1 I ■1 ■:.'»■:.';'■:'■« pm THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE ( THE ja/ Engineer sfclscc ^ English of Shakespeare; ILLUSTRATED IN $. Philological (foommmtarg ON BI9 JULIUS C^SAR BY GEORGE Li CRAIK, PROFESSOR OF BISTORT AMI f Shakespeare, Collier's Second edition,! Singer's, Staunton's, Hudson's, White's, and Clark and Wright's "Cambridge Edition;" carrying out * I have retained the -our in all words like valour, favour, etc., except honor and its derivatives. I changed that word (perhaps nol wi 1 ly, on the whi tu e I found thai tin' Folio had honor in tin- majority of cases, ami even in " hon- or for hi valour " in 37 |. f Crail are to the First edition. In the Scioud Collier has adopted many of Craik's ons. \ 111 Preface to the American Edition. as well as I could Prof. Craik's plan of giving the readings adopted by the different editors, and their comments on difficult or disputed passages. I have added largely to the references to Bible passages illustrating Shakespeare's English. I had done a good part of this work some months before I met with The Bible Word-Book, by Eastwood and Wright (London, 1866) ; but in revising my notes for publication I made free use of that admi- rable little book, and drew from it considerable additional matter. To Prof. F. J. Child, of Harvard College, for the encouragement he has given me in my work, and for many valuable criticisms and suggestions, I am under especial obligations. W. J. R. Cambridge, Feb. 15, 1867. PREFATORY NOTE TO THE SIXTH EDITION. In this edition several typographical and other errors are corrected, and a few notes are added on pages 3S1 and 382. Nov. 7, 1871. THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE. In this attempt to illustrate the English of Shakespeare, I would be understood to have had a twofold purpose, in conformity with the title of the volume, which would naturally be taken to prom- ise something of exposition in regard both to the language or style of Shakespeare and to the English language generally. My first business I have considered to be the cor- rect exhibition and explanation of the noble work of our great dramatist with which the volume pro- fesses to be specially occupied. I will begin, there- fore, by stating what I have done, or endeavored to do, for the Play of Julius Cesar. I have given what I believe to be a more nearly authentic text than has yet appeared. Julius Cccsar is, probably, of all Shakespeare's Plays, the one of which the text has come down to us in the least Unsatisfactory state. From whatever cause it has happened] the pa in this Play as to the true reading of which there can be much reasonable doubt are, comparatively, very few. Even when anything is wrong in the original edition, the man- in which ii is to be Bet to rights is for the most pari both prettj obvious and nearly certain. There lix) x The Author's Preface. are, perhaps, scarcely so many as half a dozen lines of any importance which must be given up as hope- lessly incurable or even doubtful. It is, I should think, of all the Plays, by much the easiest to edit; both the settlement of the text and its explanation are, I conceive, simpler than would be the case in any other ; and it is for that reason partly that T have selected it for the present attempt. The alterations which I have found it necessary to make upon the commonly received text do not amount to very many ; and the considerations by which I have been guided are in every instance fully stated in the Commentary. The only conjectural innovations which I have ventured upon of my own are, the change of " What night is this ? " into " What anight is this!" in the speech numbered 117; the insertion of " not" after " Has he," in that numbered 401 ; and the transposition of the two names Ln- cilizis and Lucius in that numbered 520. The first and second of these three corrections are of little moment, though both, I think, clearly required ; the third I hold to be both of absolute certainty and necessity, and also of considerable importance, af- fecting as it does the whole course of the Fourth Act of the Play, restoring propriety and consistency to the conduct of the action and the parts sustained by the various personages, and vindicating a reading of the First Folio in a subsequent speech (570), which, curiously enough, had never been previously noticed by anybody, but has been silently ignored and departed from even by those of the modern editors who have professed to adhere the most scru- pulously to that original text. The Author's Preface. xi For the rest, the present text differs in nothing material from that which is found in all the modern editions, unless it be that I have restored from the First Folio one or two antiquated forms, — such as 'em for them, and moe in several places for more, — which have been usually suppressed, although 'cm remains familiar enough in our colloquial speech, or at any rate is still perfectly intelligible and unam- biguous, and ?noe is sometimes the only form that will suit the exigencies of the verse. . . . As for the present Commentary on the Play of Julius C&sar, it will be perceived that it does not at all aspire to what is commonly distinguished as the higher criticism. It does not seek to examine or to expound this Shakespearian drama aesthetically, but only philologically, or with respect to the lan- guage. The only kind of criticism which it pro- fesses is what is called verbal criticism. Its whole aim, in so far as it relates to the particular work to which it is attached, is, as far as may be done, first to ascertain or determine the text, secondly to ex- plain it; to inquire, in other words, what Shake- speare really wrote, and how what he has written !•> to he n ad and construed. Wherever either the earliest text or that which is commonly received has been deviated from to the extent of a word or a syllable, tin- alteration has been distinctly indicated. In this way a complete representation is given, in so tar at least as regards the language, both of the texl of the editio frinceps and of the textus receptus. I have not sought to register with the same exactness tin various leadings of the other texts, ancient and modem ; hut 1 he- xii The Author's Preface. lieve, nevertheless, that all will be found to be noted that are of any interest either in the Second Folio or among the conjectures of the long array of edi- tors and commentators extending from Rowe to our own day. Then, with regard to the explanation of the text : I confess that here my fear is rather that I shall be thought to have done too much than too little. But I have been desirous to omit nothing that any reader might require for the full understanding of the Play, in so far as I was able to supply it. I have even retained the common school-boy explanations of the few points of Roman antiquities to which allusions occur, such as the arrangements of the Calendar, the usages of the Lupercalia, etc. The expression, however, is what I have chiefly dwelt upon. The labors of scores of expositors, embodied in hun- dreds of volumes, attest the existence in the writings of Shakespeare of numerous words, phraseologies, and passages the import of which is, to say the least, not obvious to ordinary readers of the present day. This comes partly from certain characteristics of his style, which would probably have made him occasionally a difficult author in any circumstances ; but much more from the two facts, of the corrupted or at least doubtful state of the text in many places, and the changes that our national speech has under- gone since his age. The English of the sixteenth century is in various inspects a different language from that of the nineteenth. The words and con- structions are not throughout the same, and when they are they have not always the same meaning. Much of Shakespeare's vocabulary has ceased to The Author's Preface. xiii fall from either our lips or our pens ; much of the meaning which he attached to so much of it as still survives has dropped out of our minds. What is most misleading of all, many words and forms have ac- quired senses for us which they had not for him. All such cases that the Play presents I have made it my object to notice.' Wherever there seemed to be any risk of the true meaning being mistaken, I have, in as few words as possible stated what I conceived it to be. Where it was not clear to my- self, I have frankly confessed my inability to explain it satisfactorily. In so far as the Commentary relates to the par- ticular Play which it goes over, and professes to elucidate, it is intended to be as complete as I could make it, in the sense of not leaving any passage unremarked upon which seemed to be difficult or obscure. But, of course, it puts forward no preten- sions to a similar completeness, or thoroughness, in respect of any further purpose. It is far from em- bracing the whole subject of the English of Shake- speare, or making any attempt to do so. It is merely an introduction to that subject. In the Prolegomena, nevertheless, I have sought to lay a foundation for the full and systematic treatment of an important department of it, in the exposition which is given of some principles of our prosody, and some peculiari- ties of Shakespeare's versification, which his editors have not in general sufficiently attended to. Such investigations are, I conceive, full of promise of new light in regard to the history both of the Plays and of the mind of their author. Still less can the Commentary pretend to any xiv The Author's Preface. completeness in what it may contain in reference to the history and constitution of the language gener- ally, or of particular classes of words and construc- tions. Among the fragments, or specimens, how- ever, — for they can be nothing more, — which occur in it of this kind of speculation, are a few which will be found, perhaps, to carry out the examination of a principle, or the survey of a group of connected facts, farther than had before been done ; such as those in the notes on Merely (45), on Its (54), on Shrew and Shrewd (186), on Statue (246), on the prefix Be (389), etc. . . . G. L. C CONTENTS. PASS PROLEGOMENA. Shakespeare's Personal History I Shakespeare's Works 4 The Sources for the Text of Shakespeare's Plays 10 The Shakespearian Editors and Commenta- tors 23 The Modern Shakespearian Texts 25 The Mechanism of English Verse, and the Prosody of the Plays of Shakespeare. 