper of a time when whoever wanted amuse- ment was most amused by verbal novelty. Through- out, too, one can at last begin to realize how the ears of Elizabethan audiences were as eagerly sensitive to fresh, graceful, ingenious turns of phrase as modern ears are to catching melodies ; and fresh turns of l)hrase Shakespere gave them here, to their heart's content, — now in contented conventional serious- ness, the next minute in a frank, good-natured burst of burlesque, — with a ])aradoxical comprehensiveness thoroughly, if still superficially, individual. 1 E.g. I. i. 232 seq. - IV. iii. 26, GO, 101. 3 E.g. V. i. * E.g. V. ii. 1-78. 6 E.g. I. ii. 6 E.g. I. i. 182 seq. ' V. ii. 523 seq. 86. WILLIAM SHAKSPERE From all this, one would naturally expect Love'g Labour '.s Lost to be far from amusing on the modern stage. Within a few years, however, it has been acted with considerable success. The secret of vital- ity like this is not to be found in such matters as we have glanced at ; it must be sought in something not merely contemporary, but of more permanent dramatic value. Several things of this kind are soon perceptible. In the first place, the play has an open- air atmosphere of its own, a bit conventional, to be sure, but romantic and sustained ; you feel through- out that what is going on takes place in just the sort of world where it belongs. In the second place, there are various perennially effective situations, such as the elaborate concealment and eavesdropping by which the King and his lords discover that they have all fallen from their high resolves in common ; ^ and more notably still such as the elaborate confusion of identity, when the Princess and her ladies mask them- selves to bewilder their disguised lovers.^ In the third place, the elaborate repartee of the dialogue, particularly in the passages which make Biron and Rosaline so suggestive of Benedick and Beatrice, though very verbal, is very sparkling.^ In the fourth place, the elaborate introduction of a play within a play,^ broadly burlesquing a kind of literature which was passing out of fashion, must always have been 1 IV. iii. 1-210. 2 V. ii. 158-265. • See II. i. 114-128; and cf. Much Ado, I. i. 117-146. ♦ V. ii. 523-735. LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 87 diverting, if only by way of contrast. Finally, to go no further, the contrast of clowns and courtiers in this very scene emphasizes what pervades the play, — constant caricature of contemporary absurdity along with frequent serious perpetration of the like. To specify these details has been worth while, because, as we shall see later, they constantly reappear in the later work of Shakspere, who is remarkable among dramatists for persistent repetition of whatever has once proved dramatically effective. We might have specified more such detail ; we might have studied Love's Labour 's Lost far more profoundly, defining the various affectations it commits or satirizes, dis- cussing whether this part of it or that was meant for a personal attack on a rival company, and so on. For our purposes, however, we have touched on the play sufficiently. Contemporary, in a general way, with Titus Andronicus and Henry FZ, and — per- haps because so palpably corrected and augmented — vastly better than either of them, it groups itself with them in our view of Shakspere as an artist. When he began to write, comedy was more highly de- veloped than tragedy or history. His first comedy, then, was more ripe than his first work of other kinds ; but like them it may be regarded, in the end, as a successful experiment in the best manner of his time, — not as a new contribution to dramatic literature. 88 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE IV. The Comedy of Errors. [At Christmas time, 1594, a "Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmiis) " was played at Gray's Inn. Meres, in 1598, men- tioned Errors among the comedies of Shakspere. The play was first entered in 1623, and published in the folio. Its source is clearly the Menechmi of Plautus, probably in some translation, and one or two scenes from his Amphitryon. Modern critics generally agree iu placing it, on internal evidence, before 1591, with a slight preference for 1589 ^ or 1590.] In the three plays we have considered, assuming them to be at least partly Shakspere's, we found him, in his earliest dramatic work, by no means origi- nal. Instead of trying to do something new, he devoted himself to writing a tragedy of blood much in the manner of Kyd or Marlowe, to collaborating in a conventional chronicle-history in which various contemporary manners appear, and to making a comedy in the manner of Lyly. If we try to charac- terize this work by a single word, we can hardly find a better term than experimental. As apparently an experiment, the Comedy of Errors., like the play we shall consider next, groups itself with what precede. Like the next play, however, — the Two Gentlemen of Verona., — it differs from the others in not imitating any one else. The first three experi- ments seem unpretentiously imitative ; the two follow- ing seem independent. 1 1589 is the latest year in which the allusion to France "making war against her heir — " III. ii. 127 — would have been literally true. THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 89 Clearly enough, the Comedy of Errors attempts to adapt for the Elizabethan stage — to translate into contemporary theatrical terms — a classic comedy. In a way, the effort is akin to that of the poems, which, as we saw, exemplified the phase of Renascent feeling which delighted not so much in the formal graces of foreign culture as in the humane spirit of ancient literature. While in the poems, however, Shakspere altered and adapted Ovid or whom else, with excessive verbal care, to the taste of the literary public, he altered Plautus, in the Comedy of Errors^ for purely theatrical purposes. The resulting contrast is curious. The poems, in their own day far more reputable litera- ture than any contemporary plays, became, from the very concreteness of their detail, rather more cor- rupt in effect than the originals from which they were drawn. At all events, they carry that sort of thing as far as it can tolerably go ; for throughout, while dealing with matters which demand pagan unconsciousness, they are studiously conscious. The Comedy of Errors^ on the other hand, — in its own day a purely theatrical affair, — Shakspere altered in a way which the most prim modern principles would unhesitatingly pronounce for the better. In Plau- tus, for example, the episode of the courtesan and the chain is frankly licentious ; in Shakspere, it is so different ^ that without a reference to Plautus one can hardly make out why the lady in question is called a courtesan at all. This trait we shall find to be gen- 1 III. ii. 169 seq.; IV. i., iii. 90 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE erally characteristic of Shakspere. Always a man of his time, to be sure, he never lets the notion of pro- priety stand between him and an effective point ; when there is nothing to prevent, however, he is decent; among his contemporaries, he is remarkable for refine- ment of taste. This incidental refinement of plot is by no means his only addition to the material of Plautus. The second Dromio is Shakspere's, so is the conventional pathos of -^geon, so the effort to contrast the shrewish Adriana with her gentler sister. The very mention of these characters, however, calls our attention to the most obvious weakness of the Comedy of Errors. Except for conventional dramatic purposes, the char- acters throughout are little more than names ; they are not seriously individualized. A convenient rhe- torical scheme of criticism sometimes states the prin- ciple that any story or play must have a plot, — the actions or events it deals with ; and that as actions or events must be performed by somebody, or happen to somebody, somewhere, any play or novel must also include characters and descriptions. A theoretically excellent play, then, consists of an interesting plot, which involves individual characters, in a distinct local atmosphere. Applying this test to the Comedy of Errors, we find a remarkably ingenious and well- constructed plot, and little else. Characters and background might be anybody and anywhere. As a piece of untrammelled construction, as a plot put together with what seems almost wilful disregard ?i THE COMKDY OF P:RR0RS 91 of other complications, tlie Comedy of Errors most clearly shows itself experimental. In construction, to be sure, the play is theatrically as successful as any in the Elizabethan drama. Indeed, it sometimes ap- proaches the niceties of the classic tradition ; hardly anything else in Shakspere so nearly observes the unities. When we have sufficiently admired its con- struction, however, and the general ease and smooth- ness of its style, we have nearly exhausted it. Sliakspere, in his mature years, is not so soon ex- haustible. This very fact, apart from other evidence, would make us guess the Comedy of Errors to come early among his writings. In the plot thus carefully composed, there are at least two features worth our notice. The first, at which we need merely glance, is the vigorous effect of dramatic contrast produced by beginning this pro- longed farce with the romantic narrative of ^geon's shipwreck and misfortunes and wanderings, and by ending it with the still more romantic discovery that the Abbess of Ephesus is the long-lost wife whom he has so faithfully mourned. The second, on which we may dwell a little longer, is the fundamental source of all the fun and trouble, — the elaborate, double confusion of identity. Confusion of identity, we remember, was one of the effective stage devices in Love's Labour 's Lost ; but there it was merely a bit of episodic masking. Here it is the very essence of the plot. It is taken, of course, straight from Plautus ; it remains effective in extravagant acting to this day. 92 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Nowadays, however, and just as much in Shakspere's time, it could never have been plausible. In so ex- travagant a form as that in which we here find it, nothing could make it plausible except the actual con- ventions of the classic stage. There, we remember, the actors wore masks. Mask two of them alike, and no eye could tell at a glance which was which. No " make-up " on any modern stage which reveals human features, however, could possibly make two people look enough alike to warrant such theatrically effec- tive confusion of identity as pervades the Comedy of Errors. V. The Two Gentlemen op Verona. [The Two Gentlemen of Verona was mentioned by Meres in 1598. Beyond a stray allusion in 1615 to making " a virtue of necessity," ^ there seems to be no other extant notice of it until its publication in the folio of 1623. Its source is some English version of the Diana of Montemayor, a Portuguese poet. On internal evidence modern critics generally agree in placing it early, — from 1591 to 1593 or so.] Like all the plays we have considered so far, the Two Gentlemen of Verona seems experimental ; like the Comedy of Errors^ it is not imitative, but inde- pendent, and its experimental effect is caused chiefly by the abnormal development of one essential feature, to the neglect of the other two. Here the resemblance 1 IV. i. 62. THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA 93 ends. The essential feature abnormally developed in the Two Gentlemen of Verona is not the plot, but the characters. More than what precede, then, this play tends straight toward the unmistakably greater work to come. At bottom, like all the rest, it is a dramatic version of narrative material. The kind of narrative here chosen for this translation is akin to what probably gave rise io Love's Labour'' s Lost. Substantially, both of these plays, like most of the following, amount to little more than such stories as are familiar in the Decameron and its numerous polyglot descendants. At least in English, the old translators of such fic- tion pretended, with true British cant, to didactic purpose.^ Clearly, however, their real purpose was to amuse ; and their efforts took the form of such unadorned plots as to-day suffice to stimulate tlie imagination of children, and sufficed three hundred years ago to stimulate anybody's. When translating such narrative into dramatic terms, then, a play- wright found his attention centred elsewhere than when he was similarly translating chronicle-history. In that case, he was bound, while interesting his audience, to instruct them ; for, after all, they received chronicle-histories rather in the mood of thoughtless students than in that of theatre-goers. The old chronicles, too, contained a great deal more matter than a dramatist could possibly use. With Italian novels the case was different. Often they were so ^ See the Introduction to Paynter's Palace of Pleasure. 94 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE short as to need rather amplification than condensa- tion. The dramatist, then, was forced to invent something ; and here, as much as when dealing with classic comedy, his object, like that of his original, was to be as entertaining as he could. With such an object, we have seen, Shakspere experimentally introduced new factors into the plot of the Comedy of Errors^ handling the plot throughout as carefully as he handled the verses of his poems. In the Two Gentlemen of Verona he let his plot take care of itself ; but, without apparently conceiving his characters as very consistently individual, he enlivened them throughout, and thus incidentally gave their surroundings some definite atmosphere, by adding to the bare outline of his plot any number of subtle touches based on observation of real life. These touches of character, which make you feel at any given moment as if these people were real, pervade the play. Typical ones may be found in the first scene between Julia and Lucetta,^ so frankly repeated and improved in the Merchant of Venice ; ^ in the mission of the disguised Julia to Sylvia,^ so admirably improved in Twelfth Night ;'^ and in the less beautiful but perhaps more final episode of Launce and his dog.^ They are not only true to life ; the observation, the temper, they imply has a distinct character of its own, — a character which anybody 1 I. ii. 2 I. ii. 8 IV. iv. 113 seq. * L V. 178 seq. 6 II. iii. ; IV. iv. THE TWO GENTLEMEX OF VERONA 95 familiar with the ripe work of Shakspere knows, without knowing why, to be peculiar to him. Here, at last, then, in the experimental detail of a roman- tic comedy, Shakspere first shows himself original. The vitality of detail in the Two Gentlemen of Verona gives it a vigor of effect previously unknown to the English stage. This vigor of effect, however, is not so obvious as it would have been if Shakspere, in his later work, had been less economical of invention. Economy of invention — perhaps another name for professional prudence — made him more apt than almost any other known writer to use again and again de- vices which had once proved effective. Among mendacious proverbs, few are so completely false as that which declares Shakspere never to repeat ; it were truer to say that he rarely did much else if he could help it. Whatever is notable in the Two Gen- tlemen of Verona^ then, appeared later, and more effectively, in his more mature work. To people familiar with that mature work, this earlier version of its excellences must generally seem thin and weak. Considered where we have placed it, however, — after what has preceded, before what is to come, — it still produces an effect of great vitality. There are two or three situations, also, which, when new, must have been effective on the stage. Per- haps the most effective of these come from Julia's disguising herself as a boy,^ — a device which, aa we 1 II. vii. ; IV. ii., iv. ; V. iv. 96 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE have seen, must have been convenient in a theatre where female parts were played by boys, then, as now, not habituated to skirts. Less palpably effective, but still unquestionably so, are the scenes where Proteus plays false to Valentine.^ The more one considers the fresh detail of this play, the cleverer it seems. Detail once admired, however, the Two Greiitlemen of Verona is by no means masterly. Not only is the plot hastily and clumsily put together, and therefore far from plausible, but the characters themselves are not generally conceived as consistent individuals. Their vitality is a matter of detail. Ethically they are incomplete, out of scale. From all this results an effect which, even in its own day, must have been unsatisfactory. At the end, our sympathy is clearly expected to be with both gentlemen, who are duly rewarded with such brides as romantic tradition ex- pects them to live happily with ever after. In fact, we cannot sympathize with either of them. Proteus has behaved too outrageously to be rewarded at all ; there is no reason for his change of heart ; and there is no excuse for the conventional magnanimity of Valentine. For all its merits, the Two Gentlemen of Verona remains in total effect unplausible, experi- mental, artistically unsatisfactory. 1 II. iv. 100 seq. ; II. vi. ; III. i., ii. ; IV. ii. etc. SHAKSPERE ABOUT 1593 97 VI. Shakspere about 1593. Uncertain as our chronology must be, we may feel tolerably assured that, whatever their actual dates, and whatever subsequent revision they may have had, the works now before us were substantially finished by 1593. With one or two possible exceptions, furthermore, and exceptions which hardly alter the general case, we may fairly assume that in 1593 Shaks- pere had accomplished little more. It is worth while, then, to pause for a moment, and define our impres- sion of him at that time. Venus and Adonis, we remember, was published in that year, just about his twenty-ninth birtliday. This first serious publication may fairly be counted an epoch in his career. In the course of six years at most, — the years from twenty-three to twenty-nine, — he had certainly suc- ceeded in establishing himself as an actor, in writing, wholly or in part, at least seven noteworthy plays which have survived, and in composing at least one poem, of the highest contemporary fashion, which not only succeeded in public, but attracted to him the friendly patronage of a great nobleman. When we stop to consider how much, even of the works we have now touched on, has remained in permanent lit- erature, the achievement seems astounding. When we turn to consider what English literature had otherwise produced meantime, however, we find a state of things almost equally notable. In 1587, we 7 .^ 98 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE have seen, Elizabethan literature, as we now know it, hardly existed. In 1588 ^ the " Martin Marprelate " controversy began. In 1589 came the first publications of Bacon and of Nash, and the first volume of Hak- luyt's Voyages. In 1590 appeared Tamburlaine, the first publication of Marlowe ; the Arcadia^ the first of Sidney ; and the first three books of Spenser's Faerie Queene. In 1591 came the first publications of Dray- ton and of Ralegh, Sidney's Astrophel atid Stella, and two volumes of minor verse by Spenser. In 1592, along with publications by Constable, Greene, Gabriel Harvey, Lyly, Marlowe, and Nash, came Daniel's first publication, — the Sonnets to J)eUa. By 1593, then, Elizabethan literature was well under way ; the period since 1587 had been one of unprecedented literary fertility. The mental activity displayed in the early work of Shakspere, then, was a more normal fact than it would have been during almost any other six years of Eng- lish history. During the same six years, too. Mar lowe, who was just Shakspere's age, had been almost equally active. In 1593 he was killed. Except Shakspere, he proves, on the whole, the most notable literary figure of his day. By comparing his work, then, with the work which Shakspere accomplished during his lifetime we may most conveniently define our impression of Shakspere himself. Tamburlaine, Marlowe's first extant play, is believed 1 All notes of publication in this study are taken from Ryland'& Chronological Outlines of English Literature: Macmillan : 1890. SHAKSPERE ABOUT 1593 99 to have been acted in 1587, when he was twenty-four years old. It was followed by a Second Part, analo- gous to the Second Part of Henry VI., by Dr. Faustus, by the Jew of Malta, and by Edward II. There is a fragment, too, of a play on the Massacre at Paris (S. Bartholomew), and of another on Dido, as well as a series of very loose translations from Ovid, and the ffero and Leander which we have already considered. Doubtless, too, Marlowe had a hand in other plays, — perhaps in Henry VI. and Richard III. The works we have mentioned, however, undoubtedly his, are enough for our purpose. Putting aside Hero and Leander, to which we have given attention enough, we see at once that Marlowe's completed work consisted of four blank-verse trage- dies. In all of these the plots are not very carefully composed, the characters — though broadly conceived — are not minutely individualized, and the general atmosphere is one of indefinite grandeur. In all four there are many passages full of noble, surging imagina- tion ; and many more which seem inferior. Yet the total effect of any one of these tragedies, still more the total effect of all four, is among the most im- pressive in English literature. From the beginning, Marlowe, as an artist, was passionately sensitive to the eternal tragedy which lies in the conflict between human aspiration and the inexorable limit of human achievement. In Tamhurlaine this passionate sense of truth is expressed in terms of a material struggle ; in Faustus the struggle is spiritual ; in the Jew q/ 100 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Malta it is racial ; in Edward II. it is personal. Whether the struggle be with the limits of the con- querable earth, however, or with those of human knowledge, or with those of ancestral inheritance, or with our own warring selves, the struggle is forever the same. We would be other than we are ; other than we are, we may not be. In all four of Marlowe's tragedies that great, true note vibrates. Knowingly or not, Marlowe expressed himself greatly. Dead in degradation before he was thirty years old, he must always remain a great poet. In turning from this work to Shakspere's, we are instantly aware of a marked contrast, not wholly to Shakspere's advantage. If all four of Marlowe's trage- dies expressed but one profound sense of truth, at least they expressed that one tragic fact in lastingly noble terms. So far, on the other hand, Shakspere's tragedy, and history, and comedy has expressed nothing more serious than is expressed in his poems, — a flexible eagerness to adapt himself to the popular taste. Ex- perimental we have called his plays, and the word will equally apply to his poems. Clearly the first six years of Shakspere's work indicate no profound perception, no serious artistic purpose. When we consider Shakspere's experiments, how- *^ver, ranging over these first six years of his pro- fessional life, we are presently impressed by the fact that no two of them are alike. One is a tragedy of blood, one is a chronicle-history, one is a fantastic comedy after the manner of Lyly, one is SHAKSPERE ABOUT 1593 101 Bomcthing resembling a pseudo-classic comedy, one is a kind of romantic comedy which later Shakspere made peculiarly his own, one is a fashionable erotic poem. Clearly another trait besides lack of serious artistic purpose distinguishes him from Marlowe ; in view of the comparative excellence of all these works, it would be hard to find a more excellent versatility than Shakspere's. In our study of his poems, we dwelt enough on the peculiarly concrete habit of thought which marked him ; we assured ourselves that in his mind words so naturally stood for real concepts, that by merely play- ing with words he played unwittingly with thoughts, too. His notable versatility proves to be a second trait as marked and as permanent. In neither is there so far a trace of conscious originality, such as one feels must surely have underlain the passionate phi> losophy of Marlowe. Yet, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona we found Shakspere at last as freshly original as he had already been versatile. The originality there displayed, however, was not a matter of philosophy, not of generalization, not of wisdom. It was an origi- nality of observation, and of humanly concrete state- ment ; what he did was only to try a new theatrical experiment, — to introduce into popular comedy gleams of real human life hitherto unknown there. This originality seems only half-conscious ; it seems simi)ly the experimental adaptation to his professional work of what he had learned by actual experience of life ; as such, it would very likely have seemed to him almost accidental. 