28 Shaki 11. mi. 's Julius Cesar 44 Till: TRAGEDY OF JULIUS C^LSAR 59 PHILOLOGICAL COMMENTARY 131 (XV) [The English language, which has produced and nour- ished with its milk the greatest of modern poets, the onlv one who can be compared to the classical poets of antiquity, (who does not see that I am speaking of Shakespeare?) may of good right be called a universal language. Grimm. English . • . has always needed, and still needs, more powerful securities and bulwarks against incessant revolu- tion than other languages of less heterogeneous compo- sition. The three great literary monuments, the English Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton, fixed the syntax of the sacred and the secular dialects in the forms which they had already taken, and perpetuated so much of the vocabulary as entered into their composition. • •••••• Their great poets have been more powerful than any other secular influence in first making, and then keeping, the Englishman and the American what they are, what for hundreds of years they have been, what, God willing, for thousands they shall be, the pioneer race in the march of man towards the highest summits of worthy human achieve- ment. Marsh. We must be free or die. who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spoke, the faith and morals hold That Milton held ! Wordsworth.] (xvi) REuf a "'caf£„ g i neen rHK 1SC0 > C ^- English of Shakespeare, ETC. PROLEGOMENA. I. SHAKESPEARE'S PERSONAL HISTORY. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of War- wick, in April, 1564. His baptism is recorded in the parish register as having taken place on Wednesday the 26th, and the inscription on his tomb makes him to have been in his fifty-third year when he died, on the 23d of April, 1616; his birthday, therefore, can- not have been later than the 23d. It was more probably some days earlier. It is commonly as- sumed, nevertheless", to have been the 23d, which, idea being also the day of his death, is the day dedicated to St. George the Martyr, the patron saint of England. His father was John Shales], rare ; his mother, Mary Ardcrnc, 01 Arden. The Ardens were among the oldest of die county gentry; many of the Shakcspcares also, who were luminous in Warwick- shire, id condition. The name in provin- cial speech was probably sounded S/nick secure or Shacksper'f but even in the poet's own day its more (i) 2 Prolegomena. refined or literary pronunciation seems to have been the same that now prevails. It was certainly recog- nized as a combination of the two words Shake and Spear. His own spelling of it, however, in a few instances in which that, our only known fragment of his handwriting, has come down to us, is S/iak- sfierc. John Shakespeare appears to have followed the business of a glover, including, no doubt, the making of gloves as well as the selling of them. He seems to have fallen latterly into decayed circumstances; but in his better days it is evident that he ranked with the first class of the burgesses of his town. He was for many years an alderman, and twice filled the office of High Bailiff, or chief magistrate. He was also, though perhaps never very wealthy, but rather always a struggling man, possessed of some houses in Stratford, as well as of a small freehold estate acquired by his marriage ; and his connection with the Ardcn family would itself bring him con- sideration. His marriage probably took place in 1557. He lived till 1602, and his wife till 1608. Of eight children, four sons and four daughters, William was the third, but the eldest son. Shakespeare's father, like the generality of persons of his station in life of that day, appears to have been unable to write his name ; all his signature in the books of the corporation is his cross, or mark ; but there can be no doubt that the son had a gram- mar-school education. He was in all probability sent to the free-school of his native town. After he left school it has been thought that he may have spent some time in an attorney's office. But in 1582, when he was only eighteen, he married ; his wife, Anne Hathaway, of Shottery, in the neighborhood Personal History. 3 of Stratford, was about eight years older than him- self; children soon followed, — first a daughter, then 'twins, a son and daughter; and this involvement may be conjectured to have been what drove him to London, in the necessity of finding some way of supporting his family which required no apprentice- ship. He became fust an actor, then a writer for the stage. Already by the year 15S9 he had worked his way up to be one of the proprietors of the Black- friars Theatre.* But he seems always to have con- tinued to look upon Stratford as his home ; there he left his wife and children ; he is said to have made a point of revisiting his native town once a year; and thither, after he had, by the unceasing activity of many years, secured a competency, he returned to spend the evening of his days in quiet. So that we may say he resorted to London, alter all, only as the sailor goes to sea, always intending to come back, lie appears to have finally retired to Strat- ford, about the year 161 2. and settled there on a prop- erty which he had purchased some years previous : his wife still lived, and also his two daughters, of whom the elder, Susanna, was married to Dr. John I fill. a physic ian. in i'>o- ; the younger, Judith, to Mr. Thomas Quiney, in February, [616. But he had lost in, who was named Hamnet, in i^jG, when the boy was in his twelfth year. Shakespeare died at Stratford, as already mentioned, on the 23d April, [6l6; and he lies interred in the palish church tli> Ili- w ife survived till A' 1 ,. I : tth his • [But I ol ill.- document upon whi< li I ■ i bv thi highe 1 paleo- !ii( authority in England. See white's bhaki | vol. i. [>. Ivii., foot-note ; pp. Ixiii. foil.] 4 Prolegomena. daughters had families ; Susanna, a daughter, who was twice married ; Judith, three sons ; but no de- scendant of the great poet now exists. The last was probably Elizabeth, daughter of Dr. Hall, who be- came the wife first of Thomas Nash, Esq., secondly of Sir John Barnard, and died without issue by either husband in February, 1670. Nor is it known that there are any descendants even of his father remaining, although one of his brothers and also one of his sisters are ascertained to have been mar- ried, and to have had issue. II. SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS. The first work of Shakespeare's which was printed with his name was his poem entitled Venus and Adonis, in stanzas consisting each of an alter- nately rhyming quatrain followed by a couplet. It appeared in 1593, with a Dedication to the Earl of Southampton, in which the author styles it the first heir of his invention. This was followed in 1594 by The Rape of Lucrcce, in stanzas of seven lines, one rhyming to the fourth being here inserted before the closing couplet ; it is also dedicated to Lord Southampton, to whom the author expresses the most unlimited obligation. " What I have done," he says, " is yours ; what I have to do is yours ; being part in all I have, devoted yours." The Venus and Adonis was thrice reprinted in Shake- speare's lifetime ; the L.7icrece, five or six times. His other works, besides his Plays, are The Pas- sionate Pilgrim, a small collection of poems, first printed in 1599; and his Sonnets, 154 in number, with the poem entitled A Lover's Complaint (in the same stanza as the Lucrece), which appeared Works. 5 together in 1609. But the Sonnets, or some of them at least, were well known long before this. " As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythag- oras," says a writer named Francis Meres in his Palladis Taw/a, published in 159S, " so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey- tongued Shakespeare : witness his Venus and Ado- nis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends." It was still a common practice for works to be circulated to a limited extent in manu- script while they were withheld from the press. The first edition of Shakespeare's collected Dra- matic Works appeared in 1623, or not till seven rs after his death, in a folio volume. A second edition, with numerous verbal alterations, but no additional Plays, was brought out in the same form in 1632. In 1664 appeared a third edition, also in folio, containing seven additional Plays. And a fourth and last folio reprint followed in 16S5. The Plays that are now commonly received as Shakespeare's are all those that arc contained in the first Folio, being thirty-six in number, together with Pericles, Prince of Tyre, one of the seven added in the Third Polio. Besides the other six in that edi- tion, — entitled 77/c Tragedy of Locrine, The First J '■at of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle, The Chronicle History of Thomas Lord Cromwell, 'J'/ic London Prodigal, The Puritan, and A York- shire Tragedy, — there have been ascribed to Shake- are in more recenl times the old Plays of The Reign of King Edward the Third and The Trage- dy of Arden of I rshamj and by certain Ger- man critics tho 1 of The Comedy of ' George-a- Green terally held to be the work of Robert Greene), The Comedy of Mucedorus, The Birth of Merlin^ 6 Prolegomena. and The Merry Devil of Edmonton. Some of these are among the humblest productions of the human intellect: that the notion of their being Shakespeare's should have been taken up by such men as Schlegel and Tieck is an illustrious instance of how far the blinding and extravagant spirit of system may go. Finally, the Play of The Two No- ble Kinsmen, commonly included among those of Beaumont and Fletcher, has been attributed in part to Shakespeare ; it is described on the title page of the first edition, published in 1634, as written by Fletcher and Shakespeare, and the opinion that Shakespeare had a share in it has been revived in our own day. Of the thirty-seven Plays generally held to be gen- uine, eighteen are known to have been separately printed, some of them oftener than once, in Shake- speare's lifetime: — Titus Androuicus, Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour's Lost, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Merchant of Venice, Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, Richard the Second, First Part of Plenry the Fourth, Second Part of Llenry the Fourth, Rich ard the Third (all substantially as we now have them) ; Hamlet, in three editions, two of them greatly differing the one from the other ; and, in forms more or less unlike our present copies, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Llenry the Fifth, and the Second and Third Parts of Henry the Sixth, under the titles of " The First Part of the Contention be- twixt the Houses of York and Lancaster," and "The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York" (often referred to as " The Second Part of the Conten- tion"). Nor is it improbable that there may have been early impressions of some others of the Plays, Works. 7 although no copies are now known. The Tragedy of Othello was also printed separately in 1622. All these separately published Plays are in quarto, and are familiarly known as the old or early Quartos. The following eighteen Plays appeared for the first time, as far as is known, in the Folio of 1623 : — The Tempest, The Too Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, All's Well that Ends Well, Twelfth Night, A Winter's Tale, King John, The First Part of Henry the Sixth, Henry the Eighth, Coriolanus, Timou of Athens, Julius Ccesar, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. There is reason to believe that the first edition of r fitus Andronicus was printed in 1594, although the earliest of which any copy is now known is dated 1600. The earliest existing editions of JRomeo ■' Juliet, Richard the Second, and Richard the Third, bear the date of 1597. The dates of the other Quartos (except Othello) all range between 1598 and [609. It appears, however, from Francis Meres's book, mentioned above, that by the year I, when it was published, Shakespeare had al- read) produced at hast the following Plays, several of which, as we hav< . are nol known to have 1 printed till they were included, a quarter of a hiry afterwards, in the First Folio: — The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, / ' Labour's Lost, Midsummer Nighfs Dream, The Mocha/// ice, Richard the Second, Richard the Third, Henry the Fourth, King" John, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and another called Lo -' / ibour*s Won, which has been Commonly suppo 1 d to be that now entitled All's 8 Prolegomena Well that Ends Well.* And Meres cannot be held to profess to do more than to instance some of the works by which Shakespeare had by this time, in his opinion, proved himself the greatest English writer that had yet arisen, both in tragedy and in comedy. Six years before this, or in 1592, Robert Greene, * But the play of All's Well that Ends Well seems to have its present title built or wrought into it, and as it were in- corporated with it. It is Helena's habitual zvord, and the thought that is never absent from her mind. "All's well that ends well," she exclaims, in the Fourth Scene of the Fourth Act, — Still the fine's the crown : Whate'er the course, the end is the renown. And again in the First Scene of the Fifth Act : — All's well that ends well yet. So also the King, in the concluding lines of the play : — All yet seems well ; and, if it end so meet The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet; and then to the audience : — The king's a beggar, now the play is done; All is well ended, if this suit be won, That you express content. There would be no nature or meaning in the dialogue cir- cling around the phrase in question, or continually return- ing upon it, in this way, unless it formed the name of the Play. On the other hand, there is not an expression throughout the piece that can be fairly considered as allu- sive to such a title as Love's Labour's Won. Another notion that has been taken up is that the Play now known as The Tempest is that designated Love's La- bour's Won by Meres. This is the theory of the Reverend Joseph Hunter, first brought forward in a " Disquisition on the Tempest," published in 1841, and reproduced in the Sec- ond Part of his "New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare," 1844. But, notwithstanding all the learning and ingenuity by which it has been set forth and defended, it has probably not met with much accept- ance. One would as soon believe with Ulrici that The Tempest is the very latest of all Shakespeare's Plays, as with Mr. Hunter that it is one of his earliest, — " nearly the first in time," he calls it, " as the first in place [meaning as it Works. 9 accounted by himself and others one of the chief lights of that early morning of our drama, but destined to be soon completely outshone and extin- guished, had, perhaps with some presentiment of his coming fate, in a pamphlet which he entitled " Greene's Groatsworth of Wit," thus vented his stands in the original collective edition], of the dramas which are -wholly his." May not the true Love's Labour's Won be what we now call The Taming of the Shrew ? That play is founded upon an older one called The Taming of A Shrew ; it is therefore in the highest degree improbable that it was originally pro- duced under its present name. The designation by which it i> now known, in all likelihood, was only given to it after its predecessor had been driven from the stage, and had come to be generally forgotten. Have we not that which it previously bore indicated in one of the restorations of Mr. Collier's M.S. annotator. who directs us, in the last line but one of the Second Act, instead of " in this case of tvooi//g," to read "in this case of -/inning.'' thus giving US what may stand, in want of a better, for a rhyme to the "if I fail not of my cunning" of the line following? The lines are pretty evidently into di 1 to rhyme, however rudely. The Play is, besides, full of other repetitions of the same key-note. Tim . in the Second Scene of Act I., when Hortensio informs Gre- mio that he had promised Petrucio, if he would become suitor to Katharine, that they •• would he contributors, Ami bear his charge of wooing, whatsoe'er," Gremio answers, will, provided that he win her." In the tilth • Act IV., when tin- resolute Verone e has brought the shrew- to a complete submission, Hortensio's eon oat illa- tion i , "Petrut thy ways; the field is won." So in luding •■in- tin- lady's father exclaims, "Now fair i ciol Tip- u ager thou ha t won : " to which tl replies. "Nay, I will win my wager bi laid hi la t wordf in passing from th if in Mur supposed title of the piece, are, — 'Tw.-is I won th on | /.in <■ n tii i | hit the white ; G I ' , ll mi. it may be added, might hend the underplol of Lui entio t thai of Horten Widow, though in the i a e of the latter it might rather l><- i uppo ed to be the ladj who ■hould I e- ccm ing of th that had I n to . ■■ Nilnl unquam apud maminis, . . . adeo omnibus numtris ab tolutum prodii ".- mi mini." 14 Prolegomena. have been thought, could not well claim as a work what called itself only a play. Nor do the publish- ers in the present instance make profession of having bestowed any special care upon the editing of their volume ; what they say (or more probably what some regular author of the day. Ben Jonson, as it has been conjectured, or another, had been got to write in their names) is nothing more than the sort of recommendation with which it was customary for enlarged and improved editions to be introduced to the world, and the only positive assertion which it can be held to involve is, that the new impression of the Plays had been set up, at least in part, from the author's own manuscript. They lay claim, and we may therefore be sure could lay claim, to nothing further. They even admit, as we have seen, that it would have been better if the author himself had superintended the publication. Of correction of the press there is not one word. That, we may be pretty certain, was left merely to the printer. It is not likely that the two players, who, with the excep- tion of this Dedication and Preface, to which their names are attached, are quite unknown in connec- tion with literature, were at all qualified for such a function, which is not one to be satisfactorily dis- charged even by persons accustomed to writing for the press without some practice. J)ut this is not all. The materials which Ileminge and Condell, or whoever may have taken charge of the printing of the First Folio, had at their com- mand, were very possibly insufficient to enable them to produce a perfect text, although both their care and their competency had been greater than they probably were. In the first place, there is nothing in what they say to entitle us to assume that they The Old Texts. 