102 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE In three ways, then, although his accomplishment was not yet permanently great, Shakspere's power had displayed itself by 1593. In the first place, his mind was so made that words and concepts seemed one, and so his verbal gymnastics proved unwittingly wise ; in the second place, whatever he turned his hand to he did as well as the next man, and he turned his hand to everything ; in the third place, in experi- menting with comedy he had stumbled on the fact and the use of his own great faculty of observation. None of these traits, however, are showy, none of the kind which either require or command instant recognition. To Shakspere, we may guess, they may well have seemed humdrum ; and these six years little else than a prolonged apprenticeship. He had learned his trade ; apart from this, he would probably have thought that he had accomplished nothing. VII THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE, FROM A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM TO TWELFTH NIGHT I. As the general uncertainty of our chronology must indicate, the separation of some plays in this chapter from those in the last is arbitrary. Its justification must rest chiefly on two facts which broadly distin- guish the groups : In the first place, while the interest of the preceding plays is chiefly historical, the interest of those to come remains intrinsic ; apart from any historical conditions they are often in themselves de- lightful. In the second place, while in the preceding plays one finds at bottom hardly anything more signi- ficant than versatile technical experiment, one finds throughout those to come constant indications of growing, spontaneous, creative imagination. In an artist of whatever kind, a period of vigorous creative imagination declares itself after a fashion which people who are not of artistic temperament rarely understand. The artist does not feel that he has something definite to say, — that he has a state- ment to make ; but when he is about his work, or perhaps before, he is constantly aware of a haunting mood which will not let him rest until he has some 104 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE how expressed it. What that mood signifies in the scheme of the eternities he may as likely as not neither know nor care. All he need certainly know is that, without being able to tell why, he feels somehow with painful acuteness ; what he cares for is chiefly to express his feeling in such manner as shall get rid of it. If he be a man of genius, his work under these conditions will be of lasting value ; if not, it may be comically insignificant. To the artist, this is a matter of accident : to himself a man of genius is as common- place as a plough-boy. The thing for us to remark, then, in this chapter and in the two following, is that throughout, to greater or less degree, the plays and the poems seem born of true artistic impulse, of that trait, uncomfortable to great folk and small, which at times, to any artistic temperament, makes the legends of inspiration seem almost credible. As generally of lasting artistic value, then, — as palpably works of genius, — the writings to come must be read in a different mood from those which pre- cede. To understand them we must not only train ourselves to appreciate how they impressed Eliza- bethans three liundred years ago ; we must actually enjoy them ourselves. So essential is this, indeed, and so great the lasting enjoyment which, as we know them better, we may find throughout them, that in many moods to busy ourselves with them further seems wasted time, — worse still, it often seems Hke pedantic blindness to the constant delights which alone have made tliem permanent. In the end, how- A MID8UMMKR NIGHT'S DREAM 105 ever, if we assume in ourselves the full power of enjoyment, of artistic appreciation, and if we test it now and again by reading for pure pleasure the works which in our coming study we must discuss, we shall gain from our discussion the only thing which could really justify it, — an increased power of enjoyment. These general facts are nowhere clearer than in the Midsummer Night'' s Dream. II. A Midsummer Night's Dream. [The Midsummer Nir/ht's Dream was entered in tlie Stationers' Register on October 8th, 1600. During the same year it was twice published in quarto, with Shakspere's name. It was mentioned by- Meres, in 1598. The sources, none of them closely followed, are many and various Among them are probably the life of Theseus in 'Sorth's Plutarch ; Ciiaucer's Kni(/lit's Tale, Wife of Bath's Tale, and Lef/end of Good Women ; and perhaps Golding's Ovid. The fairy scenes have obvious relation to the actual folk-lore of the English peasantry. Besides, the sources of both the Comedi/ of Errors and the Two Gentlemen of Verona probably affect this play, too. Conjectures as to the origin and date of the Midsummer Night's Dream vary. Some hold that the play was made, like Milton's Comus, for a wedding festival The conjectures as to date, based on internal evidence, — verse-tests and allusions, — vary from 1590 to 1595, with a slight preference for 1594 ] The first, constant, and last effect of the Mid- summer Night's Bream is one of poetry so pervasive that one feels brutally insensitive in seeking here anything but delight. Nowhere does Shakspere more fully justify Milton's words : ^ — •1 U Allegro. 106 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE " Then to the well- trod stage anon. If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild." Nothing of Shakspere's, on the other hand, better confutes the saying which Drummond of Hawthornden attributes to Ben Jonson, that Shakspere wanted art. While it is undoubtedly true that, over and over again, Shakspere stopped far short of such laborious finish as makes the plays of Jonson, whatever else, so admirably conscientious, it is equally true that when Shakspere chose to take pains his technical workmanship was as artistic as his imaginative impulse. Few works in any literature possess more artistic unity than the Midsummer Nighfs Dream, few reveal on study more of that mastery whose art is so fine as to seem artless. Alike in spirit and in form, then, — in motive and in technical detail, — this play is a true work of art ; its inherent beauty is the chief thing to realize, to appreciate, to care for. If we would understand why thQ Midsummer Night'' 8 Dream seems to belong in Shakspere's work where we have placed it, however, we must for a while neglect this prime duty of enjoyment, and consider the play minutely, attending first to the materials of which it is made, and then to the way in which it handles them. Putting aside, as needless for our purpose, those various and scattered sources which are believed pecu- liarly its own, we may conveniently recall the fact A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 107 that in the three comedies already considered we found certain devices and situations which seemed notably effective.* In Love's Labour 's Lost, among other matters, we noted a fresh, open-air atmosphere, a burlesque j)lay performed by characters whose rude- ness and eccentricity was in broadly comic contrast to the culture of their audience, and the perennially amusing confusion of identity. In that case, however, the confusion was reached by the unplausible device of masking. A stage mask, covering only the upper features, must leave the mouth free ; consequently, it does not transform the wearer, and such blunders as the King's or Biron's require an audience convention- ally to accept a disguise which really is none. Con- fusion of identity, however, thus found effective even when not plausible, was repeated and elaborately developed in the Comedy of Errors. Here, again, though, it lacked plausibility ; the audience was asked to accept a degree of personal likeness attainable on the stage only by means of such masks as were worn by the Roman actors for whom the plot was originally made. To hasten on, we remarked, among other effective traits in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the love-inspired treason of Proteus, and his instanta- neous shifts of affection ; though effective, however, these were neither plausible nor sympathetic. To go no further, here are a number of stage devices, already used experimentally by Shakspere with proba- ble success, but never in a way which could give 1 See pp. 86, 91, 96. 108 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE either writer, spectator, or reader serious artistic satisfaction. In the Midsummer NigMs Dream all these are reproduced, but none experimentally. Each has its place in a composition so complete that at sensitive moments one shrinks from dissecting it ; and all are plausible. The scene is laid in a mythical world far enough from reality to make the wood-notes seem that of its inevitable atmosphere. The situation of the burlesque play is reproduced with a firmer hand ; and this time the burlesque interlude has a plot, of which we shall see more later.^ The love treason is trans- ferred from a tolerably cool man to an emotionally overwrought girl ; thereby, while retaining all its the- atrical effect, it becomes at once far less deliberate and far more sympathetic.^ While Proteus tells Valen- tine's secret to the Duke, too, Helena tells Hermia's only to her lover. Finally, both confusion of identity and protean changes of affection ^ are made plausible, like very dreams themselves, by bodily transference to a dream-world, where the fairies of English folk-lore play endless tricks with mortals and with one another, making their fellow-beings fantastically their sport. These instances are enough to show why we may reasonably call this play, in Shakspere's development, a first declaration of artistic consciousness. A con- fusion of pleasant motives, already used in unsatis- 1 See p. 116. 2 Cf. T. G. III. i. 1-50 with M. N. D. I. i. 226 seq. 3 Cf. T. G. II. iv. 192 seq. with M. N. D. II. ii. 103 seq. ; IIL i 132 seq., etc. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 109 factory form, may be guessed to have gathered in his mind. Whoever has had a gleam of artistic experi- ence — such as the haunting line, for example, which belongs inevitably in some unwritten sonnet — knows that such spirits as these can be laid only by expres- sion. There need be no didactic purpose here ; in one sense there need hardly be purpose at all. If we imagine that the Shakspere we have already defined was thus possessed by creative impulse, we imagine enough to account for the Midsummer JVighfs Dream. So much for the artistic motive of the play. Turn- ing to the technical art by which this is made mani- fest, we may conveniently consider it in the three aspects which we have earlier seen to be essential to any narrative or dramatic composition : plot, charac- ter, and atmosphere, or background. To a modern reader, the plot of the Midsummer NighVs Dream seems to concern itself chiefly with the doings of the fairies, who are so constantly charming, and of the clowns, who are so constantly amusing. Even to-day, however, a sight of the play on the stage reveals at once that, so far as plot is concerned, these matters are accessory ; that the real centre of the plot is the love-story of the four Athenians. The artis- tic purpose of all the rest is simjjly to make this plausible. With this purpose, the play begins with a statement of the condition of affairs in the romantic Athens of Theseus, — not a real world, but a world no further removed from realitv than itlentv of others which we are accustomed conventionally to accept on 110 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE the stage. Thence, and not from the actuality of real life, we proceed through the extravagant buffoonery of the clowns — the most grotesque of human beings, but still grotesquely human — to the dreamland of the fairies. This dreamland, after all, is little further removed from the romantic introductory Athens of Theseus than that Athens itself was from the world where it found us. Once in dreamland, the fantastic ex- travagances of the main plot — in their earlier forms so far from credibility — are kept constantly plausible by the superhuman agencies which direct them ; and these in turn are kept plausible by the incessant inter- mingling and contrast with the fairies of the equally extravagant, but still fundamentally human clowns. Then, after some three acts of this, the morning horns of Theseus break the dream ; the fairies vanish ; we come back to our own world through the romantic Athens of Theseus, with which we began. The fifth act recapitulates, almost musically ; the final scene of the fairies is not a part of the action, but an epilogue, a convention frequent in the Elizabethan theatre. The fairy scenes, then, — the accessories by means of which the main plot is made artistically plausible, — are themselves made plausible first by deliberate removal from real life ; and secondly by deliberate contrast with a phase of real life hardly less extrava- gant than they. The constructive art here shown is admirable. At first, too, this constructive art seems original. On consideration, however, it proves to be only an A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM IH adaptation of a convention common on the Elizabethan stage. Though among Shakspere's works an Induction is found only in the Taming of the Slireiv, Inductions — which made the main action a play within a play — were very frequent throughout the early drama. We shall have more to say of them when we come to the Taming of the Shrew} Here it is enough to point out that the first act of the Midsummer Night's Dream is, essentially, a very skilful development of the conven- tional Induction. The plot of the Midsummer Nighfs Dream, then, is far superior to anything we have met before. When we come to the characters we find a state of things less favorable to our notion that the play should be placed here in Shakspcre's artistic develop- ment. Certainly less individual than those of the Two Geiitlemen of Verona, these characters seem almost less so than those of Love's Labour's Lost. Taken by themselves, for example, the Athe- nians of the court of Theseus seem hardly more individual than the Ephcsians of the Comedy of Errors. Considered not by themselves, however, but rather as one of three clearly defined groups, their aspect changes ; they stand in marked and strongly dramatic contrast to two other groups, as distinct from one another as from the Athenian courtiers, — the clowns and the fairies. In answer, then, to those critics who, largely on the score of individualized char- acter, would place the Midsummer Night' s Dream earlier than the Tivo Gentlemen of Verona, we may say that, ^ See p. 1 5!t. 112 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE like the other plays considered in the last chapter, the latter is intrinsically experimental, while the former is intrinsically artistic ; and that three broadly general- ized groups of character, whose mutual relations are skilfully adjusted, fit the general artistic motive of the Midsummer NighVs Dream far better than could more individual characters whose individuality should make them a bit unmanageable. In the Two G-entlemen of Verona^ furthermore, the individual touches were rather matters of experimental detail than of creative imagination. The contrast defines a general truth : Because a writer can individualize character, it does not follow that he can master and manage his own in- dividual creatures. In the perfectly manageable vague- ness of character here, then, we have fresh evidence of how careful Shakspere's art may have been. As we have seen, if our chronology be not all wrong, his power developed slowly. Here, then, we may at least guess that the state of things shows him in a truly artistic mood, too wise even to attempt things at all beyond his certain power. In one scene, though, the juvenility of character seems too great for any such explanation ; this is in the child-like squabble between Hermia and Helena.^ On the stage, to be sure, it is still funny ; but the fun is crude : grown girls, we feel, never squabble quite in this way. Properly to appreciate the scene, we must remember the circumstances for which it was written : there were no female actors, — a fact which goes far to atone for the coarseness of female 1 Til. ii. 282-344. A iMIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DRKA.M llo character common throughout the lesser Elizabethan drama ; Helena was written to be played by a big boy, Hcrmia by a small one. If we be inclined to wander in our deliglit with the atmosphere of the Midsummer NUjMs Dream, a fact liice this should recall us to ourselves. Dainty as its atmosphere is, specific too as distinguished from any other in literature, the play itself could never have seemed to its writer only the beautiful poem which it chiefly seems to us. He made it for living actors, — men and boys. The fairy atmos- phere was to be conveyed to his audience not only by the lovely lines which remain as fresh as ever, but by the bodily presence of child-actors, whose actual forms should revive among the specta- tors the familiar old fancies of the little people. Such fancies, far from what arise nowadays as we contemplate in the Midsummer NighCs Dream the stout legs of a middle-aged ballet, could be more than suggested on the stage of Shakspere's time. It was a stage whose conventions allowed Macbeth and Ban- quo, fifteen years later, to make their entrance on wicker hobby-horses, with dangling false legs^ ; whose conventions permitted Cleopatra to wear laced stays, which she orders cut in a moment of agitation.^ On such a stage, the pink limbs of chubby children — and the lesser fairies who serve Bottom have no lines which might not be taught a child of three or four^ — • 1 See p. 309. '^ Antony and Cleopatra, I. iii. 71. 8 III. i. 166 seq. ; IV. i. 8 114 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE might have seemed almost actually the fairy fancies which remain the folk-lore of Northern Europe. Here and there, among modern peasantry, such folk- lore still survives, much as it was when Shakspere wrote. The contrast between his way of dealing with it and ours is typical of the change in the times. He asked himself, as an artist, how it might serve his artistic purpose ; and using it accordingly, he made it the lasting type of cultivated romantic tra- dition. If Spenser's fairies never quite lived, and Drayton's have long been forgotten, Shakspere's will always remain the lasting little people of the English ages. Men of our time treat the old stories differ- ently, asking not what may be done with them, but what they mean. In the legends of the little people, some wise contemporaries of ours fancy that they can trace lingering race-memories of the dwarfish aborigines of Europe. When our own ancestors drove them back toward the northern snows, these scholars guess, some may have lingered in caves and burrows, emerging at night, brutishly grateful to who- ever was kind, mischievous to whoever plagued them. So, perhaps, there are modern minds who may get from the Midsummer NigJifs Dream more satisfaction in pointing out that the name of Oberon is a version of that of the dwarf king Alberich — himself doubtless some prehistoric Eskimo — than in giving themselves over to the delights of Oberon's dreamy realm. As students not of science, but of literature, how- ever, we should never lose sight of these delights. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 115 Our study has compelled us to analyze in this play something besides its beauty. If we would under- stand Shakspere, however, its beauty, not its anat- omy, is what we must think of first, last, and always. Its beauty is what Shakspere must have cared for and thought of. As a true creative artist, indeed, he was probably less conscious of its mechanism than our study has made us. An artist who has real creative impulse generally works by an unwit- ting instinct, with a truth which makes his work both significant and organic ; sometimes it seems as if a critically conscious artist could never create like one who believes himself to work untrammelled, to say things as he says them, because, without troubling himself as to why, he feels sure that just thus they should be said. Some mood like this seems to underlie the famous criticism of Theseus on this very fairy story. By appreciating that, after all, we may best appreciate the Midsummer Night's Dream : ^ — " I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman : the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt : 1 V i. 2-17. 116 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination hodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name." III. Romeo and Juliet. [An imperfect and probably unauthorized quarto of Romeo and Juliet was published anonymously in 1597. A tolerably complete quarto, also anonymous, appeared in 1599; there was a third quarto in 1609. The play is attributed to Shakspere by Meres; and the Centurie of Prayse cites an allusion to it as Shakspere's in 1595. The story, a very old one, occurs in various forms and languages. The immediate sources of the play are two English versions of a French version of a novel by Bandello: Romeiis and Jidiet, a long poem by Arthur Brooke, published in 1562; and Paynter's Palace oj Pleasure. Conjectures as to date range from 1591 to the second quarto. The general opinion seems to be that there was an early play, perhaps collaborative, which Shakspere slowly rewrote at intervals. The play, in its present form, may be reasonably placed near the Midsummer Night's Dream, about 1594 or 1595.] One reason for grouping together the Midsummer Night'' s Dream and Romeo and Juliet lies in the fact that the story of the latter is virtually the same as that of Pyramus and TJiishe. As in Love's Labour 's Lost, Shakspere at once practised and burlesqued the absurdities of fashionable style, so here he seems a bit later to treat this tragic tale in two distinct moods : in one, he makes of it a play which, whatever ROMEO AND JULIET 117 its date, is generally admitted to be his first great tragedy ; in the other he turns it into a burlesque vvhich emphasizes every point of the tragedy where the sublime verges on the ridiculous. Another thing which groups the plays together is Mercutio's lyric interlude al)Out Queen Mab,^ — a passage so fatal to modern actors, who try to make it a part of the action. Clearly, however, the relation of Romeo and Juliet to the Midsummer NighVs Dream is even more debatable than we found the relation between that play and the preceding comedies. The relation of Romeo and Juliet to its sources, on the other hand, — to matter distinctly not Shaks- perean, — is very close indeed. Most of us know the play so well, and think of it so constantly as Shaks- pere's from beginning to end, that a direct comparison of some familiar passages and their sources is worth while. It will show more palpably than any similar comparison of less familiar matters how completely an Elizabethan dramatist looked upon his task as mere translation.^ Two examples will serve our pur- pose : the first is that which Shaicspere translated into the familiar character of the Nurse, so often talked about as peculiarly his own ; the second is that which he translated into the soliloquy of Juliet when she drinks the sleeping-draught. These are broadly typical not only of Romeo and Juliet throughout, but also of Shakspere's plays in general, and indeed of the whole Elizabethan drama. ' I. iv. .53-9.5. * See p. 76. 118 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE In Paynter's version of the story ^ there is nothing more than mention that Juliet's governess, an old woman, was the go-between for the lovers ; and this is said to be all that exists in either the French ver- sion or the Italian. Brooke, on the other hand, intro- duces the following passage : ^ — " To Romeus she goes of him she doth desyre, To know the mean of mariage by councell of the fryre. On Saterday, quod he, if Juliet come to shrift, She shall be shrived and maried, how lyke you noorse this drift ? Now by my truth (quod she) gods blessing have your hart ; For yet in all my life 1 have not heard of such a part. Lord, how you yong men can such crafty wiles devise, If that you love the daughter well to bleare the mothers eyes. Now for the rest let me and Juliet alone : To get her leave, some feate excuse I will devise anone For that her golden locks by sloth have been unkempt : Or for unwares some wanton dreame the youthfull damsell drempt, Or for in thoughts of love her ydel time she spent : Or otherwise within her hart deserved to be shent. I know her mother will in no case say her nay: I warrant you she shall not fayle to come on Saterday. And then she sweares to him, the mother loves her well : And how she gave her suck in youth she leaveth not to tell. A pretty babe (quod she) it was when it was yong : Lord, how it could full pretely have prated with it tong. A thousand time and more I laid her on my lappe, And clapt her on the buttocke soft and kist where I did clappe. ' Both Paynter's version and Brooke's were published by the New Shakspere Society, ed. P. A. Daniel, in 1875. They occur also in Hazlitt's Shalcspere's Library. ^ Romeus and Juliet, 631 seq. ROMEO AND JULIET 119 And gladder then was I of such a kisse forsooth : Then I had been to have a kisse of some olde lechers mouth. And thus of Juliets youth began this prating noorse, And of her present state to make a tedious long discoorse. For . . when these Beldams sit at ease upon theyr tayle : The day and eke the candle light before theyr talke shall fayle. And part they say is true, and part they do devise: Yet boldly do they chat of both when no man checkes theyr lyes." Tliat marvellously Shaksperean creation, the Nurse, it turns out, was conceived and brought forth, thirty- years before Shakspere's time, by Arthur Brooke. Now for that marvellously Shaksperean piece of psychology, when Juliet drinks the potion. Here is Paynter's version : ^ — " lulietta beinge within hir Chambre having an eawer ful of Water standing uppon the Table filled the viole which the Frier gave her: and after she had made the mixture, she set it by hir bed side, and went to Bed. And being layde, new Thoughtes began toassaile her, with a concept of grievous Death, which brought hir into such case as she could not tell what to doe, but playning inces- santly sayd, 'Am not I the most unhappy and desperat creature, that ever was borne of Woman? . . ray distresse bath brought me to sutch extremit}', as to save mine honor and conscience, I am forced to devoure the drynke whereof I know not the vertue : but what know I (sa3'd she) whether the Operatyon of thys Pouder will be to soone or to late, or not correspondent to the due time . . ? What know I moreover, if the Serpents and other venomous and crauling Wormes, whycb commonly frequent the Graves 1 Dauiel, p 130; Hazlitt, p. 244. 120 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE and pittes of the Earth wyll hurt me, thynkyng that I am deade? But howe shall I indure the stynche of so many carious and Bones of myne auncestors which rest in the Grave, yf by Fortune I do awake before Rhomeo and Fryer Laurence doe come to help me?"'* All directly from the French, this is substantially repeated by Brooke. At this point, then, we may turn to his version, which goes on a little more fluently than Paynter's : — " And whilst she in these thoughts doth dwell somewhat to long, The force of her ymagining anon dyd waxe so strong, That she surmysde she saw, out of the hollow vaulte, (A griesly thing to looke upon) the carkas of Tybalt ; Right in the selfe same sort that she few dayes before Had seene him in his blood embrewde, to death eke wounded sore And then when she agayne within her selfe had wayde That quicke she should be buried there, and by his side be layde, All comfortles, for she shall living feere have none, But many a rotten carkas, and full many a naked bone ; Her dainty tender partes gan shever all for dred, Her golden heares did stand upright upon her chillish head. Then pressed with the feare that she there lived in, A sweat as colde as mountaine yse pearst through her tender skin, That with the moysture hath wet every part of hers : And more besides, she vainely thinkes, whilst vainely thus she feares, A thousand bodies dead have compast her about. And lest they will dismember her she greatly stands in dout."' 1 Cf. Romeo and Juliet, IV. iii. 14 seq. * Romeus and Juliet, 2377 seq. KOMEO AXD JULIET 121 Paynter's conclusion of the translation is perhaps the more memorable : — " And feelyng that hir forces diminyshed by lyttle and lyttle, fearing that through to great debilyty she was not able to do hir enterpryse, like a furious and insensate Woman, with out further care, gulped up the Water wythin tlie Voyal, then crossing hir armes upon hir stomacke, she lost at that instants all the powers of hir Body, restyng in a Traunce." In Juliet's soliloquy, Shakspere introduces two touches not in these original versions : her business with the dagger, and her doubt of the Friar's honesty. Apart from these, he merely condenses and translates these grotesque old narratives into permanent form ; for example : ^ — " 0, if I wake, shall I not be distraught. Environed with all these hideous fears ? And madly play with my forefathers' joints ? And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud ? And, in this rage with some great kinsman's bone, As with a club, dash out my desperate brains ? O, look I methinks I see my cousin's ghost, Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body Upon a rapier's point : stay, Tybalt, stay ! Romeo, I come ! this do I drink to thee." With less citation, it would have been hard to em- phasize the two facts which these typical passages should make clear : in the first place, they show how Elizabethan dramatists generally dealt with the 1 IV. iii. 49 seq. 122 WILLI A^I SHAKSPERE original sources of their plays, — tragic, comic, and historic alike ; in the second place, they prove the remoteness of Romeo and Juliet, even in psychologic detail, from what it is commonly thought to be, — a pure creation of Shakspere's brain. Turning now from substance to style, we may find in the style of Romeo and Juliet many traits by no means peculiar to Shakspere among Elizabethan writers. A glance at Romeo's speeches anywhere in the first act,^ or at any of Mercutio's,^ will reveal plenty of such quips, and cranks, and puns as we found in Loveh Labour h Lost. Throughout the play, too, we continually come on lyric passages, as distinguished from dramatic. For one thing, rhymes are frequent. Again, such a speech as Mercutio's about Queen Mab^ can be understood only when we compare it to inter- polated songs in modern comedies ; it is simply a charming, independent piece of lyric declamation. So, when Romeo accosts Juliet^ we have a formal sonnet ; nor can blank verse disguise the essentially lyric quality of the Epithalamium ;^ or of the Morning Song ; ^ or of the fugue-like quartette of lament over the unconscious Juliet.'^ The more one studies the play, in short, the more curiously archaic the style often seems ; it is really an example of the Euphuistic fantasy prevalent in early Elizabethan literature. 1 E. g. I. i. 177 seq. 2 His dying pun is familiar; IIL i. 102. • I. iv. 53 seq. * I. V. 95-108. 6 iii_ V. 1-36. > III. ii. 1-33. 7 IV. V. 43-64. ROMEO AND JULIET 123 While this literature is obsolete, however, Borneo and Juliet^ in spite of its fidelity to obsolete sources, survives among the most popular plays on the modern stage. The reason why is not far to seek. Shaks- pere has infused the whole play with creative imagi- nation. On the numberless beauties of detail, which make us half forget its eccentricities, we need not dwell ; the great lyric charm of Romeo and Jidiet is not its chief merit. As a composition, as a complete conception, the play is masterly. Fundamentally the plot is that of a conventional tragedy of blood. Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris, Romeo, and Juliet, — not to speak of Lady Montague, — come to violent deaths ; and the last scene takes place in a charnel-house, w^iich, in the stage setting of the time, might well have been strewn with heaps of bones. On horror's head horrors accumulate as much as any- where ; but whereas in the old tragedies of blood the horrors came from nowhere, in this case they are the legitimate effects of uncontrollable causes. For ex- ample, the play opens after a manner still conven- tional, with a scene between servants, the object of which apparently is only to occupy the first few minutes. But watch what these servants do : One bites his thumb. A fight ensues. Tybalt enters and takes part. Before blood-letting on either side has given his temper a chance to cool, the fight is offi- cially stopped. While his passion, thus aroused, still runs high, he discovers Romeo at the Capulet feast, where Romeo's presence seems to him a studied in* 124 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE suit. Restrained by old Capulet, he grows more angry still. As soon as he meets Romeo in public, he openly insults him. Mercutio steps in, and is killed. Romeo avenges him. So the tragedy proceeds ; were it not for that first thoughtless thumb-biting of the servants, we see, nothing could have fallen out in quite this way. The thumb-biting is one of the direct causes which by a growing series of effects lead straight to the final catastrophe. Few plots anywhere are so carefully composed. The individuality of the characters, meanwhile, constant and consistent throughout, is not so em- phasized as to distract attention from the plot. Rather the very coherence of plot on which we have just touched is secured by the fact that the temperaments of the separate characters interact as they would in life. It is because Tybalt and Mercutio, for example, are the kind of men they are, that they come to their ends in a way which involves the fate of Romeo and Juliet. Throughout the play one feels instinctively that here, at last, the creative imagination of Shakspere had begun to make his own fictions as real as human beings. We can hardly conclude, however, that this matter presented itself to him as seriously as we are disposed to think of it. After all, what a writer feels, in the position we here suppose to have been Shakspere's, is not so much profound psychologic wisdom as intuitive knowledge that the people he is describing must be what they are, and must act or think as they do. So far ROMEO AND JULIET 125 as his conscious intervention with them goes, indeed, it may rather impair than improve their vitality. In Romeo and Juliet^ for example, there is one state- ment which, perhaps fantastically, might be taken for evidence — as far as it goes — that Shakspcre was not consciously treating his characters so seriously as posterity has supposed. This concerns Juliet's age. In Brooke she is sixteen years old. Why Shaks- pcre should make her two years younger has given rise to much speculation, about the prematurity of Italian youth and the like. Perhaps this speculation is very wise. More probably, however, at least to some of us, the reason why Shakspere's Juliet is fourteen seems to lie in a single pun, at the time of Juliet's first appearance : ^ — " Lady Capulet : She 's not fourteen. Nurse: 1 '11 lay fourteen of my teeth, — And yet, to my teen he it sjjoken I have but /oi R. II. V. i. 55 ; 2 Hen. IV. III. i. 70. « 2 H.IV. IV. ii. 3 I II 1 \\ I. ii. 219 seq. 174 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE not the details, but the proportions of actual life, the nearer the imagination of its maker approaches in its scheme the divine imagination which has made our infinitely mysterious world, the more end- lessly suggestive that work of art must always be. To the artist, however, all this meaning is often as strange as to one who meets for the first time the work in which it lies implied. What the artist knows is often no more than a blind conviction that thus, and not otherwise, the mood which possesses him must be expressed. Those who find in the great artists consciously dogmatic philosophers are gener- ally those who are least artists themselves. In Henry IV. we have sought out traits which, more than probably, Shakspere himself never realized. What he must surely have realized need have been no more than this : Setting to work at a stage-play, of the old chronicle-history school, he found his power of creative imagination so spontaneously alert that by the mere process of letting his characters do and say what they inevitably would, he made the most successful chronicle-history which had as yet appeared on the English stage. That he had done more, — that he had changed chronicle-history into historical fiction, and that he had created characters which should become the household words of the world, — he need never have guessed. A cool study of the play as it stands makes this opinion the most probable. The Second Part seems more hasty than the first; it was very likely hastily made to meet a popular demand which THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 175 the First had excited. Nowadays, too, as we have seen, both parts so abound with the obsolete conventions of chronicle-history that they would surely act ill. As stage-plays, then, — and for stage-plays Shakspere surely meant them, — they are things of the past. So constantly vital is the imagination which pervades them, however, that as readers we of later days never think of the dead conventions at all. We accept them for just what they are, — only means of expression ; by their means we come face to face with the imagi- native conceptions of a master's mind. In our sense of the ultimate human plausibility of these conceptions, the fruit of a union between creative imagination and a solid basis of historical fact, we properly lose all sense of the means by which this end is wrought. X. The Merry Wives op Windsor. [The Merry Wives of Windsor was entered in the Stationers' Regis- ter on January 18th, 1602. It was published, in a very imperfect quarto, during the same year. The relation of this quarto to tiie final version of the play has been much discussed ; probably, though it professes to be a work of Shakspere as it was performed " before her Majestic," it is pirated and incomplete. There was another quarto in 1619. The tradition that the play was written in a fortnight at the express command of the Queen, who desired to see Falstaff in love, cannot be traced beyond 1702. Nor can the comparative chronology of this play and Henry V. be definitely settled. Mr. Fleay believes the Merry Wives to be a revision of an old play called the Jealous Comedy. The plot appears to be based on certain novels translated from the Italian, to be found in Hazlitt's iihakespeare's Library. A conjectural date, commonly accepted, is 1598 or 1599.] 176 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Whatever the origin of the Merry Wives of Wind- sor, and whatever the history of its final text, the play is clearly related to both Henry IV. and Henry V. On the titlepage of the quarto this fact appears at a glance : — " A Most pleasaunt and excellent conceited Comedie, of Syr John Falstaffe, and the merrie Wives of Windsor. Eutermixed with sundrie variable and pleasing humors, of . . Justice ShM.1- low, . . With the swaggering vaine of Auncient Pistoll, and Corporal! Nym." Falstaff, of course, appears in both parts of Henry IV. ; Shallow and Pistol in the Second Part ; Pistol again, and Nym, in Henry V. The conclusion that the Merry Wii-es must therefore be subsequent to Henry V., however, is not necessary ; for as Henry V. was certainly published in 1600, two years before the quarto of the Merry Wives, the mention of Nym on this titlepage may merely be a reference to the general popularity of the character. Which version of Nym was first written, nobody can tell. The one thing of which we may feel sure is that all these characters were popular. Accordingly there has now and again been effort seriously to identify the personages in the Merry Wives of Windsor with those who bear the same names in the chronicle-histories. This effort has met with small success. While Falstaff, and Bar- dolph, and the Hostess, and Pistol, and the rest re- main the same people in scene after scene of Henry IV. and Henry F"., they seem somehow different THE MEKKY WIVES OF WINDSOR 177 •11 the Merry Wives. The truth is probably that, as they appear in this jolly comedy, they are identical with their other selves only in a very general way, which freshly emphasizes the archaism of Shakspere's theatre. Nowadays, when Thackeray, or Balzac, or Anthony Trollope introduces in one book a character which has appeared in another, we expect to find the various aspects of the character consistent ; each imasrinarv individual is assumed to have the same sort of identity which real people have. In liter- ature of an older kind, on the other hand, there are what we may call generic personages : the Harlequin and the Pantaloon of pantomime, for example ; the Sganarelle of Molifere ; the Lisette and Frontin of Eighteenth Century comedy ; the Vice of the old English Moralities. Wherever these personages ap- pear, their make-up is the same, and so are their general traits. Over and over again, however, they appear, under incompatible circumstances ; and all one ever expects is that in any given play, or what else, the personage shall be for the moment consist- ent. It is in this old, conventional way, rather than in the modern, literal sense, that the personages of the Merry Wives of Windsor are identical with those of the chronicle-histories. Their identity is one of type, of aspect, of name, not of history ; it is an identity which belongs to a far earlier period of serious literature than our own. Nowadays one finds such types chiefly in the detectives and the desperadoes of penny dreadfuls. This generic quality of the characters in the Merry 12. , 178 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Wives of Windsor is somewhat obscured by their decided individuality, by the vigorous humor of their conception, and by the thoroughly English quality of their environment. To take a single example, the school-boy who makes a mess of his Latin grammar ^ is a perennially funny sketch of adolescent English- speaking flightiness : whoever has had pupils must always relish it. The way in which the oddities of foreign speech are burlesqued, too, in Sir Hugh Evans and Doctor Caius,^ makes the other personages seem the more English by contrast. This solitary comedy in which Shakspere lays his scene in England, seems as thoroughly national as any of the chronicle- histories. True to English life in so many details, then, and with characters as vital and as jolly in con- ception — for all their extravagance — as anything we have met in comedy, the Merry Wives always seems peculiarly English. Very clearly, however, when we stop to consider the swift, intricate, amusing plot, we find there several traits which are not English at all. In the first place, the general scheme of the plot is conventionally Italian, and the underlying assumption — that an attempt at seduction is capital fun — is far more congenial to Continental than to plain English ways of thought. In the second place, the whole action tends toward the masque of the fairies in the fifth act, itself at once a revival of the device which had already proved effec- tive in Lovers Labour'' s Lost and in the Midsummer 1 IV. i. « E.g. III. i. THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 179 Night^s Bream, an admirable little type of what the Elizabethan masque was, and a dramatic convention as remote from real English life as is the ballet of the modern stage. The Merry Wives of Windsor, in short, is not really English at all ; it is rather a vigorous translation into English terms of an essentially for- eign conception, accomplished with a skill rivalled only in Box and Cox, — perhaps the one modern adaptation from the French which does not betray its foreign origin. As a broadly humorous presentation of convention- alized characters, conducting themselves — for all the English flavor of their environment — in a manner substantially agreeable rather to Continental than to English ideas, the Merry Wives of Windsor seems a far less serious work than either Henry IV. or the riper comedies and tragedy which have preceded. It may be taken, to be sure, a little more seriously than we have as yet taken it. For one thing, in spite of considerable disguise and confusion of identity, the stock devices of the older comedy, the fun here turns chiefly on an equally lasting and far more human device, — on the self-deception of the fatuous Falstaff, and of the jealous Ford. Self-deception, as funny a thing as mistaken identitv, has its roots not in the accidents but in the essential weakness of human nature ; we shall find it later the chief comic motive of Shakspere, and later still a tragic one, too. In the second place, the main situation of the plot here — the effort of a man of rank to seduce the wives of plain citizens — was used 180 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE by other Elizabethan dramatists ; but ahnost always to the discredit of the citizens. Middleton's Chaste Maid in Cheapside will serve to illustrate' the regular treatment of the situation. In the Merry Wives of Windsor, as distinctly as in the Marriage of Figaro, the gentleman gets the worst of it. One can hardly believe, however, that this jolly, off-hand play is funda- mentally, like that of Beaumarchais, a serious satire. The most reasonable view of the Merry Wives of Windsor, perhaps, is that which groups it with the Taming of the Shrew. In substance not artistically serious, not instinct — like the Midsummer NighVs Dream or the Merchant of Venice — with definite artistic motive, it differs from the earliest comedies by being in treatment not experimental but masterly. The man who wrote it thoroughly knew his trade. To all appearances, it belongs, in Shakspere's work, to the period when, by an unparalleled feat of creative imagination, he developed the old chronicle-history into permanently plausible historical fiction. If we regard it as the comparatively thoughtless side-work of a moment when his full energy was busy elsewhere, we shall understand it best. XL Henry V. [Henry V., together with three other plays, was entered in the Stationers' Register on August 4th, 1 600, with a note that all four were "to be staied." Quite what this note means nobodj has settled. Henry V. appeared in a very imperfect form in 1600. There were HENRY V 181 other imperfect quartos in 1602 and 1608. The full text, as we have it, first appeared in the folio of 1623. The sources of the play are identical with those of Henry IV. From the fact that Meres, who mentioned Henry IV. in 1598, did not mention Henri/ V., it has been inferred that Henry V. is subse- quent to 1598. As it was published in 1600, a reasonable date for it seems 1599. This is confirmed by lines 29-34 of the Prologue to Act V., which apparently refer to the expedition of Essex to Ireland, — 15 April-28 September, 1599.] Identical in origin with Henry IV., and so far as the actually historical scenes go with Richard II., too, Henry V. differs from both. It certainly lacks the poetic completeness of Richard IL, and just as certainly the inevitable plausibility of Henry IV. This may be partly due to the accic^ent that this play deals particularly with the battle of Agincourt, which in Elizabeth's time preserved such pre-eminence of patriotic tradition as in the last century surrounded the name of Blenheim, and in our own time still sur- rounds the names of Trafalgar and of Waterloo.