15 had the author's own manuscript for more than some of the Plays. But, further, we do not know what may have been the state of such of his papers as were in their hands. We are told, indeed, that they were without a blot , and the fact is an interesting one in reference to Shakespeare's habits of compo- sition ; but it has no bearing upon the claims of the text of this First Folio to be accounted a correct representation of what he had written. He had been in his grave for seven years ; the latest of the original copies of the Plays were of that antiquity at the least ; most of them must have been much older. If, as is probable, they had been ever since they were written in use at the theatres, it can hardly have been that such of them as were not quite worn out should not have suffered more or less of injury, and have become illegible, or legible only with great difficulty, in various passages. Nor may the hand- writing, even when not partially obliterated, have been very easy to decipher. The very rapidity with which the poet's " thick-coming fancies " had been Committed to the paper may have made the record of them, free from blots as it was, still one not to be nad running, or unlikely to trip a reader to whom it was not familiar. When we take up and examine the volume itself, we lind it to present the veiy characteristics which I considerations would lead us to expect. Asa typographical production it is better executed than the common run of (Ik- English popular printing of that d It is rather superior, for instance, in point of appearance, and \< idedly in correctness, to the Second Polio, produced nine years later. N< theless it is obviou the most cursory inspection, Very tar from what would now be called even a tol- 1 6 Prolegomena. erably well printed book. There is probably not a page in it which is not disfigured by many minute inaccuracies and irregularities, such as never appear in modern printing. The punctuation is throughout rude and negligent, even where it is not palpably blundering. The most elementary proprieties of the metrical arrangement arc violated in innumer- able passages. In some places the verse is printed as plain prose ; elsewhere, prose is ignorantly and ludicrously exhibited in the guise of verse. Indis- putable and undisputed errors are of frequent occur- rence, so gross that it is impossible they could have been passed over, at any rate in such numbers, if the proof-sheets had undergone any systematic revision by a qualified person, however rapid. They were probably read in the printing-office, with more or less attention, when there was time, and often, when there was any hurry or pressure, sent to press with little or no examination. Everything betokens that editor or editing of the volume, in any proper or distinctive sense, there could have been none. The only editor was manifestly the head workman in the printing-office. On closer inspection, we detect other indications. In one instance, at least, we have actually the names of the actors by whom the Play was performed pre- fixed to their portions of the dialogue instead of those of the dramatis pcrsonce. Mr. Knight, in noticing this circumstance, observes that it shows very clearly the text of the Play in which it occurs {Much Ado About Nothi)ig) to have been taken from the play- house copy, or what is called the prompter's book.* But the fact is, that the scene in question is given in * Library Shakspere, II. 366. The Old Texts. 17 the same way in the previous Quarto edition of the Play, published in 1600 ; so that here the printers of the Folio had evidently no manuscript of any kind in their hands, any more than they had any one over tliem to prevent them from blindly following their printed copy into the most transparent absurdities. The Quarto, to the guidance of which they were left, had evidently been set up from the prompter's book, and the proof-sheets could not have been read cither by the author or by any other competent per- son. In the case of how many more of the Plays the Folio in like manner may have been printed only from the previously published separate editions we cannot be sure. But other errors, with which the volume abounds, are evidence of something more than this. In addition to a large number of doubtful or disputed passages, there are many readings in it which arc either absolutely unintelligible, and there- fore certainly corrupt, or, although not purely non- sensical, yet clearly wrong, and at the same time such as are hardly to he sufficiently accounted for as the natural mistakes of the compositor. Sometimes what is evidently the true word or expression has given place to another having possibly more or less to it in form, hut none in signification; in other > a&i -. what is indispensable to (he sense, or I., the continuity and completeness of the dramatic narrative, is altogether omitted. Such errors and deficient i' 3 can only he explained on the supposition that the compositor had left to depend upOll a manuscript which was imperfect, or which could not be i' ad. It i 1 remarkable that deformities of this kind are apl to he found accumulated ;it one place ; there are ■■>- it were ■ ir eruptions "i them ; they run into constellation - ; Bhowing th.it the .: 1 8 Prolegomena. manuscript had there got torn or soiled, and that the printer had been obliged to supply what was wanting in the best way that he could, by his own invention or conjectural ingenuity.* Of the other Folio editions, the Second, dated 1632, is the only one the new readings introduced in which have ever been regarded as of any authority. But nothing is known of the source from which they may have been derived. The prevailing opin- ion has been that they arc nothing more than the con- jectural emendations of the unknown editor. Some of them, nevertheless, have been adopted in every subsequent reprint. The manuscript of Henry the Fourth (belonging to Sir Edward Dering, Bart., of Surrenden in Kent) is curious and interesting, as being certainly either of Shakespeare's own age or close upon it, and as the only known manuscript copy of any of the Plays of nearly that antiquity. But it appears to have been, for the greater part, merely transcribed from some printed text, with such omissions and modifi- cations as were deemed expedient in reducing the two Plays to one.f The First Part of Henry * I have discussed the question of the reliance to be placed on the First Folio at greater length in an article on The Text of Shakespeare, in the 40th No. of the North British Review {for February, 1854). It is there shown, from an examination of the First Ait of Macbeth, that the number of readings in the First Folio (including arrangements of the ver-e and punctuation affecting the sense) which must be admitted to be either clearly wrong, or in the highest de- gree suspicious, probably amounts to not less than twenty on an average per page, or about twenty thousand in the whole volume. Most of them have been given up and abandoned even by those of the modern editors who profess the most absolute deference to the general authority of the text in which they are found. f I am informed by a friend, upon whose accuracy I can rely, that a collation of a considerable portion of the MS. The Old Texts. 19 the Fourth had been printed no fewer than five times, and the Second Part also once, in the life- time of the author. The Dering MS., however, exhibits a few peculiar readings. . . . It is only upon the supposition of the old text of the Plays having been printed' from a partially obliterated orotherwi.se imperfectly legible manuscript, which, as we see, meets and accounts for other facts and peculiar appearances, while it is also so probable in itself, that the remarkable collection of emendations in Mr. Collier's copy of the Second Folio can, apparently, be satisfactorily explained. The volume came into Mr. Collier's hands in 1S49, and was some time after- wards discovered by him to contain a vast number of alterations of the printed text inserted by the pen, in a handwriting certainly of the seventeenth century, and possibly of not much later date than the volume. They extend over all the thirty-six Plays, and are cal- culated to amount in all to at least twenty thousand. Here is, then, a most elaborate revision — an expen- diture of time and painstaking which surely could only have been prompted and sustained by a strong feeling in the annotator of admiration for his author, and the most anxious and scrupulous regard for the integrity of hi Such motives would be very insistent with the substitution generally for the old words of anything that might merely strike him a- being possibly a preferable reading. The much more probable presumption is that he followed some <_r n i 1 1 o . Suchalabor isonl) to he naturally accounted I",,,- 1 irding it as that of the pos lessor of a \ alued but very inaccurately printed howl,, who had obtained with the Quarto of [613 >"> doubt of that being the print '1 1 dition on which it \\.