^ Whoever should deal with Agincourt in 1599 could not help trying to produce a patriotic effect. A mere effort to produce a patriotic effect, dramati- cally conceived, however, would not necessarily have resulted in just such an effect as that of Henry V. Somehow, whether one see the play or read it, one is conscious of a strongly hortatory vein throughout. To infer from this that the writer was a deliberate and * See particularly Drayton's ballad -. — *' Fair stood the wind for France," etc. This was the model for Tennyson's " Charge of the Six Hundred." 182 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE sincere preacher is not necessary ; one can hardly avoid the inference, however, that, as an artist, the writer of Henry V. had chiefly in mind some other pur- pose than a purely dramatic. From beginning to end he seems trying not merely to translate historical mate- rial into effective dramatic terms, but also to present that material in such a manner that his audience shall leave the theatre more enthusiastically English than they entered it. As a man he need not therefore have been particularly patriotic ; as an artist he seems cer- tainly to have been sensitive to the hortatory nature of his subject. In that case, we may see at once why the effect of Henry V. is often less satisfactory than that of the earlier chronicle-histories. Hortatory purpose is as legitimate for an artist as any other. The most fit- ting vehicle for such a purpose, however, is certainly the vehicle which involves the least possible suggestion of artificiality or insincerity. Sermons in prose, pas- sionate lyrics in verse, are the normal forms of horta- tory literature. The stage, on the other hand, can never free itself from an aspect of artificiality. When you see a play, however much it move you, there is no avoiding knowledge that the actors are pretend- ing to be somebody else than themselves. All this, though perfectly legitimate in their art, is fatal to any lasting personal faith in their hortatory utter- ances. If the stage be a teacher, it may teach only by parable. An indication that the trouble with Henry V. lies HENRY V 183 in this incompatibility of artistic purpose and artistic vehicle may be found in the Chorus : ^ — " Pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that have dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object : can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France ? or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did afl"right the air at Agincourt ? O, pardon ! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million ; And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work." Such lines as these, which fairly typify the senti- ment of all six utterances of the Chorus, really show as acute a sense of the material limitations surrounding an Elizabethan play as is shown by Ben Jonson's well-known prologue to Every Man in His Humour? In this Jonson declares that as a dramatic writer he disdains to " purchase your delight at such a rate As, for it, he himself must justly hate : To make a child, now swadled, to proceede Man, and then shoote up, in one beard, and weede, Past threescore years : or with three rustie swords. And helpe of some few foot-and-halfe-foote words, Fight over Yorke^ and Lancaster's long jarres : And in the tyring-house bring wounds, to scarres. ^ Prologue to Art I. 8 seq. 2 This play was acted in 1598. The earliest publication of the pro- logue, however, was in 1616. Cf. p. 14. 184 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE He rather prayes, you will be pleas'd to see One such, today as other playes should be ; When neither Chorus wafts you ore the seas ; Nor creaking throne comes downe, the boys to please." The difference between these two comments on stage-conditions — comments which if the prologue to Every Man in His Humour be as old as the play are almost exactly contemporary — lies in the fact that while Jonson condemns the limitations of his theatre, Shakspere laments them. Generally, with purely dramatic purpose, Shakspere appears frankly to accept the conditions under which he must work. In Henry V., he professes throughout that they bother him. So far as it goes, this very fact tends to show that his artistic purpose was not merely dramatic. The general impression made by the play confirms this opinion. From beginning to end, Henry himself is always kept heroically in view ; he is presented in the exasperating way which makes so ineffectual the efforts of moralizing scribblers, dear to Sunday-school librarians. Of course he is not such an emasculate, repulsive ideal as you find in the group headed by Mr. Barlow, and by Jonas, the hired man of the Hollidays. Changing what terms must be changed, however, he is not so foreign to them as he seems ; he is rather a moral hero than a dramatic. For all his humanity, you feel him rather an ideal than a man ; and an ideal, in virtues and vices alike, rather British than human. He has sown conventional wild oats ; he has reformed ; he is bluff, simple-hearted, not keenly intellectual, coura- HENRY V 185 geous, above all a man more of action than of words. The Shakspere who propounds such an ideal, then, is limited more profoundly than by mere stage con- ditions ; throughout his conception he reveals the peculiar limitation of sympathy which still marks a typical Englishman. In the honestly canting moods which we of America inherit with our British blood we gravely admire Henry V. because we feel sure that we ought to. In more normally human moods, most of us would be forced to confess that, at least as a play, Henry V. is tiresome. If it be a dull play, however, it is just as surely the dull play of a great artist ; it is full of excellent detail. In the distinctly historical parts, the excellent detail is chiefly rhetorical ; as such, it is almost beyond praise. The eloquence of Henry's great speeches ^ everybody recognizes. Perhaps an even more notable example of Shakspere's now consummate mastery of style may be found in the Archbishop of Canterbury's exposition of the Salic law.^ The passage — one of the kind which sometimes makes superficial readers marvel at the learning of Shakspere — actually states the law in question, along with many historical details, about as compactly as any lawyer could have stated it under Queen Elizabeth. Besides this, the passage is an, admirable example of that very difficult kind of sono- rous declamation which depends for its effect on the > I. ii. 2.'J9 seq. ; II. ii. 79 seq^; IIL i- ; IV. i. 247 seq., 306 geq, ; IV. iii. 20 seq. ; etc. * L ii. 33 wq, 186 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE skilful use of proper names. A glance at Holinshed ^ will show where all the learning came from, and all the proper names. Compare, for example, these two versions of the historical statement made in lines 69-71. Holinshed writes : — *'Hugh Capet, who usurped the crowne upon Charles duke of Loraine, the sole heir male of the line and stock of Charles the great ; " and here is Shakspere's rendering of the words : — " Hugh Capet also, who usurp'd the crown Of Charles the duke of Lorraine, sole heir male Of the true line and stock of Charles the Great." The art by which a dull legal statement is converted into a piece of vigorously sounding rhetoric is all that Shakspere has added. The changes of phrase are incredibly slight, incalculably effective. They mark as clearly as any single passage in Shakspere the moment when his command of style was perhaps most easily masterly ; for they translate the original prose into a blank verse which is free alike from the monot- ony and the excessive ingenuity of his earlier days, and from the condensation, the lax freedom, and the overwhelming thought of his later. The excellence of detail in the comic scenes of Henry V. is perhaps more notable still. While in substance all the comic characters are what an Eliza- bethan would have called " humourous," and what we * The passage in qacBtion is conveniently accessible in Rolfe's edition of Henry V. HENRY V 187 should now call " eccentric comedy," they are almost all human, too. Comic dialect, to be sure, already proved effective in the Merry Wives of Windsor, is repeated in the speeches of Jamy, Macmorris, and Fluellen ; ^ repeated, too, is the broad burlesque on the excesses of Elizabethan ranting which pervades the speech of Pistol everywhere. For all this conven- tional humor, however, one grows to feel of the comic characters in Henry F., as of all the characters in Henry IK, that these are real people. Perhaps the most subtly artistic touches of all are the repeated ones, each in itself slight, by which the crew of Falstaff are completely removed from any relation with the King himself. To appreciate this we must revert for a moment to Henry IV. Com- monly one thinks of Falstaff, Prince Hal, and the rowdies of the Eastcheap Tavern, as a constantly inter- mingled company. A little scrutiny shows that the Prince is actually familiar with only two, — Poins and Falstaff himself. Gadshill, the regular highwavman, appears only in the First Part of Henry IV. ; Poins disappears with the second scene of tlie Second Part, — the scene in which we first see Pistol ; Pistol and the Prince never meet at all in Henry IV. ; and Bar- dolph is throughout a person of lower rank, Falstaff's attendant, The only character with whom a violent break is necessary proves to be Falstaff. However he may morally deserve his fate, one cannot help feeling that the King cruelly kills his heart. Clearly, then, ^ See III. ii. 79 seq. 188 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE to have introduced Falstaff in a play whose artistic object is the apotheosis of Henry would have been a blunder ; and to have put his death on the stage, how- ever agreeable to the theatrical custom of the time, could not have been less than shocking. To tell the story of his last hours as Shakspere has told it is to do a thing which no writer ever surpassed. If one were asked to name a single scene where Shakspere shows himself supreme, one would often be disposed to name the third scene of the second act of Henry V. Falstaff once removed, the fate of the others comes with no disturbing sense of the King's breach of friend- ship. How Shakspere managed it, a single example will suggest. In Holinshed we are told that " a soulJiour tooke a pix out ot a church, for which he was appre- hended, & the king not once remooved till the box was restored, and the offendor strangled." This incident Shakspere has developed into our last glimpse of Bardolph, involving the quarrel between Pistol and Fluellen,' on which turns so much of the comic action towards the end of Henry V. And so, by touch after touch, none of which we feel at the moment, the King at last is left alone in his glory. In the wonderful third scene of the second act there is a famous phrase which illustrates the condition in which Shakspere's text has come down to us.^ " For after I saw him fumble with the sheets," says the Hostess, " and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way ; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a' babbled of green fields." 1 III. vi. 21-62. * Line* 14-18 HENRY V 189 In the folio this last phrase appears in a form which for above a century was unintelligible, — "a Table of green fields." Theobald suggested " a' babbled " instead of " a Table." The suggestion was in such harmony with the spirit of the scene that it has been unani- mously accepted. Whether Shakspere actually wrote it, however, no one can ever be sure. What one can be sure of, on the other hand, is that Shakspere never saw a published copy of Henry V. which compared either in fulness or in accuracy with the folio of 1623. Such serious discussion of his art and his purposes as we have just emerged from is apt to mislead. To think of Shakspere's plays except as literature is a bit hard ; yet nothing is more certain than that even so serious a work as Henry V. could never have appeared to him as anything but a play made for the actual stage. In our study of his artis- tic development, then, we must finally regard it as a stage play. Thus it takes its place as chronologically the last of the chronicle-histories, and in the whole scheme of chronicle-history as the link between the series which begins with Richard II. and that which ends with Richard HI. In some details of style superior to any of the others — for nowhere is Shakspere's declama- tory verse more sim})ly, fluently sonorous ; and no- where are his comic scenes more skilfully touched, or much better phrased in terms both of speech and of action — it somehow lacks both the completeness of Richard II. and the pervasive plausibility of Henry 190 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE IV. In other words, while Henri/ IV. showed a de- velopment of chronicle-history analogous to that of comedy in the Midsummer NigMs Dream., or that of tragedy in Romeo and Juliet^ Henry V. shows rather a stagnation than an advance of creative energy. Compared with the plays we have lately considered it lacks spontaneity, it grows conscious. If it stood by itself, we might almost infer that the artistic im- pulse which has underlain Shakspere's work ever since the Midsummer Niglifs Dream was beginning to flag. To correct this inference we must look at other work attributed to the same time. As more than once before, a comparative weakness in one kind of writing will prove to indicate no more than that Shakspere's best energies were devoted to another. XII. Much Ado About Nothing. [^Much Ado About Nothing was another of the plays entered " to be staled " in the Stationers' Register, on August 4th, 1600. It was again entered, unconditionally, on August 23rd, 1600; and was published in a very complete quarto during the same year. The sources of the serious plot — the loves of Hero and Claudio — are to be found in Ariosto and in Bandello. In the Fourth Canto of the Second Book of the Faerie Qneene, Spenser tells the story senti- mentally. The comic parts of the play, including Benedick, Beatrice, and Dogberry, appear to be of Shakspere's invention. As the play was not mentioned by Meres in 1598, and existed in 1600, it may, with some confidence, be assigned to 1599. Mr. Fleay, however, eagerly believes it to be a revision of the Lore's Labour's Won, men tioned by Meres. This view is not generally accepted.] MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 191 In the sense that it is a permanently significant work of art, whose maker seems thoroughly to have known both what he wished to do and how to do it, Much Ado About Nothing is a masterpiece. Its total effect is as plausible as that of Henry IV. ; forgetting the means by which characters and incidents are pre- sented, one instinctively thinks of them as real. The plot has definite unity ; the characters, all of first-rate individuality, live in a world which seems actual, and constantly express themselves in a style unsurpassed for firmness and decision. All this technical power, too, is used here for a more definite artistic purpose than has generally been perceptible in the earlier work of Shakspere; the mood which underlies Much Ado About Nothing, we shall see by and by to be more profound than the moods we have met hitherto. Finally, whether you see the play or read it, you can hardly avoid feeling that it has the inevitable ease of mastery. Off-hand, such ease and completeness in any work of art seem inborn. Nothing is further from one's instinctive impression than the real truth, that they can be attained only by years of preliminary practice. We have already followed Shakspere's career long enough, however, to assure ourselves that Much Ado About Nothing was produced, at least in its final form, only after above ten years of patient stage-craft. Dur- ing these years he had thoroughly learned two things : first, how to translate into effective dramatic terms the crude material which he found in his narrative 192 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE sources; and secondly, how to repeat, with just enough variation to make the repetition welcome, characters, scenes, situations, what not, which in previous plays had proved dramatically effective. In Much Ado About Nothing he shows both of these traits : the story of Hero and Claudio, which is really the core of the play, he presents far more vividly than anybody else ; and by way of contrast and amplification he adds to it, from his own previous stage-work, the story and the characters of Benedick, Beatrice, and Dogberry. The greater vitality of these has perhaps resulted, after all, in a distortion of the effect he first intended, anal- ogous to the possible distortion of Romeo and Juliet from the tale of feud promised in the prologue to the tragedy of youthful love known to us all. In each play, your attention ultimately concentrates elsewhere than at first seemed probable. Each alike, however, is masterly, just as each is notable for the firmness with which it sets forth the parts of itself which are peculiarly Shakspere's. In this case, as we have seen, the parts in question include the characters of Bene- dick, Beatrice, and Dogberry. Under the names of Biron, Rosaline, and Dull, Shakspere had already sketched these in Love's Labour's Lost. There have been glimpses of them meanwhile, too ; but this fact is enough. If our chronology be anywhere near right, the interval between the first conception of these char- acters and their final presentation in Much Ado About Nothing was something like ten years. Of course we must remember that Lovers Labour '« MUCH ADO ABOUT .NOTHING 193 Lost^ as we have it, is not the original play of 1589 or so, but a revision of it for performance at court in 1597. Whatever alteration of phrase and finish may then have been made, however, we felt that we might fairly assume the main outline and the chief traits of style in Lovers Labour^ s Lost to belong to the beginning of Shakspere's career. A comparison of Biron and Rosaline with Benedick and Beatrice will strengthen that conclusion. The former pair seem set forth with no deeper consciousness of their value than would come from a sense of the undoubted effect their clever tit for tat must make on an audience. Bene- dick and Beatrice, on the other hand, are not inde- pendent stage characters ; for all their wit and sparkle, they have their places in a great, coherent comedy which, in its entirety, expresses a definite view of human nature. In this view of human nature there are two ele- ments. The artist who conceived such a work as Much Ado About Nothing must in the first place have been keenly sensitive to the inexhaustible power of deceiving themselves possessed by human beings. Benedick, Beatrice, Claudio, Dogberry alike are be- guiled by intrinsic weaknesses of nature into states of mind and lines of conduct whose admirable dramatic effect depends on their incompatibility with obvious facts in possession of omniscience and the audi- ence. This fundamental understanding of a human weakness, however, is not the whole story. With the help of a little deliberate rascality, the weakness in .13 194 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE question beguiles the wisest and the wittiest of people into a situation wliich no unaided acts of theirs could prevent from resulting tragically. What does prevent this result is that, by mere chance, the dullest, stupid- est creatures imaginable happen to stumble on the real facts. In thus presenting the keenest wit as saved from destruction only by the blundering of boors, Shakspere displays a sense of irony lastingly true to human experience. Self-deception, the first of these traits, we met in the Merry Wives of Windsor. By itself it would dis- tinguish these two comedies from the earlier ones, whose fun is based on the far less plausible and not deeply significant, though perennially amusing, device of mistaken identity. The older comedies are chiefly theatrical ; these become human. When to self-decep- tion is added the sense of irony which pervades 3Iuch Ado About Nothing we are face to face with another kind of literature than the old. The old was inspired chiefly by observation of the whims of audiences, and by skilful observance of literary and theatrical tradi- tion ; this, for all its technical skill, seems inspired rather by knowledge of human nature. Technically, at the same time. Much Ado About Nothing displays the traits to which we are already ac- customed. The vitality of creative imagination which enlivened and even veiled the absurdities of the Mid- summer NighVs Dream and the Merchant of Venice, and which brought Henry IV. out of chronicle-history into historical fiction, pervades this more profound play. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 195 The constant economy of needless invention, too, wliich is so marked a trait of Shakspere, appears in various ways. We have already touched on some of the obvious relations of this play to Love'' 8 Labour '« Lost and on the fact that its motive of self-deception was the motive also of the Merry Wives of Windsor. Those who know Shakspere well must already have remarked that self-deception is the motive of much work still to come, — of the misadventures of Mal- volio, for example, of the jealousy of Othello and of Leontes, of the infatuation of Lear. They must have noticed, too, that Don John comes midway between the Aaron of Titus Andronicus and lago. Not quite so clearly, perhaps, they may have observed that the loss and recovery of Hero have much in common with the situation of Emilia in the Comedy of Errors as well as with that of Juliet ; while clearly all these are by and by to be revived in Thaisa and in Hermione. One might thus go on long. It is better worth our while, however, to consider the trait in which Much Ado About Notliing is su- preme, — the wit of the chief personages. Of course the humor of Dogberry and Verges, despite its breadth, is lastingly funny ; but certainly it is not unique. Elsewhere in Shakspere, and — to go no further — in Mrs. Malaprop, one finds plenty like it. The equally lasting wit of Benedick and Beatrice, on the other hand, is unsurpassed, and one may almost say unrivalled, in English Literature. For this amaz- ing development of wit, a trait which at first thought 196 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE seems perhaps the most spontaneous in all human expression, we have already seen causes. From the beginning of Elizabethan Literature whoever had written had been constantly playing on words and with them. Fantastically extravagant as such verbal quibbles generally were, they resulted in unsurpassed mastery of vocabulary. Combine such mastery of vo- cabulary with an instinctive sense that words are only the symbols of actual thoughts, and your quibbler or punster becomes a wit of the first quality. We have seen that such a sense of the identity of word and thought characterized Shakspere from the beginning. The lasting vitality of his wit, then, as well as of his wisdom, is perhaps traceable to the insatiable appe- tite for novelty of phrase which pervaded his public. As in his earlier work, so even in Much Ado About Nothing one may fairly doubt whether the man him- self, accepting his temperament among the normal conditions of life, would generally have distinguished between his own efforts, which resulted in lasting lit- erature, and those of his fellows, which resulted chiefly in ingenious collocations of words. Like the rest, he probably strove merely to put words together in a fresh way. As the years passed, however, he grew less and less able to conceive a word as distinct from a concept ; by 1600, then, his peculiar trait had so developed that, by merely trying to make his phrases as fresh as possible, he might unwittingly have set forth the ultimate wit, and the profoundly human characters of Benedick and Beatrice. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 197 For, witty as they are, Benedick and Beatrice are human too. One thinks of tliein generally together, as an inseparable pair, equally human, equally delight- ful. To attempt in any way to distinguish between them, then, is perhaps fantastic. On the whole, how- ever, there are touches in the character of Beatrice which seem to mark her as the more sympathetically conceived. When Hero is accused, for example, her conduct is the very ideal of feminine intensity. Her first outbreak,^ — " Why, how now, cousin I wherefore sink you down ? " may best be read as an exclamation not of terror but of indignant remonstrance. Her " Kill Claudio ! " 2 so much admired by Mr. Swinburne, is more in keeping with that conception. Although these speeches have no gleam of wit, they are better than witty ; they express just such impulsive purity of nature as an ideal woman should possess. This heroic trait of Beatrice arouses Benedick to a line of action which in turn makes him heroic. Ultimately one grows to think of Much Ado About Nothing as group- ing its whole story about the heroine Beatrice. To guess that such vitality of conception was in- spired by a living model is to start on an endless round of conjecture. One may safely say, however, that, even more than Juliet or Portia, Beatrice is a real, living figure. Coming after them, then, she re- Teals in Shakspere a growing sense of what a fascinat- 1 IV. i. HI. a IV. i. 291. 198 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE ing woman really is, or rather of how a fascinating woman presents herself to a worshipping man. Such a man, enthralled by the outward spell, of look, of action, of speech, instinctively surrounds it with imagi- nary graces of nature, which make his mistress for the moment divine. What Beatrice expresses is such an ideal of womanhood as this, — womanhood as seen by a man who feels all its charm, who is not yet practised enough to know its vices, who has not yet dreamed of the disenchantment and the satiety of possession. Whatever the origin of Beatrice, we have fair ground for believing that in 1599 Sliakspere was dis- posed to idealize character. This inclination showed itself in his heroic treatment of Henry V. In that play he failed to produce a satisfactory effect, partly because there his ideal was a bit didactic, and partly because, for all its vigor, the play did not seem so alive with creative imagination as those which had just preceded. Much Ado About Nothing, almost cer- tainly of the same year, shows us why. In 1599 Shakspere's creative imagination, diverted once more, left chronicle-history where he found it ; but turning afresh to comedy, carried comedy to its highest possible point. AS YOU LIKE IT 199 XIII. As You Like It. [As You Like It was entered, along with the two preceding plays, "tobestaied" in the Stationers' Register, on August 4th, 1600. It was not printed till the folio of 162.3. Its source is a novel by Thomas Lodge, called Rosalynde, Euphuet Golden Lef/arie, etc., published in 1590. From the circumstances of its entry, together with internal evi- dence, such as the quotation of a line from Marlowe's Hero and Lean- der} published in 1598, its date has generally been conjecturally placed in 1599 or 1600.] As You Like It^ beyond question among the most popular of Shakspere's plays, differs from Much Ado About Nothing rather in substance than in man- ner. Just as masterly, just as far from experimental, it is distinctly less significant. Much Ado About Nothing^ as we have seen, expresses a mood which, at any period of history, must sometimes possess any thoughtful observer of actual life ; As You Like It, for all its delicate, half-melancholy sentiment, is in substance purely fantastic. Its completely fantastic character, to be sure, is somewhat concealed by the art with which the play is composed. Like the Midsummer Night's Dream and the Merchant of Venice^ it begins with the device — very probably suggested by the conventional old in- ductions — of presenting a scene and a state of things 1 in. V. 83-. and see p. 60. 200 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE about mid-way between real life and the impossible fantasies into which it must lead us. In this case the device has proved so generally successful that no comment on As Yoii Like It is more frequent than ardent admiration for the open-air quality of the forest-scenes. To declare so general an opinion mistaken would be stupid ; whoever fails to share it might better lament his own lack of perception. Unquestionably, how- ever, there are moods in which the rhapsodic delight conventionally felt in the forest breezes of Arden sets one to doubting whether those who feel it have ever been much nearer nature than the foot-lights. In such moods, Arden seems as fantastically artificial as the background of any pseudo-classic eclogue or oper- atic ballet ; and wonderful chiefly because everybody does not instantly perceive its trees and stones and running brooks to be paint and pasteboard. What Shakspere has really done in As You Like It is to adapt for the stage a kind of story essentially difiFer- ent either from the statements of fact which gave him material for his chronicle-histories, or from the rather bald plots of old Italian novels which generally provided his material for comedy or tragedy. Lodge's Rosalynde is a commonplace example of the more elaborate novel of early Elizabethan Literature, the kind of fiction represented in prose by Sidney's Arcadia and Lyly's Fuphues, and in poetry by the aimlessly bewildering plot of the Faerie Queene. Such fiction still delights imaginative children ; but t«. AS YOU LIKE IT 201 grown folks of our day, who become critical, it gen- erally seems tediously trivial. From this original come the fantastic plot of As You Like It^ the general atmosphere, and the great tendency to incidental mor- alizing. Beautifully phrased, this moralizing, even in As You Like It, is really almost as commonplace as that of Euphues itself. The Duke, and Jaques, and Touchstone alike spout line after line of such graceful platitude as Elizabethans loved, and people of our time generally find tiresome. After all, there is a case for who should say that the open air and the wisdom of As You Like It differ less than their ad- mirers would admit from the same traits in the novel of Lodge, where they are palpably make-believe. This is not to say that As You Like It remains no better than the lifeless old story from which it is taken. The fact that, while Lodge's Rosalvnde is dead and gone these three centuries, Shakspere's Rosalind survives among the lasting figures of Eng- lish Literature, would instantly prove the error of any such pert statement as that. What makes the differ- ence, however, is not that Shakspere suddenly becomes a poet of Nature ; it is rather the same trait which made the difference between Romeo and Juliet and the poem of Arthur Brooke, between the Merchant of Venice and the fantastic nursery stories on which it is based, between Henry IV. and the lifeless pages of Holinshed. By this time, Shak8))ere's creative imagi- nation was so easily alert that he could hardly present a character in any play without making it seem hu- 202 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE man. In As You Like It, from beginning to end, and despite an amount of operatic convention which finally brings us unremonstrating to the little Masque of Hymen,! the people are real. They are people, too, of a specific romantic kind, who need to keep them alive not the actual breezes of any earthly forest, but an atmosphere where every breath of air feeds a gentle sentiment of romantic love, with melancholy and gayety alike close at hand. When people live for us as Rosalind lives, and Celia, and Orlando, and the Duke, and Jaques, and Touchstone, and Audrey, we accept them as facts ; and with them we accept whatever else their existence involves. What makes As You Like It live, then, is the spontaneous ease with which Shakspere's creative imagination translated conventional types into living individuals. There are plenty of traces, at the same time, of the conventional conditions from which and amid which these individuals emerged into the full vitality we recognize. After all, the very open-air atmosphere is only a fresh whiff of what had proved theatrically effective m Love's Labour 's Lost and the Midsummer Niyht''s Bream. The disguise of Rosalind is a fresh and far more elaborate use of the stage device which had proved popular in the Two Gentlemen of Verona and the Merchant of Venice. The clown. Touch- stone, is a curiously individual development from a very old stage type. In the Moralities and the In- terludes, the most popular character was the Vice, 1 V. iv. 114 seq. AS YOU LIKE IT 203 a personage in many respects analogous to the Clown of pantomime or of the modern circus. In Shakspere's comedies, from Dull, and the Dromios, and Launce, to Dogberry and Verges, there has been a steady line of conventional buffoons. Here, and later, these two conventions seem for a while to merge with the historical tradition of court-jesters — in Shakspere's time still actual facts — in a new con- vention, different enough from all its sources to seem, for centuries, a thing apart. Touchstone and his fellow-clowns, too, are really more conventional than even this view of them would at first suggest. They are not an essential part of the plays where they ap- pear ; without them everything might fall out as it falls. What they provide is only a comic chorus, whose essentially amusing character makes it prob- ably the best theatrical vehicle for such incidental moralizing as is always relished by an English public. Among the characters in As You Like It, if any one emerges from the group as notably sympathetic, it is certainly Rosalind ; if any two, certainly Rosa- lind and Celia. Perhaps this may be only because they were meant to be charming, and have generally proved so. If we consider, however, that in JIuch Ado About Nothing Beatrice seemed heroine more distinctly than Benedick seemed hero, and if we con- sider, too, that as far back as the Merchant of Venice Portia stood out more conspicuously ideal than any- body else, we have in this constant prominence of idealized women a suggestion that, when these come- 204 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE dies were making, Shakspere was sensitive to femi- nine fascination, and showed no traces of sensitiveness to the mischief which such fascination involves. To draw from this suggestion any inference as to the cir- cumstances of his private life would certainly be un- warrantable. As a fact in his artistic development, however, as an evidence of the phases of human emo- tion to which for the moment he was most disposed, the suggestion is worth remembering. For the whole charm of As You Like It is based on a sentiment involved in this very prominence of bewitching wo- men. No one could have made sucli a comedy who was not keenly alive to the delights of virginal, roman- tic love. Rosalind, in short, is the heroine of such delicately sentimental comedy as expresses the lighter phase of the mood whose tragedy is phrased in Romeo and Juliet. The charm of such impressions in real life lies in their half-apprehended evanescence.^ These are not real women ; they are such women as a ro- mantic lover dreams his mistress to be. From all dreams men must wake. From such as these, the wakening is terribly painful. There are men, though, who feel that the memory of the dream is worth all the pain of the waking. Such romantic sentiments as this, however, perha])s tend to mislead us in our study. As You Like It is no impassioned, reckless outburst of romantic enthusi- asm. Such an outburst would have been foreign to Shakspere at any time. Over and over again, his work 1 See p. 126. TWELFTH NIGHT 205 o expresses moods which none but a passionate nature could feel. In his expression of such moods, how- ever, he was always a cool, sane artist. All that we have touched oa is in As You Like It. To complete our impression, though, we must remember that in As You Like It, too, is the well-known expression of a temper which underlies much of Shakspere's art at this period : ^ — " All the world 's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages," — which need not be detailed. XIY. Twelfth Night. [In the diary of John Manningliain, of tlie Middle Temple, Barrister- at-Law, for February 2nd, 1602, occurs this passage: " At our feast wee had a play called Twelve Night, or what you will, much like the conimedy of errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like aud ueere to tliat in Italian called Imianni. A good practise in it to make the steward beleeve his lady widdowe was in love with him, by couuter- fayting a letter as from his lady, in generall termes, telling him \\ hat shee likod best in him, aud prescribing his gesture in smiling, his ap- paraile, i^c, and then when he came to practise making him beleeve they tooke him to be mad " The source of the main plot may have been some Italian comedies, and very probably Barnaby Riche's Apolonlus und Silln, published in 1 II. vii. 139 seq. 206 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE 1581. The episode of Malvolio, Sir Toby, etc., seems to be original with Shakspere. As Twelfth Night was not mentioned by Meres, it is confidently assumed to belong somewhere between September, 1598, and Feb- ruary, 1602.] To many of us nowadays, no play of Shakspere's is more constantly delightful than Twelfth Night. Whether you read it or see it, you find it thoroughly amusing; and you are hardly ever bothered by the lurking consciousness, so often fatal to the enjoyment of anything, that you really ought to take this matter more seriously. Rather, if you let yourself go, you feel comfortably assured that here, at any rate, is something which was made only to be wholesomely enjoyed. If you enjoy it, then, you have not only had a good time ; you have the added, more subtle satis- faction of having done your duty. To dwell on Twelfth Night in detail, then, would be unusually pleasant. For our purposes, however, which are merely to fix its place, if we can, in the artistic development of Shakspere, we need only glance at it ; and in a study which perforce grows so long as this, it were unwise to dwell on anything longer than we need. The one fact for us to observe, and to keep in mind, is the surprising contrast between the free, rollicking, graceful, poetic Twelfth Night which any theatre-goer and any reader of Shakspere knows almost by heart, and the Twelfth Night which reveals itself to whoever pursues such a course of study as ours. Taken by itself, the play seems not only admirably complete, TWELFTH NlGIiT 207 but distinctly fresh and new, — spontaneous, vivid, full of fun, of romantic sentiment, and of human nature, and above all individually different from anything else. This Illyria, for example, is a world by itself, whither one might sail from the Messina of Benedick and Beatrice, or perhaps travel from the Verona of Romeo and Juliet, to find it different from these, much as regions in real life differ one from another. For all the romance and the fun of Tivelfth Night, its plausibility is excellent ; and so its individuality seems complete. As everybody can feel, all this is lastingly true. What is also lastingly true, yet can be appreciated only by those of us who have begun to study Shaks- pere chronologically, is that, to a degree hitherto un- approached, what is distinct and new in Twelfth Night is only the way in which the play is put together. From beginning to end, as we scrutinize it, we find it a tissue of incidents, of characters, of situations which have been ])roved effective by previous stage experi- ence. Confusion of identity, for example, almost as impossible as that of the Comedy of Errors, reappears in Sebastian and Viola. Viola herself, once more the boy-actor playing the heroine unhampered by skirts, revives Julia, and Portia, and Nerissa, and Jessica, and Rosalind — with them foreshadowing Imoircn. Like Julia in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Viola, disguised as a page, carries to her rival the messages of her own chosen lover.^ The tale of shipwreck, again, revives the similar narrative in the Comedy of 1 I. V. 178. Cf. Two Gentlemen of Vrromi, IV, iv. 113. 208 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Errors ; ^ the friendship of Antonio for Sebastian less certainly revives the analogous friendship of the other Antonio for Bassanio in the Merchant of Venice, while from the Comedy of Errors, once more, comes the business of the purse.^ In Malvolio, as we have seen before,^ self-deception appears as distinctly as ever ; while, at least on the stage, the plot of Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Maria against Malvolio seems simply a reversal of the plots by which Benedick and Beatrice are united.* Sir Toby and Sir Andrew themselves are of the race of Falstaff and Slender, differing from tliese much as, in any art, idealized figures grow to differ from figures which are taken more directly from life. The Clown is similarly of the race of Touchstone. And so on ; the more one looks for familiar things in new guise, the more one finds. What conceals them at first is only that Twelfth Night resembles As You Like It in being full of a romantic sentiment peculiarly its own, with a less palpable but still sufficient undercurrent of delicate melancholy. Throughout, too, the infusion of this new spirit into these old bodies is made with the quiet ease which we have begun to recognize as the mark of Shakspere's handiwork. Together with As You Like It, then, we may call Twelfth Night light, joyous, fantastic, fleeting, — a thing to be enjoyed, to be loved, to be dreamed about ; 1 I. ii. Cf. Comedy of Errors, I. i. 62 seq. 2 III. iii. 38 seq. ; iv. 368 seq. Cf. Comedy of Errors, IV. i 100 seq. ; ii. 29 seq. ; iv. 1 seq. 8 Seep. 195. * Cf. II. V. with Much Ado About Nothing, II. iii. ; III. i. TWELFTH XlfJIIT 209 but never, if one would understand, to be taken with philosophic seriousness. Plays in purpose, poems in fact, these two comedies alike are best appreciated by those who find in them only lasting expressions and sources of unthinking {)leasure. While As You Like It,howexcr,di&ers from Shaks- pere's other work by translating into permanent dra- matic form a dull novel of a kind not before found among the sources of his plays, Twelfth Night, far from being essentially different from liis former plays, is perhaps the most completely characteristic we have yet considered. Again and again we have already re- marked in Shakspere a trait which will appear through- out. For what reason we cannot say — indolence we might guess in one mood, prudence in another — he was exceptionally economical of invention, except in mere language. Scenes, characters, situations, devices which had once proved themselves effective he would constantly prefer to any bold experiment. This very economy of invention, perhaps, contained an element of strength ; it left his full energy free for the mas- terly phrasing, and the spontaneous creation of char- acter, which has made his work lasting. Strong or weak, however, the trait is clearly becoming almost as characteristic as the constant concreteness of his style ; and nowhere does it appear more distinctly or to more advantage than when we recognize in Twelfth Niylit — with all its perennial delights — a master- piece not of invention but of recapitulation. 14 210 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE XV. Shakspere from 1593 to 1600. In the year 1600, we may remember, more works of Shakspere were published than in any other. This alone might have warranted us in considering 1600 as an epoch in his career. The fact that by 1600, however, all the plays considered in this chapter were probably finished gives us a better warrant still ; for clearly we have reached a point where we may conveniently pause to consider the growth and the change in his work since 1593. To begin with, we may well remind ourselves of at least two inevitable uncertainties. Our chronology, in the first place, is at best conjectural ; in the second place, our texts are almost invariably some years later than the dates to which we have assigned them. In view of the incessant alteration made in dramatic works which hold the stage anywhere, it would be folly to assume the complete integrity of any text in the whole series of Shakspere's plays. The latter consideration, to be sure, need trouble us less than at first seems probable. While it must surely be of weight in any system of verbal criticism, it does not so seriously affect a study concerned with broad effects. In considering any of the plays before us, however, we must beware of the temptation to assume rigidly that it was finished, just as we have it, at the time to which we conjecturally assign it. SHAKSPERE FROM 1593 TO 1600 21) All we can fairly assert in most cases is that on the whole we believe the work, in conception and in gen- eral motive, to belong to the period we name. In the matter of actual chronology, we are more un- certain still. Except in one or two cases — the most definite of which is Henry V. — we are quite unable to specify anything like an indubitable date. What is more, an indubitable date in itself might be mislead- ing. Any single year embraces twelve months ; two works properly assigned to it, then, may often be nearer to works of contiguous years than to each other. All we may fairly assert of our chronology, then, is that to a number of critics the order in which we have considered the plays discussed in this chap- ter has seemed approximately probable; while, with more certainty than is usual in our study, we may feel sure that, in some order or other, and in a condition more or less approaching that in which we possess them, all the plays we have as yet considered existed by 1600. In 1597 there were quartos of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II., and Richard III. In 1598, Meres's list mentioned the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Comedy of Errors, Love'' s Labour'' s Lost, the Midsummer NiyhV s Dream, the Merchant of Venice, Richard II., Richard III, Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet ; in 1598, too, there were quartos of Love's Labour 's Lost, and the First Part of Henry IV. In 1600 came quartos of Titus Andronicus, the Mid- summer NighVs Dream, the Merchant of Venice, the 212 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Second Part of Henry IV., Henry V., and Much Ado About Nothing ; while As You Like It was entered in the Stationers' Register. There can be no reasonable doubt that Henry VI. is on the whole earlier than any other of the chronicle-histories, nor yet that the Merry Wives of Windsor belongs to the period of Henry IV. and Henry V. This leaves us in doubt only concern- ing the Taming of the Shreiv, which is of little weight in our general consideration of Shakspere, and Twelfth Night, which was certainly in existence by February, 1602, and with equal certainty contains little which should alter an opinion based on the other plays before us. Whatever our errors in chronological detail, then, our chronology now warrants the conclusions we may draw about the comparative traits of Shakspere in 1593 and in 1600. In 1593, we remember, when Marlowe's work was finished, Shakspere, though had he accomplished nothing great, had displayed three marked charac- teristics, — a natural habit of thought, by means of which he found words and concepts more nearly iden- tical than most men ever find them ; restless versa- tility in trying his hand at every kind of contemporary writing ; and finally a touch of originality, in enliven- ing the characters of romantic comedy by the results of every-day observation.