> f< I- 20 Prolegomena. the means of collating it with and correcting it by a trustworthy manuscript. And, when we come to examine the new readings, we find everything in sufficient correspondence with this hypothesis ; some things almost, we may say, demonstrating it. Some of the alterations are of a kind altogether transcend- ing the compass of conjectural emendation, unless it had taken the character of pure invention and fab- rication. Such in particular are the entire lines inserted in various passages of which we have not a trace in the printed text. The number, too, of the new readings which cannot but be allowed to be either indisputable, or, at the least, in the highest degree ingenious and plausible, is of itself almost conclusive against our attributing them to nothing better than conjecture. On the other hand, some of his alterations are in all probability mistaken, some of his new readings apparently inadmissible,* and * Among such must be reckoned, undoubtedly, the altera- tion, in Lady Macbeth's passionate rejoinder {Macbeth, <-7),— What beast was't then, That made you break this enterprise to me? — of beast into boast. This is to convert the forcible and characteristic not merely into tameness, but into no-mean- ing; for there is no possible sense of the word boast which will answer here. But in this case the corrector was prob- ably left to mere conjecture in making his selection between the two words; for in the handwriting of the earlier part of the seventeenth century the e and o are frequently absolutely undistinguishable. In the specimen of the annotator's own handwriting which Mr. Collier gives, the two e's of the word briefely are as like o's as e's, and what Mr. Collier reads bleeding might be equally well read blooding, if that were a word. Would Mr. Collier thus correct Tennyson's {Edwin Morris), — Were not his words delicious, I a beast To take them as I did ? There cannot, I conceive, be a question that a celebrated The Old Texts. 21 many passages which there can hardly be a doubt are corrupt are passed over by him without correc- tion. All this becomes intelligible upon our hypoth- esis. Working possibly upon the same manuscripts (whether those of the author or not) from which the printed text had been set up, he would with more deliberation, or by greater attention and skill, suc- ceed in deciphering correctly much of the difficult or faded writing which had baffled or been misread by the printer. In other places, again, he was able to make nothing of it, or it deceived him. In some cases he may have ventured upon a conjecture, and when he does that he may be as often wrong as right. The manuscripts of which he had the use — whether the author's original papers or only tran- scripts from them — probably belonged to the theatre ; and they might now be in a much worse condition in some parts than when they were in the hands of Hcminge and Condell in 1623. The an- notator would seem to have been connected with the Btage. The numerous and minute stage directions ; age in another Play has been seriously injured by I e mistake which the annotator ha- made in the in- stall' ration. Is it not Self-evident that the m the Third Seine of the Fourth Act of the Winter's Tale hould run as follows ? — Natmc is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean. SO eVi r that art, Which you say add- to natu 1 art 'I hat nature maki .... 'i be art it 1 if is nature. Tl ••»'y Mi . Collii 1 MS. an no ta tot . 22 Prolegomena. which he has inserted look as if it might have been for the use of some theatrical Company, and mainly with a view to the proper representation of the Plays, that his laborious task was undertaken.* [For a concise account of the controversy which * I do not remember having seen it noticed that the thea- tres claimed a property in the Plays of Shakespeare, and affected to be in possession of the authentic copies, down to a comparatively recent date. The following Advertise- ment stands prefixed to an edition of Pericles, in 121110, published in 1734. and professing to be "printed for J. Ton- son, and the rest of the Proprietors : " — " Whereas R. Walk- er, and his accomplices, have printed and published several of Shakespeare's Plays, and, to screen their innumerable errors, advertise that they are printed as they are acted ; and industriously report that the said Plays are printed from copies made use of at the Theatres ; I therefore declare, in justice to the Proprietors, whose right is basely invaded, as well as in defence of myself, that no person ev; .had, directly or indirectly, from me any such copy or copies; neither would I be accessary, on any account, to the imposing on the public such useless, pirated, and maimed editions, as are published by the said R. Walker. W. Chetwood, Prompter to JJi's Majesty's Company of Comedians at the Theatre, Royal in Drury Lane." On the subject of this Chetwood see Malone's Inquiry into the Shakespeare Papers, pp. 350 — 352. In Tonson's similar editions of The History of Sir John Oldcastle and The Tragedy of Locrine (both declared on the title page to be "By Mr. William Shakcspcar "), he 6peaks in like manner of himself " and the other Proprietors of the Copies of Shakespear's Plays," and complains that "one Walker has proposed to pirate all Shakespear's Plays, but through ignorance of what Plays were Shakespear's, did in several Advertisements propose to print CEdipus King of Thebes as one of Shakespear's Plays, and has since printed Tate's King Lear instead of Shakespear's, and in that and Hamlet has omitted almost one half of the genuine editions printed by J. Tonson and the Proprietors." It would appear 1 Nichols's Illustrations, II. 199, that Theobald, in the ice to the Second Edition of his Play of The Double J il ehood, which he pretended was written by Shakespeare, ~>poke of private property perhaps standing so far in his way as to prevent him from putting out a complete edition of Shakespeare's Works. The passage, which does not occur in the first edition (172S), is retained in the third (1767). Editors and Commentators. 23 the Collier Folio has caused, and a very satisfactory review of the results, see White's Shakespeare, vol. i. pp. cclxxx-ccxcvi.] IV. THE SHAKESPEARIAN EDITORS AND COMMENTATORS. The four Folios were the only editions of the Plays of Shakespeare brought out in the seventeenth cen- tury ; and, except that the First, as we have seen, has a Dedication and Preface signed by Heminge and Condell, two actors belonging to the Blackfriars Theatre, nothing is known, and scarcely anything has been conjectured, as to what superintendence any of them may have had in passing through the press. The eighteenth century produced a long suc- cession of editors: — Roue, 1.709 and 1714 ; Pope, 1725 and 1728; Theobald, 1733 and 1740; 1 lanmer, 1744; Warburton, 1747; Johnson, 1765; Steevens, 170'); Capell, 1768; Reed, 1785; Malone, 1790; Rum, 1786-1794. The editions of 1 lanmer, John- son. Steevens, Malone, and Reed were also all reprinted once or oftener, for the most part with enlargements; and all the notes of the preceding editions were at last incorporated in what is called i: d'8 Second Edition of Johnson and Steevens, which appeared, in twents-one volumes 8VO, in 13. This was followed in 1821 by what is now the standard Variorum edition, also in twenty-one Volumes, Which had been molly prepared I >y Ma- lone. and was completed and carried through the press by his friend Mr. James Bos well. We have since had the various editions of Mr. Knight and Mr. Collier, from both of whom, in addition to other original research and speculation, both bibliographi* 24 Prolegomena. cal and critical, we have received the results of an examination of the old texts more careful and ex- tended than they had previously been subjected to. New critical editions by the late Mr. Singer, by Mr. Staunton, and by Mr. Dyce, have also appeared with- in the last few years ; and there are in course of publication the Cambridge edition by Mr. Clark and Mr. Wright [completed Sept., 1866], and the mag- nificent edition by Mr. Halliwell, which is to extend to twenty volumes folio. [Of American editions may be mentioned that by the Hon. Gulian C. Ver- planck, three vols., 1847; that by Rev. Henry N. Hudson, eleven vols., 1855 ; and that by Mr. Rich- ard Grant White, twelve vols., 1857-1S65.] The list of commentators, however, includes sev- eral other names besides those of the editors of the entire collection of Plays ; in particular, Upton, in " Critical Observations," 1746 ; Dr. Zachaiy Grey, in " Critical, Historical, and Explanatory Notes," 1755 ; Heath, in "A Revisal of Shakespear's Text," 1765 ; Kenrick, in a " Review of Johnson's Edition," 1765, and " Defence of Review," 1766 ; Tyrwhitt, in " Observations and Conjectures," 1766 ; Dr. Richard Fanner, in " Essay on the Learning of Shake- speare," 1767; Charles yennens, in annotated edi- tions of "King Lear," 1770, — "Othello," 1773, — " Hamlet," 1773, — "Macbeth," 1773, — and "Julius Cajsar," 1774; John Monck Mason, in "Comments on the Last Edition of Shakespeare's Plays," 1785, and " Further Observations," 1798; A. Beckett, in "A Concordance to Shakespeare, to which are added three hundred Notes and Illustrations," 17S7 ; Ritson in [" Remarks Critical and Illustrative on the Text and Notes of the last* Edition of Shakespeare," 1783], * Steevens's. The Modern Texts. 