^ At the age of twenty-nine, after six years of professional life, this seemed the sum of his accomplishment. 1 See pp. 65, 100-102. SHAKSPERE FROM 1593 TO 1600 213 During the seven years which followed, the years which brought him from twenty-nine to thirty-six, and in the last of which he had been professionally at work for thirteen years, all these traits persisted and de- veloped. While, in view of the intense craving for verbal novelty which remained so marked a trait of his public, it would be unsafe to assert that he was steadily changing his habit of thought from a con- sideration of mere phrases to one of the concepts for which in his mind the most trivial phrase would nor- mally stand, it is certain that his style, always preg- nant, kept growing more so ; and that by 1600 he was perhaps more perfectly master of concept and word alike than the growing intensity of his later thought allowed him to remain. As for his versatil- ity, we need only remember that when this period began tragedy remained in the condition of Titus An- dronicus, comedy at best in that of the Two Gentle- men of Verona, chronicle-history in that of Henry VI. ; and that by 1600 he had surely produced, to go no further, Romeo and Juliet, 3Juch Ado About Nothing, and Henri/ IV. As for his observation of life, the first clear trace of which we found in the Two Gentlemen oj Verona, it was the necessary foundation of his char- acteristic creative imagination, which revealed itself perhaps most plainly in the development from Old- castle of Falstaff. This power of creating character — of making his personages not only theatrically effective, but so hu- man that posterity has discussed them as gravely 214 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE as if they had actually lived — is the most marked trait which appeared in Shakspere during the seven years we are now considering. In 1593 not one of the great Shaksperean characters is known to have existed ; by 1600 he had surely created Romeo, and Juliet, and Mercutio, and Richard III., and Shy- lock, and Portia, and Falstaff, and Hotspur, and Prince Hal, and Benedick, and Beatrice, and Dog- berry, and Rosalind, and Jaques, and Touchstone — one might go on for a page or two. A normal result, perhaps, of the traits which he had earlier shown, this creative power had now declared itself with a vigor which makes the result of his work, even had he never done more, sufficient to place him at the head of imaginative English Literature, A little scrutiny, however, shows that, in spite of its scope and achievement, this power worked and de- veloped very normally. Off-hand one is disposed to think of Shakspere as at any moment able, if he chose, to do anything. Unless our chronology be utterly wrong, however, it proves pretty clearly that when he was busy with one kind of writing he was by no means in condition to do equally well with another. Compare the Midsummer NigMs Dream, with Richard III., for example ; Romeo and Juliet with Richard II. ; the Merchant of Venice with King John ; Henry IV. with the Taming of the Shrew and the Merry Wives of Windsor ; Much Ado About Nothing with Henry V. Rouglily speaking, we may assume each of these grou])8 to be contemporary. Pretty SHAKSPERE FROM 1593 TO 1600 215 clearly, for all his power, Shakspere was human enough to slight one thing when he was giving his best energies to something else. Along with the old versatility of effort, then, we find a new trait, or per- haps rather a new development, which we may call versatility of concentration. Besides all this, we must emphasize the trait by which, in the beginning of this chapter, we justified the separation of the plays here discussed from those discussed before.^ Throughout these later plays, some- times pervading them, sometimes apparent rather in detail, we are constantly aware of the impulse which we called artistic. In distinction from the Shakspere of the old experimental work, the Shakspere who made the plays now before us must have been so constantly, spontaneously, profoundly aware of how what he was dealing with made him feel that he would instinctively try to express his feeling by every possible means. In the Midsummer Nighfs Dream^ where we consid- ered this trait most carefully, it appeared at once first and perliaps most purely. Ever since it has appeared again and again, in constantly varying form. At the risk of tedious repetition, it is prudent to warn whoever has not carefully watched the work of artists that no valid conclusion concerning their actual lives and characters can be drawn from even their most sincere artistic achievements. Without other evidence than is as yet before us, we cannot assert that Shakspere thought, or believed, or cared for this 1 See p. 103. 216 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE ideal or that ; nor yet that to have known in imagina- tion what he has expressed he must personally have experienced certain circumstances, good or evil. We can assert, however, that he could hardly have ex- pressed these things without at least three qualifica- tions : first, a sympathetic understanding of such great historic movement as is finally phrased in Henry IV. and Henry V. ; secondly, a sympathetic sharing of such romantic feeling as underlies both the single tragedy of this period and all the comedies ; and thirdly, a sympathetic understanding of how a charming, idealized woman can fascinate and enchain an adoring, romantic lover. All of which, while last- ingly true, is not spiritually profound. We come, then, to what we may call his limitations. In the first place, the only play of this period which involves any profound sense of the evils lurking in human life and human nature, is Much Ado About Nothing^ where the undercurrent of- irony tends slightly toward deeper things. In the second place, as we saw most concretely in Twelfth Nighty Shakspere throughout this period, though a skilful stage-play- wright and easily master of his technical art, was very chary of invention. His mastery is shown not only by his mere verbal style, but by constructive skill. This we saw in Romeo and Juliet ; and, better still, in the Midsummer Nighfs Dream, and the Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It, where he subtly adapted the conventional old Induction, as it appears in the Taming of the Shrew, to the form in which, as part of SHAKSPERE FROM 1593 TO 1600 217 the main action, it removes incredible incidents to plausible distance. His economy, or poverty, of in- vention, on the other hand, shows itself in his inces- sant repetition of whatever device — of character, of incident, of situation — had once proved theatrically effective. In the presence of such work as we have been con- sidering, however, one has small patience with talk of limitations. One's impulse is rather to question whether in seven years any merely human being could possibly have contributed to a stage and a nation which up to that moment had had little permanent literature at all, so wonderful a body of permanent literature as is actually before us. To correct this impression, — to see Shakspcre's work in its true re- lation to its time, — we must glance hastily at the other productions ^ of these seven years. In 1594 were published, together with Lucrece, the first works of Chapman, Hooker, and Southwell, Daniel's Rosamund, Drayton's Idea's Mirror, and plays by Greene, Lodge, Marlowe, Nash, and Peele. Hooker's work was the most lasting — the first four books of his Ecclesiastical Polity. In 1595 came Daniel's Civil Wars, Sidney's Apology for Poetry, and the Colin Cloiit, the Astrophel, the Amoretti, and the Epithalamium of Spenser. In 1596 came Davies's Orchestra, Ralegh's Discovery of Guiana, and the last three books of the Faerie Queene. In 1597, together with the three first quartos of Shakspere's plays, came ^ Ryland : Chronological Outlines, etc. 218 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE the first ten of Bacon's Essays^ another book of Hook- er's Ecclesiastical Polity, and the first published works of Dekker and of Middleton. In 1598, together with two new quartos of Shakspere, came the first instal- ment of Chapman's Homer, Drayton's Heroical Epis- tles, Marlowe and Chapman's Hero and Leander, and the first published work of Thomas Hejwood. In 1599, the year when Spenser died, came Davies's Nosce Teipsum, and among other plays Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour. In 1600, together with six new quartos of Shakspere, came Dekker's Fortunatus and ShoemaTcer^s Holiday, Fairfax's Tasso, the last volume of Hakluyt's Voyages, and Jonson's Cynthia's Bevels. This list, a mere hasty culling from Ryland's book, is enough for our purposes. Without pretending to be exact or exhaustive, it shows clearly two facts : at the time when Shakspere was making the plays con- sidered in this chapter, the intellectual life about him was active to a degree unprecedented in English Litera- ture ; and the works contributed to English Literature during this period differed from what had come be- fore almost as distinctly as this second group of Shakspere's plays differs from the firet. What came before was archaic ; at least by comparison, what comes now seems modern. A glance at the mere names of the playwrights will confirm this impression. In Mr. Fleay's Chronicle History of the London Stage, he gives in one chapter a list of the authors who wrote between 1586 and 1593,' 1 Pages 89-91. SHAKSPERE FROM 1593 TO 1600 219 and in the next a list of those who wrote between 1594 and 1603.^ Shakspere's name appears in both lists. In the first his fellow-playwrights are Peele, Marlowe, Greene, Lodge, Kyd, Xash, and Lyly ; in the second they are Jonson, Dekker, Chajjman, Marston, Middleton, and Heywood. The only name besides Shakspere's which the lists contain in common is that of Lyly, an old play of whose was revived after 1597 by the Chapel children of Blackfriars. These facts are enough. Great as Shakspere's de- velopment was during these seven years, it was only a part of the contemporary development which finally modernized both English Literature and the English stage. As was the case with his versatile, experi- mental beginning, what he accomplished was less extraordinary than it would have been during almost any other equal period of English history. We can hardly wonder that at a moment of such supreme general vigor and activity, he was not remarked as supreme. For, after all, if one ask how his work and his achievement so far must have presented itself to his own mind, there is no more plausible answer than this : With all his old command of mere langunge, and with consummate command of theatrical technique, he had been possessed by an amazing power of creative imagination, and by sustained though variable artistic impulse. To these facts the permanence of his achieve- ment during this period is due. In the course of time, 1 Pages 154-156. 220 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE this permanence has obscured the equally true facts that when his energy was concentrated anywhere it weakened somewhere else, and that, in spite of his great power of creating characters and phrases, he was weaker than many of his contemporaries in such in- genious, fresh invention of stage situations as always commands contemporary applause. At the same time, too, he had never used his mastered powers for the serious expression of a profound or solemn purpose. His temper, so far as we may judge it from the work we have considered, was romantic, buoyant, wholesome. To himself, if we had no other evidence, we might guess that he seemed a vigorous, successful playwright, who accomplished tolerable results in spite of obvious limitations and infirmities which he did not allow to bother him. Before completing our notion of him now, however, we must turn to the Sonnets. vm SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS [In 1598, Meres, praising Shakspere, mentioned " hissugred Sonnets among his private friends." In the Passionate Pllgruii, ascribed to Shakspere thuugh probably in large part spurious, and published iu 1599, appeared Sonnets 138 and 144, — " When my love swears that she is made of truth," etc., and " Two loves I have of comfort and despair," etc. On May 20th, 1609, "a Booke calles Shakespeares sonnettes" was entered in the Stationers' Register. Iu 1609, " Shake-Speares Sonnets. Never before Imprinted " were published, substantially as we have them. The book was dedicated liy Thomas Thorpe, the jjub- lisher, " To the onlie begetter of these insuiug sonnets, Mr. W. H." What the term " begetter " means, and who " Mr. W. H." was, have never been quite settled. Concerning the dates of the sonnets we can assert only that some of them were probably in existence before 1598, tiiat two of the second series were certainly in existence, substantially as we have them, ill 1599, and that all were finislied by 1609. In what order they were actually written we have no means of determining. For our purposes, however, we are justified in assuming that, as a whole, the sonnets in- clude work probably done before Henry I V., and also work done dur- ing the period covered by the next chapter.] During the last century or so, a considerable litera- ture of comment and interpretation ^ has gathered about the So7mets. Some of this is instructive, some ' Conveniently summarized by Tyler : Shakespeare's Sonnets ; Lon- don, 1890, pp. 145-149. 222 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE suggestive ; much is ingeniously absurd. In general, however, all this criticism alike deals chiefly with the question of whether the Sonnets are authentic state- ments of autobiographic fact, or literary exercises, or perhaps rather allegorical fantasies. A similar un- answerable question exists concerning the first great series of Elizabethan sonnets, — Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. About the two other best-known series, there is less doubt : Spenser's Amoretti are almost certainly authentic addresses to the lady who became his wife ; while Drayton's sonnets to Idea are prob- ably mere rhetorical exercises. If to these names we add that of Daniel, who wrote somewhat analogous verses to one Delia, we have completed the list of familiar series of Elizabethan sonnets, as distinguished from stray, independent ones. The names of Sidney, Spenser, Drayton, and Daniel, with whom we here group Shakspere, in- stantly define one fact about the Somiets which marks them apart from most of Shakspere's work. Sidney and Spenser never wrote for the actual stage ; and, though Drayton seems to have collaborated in a num- ber of plays, and Daniel to have written one or two, both Drayton and Daniel are generally remembered not as dramatists but as poets, the body of whose purely literary work remains considerable. In other words, we group Shakspere now with the masters not of popular, but of polite literature. The Sonnets, like almost all the extant work of these other poets, were addressed not to the general taste of their time, but to SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS 223 the most sensitively critical. Whatever else, they are painstaking, conscientious works of art. Throughout them, too, appears a mood perhaps most fully expressed in Sonnet 81 : — *' Or I shall live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten; From hence your memory death cannot take, Although in me each part will be forgotten. Your name from hence inmiortal life shall have, Though I, once gone, to all the world must die: The earth can yield me but a common grave, When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my gentle verse. Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read, And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead ; You still shall live — such virtue hath my pen — Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men." The writer of these sonnets, in short, avows his belief that they shall be lasting literature. Not an infallible sign of serious artistic purpose, this is at least a fre- quent. It appears in Spenser's Amoretti, and in many passages of Chapman and of Ben Jonson, like that superb boast about poetry in the Poetaster : — " She can so mould Rome and her monuments Within the liquid marble of her lines, That they shall live, fresh and miraculous, Even in the midst of innovating dust." In small men pathetically comic, such confidence becomes in great men nobly admirable. Of Shaks- pere's Sonnets, then, we may fairly assort that they 224 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE must have seemed to the writer more important and valuable than his plays. Such being the case, whoever attempts to define an impression of Shakspere's individuality must take special interest in these most conscientiously artistic of his works. If one could make sure of what they mean, one might confidently feel intimate knowledge of tlieir author. Such confidence, though, has betrayed too many honest critics into absurdity, to prove, nowadays, however tempting, a serious danger. The only im- pregnable answer to the question of what the Sonnets signify is the one lately made by some German writer : " Ignoramus, ignorabimus" (" We do not know, and we never shall"). Keeping carefully in mind, however, the necessary uncertainty of any conclusion, we may fairly incline to one or another of the unproved, unprovable conjectures as to what the Sonnets actually mean. The conjecture of Mr. Thomas Tyler, while by no means impregnable, seems perhaps the most plausible.^ In brief, he be- lieves that the first series of the Sonnets — from 1 to 126 — were addressed to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, a very fascinating and somewhat erratic young nobleman, whose age fits the known dates ; and that the second series — from 127 to 152 — were ad- dressed to a certain Mrs. Mary Fitton, at one time a ^ T. Tyler: Shakespeare's Sonnets: London; David Nutt: 1890. Mr. Fleay puts no faith in this Tyler story ; and sets forth many reasons for believing the Sonnets to have been addressed to Southampton; Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama : 208-232. SriAKSPERE'S SONNETS 225 maid of honor to Queen Elizabeth, and demonstra- bly a person of considerable fascination and of loose morals. Shakspere, it is assumed, became her lover ; and Pembroke, by whom she certainly had a child, is assumed to have taken her from him. The improb- ability that a woman of her rank should have had to do with theatrical people is met by the fact that in 1600 Will Kempe, the clown of Shakspere's company, dedicated a book to this very lady. The probability that Mrs. Fitton was the M^oman in question was curi- ously strengthened by the fact, discovered after Tyler's work was written, that a colored effigy on her family monument shows her to have been of very dark com- plexion. And so on. The tale is plausible ; after all, however, it is only a tissue of past gossip and modern conjecture. The most one can say of it is this : The first series of Sonnets expresses a noble fascination ; the second, a base one, of which the baseness grows with contemplation. The former is certainly in har- mony with what is known of Pembroke, the latter with what is known of Mary Fitton. Had Shakspere actually undergone such an experience of folly and shame as Tyler conjectures, these poems would fitly express it. Off-hand, of course, one would declare the very frankness of self-revelation thus suggested to be in- credible. Sensitiveness, one would say, is essentially reticent ; and whoever wrote the Sonnets proved there- by the possession of rare sensitiveness. A little con- sideration, however, proves this objection mistaken. 15 226 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE To go no further, Alfred de Musset was sensitive, and George Sand, and Tennyson, and Mrs. Browning ; yet almost in our own time all four have poured forth their souls on paper with almost Byronic profusion. Not long since, an admiring reader of Mrs. Browning expressed, together with his admiration, deep satis- faction that he never knew her. Had he known her, he said, he could not have borne the thought that she had taken the whole world into a confidence which she could hardly have spoken to her nearest and dearest. All of which meant that, despite his appreciation, the reader was not at heart an artist, while Mrs. Brown- ing was. So, very surely, w^as Shakspere. Even if the Sonnets be self-revealing, however, their self-revelation takes a very deliberate shape. Nothing could be much further from a spontaneous outburst than these Sliaksperean stanzas, whose form is among the most highly studied in our literature. During the Elizabethan period there were at least three well- defined varieties of sonnet : the legitimate Italian, or Petrarchan, generally imitated by Wyatt, Surrey, and Sidney ; the Spenserian, in which the system of rhymes resembled that of the Faerie Queene ; and that now before us, whose most familiar example is in the work of Shakspere. If not so intricately melodious as the Spenserian sonnet, nor yet so sonorously sustained as the Petrarchan, this Sliaksperean sonnet is con- stantly fresh, varied, dignified, and above all idio- matic. Why certain metrical forms seem specially at home in certain languages, it is hard to say ; but as SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS 227 surely as the hexameter is idiomatically classic, or the terza rima Italian, or the Alexandrine French, so the blank verse line of Elizabethan tragedy and the melo- diously fluent quatrains of the Shaksperean sonnet are idiomatically English. If one would appreciate at once their idiomatic quality and the exquisite skill of their })hrasing, one cannot do better than try to alter a word or a syllable anywhere. In one place Mr. Tyler has tried. The second line of the 146th sonnet is corrupt, reading thus : — " Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, My sinful earth these rebel powers that thee array." Clearly my sinful earth in the second line is a printer's error. Trying to correct it, Mr. Tyler has suggested two words which apparently fit the meaning, and has made the line read " [Why feed'st] these rebel powers that thee array ? " Though one cannot suggest an improvement on this emendation, one cannot resist a conviction that the man who wrote the rest of the sonnet could never have written these two syllables. The example, if extreme, is typical of the style throughout. No- where is Shakspcre's art more constantly and elabo- rately fine. Whatever else the Soimets reveal, then, they surely reveal the temperament of an artist, — a temperament, as we have seen, which is not only exquisitely sensi- tive to emotional impressions, but is bound to find the best relief from the suffering of such sensitive- 228 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE ness ill deliberate, studied expression of it. "Who- ever, at moments of intense feeling, has felt compelled to scribble doggerel, and consequently — however piti- ful his verse — has felt better, must have at least an inkling of what such a temperament is. Not the least peculiar trait of it is one which, though not generally appreciated, goes far to explain the great emotional relief afforded by even comically inadequate expression. To phrase an emotional mood an artist must, as it were, cut his nature in two. With part of himself he must cling to the mood in question, or at least revive it at will. With another part of himself he must deliberately withdraw from the mood, observe it, criticise it, and carefully seek the vehicle of expression which shall best serve to convey it to other minds than his own. The self who speaks, in short, is not quite the self whom he would discuss. To put the matter otherwise, an artist must sometimes be almost conscious of what modern psychologists would call double personality. To put it differently still, every art of expression