25 "The Quip Modest" [1788], and "Cursory Criti- cisms," 1792 ; Whiter, in " A Specimen of a Com- mentary," 1794; George Chalmers, in "Apology for the Believers in the Shakespearian Papers," 1797? and "Supplemental Apology," 1799; Douce, in "Illus- trations of Shakespeare and of Ancient Manners," 1807 ; Rcvcrciid Joseph Hunter, in " Illustra- tions of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shake- speare," 1S44; and Reverend Alexander Dyce, in " Remarks on Mr. Collier's and Mr. Knight's Edi- tions," 1844, and "A Few Notes on Shakespeare," 1853. To these names and titles may be added the /,' nd Samuel Ayscougtis " Index to the Re- markable Passages and Words made use of by Shakespeare," 1790 ; " A Complete Verbal Index to the Plays of Shakespeare," in two vols., by Francis Twiss, Esq., 1805 ; and Mrs. Cowden Clarke's " Complete Concordance to Shakspere," 1847. Fi- nally, there may be mentioned Archdeacon JVarcs's •• Glossary of Words, etc., thought to require Illus- tration in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries," 1822. [Of this valuable work a new edition with many additions both of words and examples, by J. O. Ilalliwell and Thos. Wright, appeared in 1S59.] V. THE MODERN SHAKESPEARIAN TEXTS. No modern editor has reprinted the I 'la\ 8 of Shake- tnd in any of the old Folios ther the spelling, nor the punctua- tion, nor the words of any ancient copy have been ined unaltered, even with the correction of obvi- ous erroi 1 of th< P b. It has been universally admitted bj the co that has been followed that a genuine text is nol to be obtained without more or 26 Prolegomena. less of conjectural emendation : the only difference has been as to the extent to which it should be car- ried. The most recent texts, however, beginning with that of Malone, and more especially those of Mr. Knight and of Mr. Collier (in his eight volume edition), have been formed upon the principle of adhering to the original copies as closely as possible ; and they have given us back many old readings which had been rejected by preceding editors. There lias been some difference of opinion among editors of the modern school in regard to whether the prefer- ence should be given in certain cases to the First Folio or to some previous Quarto impression of the Play produced in the lifetime of the author ; and Steevens latterly, in opposition to Malone, who had originally been his coadjutor, set up the doctrine that the Second Folio was a safer guide than the First. This heresy, however, has probably now been aban- doned by everybody. But, besides the correction of what are believed to be errors of the Press in the old copies, the text of Shakespeare has been subjected to certain modifica- tions in all the modern reprints : — i. The spelling has been reduced to the modern standard. The original spelling is certainly no part of the composition. There is no reason to believe that it is even Shakespeare's own spelling. In all probability it is merely that of the person who set up the types. Spenser may be suspected to have had some peculiar notions upon the subject of orthogra- phy ; but, apparently, it was not a matter about which Shakespeare troubled himself. In departing from the original editions here, therefore, we lose nothing that is really his. 2. The actual form of the word in certain cases The Modern Texts. 27 has been modernized. This deviation is not so clearly defensible upon principle, but the change is so slight, and the convenience and advantage so con- siderable, that it may fairly be held to be justifiable nevertheless on the ground of expediency. The case of most frequent occurrence is that of the word than, which with Shakespeare, as generally with his contemporaries and predecessors, is always then. "Greater then a king" would be intolerable to the modern ear. Then standing in this position is there- fore quietly converted by all the modern editors into our modern than. Another form which was un- questionably part of the regular phraseology and grammar of his day is what is sometimes described as the conjunction of a plural nominative with a singular verh, but is really only a peculiar mode of inflecting the verb, by which the plural is left undis- tinguished from the singular. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, although they more usually said, as we do, " word times give offence," held them- selves entitled to say also, if they chose, '"words sometimes gives offence." But here again so much offence would be given by the antiquated phraseolo- tnodern ear, accustomed to such an appar- ent violation of concord <>nl\ from the most illiterate lips, that the detrimental s has been always sup- I in the modern editions, except only in a few insi. 11 which it happens to occur as an indis- lemenl of the 1 hj me — as when Macbeth^ \w his soliloquy before going in to murder the 1 leep- i. 1 ). ays,— Whiles I threat he In es : \v ord to the h too cold breath or, as when Romeo says to Friar Lawrence (ii. 3), z8 Prolegomena. Both our remedies Within thy help and holy physic lies. A few contractions also, such as ufton'i, on's head, etc., which have now become too vulgarized for composition of any elevation, are usually neglected in constructing the modern text, and without any appreciable injury to its integrity. 3. In some few cases the editors have gone the length of changing even the word which Shake- speare may very possibly have written, or which may probably have stood in the manuscript put into the hands of the original printers, when it has been held to be palpably or incontrovertibly wrong. In "Julius Ccesar, for instance (ii. 1), they have upon this principle changed u the first of March " into " the ides of March " (149), and afterwards "fifteen days" into "fourteen days" (154). It is evident, however, that alterations of this kind ought to be very cautiously made. VI. THE MECHANISM OF ENGLISH VERSE, AND THE PROSODY OF THE PLAYS OF SHAKE- SPEARE. The mechanism of verse is a thing altogether dis- tinct from the music of verse. The one is matter of rule, the other of taste and feeling. No rules can be given for the production of music, or of the musical, any more than for the production of poetry, or the poetical. The law of the mechanical construction of verse is common to verse of every degree of musical qual- ity, — to the roughest or harshest (provided it be verse at all), as well as to the smoothest and sweet- est. Music is not an absolute necessity of verse. There are cases in which it is not even an excellence The Verse. 29 or desirable ingredient. Verse is sometimes the more effective for being unmusical. The mechani- cal law or form is universally indispensable. It is that which constitutes the verse. It may be regarded as the substance ; musical character, as the accident or ornament. In every language the principle of the law of verse undoubtedly lies deep in the nature of the lan- guage. In all modern European languages, at least, it is dependent upon the system of accentuation es- tablished in the language, and would probably be found to be modified in each case according to the peculiarities of the accentual system. In so far as regards these languages, verse may be defined to consist in a certain arrangement of accented and unaccented svllables. - The Plays of Shakespeare are all, with the excep- tion only of occasional couplets, in unrhymed or what is called Blank verse. This form of verse was first exemplified in English in a translation of the Fourth Book of the yEneid by the unfortunate Lord Surrey, who was executed in 1547 ; it was first cm- ployed in dramatic writing by Thomas Sackville (afterwards Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset) in Gorboduc (or Ferrex ami Porrex), produced in 1 ; and, although not much used in poetical com- i" :mv other kind, either translated or origi- nal, till Milton brought it into reputation by his Paradl / /in the latter part of the following century, it had conn to he the established or cus- tomary verse lor both 1 and comedy before Shakespeare began to write for tin- stage. Our only !i Blank ■ ; 1 thai commonly called the Heroic, consisting normally in ;• sui lion of live feet of two ByllableS each, with the 30 Prolegomena. pressure of the voice, or accent, on the latter of the two, or, in other words, on the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth syllables of each line. After the tenth syllabic, an unaccented syllable, or even two, may be added without any prosodical effect. The rhythm is completed with the tenth syllable, and what follows is only as it were a slight reverberation or echo. But this general statement is subject to certain im- portant modifications : — i. In any of the feet an accent on the first syllable may be substituted for one on the second, providing it be not done in two adjoining feet. This transfer- ence of the accent is more unusual in certain of the feet than in others — most of all in the fifth, next to that in the second ; — but is not in any foot a viola- tion of the law of the verse, or what is properly to be called a license. 2. It is a universal law of English verse, that any syllable whatever, falling in the place of the accent either immediately before or immediately after a foot of which one of the syllables is truly accented, will be accounted to be accented for the purpose* of the verse. The -my of ene?7iy, for instance, or the in- of intercept, is always so accounted in heroic verse, in virtue of the true accent upon en- and upon -cept ; but in dactylic or anapaestic verse, these syllables, although pronounced precisely in the same manner, are always held to be unaccented, the law of those kinds of verse not requiring another accent within the distance at which the -my stands removed from the en-, or the in- from the -cept. This, in so far as regards the heroic line, is equivalent to saying that every alternate foot may be without a really accented syllable in it at all. Or the line might be defined as The Verse. 31 consisting, not of five feet of two syllables each, with one of them accented, bnt of two and a half feet, each of four syllables, with at least one of the four accented ; the half foot, which need not have an accent, occurring sometimes at the beginning of the line, sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the end. Practically, the effect is, that anywhere in the line we may have a sequence of three syllables (none of them being superfluous) without any accent; and that there is no word in the language (such as Hor- ace was plagued with in Latin) quod verstt dicere non est, — none, whether proper name or whatever else, which the verse does not readily admit. 3. It is by no means necessary (though it is com- monly stated or assumed to be so) that the syllables alternating with the accented ones should be unac- cented. Any or all of them may be accented also. 4. Further, in any of the places which may be occupied by an unaccented syllable it is scarcely an irregularity to introduce two or even more such unaccented syllables. The effect may be compared to the prolongation or dispersion of a note in music by what is called a shake. Of course, such a con- struction of verse is to be resorted to sparingly and only upon special grounds or occasions; employed habitually, or very frequentl) . it crowds and cumbers I rhythm, and gives it a quivering and feeble char- r. But it can nowhere lid to he illegiti- mate, — although, in ordinary circumstances, it may have a 1' agreeable effect in some places of the line than in othi These four modifications of its normal structure what, along with the artistic distribution of the pauses and cadences, principally give its variety, I loin, and life to om Heroic verse. They are 32 Prolegomena. what the intermixture of dactyls and spondees is to the Greek or Latin Hexameter. They are none of them of the nature of what is properly denominated a poetic license, which is not a modification but a violation of the rule, permissible only upon rare occasions, and altogether anarchical and destructive when too frequently committed. The first three of our four modifications are taken advantage of habitually and incessantly by every writer of verse in the lan- guage ; and the fourth, to a greater or less extent, at least by nearly all our blank verse poets. So much cannot be said for another form of verse (if it is to be so called) which has also been sup- posed to be found in Shakespeare ; that, namely, in which a line, evidently perfect both at the beginning and the end, wants a syllable in the middle. Such, for instance, is the well-known line in Measure for Measure, ii. 2, as it stands in the First Folio, — Than the soft myrtle. But man, proud man. Here, it will be observed, we have not a hemistich (by which we mean any portion of a verse per- fect so far as it extends, whether it be the com- mencing or concluding portion), but something which professes to be a complete verse. The pres- ent is not merely a truncated line of nine syllables, or one where the defect consists in the want of either the first or the last syllabic ; the defect here would not be cured by any addition to cither the beginning or the end of the line ; the syllable that is wanting is in the middle. The existing text of the Plays presents us with a considerable number of verses of this description. In many of these, in all probability, the text is cor- rupt ; the wanting syllable, not being absolutely indispensable to the sense, has been dropped out The Verse. 33 in the copying or setting up by some one (a com- mon case) not much alive to the demands of the prosody. The only other solution of the difficulty that has been offered is, that we have a substitute for the omitted syllable in a pause by which the reading; of the line is to be broken. This notion appears to have received the sanction of Coleridge. But I cannot think that he had fully considered the matter. It is certain that in no verse of Coleridge's own does any mere pause ever perform the function which would thus be assigned to it. Nor is any such principle recognized in any other English verse, modern or ancient, of which we have a text that can be absolutely relied upon. It is needless to erve, that both in Shakespeare and in all our other writers of verse, we have abundance of lines broken by pauses of all lengths without any such effect being thereby produced as is here assumed. If the pause be really equivalent to a syllable, how happens it that it is not so in every case? But that it should be so in any case is a doctrine to which I should have the greatest difficulty in reconciling myself. I low is it possible, by any length of pause, to bring anything like rhythm out of the above quoted words, — Than the soft myrtle. But man, proud man? If this be verse, there is nothing that may not be so designated. I uhoulJ be inclined to say, that, wherever there seems to be no reason lor suspecting the loss of a syllable, we ought in a i ase of this soil to regard the words as making not one line, but two hemistichs, or truncated lines. Thus, the passage in Measure r J/' a arc would stand — 34 Prolegomena. Merciful heaven ! Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt, Splitt'st the unwedgcable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle. But man, proud man, Dress'd in a little brief authority : etc. This is nothing more than what has been clone with the words " Merciful heaven ! " which all the mod- ern editors print as a hemistich, but which both in the First Folio and in all the others arc made to form a line with the words that immediately pre- cede ; thus : — Nothing but thunder : Mercifull heauen. What mainly gives its character to the English Heroic line is its being poised upon the tenth syl- lable. It is by this, as well as by the number of feet, that its rhythm or musical flow is distinguished, for instance, from that of what is called the Alexan- drine, or line of twelve syllables, the characteristic of which is that the pressure is upon the sixth and the twelfth. Without this twelve syllables will no more make an Alexandrine than they will a common Heroic line. There are in fact many Heroic lines consisting of twelve syllables, but still, nevertheless, resting upon the tenth. It follows that generally in this kind of verse the tenth syllable will be strongly accented. That is the normal form of the line. Wnen there is rhyme, the consonance is always in the tenth syllable. As, how- ever, in dancing (which is a kind of visible verse, — the poetry of motion, as it has been called), or in architecture (which is another kind, and may be styled the visible poetry of repose), the pressure upon that which really sustains is sometimes sought to be concealed, or converted into the semblance of The Verse. 35 its opposite, and the limb or the pillar made to appear to be rather drawn towards the ground than resting upon it, so in word-poetry too we have occa- sionally the exhibition of a similar feat. Instead of a strongly accented syllable, one taking only a very slight accent, or none at all, is made to fdl the tenth place. One form, indeed, of this peculiarity of struc- ture is extremely common, and is resorted to by all our poets as often for mere convenience as for any higher purpose, that, namely, in which the weak tenth syllable is the termination of a word of which the syllable having the accent has already done duty in its proper place in the preceding foot. It is in this way that, both in our blank and in our rhymed verse, the large classes of words ending in -2«£*, -ness, -ment, -j', etc., and accented on the antepenul- timate, arc made available in concluding so many lines. The same thing happens when we have at the end of the line a short or unaccented monosylla- ble which either coalesces like an enclitic with the preceding word, or at least belongs to the same clause of the expression ; as in Beaumont and Fletcher's By my dear father's sou!, you stir not, Sir! {//amorous Lieutenant t ii. 2); or, And yields all thank to me for that dear care Which I waa bound to have in training you. (King and No King", //.) But another case is more remarkable. This 18 when the weak or unaccented tenth syl- lable i- neither the final syllable of a word the ac- cenl lable of which has already done Bervice in the preceding I"'*:, nor in am way a pari of the same clause of the expression to which that foot 36 Prolegomena. belongs, but a separate monosyllabic word, fre- quently one, such as and, but, if, or, of, even the, or a, or an, among the slightest and most rapidly uttered in the language, and belonging syntactically and in natural utterance to the succeeding line. We may be said to have the strongest or most illustrious exemplifications of this mode of versifying in the Labitur ripa, Jove non probante, u- xorius amnis, and other similar exhibitions of " linked sweetness '' in Horace, Pindar, and the Greek dramatists in their choral passages (if we may accept the common ar- rangement), — to say nothing of sundry modern imitations in the same bold style, even in our own vernacular, which need not be quoted. Such a con- struction of verse, however, when it does not go the length of actually cutting a word in two, is in perfect accordance with the principles of our English pro- sodical system ; for, besides that the and, or, of, or if is not really a slighter syllable than the termination -ty or -ly, for instance, which is so frequently found in the same position, these and other similar mono- syllables are constantly recognized, under the second of the above laws of modification, as virtually ac- cented for the purposes of the verse in other places of the line. Still when a syllable so slight meets us in the place where the normal, natural, and custom- :irv rhythm demands the greatest pi'essure, the effect is always somewhat startling. This unexpectedness of effect, indeed, may be regarded as in many cases the end aimed at, and that which prompts or recom- mends the construction in question. And it does undoubtedly produce a certain variety and liveliness. It is fittest, therefore, for the lighter kinds of poetry. It is only there that it can, without impropriety, be The Verse. 