involves a fundamental use of the art which is in least repute, — the histrionic. The lyric poet must first experience his emotion, must then abstract himself from it, — thereby relieving himself considerably, — and finally must imaginatively and critically revive it at will. Undoubtedly this process is not always conscious. Beyond question, remark- able artistic effects are sometimes produced by methods w^hich seem to the artist spontaneous. Such effects, however, wonderful though they be, are in a sense SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS 229 rather accidental than masterly ; and whatever else the art of Shaksi)cre's Sonnets may be called, it is beyond doubt masterly, not accidental. Granting all this, however, we may still be sure that even deliberate, conscious, fundamentally histrionic art can express nothing beyond what the artist has known. His knowledge may come from his own experience ; or from the experience of others whom he has watched ; or from experiences recorded in history or in litera- ture ; or even from the vividly imagined experiences of creatures whom he himself has invented. Actually or sympathetically, however, he must somehow have known the moods which he expresses. In the sense, then, that what any artist expresses must somehow have formed a part of his mental life, all art may be called self-revealing, autobiographic. Shakspere's Sonnets, then, may teach us truth about Shakspere ; for what they express, in terms of emotional moods, cannot be much questioned. The real doubt, after all, concerns only what caused these moods ; and that is a question rather of gossip and of scandal, of impertinent curiosity, than of criticism. What the Sonnets surely express — what no criticism can take from us — is the eagerness, the restlessness, the eternally sweet suffering of a lover whose love is of this world. Love, sacred or profane, idealizes its object. If this object be earthly or human, experience must finally shatter the ideal. Religion is a certainty only because the object of its love is a pure ideal, which nothing but change of faith can alter. So long 230 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE as any human being cares passionately for anything not purely ideal, so long will he surely find life tragic. The lasting tragedy of earthly love, then, is what the Sonnets phrase ; and this they phrase in no imper- sonal terms, but rather in the language of one whose temperament, as you grow year by year to know it better, stands out as individual as any in literature. To define a temperament thus known, however, is no easy matter. At best one may hope, by specifying a few typical phases and expressions of it, to suggest some inkling of the lasting, strengthening impression of Shakspere's individuality which grows on whoever knows the Sonnets well. Recall, if you will, the 111th Sonnet,i " 0, for my sake do you with Fortune chide," and compare with it the 29th and the 30th : — XXIX. *' When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings. 1 See p. 46. SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS 231 XXX. '* When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon u]i remembrance of things past, I sij,'h the hick of many a thing I sought. And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste: Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe, And moan the expense of many a vanish 'd sight: Then can I grieve at grievances foregone. And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restored and sorrows end." These are more than enough to express a nature of great natural delicacy, passionately sensitive at once to the charm of a personal fascination, and to the inexhaustible pain which must come from surround- ings essentially base.^ Other sonnets show a temperament equally sensitive to the spiritual miseries which chasten a passionate animal nature : — • CXXIX. " The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, Enjoy'd no sooner, but despised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad ; * See pp. 40-44. 232 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Mad in pursuit and in possession so ; Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme ; A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe ; Before, a joy proposed ; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. cxxx. ** My mistress* eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks ; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground : And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare." The bitter irony of that sonnet is not, perhapSj always appreciated. With all this sensitiveness to actual fact, the man remained profoundly metaphysical. At least he was constantly and instinctively, if not quite consciously, aware of the evanescence of all earthly phenomena, and of the real certainty of analytic idealism. For a })lain expression of the first of these traits, the follow- ing sonnets will serve : — SHAKSPEKE'S SONNETS 233 LXIV. ** When I have seen by Time's fell band defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried aj^e; When .sometime lofty towers 1 see dowu-razed And brass eternal slave to mortal rage ; When I have seen tlie hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of tlie watery main, Increasing store with loss, and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself conl'ounded to decay ; Ruin hath tauglit me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose. LXV. " Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o'er-sways their power. How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower ? 0, how shall summer's honey breath hold out Against the wreckful siege of battering days. When rocks impregnable are not so stout. Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays ? 0, fearful meditation ! where, alack, Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid ? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back ? Or who his spoil of beauty can forljid I 0, none, unless this miracle have might, That in black ink my love may still shine bright. 1 Cf. Sonnet 81, p. 223. 234 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE That all the while he knew the consolations of analytic idealism we may be sure from such sonnets as these : — LXXIII. " That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day, As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie. As the death- bed whereon it must expire Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by. This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long. LXXIV. " But be contented : when that fell arrest Without all bail shall carry me away, My life hath in this line some interest. Which for memorial still with thee shall stay. When thou reviewest this, thou dost review The very part was consecrate to thee : The earth can have but earth, which is his due ; My spirit is thine, the better part of me : So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life. The prey of worms, my body being dead. The coward conquest of a wretch's knife, Too base of thee to be remembered. The worth of that is that which it containt. And that is this, and this with thee remains." STIAKSPERE'S SONNETS 235 All his metaphysics, however, could not make actual life momentarily unreal : LXVI. " Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing triium'd in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplaced, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgraced. And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority. And folly doctor-like controlling skill. And simple truth miscall'd simplicity. And captive good attending captain ill : Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone." xc. " Then hate me when thou wilt ; if ever, now ; Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross. Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow, And do not drop in for an after-loss : Ah, do not, when my heart hath 'scaped this sorrow, Come in the rearward of a conquer'd woe ; Give not a windy night a rainy morrow, To linger out a purposed overthrow. If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last, When other petty griefs have done their spite, But in the onset come ; so shall I taste At first the very worst of fortune's might, And other strains of woe, which now seem woe, Compared with loss of thee will not seem so." 236 WILLIAM SIIAKSPERE With less direct quotation it would hardly have been possible to define the generalities which attempted to name some of the leading personal traits of Shaks- pere, as thej' appear in the Sonnets. Nor without much quotation could another of his characteristic traits have been made clear. The deep depression, the acute suffering, the fierce passion which should nor- mally result from what we have seen, Shakspere seems fully to have known. Instead of expressing it, how- ever, in such wild outbursts as one might naturally expect, he displays throughout a power of self-mas- tery, which gives his every utterance, no matter how passionate, the beauty of restrained and mastered artistic form. A form not in itself beautiful, one grows to feel, must, for its very want of beauty, have been inadequate to phrase the full emotion which such a nature felt. The Sonnets, then, alter any conception of Shaks- pere's individuality which might spring from the plays we have read. Even though they tell nothing of the facts of his life, the Sonnets imply very much concern- ing the inner truth of it. No one, surely, could have written these poems without a temperament in every sense artistic, and a consciously mastered art. Nor could any one have expressed such emotion and such passion as underlie the Sonnets without a knowledge of suffering which no sane poise could lighten, like that of the chronicle-histories ; nor any such cheerful sanity, or such robust irony as the comedies express ; nor any such sentimental sense of tragedy as makes SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS 237 Romeo and Juliet perennially lovely. Whoever wrote the Sonnets must have known the depths of spiritual suffering; nor yet have known how to emerge from them. Such a Shaksperc, unlike what we have known hitherto, is not unlike th.^ Shakspere who will reveal himself in the plays to come. IX THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE, FROM JULIUS C^SAR TO CORIOLANUS I. The plays to be discussed in this chapter differ from what have preceded somewhat as the plays from the Midsummer NigMs Dream to Twelfth Night differed from the plays discussed before them. This first group, — from Titus Andronicus to the Ttvo Gentle- men of Verona, — which probably occupied the first six years of Shakspere's professional life, were chiefly experimental. The second group, which probably oc- cupied the next seven years of his professional life, were all more or less alive with the surging forces of artistic impulse and creative imagination ; none of them, however, necessarily implied profound spiritual experience. The group to which we now come, which probably occupied tlie years between 1600 and 1608, mark a distinct development in Shakspere's artistic character. That the development which we are trying to follow is rather artistic tlian personal, however, we cannot too strenuously keep in mind. The details of Shakspere's private life, quite undiscoverable nowadays, are, after JULIUS CiESAR 239 all, no one's business. For the rest, nobody familiar with the literature and the stage of his time can very seriously believe that in writing his plays he generally meant to be philosophic, ethical, didactic. Like any other playwright, he made plays for audiences. He differed from other playwrights chiefly in the fervid depth of his artistic nature. The circumstances of his life, meanwhile, made the stage his normal vehicle of artistic expression, — the vent for such emotional dis- turbance as unexpressed would have become intoler- able. The subjects which he chose, or which were given him, in short, connecting themselves with the fruit of his actual experience, were bound to throw him into specific emotional moods. These moods he was forced, by the laws of his nature, to infuse into the plays which he was writing, just as Marlowe had more simply and more instantly infused imaginative feeling into his tragedies ten years before. What marks the personal development of Shakspere as an artist, then, is that his emotional motives suggest a deepening knowledge of life. A writer who had never dreamed of such sentiments as underlie the Sonnets, might conceivably have written all the plays we have considered hitherto ; he could not have written the plays which are to come. A study of Julius Ccesar will serve to define these generalizations. 240 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE II. Julius C^sar. [Julius CcEsar was neither entered in the Stationers' Register nor published until the folio of 1623. Its source is certainly North's Plutarch, which was published in 1579; the general substance of the speech of Antony over Caesar's body may have been suggested by a translation of Appian's Chronicle of the Roman Wars, published in 1578. Not mentioned by Meres in 1598, Julius Ccesar is distinctly alluded to in the following stanza from Weever's Mirror of Martyrs, published in 1601 : — " The many-headed multitude were drawne By Brutus Bpeech, that Ccesar was ambitious, When eloquent Mark Antonie had showne Hia vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious ? Man's memorie, with new, forgets the old, One tale is good, untill another's told." As Mr. Fleay suggests,' thereby as usual throwing light on the essen- tially theatrical nature of even Shakspere's most masterly work, the speech of Polonius,^ : — " I did enact Julius Caesar : I was killed i' the Capitol ; Brutus killed me," probably indicates that Julius Ccesar had been acted shortly before Hamlet, and that the audience would recognize in Polonius the actor who had played Caesar. The conjectural date generally assigned to Julius Ccesar is from 1600 to 1601.] At first sight Julius Ccesar impresses you as a chronicle-history, differing from what have preceded chiefly in the fact that its subject is not English, but Roman. Even though when the conspirators appear,' " Their hats are pluck'd about their ears, And half their faces buried in their cloakB," 1 Life, p. 214. 2 Hamlet, III. ii. 108-9. « II. i. 73. JULIUS C^SAR -241 and though in the midst of the ensuing scene the clock strike three,^ one never thinks of anything in this play as modern. With complete disregard of archaeo- logical detail, Shakspere conceived his characters throughout in a manner so true to the spirit of Plutarch that one might almost select Julius Coesar as a model exposition of the temper which tradition assigns to Roman antiquity. Almost immediately, however, any one familiar with the Elizabethan stage finds in Julius Ccesar a marked likeness to another kind of play than chronicle-history. As Mr. Fleay points out,^ many of the tragedies of blood were in two parts: Marston's Antonio and Mel- lida^ Chapman's Bussy d^Ambois, Kyd's Jeronymo, are familiar examples. In the first part, the hero meets his fate ; in the second, he is revenged, with the approv- ing consent of his visible ghost.^ This is just what happens in Julius Ccesar. The first three acts consti- tute Ccesar' s Tragedy, the last two, Ccesar^s Revenge. So marked is this that Mr. Fleay finds reason to believe the play as we have it to be a condensed version of what were originally two. Without accepting this opinion, we may at least de- clare it plausible ; for surely the effect of Julius Ccesar is radically unlike anything else we have met. An interesting view of it is stated in a note by Mr. Young:* — 1 Ibid. 192. ' Life, p. 215. » See p. 252. * Whose kindness ia acknowledged in the introductory Note to this book. 242 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE " It is a piece of transitional art, a hybrid between the chronicle-histories and the great tragedies. It has neither the lack of artistic or ethical significance characteristic of the former, nor is it, like the latter, dominated by a single great character only. While it has all the unity of interest distinguishing the tragedies, it gets it, not by means of a single informing idea of artistic or ethical significance, but by employing a masterly technique in the service of a chronicle-history motive, to tell just what had happened." Suggestive as this opinion must be, it does not quite emphasize the full divergence of Julius Ccesar from the English chronicle-histories. These are generally obvious dramatic versions of the narratives which they represent. Even though all the substance of Julius Ccesar, however, and all its essential unity be trace- able to Plutarch, no treatment of Plutarch's material could be much less obvious than Shakspere's. From Plutarch, to be sure, he selects his incidents with the skill in choice of what is dramatically effective, which he has learned by thirteen years of writing for the stage. This is not all, though ; he selects not incidents which should tell the recorded story of Caesar, but inci- dents which give that story a new and very significant character. To understand Julius Ccesar, in short, we must appreciate that when Shakspere read Plutarch, the narrative awakened in him a definite state of feel- ing ; this state of feeling, as well as the facts which awakened it, he was bound as an artist to express. Easy to appreciate, this feeling is not easy to define. One can point out the technical devices, or situations, JULIUS C/ESAR 243 or motives which help to compose or to express it. One can show how the motive of self-deception, already so effectively used in comedy, really underlies the con- ception of Caesar and of Brutus alike. One can show how the mob, far more seriously treated than the mob in Henry VI.,^ develops and emphasizes the distrust of the rampant, headless, brainless populace to which, at least as an artist, Shakspere was surely sensitive. One can compare the ghost of Caesar with the bogies of Richard III.^ and show how these are little better than nursery goblins, while the spirit of Caesar has a touch of such actuality as in one mood makes one remember the tales of Nemesis, and in another recalls the proceedings of the Society for Psychic Research. Yet all this does not help us far. Unsatisfactory though the phrase be, there is perhaps no more exact term for the underlying mood of Julius Ccesar than unpassionately ironical. In Julius Ccesar human affairs have broken loose from human control. Csesar himself, though to his own mind almost divinely supreme, is only a passing incarnation of the political force everywhere surely, miserably inherent in the folly-stricken populace. The extinction of his person does not so much as trouble this force. Other Caesars shall come, and others still ; all, like the great Caesar, to be the sport of fate. Yet those who wish for better things and nobler are just as powerless. Brutus, let him think 1 Compare III. ii. with 2 Henry VI., IV. ii.-viii. « IV. iii. 275 seq. ; cf. Rich. III. V. iii. 118 seq. 244 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE as he will that he acts freely, is rather passively swept on to the end which now, as then and ever, must await those fervent idealists, born after their moment, who passionately love the traditional virtues of an olden time. What is best in human nature is as powerless as the puppets who deem themselves potent, except, perhaps, that it redeems and ennobles character. Men may still be great; but great or small, they can actually do nothing. Nowhere is the world-old cry of the stricken idealist against the un- conquerable progress of vile, overwhelming fact more despairingly uttered than by Brutus i^ "O, Julius Csesar, thou art mighty yet ! Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords In our own proper entrails." Such effort as this to expound an artist's mood must always run a double risk of misleading. You may seem, on the one hand, to be stating personal con- victions, or, on the other, to assert that the artist criti- cised was preaching. One cannot repeat too often, then, that a critic's chief business is not to air his own views, but to define those of the artist he dis- cusses ; and that so far as the artist is concerned, he need never have abstractly formulated his views at all. The artist, indeed, has done his work if he have but felt his mood and expressed it. From all the fore- going attempt to analyze the mood of Julius CcBuary then, nobody need infer anything more than that 1 V. iii. 94. -^' JULIUS C^SAR 245 Shakspere's subject made him feel in a specific way. Such analysis of that feeling as we have attempted would probably have been quite foreign to him. For all that, such analysis is helpful to those who nowa- days would try to share his feeling. The mood which underlies Julius Ccesar is analo- gous to the lighter but still serious mood which we found to underlie Much Ado About Nothing} Deeper though the mood of Julius Ccesar be, however, it never becomes passionate, overmastering. No trait of Julius Ccesar^ in short, is more characteristic than what, in the broadest sense of the word, may be called its style. This is never overburdened with such a rush of thought and emotion, such a bewil- dering range of perception, as should overwhelm or confuse it. Nowhere is Shakspere's power more surely poised than here ; nowhere is his touch more firm and masterly ; nowhere do vivid incidents, indi- vidual characters, marvellously plausible background or atmosphere, blend in a verbal style at once stronger and more limpid. The sense of fate displayed in Julius Ccesar war- rants, for want of a better word, the term ironical ; the cool mastery of style throughout warrants the term unpassionate. Unpassionately ironical, then, we may call the play. As unpassionate, it has much in common with the plays which we have read before. In none of tiiese, for all their beauty, their energy, their power, has there been a surge of thought or feel- i See p. 194. 246 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE ing which has overwhelmed, overburdened the style. Rather, Shakspere's style has been constantly freeing itself from the excessive ingenuity of the older days ; and with all the flexibility which only such ingenuity could fully have developed, it has been growing more and more nearly identical with the thought it would phrase. Here, at last, with full mastery, Shakspere uses his superb, unpassionate style to express a mood which allies Julius Ccesar to what is coming as surely as that style allies it to what is past. For, far beyond any other play we have as yet considered, Julius Ccesar involves a sense of the lasting irony of history, — an understanding of the blind fate which must always seem to make men its sport. in. All's Well That Ends Well. [Like Julius Ccesar, All 's Well That Ends Well was first entered in 1623, and first published in the folio. Its source is clearly the story of Giletta of Narbona in Paynter's Palace of Pleasure- As to its origin and general date there has been much discussion. From the clearly early character of some passages, as well as from the general character of the story, many critics have been disposed to think this play a comparatively late revision of the Love's Labour's Won mentioned by Meres. Mr. Fleay, while admitting the obviously early passages to be old, is of opinion that if any play is to be recognized as Love's Labour 's Won, it is probably not this one, but rather Much Ado About Nothing.^ The question can never be defiuitely settled. From the general character of the style in the later parts of All 's Well That Ends Well, however, critics substantially agree in assigning the play in its present form to about 1601.] 1 Life, pp. 204, 216. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL 247 A short extract from Airs Well That Ends Well will illustrate the incongruity of its style. In the scene where Helena is presented to the King, the dia- logue proceeds as follows : ^ — " King. I say we must not So stain our judgment, or corrupt our hope, To prostitute our past-cure malady To empirics, or to dissever so Our great self and our credit, to esteem A senseless help when help past sense we deem. Hel. My duty then shall pay me for my pains: I will no more enforce mine office on you; Humbly entreating from your royal thoughts A modest one, to bear me back again. King. I cannot give thee less, to be call'd grateful: Thou thought 'st to help me ; and such thanks I give As one near death to those that toish him live : But what at full I know, thou know'st no part, I knovnng all my peril, thou no art. Hel. What I can do can do no hurt to try. Since you set up your rest 'gainst remedy. He that of greatest works is finisher Oft does them by the weakest minister,'^ etc. The lines italicized in this passage are clearly in a manner quite as early as that of Love's Labour's Lost, which we assigned to 1589. The other lines are in a manner common with Shakspere twelve years later. Though the latter predominate in AlVs Well That Ends Well, there is enough of the former to give the play unmistakable oddity of effect, and to make its style in detail a favorite matter of study to those who love linguistics. • II. i. 122-UO. 248 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE Distinct in effect from any of the other comedies, on account of this palpable incongruity of style, All '» Well That Unds Well resembles them in its general economy of invention. The main situation — of a woman making love to a man — occurs both in the relations of Phoebe to Rosalind in As You Like It, and in those of Olivia to Viola in Ttvelfth Night. The device by which Helena finally secures her husband is clearly repeated in Measure for Measure, while the business of the ring is repeated from the last act of the Merchant of Venice. Parolles is a curious combi- nation of Pistol and Falstaff ; his relations to Bertram being almost a repetition of Falstaff 's to the Prince. Helena's original scheme involves considerable self- deception ; her final stratagem involves mistaken iden- tity. The further we look, in short, the more familiar matter we find. Whether All 's Well That Ends Well be a revision of Love's Labour 's Won, or not, then, it is clearly a play of which part was made early, and part late ; a play, too, where the later part has many traces of Shakspere's general manner about 1601. We may fairly guess, accordingly, that if the play were ever finished in its older form, it may probably have expressed no more serious view of life than the Two Gentlemen of Verona, whose motive is remotely similar. The passages which give it more signifi- cance are almost all in the later style. While its incongruity and consequent lack of finish make AlVs Well That Ends Well a clearly less serious ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL 249 work of art than the plays near which we place it, the mood which it expresses deserves our full atten- tion. Up to this point when Shakspere has dealt with love, he has always been romantic. He has shown us some rather worthless lovers, to be sure • Proteus is highly unsympathetic ; Romeo, for all his charm, is neither vigorous nor constant ; and Bassa- nio, when we analyze his conduct, is anything but heroic. Throughout Shakspere's love-scenes, in fact, we have trace after trace of some such fascinating, volatile youth as seems to have inspired the first series of sonnets. Of all the lot, however, none is more vola- tile and less fascinating, none more pitifully free from romantic heroism, than Bertram. What makes All '« Well That Ends Well notable for us, in short, is that its love passages plainly reveal a sense of the mysterious mischiefs which must flourish in this world as long as men are men and women are women. So remote is this mood from the old one of romantic sentiment or romantic happiness that for all the romantic fidelity of Helena to her worthless husband, one feels Shakspere to be treating the fact of love with a cynical irony almost worthy of a modern Frenchman. Even though All '« Well That Ends Well be perhaps, then, like the Richards and the Merry Wives of Wind- sor, the careless work of a moment or of moments when Shakspere's chief energy was busy elsewhere, it is significant because it definitely expresses a mood not hitherto found in his plays. Restless one feels 250 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE this mood, unsettled, unserene, unbeautiful. There is no other work of Shakspere's which in conception and in temper seems quite so corrupt as this, where we are asked to give our full sympathy to Bertram. There are other works of Shakspere which are more painful ; there are none less pleasing, none on which one cares less to dwell. No other, however, more clearly reveals a sense which, as distinctly as the sense of irony which we found in Julius Ccesar, char- acterizes the coming work of Shakspere. This sense, abundantly evident in the Sonnets, but not shown in the plays we have read before, is a sense of the deplorable, fascinating, distracting mystery which throughout human history is involved in the fact of sexual passion. The irony of fate underlies the mood of Julius Ccesar ; under the mood of All 's Well That Ends Well lies the miserable mystery of earthly love. These motives jrft- sliall find henceforth again and again. »■•**- IV. Hamlet. [The Revenge of Hamlett Prince of Denmark was entered in th» Stationers' Register on .July 26th, 1602. In 1G03 the Tragicall Histo- rle of Hamlet Prince of Denmark bi/ William Shakespeare was pub- lished in quarto. This obviously imperfect quarto was probably pirated. Whether it represents an earlier version of the play or is a mutilated version of the whole, remains uncertain. In 1604 appeared a second quarto, which shows the play in substantially its final form. There were subsequent quartos in 160.") and iu 1611, Above twent/ allusions to Hamlet between 1604 and 1616 have been discovered. HAMLET 251 There is evidence that a play on this subject, which Mr. Fleay bC' lieves to have been by Kyd, existed as early as 1589. What relation this old play bore to Sliakspere's, and whether he had a hand in it, remain matters of dispute. The story, originally told by Sa.xo Grainmaticus, a thirteenth-centurj chronicle, was told in French by Belleforest, of whose version an Eng- lish translation was puhlislied in 1608. This trau.slatiou very probably existed earlier. Conjectures as to the date of the finished play range from 1601 t't was played before the Kinges Majestie at Whitehall uppon Sainct Stephens night at Christmas last " was entered in the Stationers' Register on November 26th, 1607. The play thus entered was twice published in quarto during 1608. In each case the titlepage is peculiar, reading as follows : — " M. William Shake-speare, HIS Tme Chronicle History of the life and death of King Lear, and his three Daughters With the unfortunate life o/* Edgar Bonne and heire to the Earle of Glocester, and his sullen and assumed humour of ToM of Bedlam. 288 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE At the head of the text is a similarly peculiar title : — " M. William Shake-speare HIS History, of King Lear." This unique emphasis on the name of Shakspere is probably due to the publication in 1605 of an old play, entered in the Stationers' Register on May 8, 1605, as "The Tragical History of King Leir and his three daughters, as it was lately acted ; " but really rather a comic than a tragic chronicle-history. This publication is believed to have been an attempt to avail of the popularity of Shakspere's play. The probable sources of Shakspere's King Lear are this old play and the chronicle of Holinshed ; and, for tlie story of Gloster, the tale of the blind king of Paphlagonia in Sidney's Arcadia. The story of Lear, however, was familiar, existing in many early versions, of which the most familiar is Spenser's. ^ From various internal evidence, together with the publication of the rival play, King Lear is generally assigned to 1605.] One is apt to forget that a play which seems so modern as Othello was made for the Elizabethan theatre. After Othello, then, we need some sharp reminder that this Shakspere whom we are study- ing could never have dreamt of such a stage or such a world as ours. We could have none sharper than we find in King Lear. Whether you read this great tragedy, or see it on the stage, the effect produced by any single and swift consideration of it must nowadays be one of murky, passionate, despairing confusion. The common an- swer to any consequent complaint, is that to appreciate King Lear you should study it. This is perfectly true. Equally true, liowever, is a fact not so often 1 Faerie Queene, II. x. 27-32. KING LP:aR 289 emphasized : Kiny Lear was certainly meant to be acted ; and wlien a play is acting neither players nor audience are at liberty to stop for reflective comment. Far more than a novel, or a poem, or any piece of pure literature, a play, which is made to be played straioht throuo-h, must be conceived bv both its maker and its audiences as a unit. In criticising any stage- play, this fact should never be forgotten. Whoever remembers it will probably continue to find King Lear, read or seen at a single sitting, magnificently confused. For this there are several obvious reasons. In the first place, the style of the play is overpacked with meaning ; in the second place, the situations are so often rather intellectually than visibly dramatic that to see them helps little toward their interpretation ; in the third place, the technical traits which probably made King Lear popular with Elizabethan audiences belong, far more than is usual in Shakspere's later work, to the obsolete conditions of Shakspere's time. Two or three examples may serve to emphasize the excessive compactness of King Lear. Perhaps none are more to our purpose than may be found in the trial by battle.^ This clearly revives a situation pre- viously used with effect, — perhaps in the combat be- tween Hector and Ajax,^ and certainly in the trial at arms between Plamlet and Laertes, and in the final struggle between Richard III. and Richmond. Dis- 1 V. iii. 107-150. ^ Truihis and Cressida, IV. v. 65-117. 19 290 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE tinctly the most elaborate previous use of it, however, and the use most similar to what we find here, occurred in Richard II. There the first 122 lines of the third scene are given to the trial by battle between Boling- broke and Norfolk. Every one of these lines is a sonorous piece of half-operatic verse ; though they do not mean much, they sound splendidly ; and no mat- ter how fast the actors should rattle them off, there is no serious danger of obscurity. The first challenge ^ is a fair example of the whole scene : — " Mar. In God's name and the king's, say who thou art And why thou comest thus knightly clad in arms, Against what man thou comest, and what thy quarrel : Speak truly, on thy knighthood and thy oath ; As so defend thee heaven and thy valour ! Mow. My name is Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk; Who hither come engaged by my oath — Which God defend a knight should violate ! — Both to defend my loyalty and truth To God, my king and my succeeding issue, Against the Duke of Hereford that appeals me; And, by the grace of God and this mine arm, To prove him, in defending of myself, A traitor to my God, my king, and me: And as I truly fight, defend me heaven ! " Compare with this the challenge in King Lear : ^ — •' Her. What are you ? Your name, your quality ? and why you answer This present summons ? Edg. Know, my name is lost; By treason's tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit : Yet am I noble as the adversary 1 come to cope." 1 Rich. II. I. iii. 11-25. 2 y. Hi. 119-124. KING LEAR 291 A little later in the scene Edmund thus returns the lie to Edgar : ^ — "Back do I toss these treasons to thy head; With the hell-hated lie o'erwhehu thy heart; Which, for they yet glance by and scarcely bruise, This aword of mine shall give them instant way, Where they shall rest for ever. Trumpets, speak ! " Read these last two speeches as fast as an actor, duly counterfeiting the excitement of the moment, must give them, and you will find that they puzzle any hearer who does not know them by heart. The contrast shown by these quotations persists through- out the scenes in question. In Richard II. the trial by battle fills 122 lines, and even then only begins ; in 44 lines of King Lear, which involve vastly more dramatic expression of character than is found in the older scene, the trial by battle is carried to an end. Actual compactness, then, is one reason why the style of King Lear is at first glance obscure. Philoso- phizing thrown in with no dramatic purpose often deepens the obscurity. In the first scene of the fourth act, for example, Edgar enters and soliloquizes thus : — " Yet better thus, and known to be contemn'd, Than still contemn'd and flatter'd. To be worst, The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune. Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear : The lamentable change is from the best; 1 Ibid. 146-150. 292 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE The worst returns to laughter. Welcome, then, Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace ! The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst Owes nothing to thy blasts. But who comes here ? " In response to this cue, Gloster enters, blind, and led by an old man, to whom within a few lines he remarks : ^ — " I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw : full oft 't is seen, Our means secure us, and our mere defects Prove our commodities." Though any one can study out what these generali- zations mean, no human being could ever have guessed from a single hasty hearing ; yet, apart from their actual meaning, they have no dramatic use. The truth is that such detailed illustration of the obscurity which pervades King Lear was probably needless. Open the play anywhere, read a dozen lines, and you will find yourself either amazed by their concentrated significance, or puzzled by their excessive compact- ness. On the stage such a style could never have been effective. Ineffective on the stage, too, for all the intellec- tually dramatic strength of their conception, are many notable situations in King Lear. A single example will serve our purpose : take the great sixth scene of the third act, where mad King Lear, and his mournful Fool, and Edgar, who feigns mad- ness, sit together, like a court in bank, to judge 1 Lines 20-23. KING LEAR 293 an imaginary Goneril and Regan. However skilfully this be played, the grotesqueness of the three mad figures is bound to distract any modern mind from the tragic significance of the situation Yet, to any modern mind, the thought of regarding such a scene as grotesque is repellent. So we come to the third reason why King Lear is nowadays puzzling. The superficial grotesqueness of that very scene clearly suggests this reason. Glance at the titlepage of the quarto. King Lear was evidently set forth as a chronicle-history ; and indeed it differs from what we still recognize as chronicle-history more in substance than in manner. Nowadays we make a sharp distinction between Plan- tagenets and the legendary sovereigns of prehistoric Britain. Holinshed makes little ; no Elizabethan au- dience would have made much; and King Lear is translated straight from Holinshed to the Eliza- bethan stage. A playwright who should make a popular chronicle-history, however, was bound to translate his material into popular terms. In the case of King Lear^ the rival quarto of 1605 and the emphasis on Shakspere's name in the two quartos of 1608 go far to prove that, at least when new, Shaks- pere's chronicle-history of King Lear was popular. Clearly this must have been in spite of the undue compactness of style which gives us fresh evidence of Shakspere's abnormal mental activity. At first sight, too, this popularity would seem to have existed in spite of the essentially unactable quality of such scenes as that where the mad court sits. 294 WILLIAM SHAKSPERP: Glance again, though, at the titlepage. Remember that on the titlepage of the quarto of Henry IV. Falstaff had as much room as the King ; and that on the titlepage of the quarto of Henry V. there was al- most as much space given to Ancient Pistol. Clearly enough, these were the brands of comic sauce which added relish to the serious portions of the older chronicle-histories. On the titlepage of King Lear we find the same prominence given to " Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Glocester, and his sullen and assumed humour of Tom of Bedlam." Startling as the obvious conclusion may seem, it is unavoid- able : the character of Edgar, at least so far as his feigned madness went, was intended to be broadly comic. In this respect, too, it was not peculiar but conventional. To go no further, consider the comic scenes of Middleton's Changeling ; and that dance of madmen in Webster's Duchess of Malfi, which nowa- days seems so inexplicable. Once for all, the ravings of actual madness were conventionally accepted as comic by an Elizabethan audience, just as drunken- ness is so accepted to-day. Grasp this fact, and you will find the strangest of transformations in King Lear himself. Shakspere never conceived a character with deeper sympathetic insight. Nowadays, that is what we think of, just as nowadays we think of Shylock's profound human nature.^ To go no further than the scene of the mad court, however, Lear is shown to us as a raving mad- man, and as such still looks grotesque. When Shaks- ^ See p. 151 seq. KING LEAR 295 pere wrote, this grotesquencss, to-day so repellent, was a thing in which audiences were accustomed to delight. Only when we understand that King Lear, for all his marvellous pathos, was meant, in scene after scene, to impress an audience as comic, can we begin to understand the theatrical intention of Shakspere's tragedy. Conventionally comic in this aspect, the part of King Lear appealed also to another Elizabethan taste of which little trace remains. As any of the old tragedies of blood or chronicle-histories will show, Elizabethan audiences delighted in sonorous rant. If no, traces of the older plays were left, Hamlet's ad- vice to the players ^ would suggest this, as well as the existence of a ripening taste which deprecated undue bombast. At the same time, this ripening taste, according to Ben Jonson,^ had not prevailed even in 1614, when there were still men left to " sweare Jeronimo or Andronieus are the best playcs." How to gratify this taste for rant without violating pro- priety, then, was a fine artistic problem. Shakspere solved it in the tremendously ranting speeches which fitly express the madness of Lear. At once ranting and grotesque, the madness of Lear, to-day so su- premely and solely tragic, was probably the trait which chiefly made the Elizabethan public relish this play. To dwell on these obsolete, archaic traits of Kimj Lear has been doubly worth our while. They should 1 Hamlet, III. ii. * Induction to Bartholomew Fair. See p. 66. 296 AVILLIAM SHAKSPERE serve, in the first place, to remind us of what we have lately inclined to forget, — that, with all their lasting greatness, Shakspere's tragedies were made for con- ditions so remote from ours that any student who should neglect their history runs constant risk of mis- understanding. In the second place, more notably still, such obsolete Elizabethan traits as probably secured the early popularity of King Lear are traits which the author must deliberately have introduced. Without meaning to, an artist may imply endless truth ; when his art adapts his work to a popular demand, however, he can hardly be unaware of it. The traits which make King Lear permanently great, on the other hand, are very different from what we have considered. No popular audience could ever much have relished them. They are the traits of thought, of imagination, of diction alike, which are generally characteristic of Shakspere. Nowhere do they appear, on study, more distinctly. No play of Shakspere's more surely rewards elaborate considera- tion. A single example will suffice us, — the excel- lent reasons which Goneril and Regan have to justify what is commonly held to be their gross ingratitude. In the fij'st place, these women have inherited from their father an impetuous, overbearing temper, of the kind which is especially sensitive to the exhibition of its own weaknesses by other people. Constitutionally, then, they would be specially liable to provocation by a man so like them as their father. In the second place, their elaborate professions of filial devotion are KING LEAR 297 not cssciitiiilly insincere ; they are simply elaljurute manifestations of such formal etiquette as still ajjpcars ill the formuhe of correspondence. Cordelia's sincerity is an excess of not too mannerly virtue; Gonerirs and Regan's protestations of love are (July what court manners conventionally require. Lear, quartered with (Joneril, behaves outrageously,^ and she is justifiably angry ; her anger manifests itself, characteristically, not by a direct outburst, but by orders, quite in accordance with court etiquette, that Lear and his j'owdies be treated with abruptness. Just at this moment, Lear engages as a servant the disguised Earl of Kent, a very loyal, but a very hot-tempered ^ nobleman.2 When Goneril's steward is rude to Lear, Kent — believed to be an ordinary serving man — trips the steward up, thereby giving full color to the worst tales of Lear's rowdyism. Goneril there- upon, in fierce temper, remonstrates. Whereupon, amid the noisy chatter of his Fool, Lear, instead of listening to reason, proceeds to curse her, to rave, and to rush off to Regan. Naturally incensed, Goneril sends to Regan an unvarnished statement of what has occurred. Her messenger is the very steward whom Kent has thrashed. Kent meets him at Glos- ter's castle; 3 and addresses him in a way which, while perhaps tolerable from a nobleman to a ser- vant, is quite intolerable between men of equal rank, which the disguise of Kent makes them appear. An- other quarrel ensues. Regan and her husband come 1 1. iii. 2 1. iv. ^ II.* ii. 298 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE on the scene, to receive from Kent, Lear's messenger, no more explanation of his violent behavior than that lie does not like the countenance of Goneril's steward. Cornwall, Regan's husband, suggests that his own personal appearance, or Regan's, might perhaps be equally distasteful. To which Kent answers,^ — " Sir, 'tis my occupation to be plain : I have seen better faces in my time Than stands on any shoulder that I see Before me at this instant." Such conduct in a man whom nobody dreams to be anything but a common servant, merits the stocks. The worst stories of Goneril are confirmed, before Regan hears them, by this scandalous conduct of Lear's insolent follower. When Lear arrives,^ Regan, once for all, will no more harbor rowdyism than will Goneril. Lear's behavior is in no way conciliatory. Finally, before he plunges off into the storm, both of his daughters have been worked up into such a rage that if they had acted as modern moralists command they would certainly have been too good for human nature. Given their temperaments, the conduct of Lear, and the misunderstanding involved in the clash between the character and the disguise of Kent, and nothing could be more humanly justifiable than their behavior. Yet so carefully is the intention of the plot preserved that to this day these passionate, hu- man women are considered to be what Lear and the , 1 Lines 98-101. 2 Ji, iv. KING LEAR 299 audience were expected to find them, — monsters of ingratitude. To a student such not obvious but clearly discover- able traits as this, make any work of art fascinating ; and King Lear constantly rewards minute criticism. Some have made a pathologic study of Lear's madness ; others have delighted in aesthetic study of the means by which so painful a tragedy has been made to pro- duce an effect of lasting beauty. Any study of Kin