37 made a characteristic of the verse. It partakes too much of the nature of a trick or a deception to be employed except sparingly in poetry of the manliest or most massive order. Yet there too it may be in- troduced now and then with the happiest effect, more especially in the drama, where variety and vivacity of style are so much more requisite than rhythmical fulness or roundness, and the form of dialogue, always demanding a natural ease and freedom, will justify even irregularities and audacities of expression which might be rejected by the more stately march of epic composition. It has something of the same bounding life which Ulysses describes Diomcd as showing in "the manner of his gait:" — He rises on the toe : that spirit of his In aspiration lilts him from the earth. Two things are observable with regard to Shake- speare's employment of this peculiar construction of verse : — 1. It will be found, upon an examination of his Plays, that there are some of them in which it occurs vers- rarely, or perhaps scarcely at all, and others in which it is abundant. It was certainly a habit of writing which grew upon him after he once gave in t<, ii. Among the Plays in which there is little or none of it are some of those known to he amongst his earliest ; and some that were undoubtedly the hut of the latest period of his life are among those that have the most of it. [t is probable that the different stages in the frequency with which it is indulged in correspond generally to the order of cession in whii h the Plays were written. A certain pi.. may he traced, more or It tinctly, in every writer; and there is no point of style which more marks a poetic u liter than the 38 Prolegomena. character of his versification. It is this, for instance, which furnishes us with the most conclusive or at least the clearest evidence that the Play of King Henry the Eighth cannothave been written through- out by Shakespeare. It is a point of style which admits of precise appreciation to a degree much beyond most others ; and there is no other single indication which can be compared with it as an element in determining the chronology of the Plays. It is therefore extremely difficult to believe that the three Roman plays, Julius Ccesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, can all belong to the same period (Malone assigns them severally to the years 1607, 1608, and 1610), seeing that the second and third are among the Plays in which verses hav- ing in the tenth place an unemphatic monosyllable of the kind in question are of most frequent occur- rence, while the only instances of anything of the sort in the first are, I believe, the following : — 54. I had as lief not be as live to be In awe of such a thing as I myself. 54. And Cassius is A wretched creature, and must bend his body. 54. A man of such a feeble temper should So get the start of the majestic world. 55. I do believe that these applauses are For some new honours that are heaped on Caesar. 155. All the interim is Like a phantasma. 306. Desiring thee that Publius Cimber may Have an immediate freedom of repeal. 354. And am moreover suitor, that I may Produce his body to the market-place. 357. And that we are contented Caesar shall Have all true rites and lawful ceremonies. The Verse. 39 405. But yesterday the word of Caesar might I hive stood against the world. 493. Or here, or at The Capitol. Not onlv does so comparatively rare an indulgence in it show that the habit of this kind of versification was as vet not fully formed, but in one only of these ten instances have we it carried nearly so far as it repeatcdlv is in some other Plays : be, and is, and should, and may, and shall, and might, and are, all verbs, though certainly not emphatic, will yet any of them allow the voice to rest upon it with a con- siderably stronger pressure than such lightest and slightest of " winged words " as and, or, but, if, that (the relative or conjunction), who, which, than, as, of, to, with, for, etc. The only decided or true and perfect instance of the peculiarity is the last in the list. 2. In some of the Plays at least the prosody of many of the verses constructed upon the principle under consideration lias been misconceived by everj editor, including the most recent. Let us take, for nple, the play of Coriolanus, in which, as has just been observed, such verses are very numerous. Hire in the firsl place, we have a good many in- stances in which the versification is correctly exhib- ited in the Firsl Folio, and. of course, as might be I. in all subsequent editions; such as — Onlj i:i troki , but with thy grim looks and The thunder-like percue ion <>r thy Bounds. — i. 4. I ,,t thi in in my 1 ounl 1 ice, wh Son ur brethren roared and ran. — ii. 3. Tin- thwarti ol pour di po ition • if You had not d them how you were di po ed. — iii. 2. ,,-, 1,,.. wet 1 v. ;■ an 1 mother, and My 1, i, ml i,t 11, ,1,1,- touch, when I am forth. — iv. 3. 40 Prolegomena. Permitted by our dastard nobles, who Have all forsook me. — iv. 5. Mistake me not, to save my life ; for if I had feared death, of all the men i' the world. — iv. 5. Had we no quarrel else * to Rome, but that Thou art thenee banished, we would muster all. — iv. 5. You have holp to ravish j'our own daughters, and To trelt the city leads upon your pates. — iv. 6. Your temples burned in their cement; and Your franchises, whereon you stood, confined. — iv. 6. Upon the voice of occupation, and The breath of garlic-eaters. — iv. 6. I do not know what witchcraft's in him; but Your soldiers use him as the grace 'fore meat. — iv. 7> Mine ears against your suits are stronger than Your gates against my force. — v. 3. As if Olympus to a molehill should In supplication nod. — v. 3. Hath an aspect of intercession, which, Great Nature cries, Deny not. — v. 3. Aufidius, and you Volsces, mark ; for we'll Hear nought from Rome in private. — v. 3. That thou restrain'st from me the duty which To a mother's part belongs. — v. 3. And hale him up and down ; all swearing, if The Roman ladies bring not comfort home. — v. 4. * The reading of all the copies is "No other quarrel else ; " but it is evident that other is merely the author's first word, which he must he supposed to have intended to strike out, if he did not actually do so, when he resolved to sub- stitute else. The prosody and the sense agree in admonish- ing us that both words cannot stand. So in Antony and Cleopatra, iv. 10. in the line " To the young Roman boy she hath sold me, and I fall : " young is evidently only the word intended to be u sed, ami never could he meant to be retained after the expression Roman boy was adopted. Another case of the same kind is unquestionably that of the word old in the line (As You Like It, iv. 3), — Under an (old) oak, whose boughs were mossed with age. The Verse. 41 The city posts by this hath entered, and Intends to appear before the people, hoping. — v. 5. I seemed his follower, not partner; and He waged me with his countenance, as if I had been mercenary. — v. 5. At a few drops of women's rheum, which are As cheap as lies. — v. 5. With our own charge; making a treaty where There was a yielding. — v. 5. That prosperously I have attempted, and With bloody passage led your wars, even to The gates of Rome. — v. 5. Breaking his oath and resolution, like A twist of rotten silk. — v. 5. Though in this city he Hath widowed and unchilded many a one. — v. 5. These instances are abundantly sufficient to prove the prevalence in the Play of the peculiarity under consideration, and also its recognition, whether con- sciously and deliberately or otherwise does not mat- by the editors. But further, we have also some instances in which the editors most attached to the original printed text have ventured to go the length 0/ rearranging the verse upon this principle where it stands otherwise in the First Folio. Such arc the following : — Commit the war of white and damask in l I sir nicely gauded cheeks. — ii. 1. Here the EJolio includes their in the first line. A kinder value of the people than He hath ■ prized them at — ii. 2. The Folio gives this as pro To allay my rage • and with Your colder reasons. — v. 3. The Folio gives from "My rages" inclusive as a line. 42 Prolegomena. After this it is surely very strange to find in our modern editions such manifest and gross misconcep- tions of the versification as the following arrange- ments exhibit : — My gentle Marcius, worthy Caius, And — By deed-achieving honour duly named. — ii. i. I have seen the dumb men throng to see him, And — The blind to hear him speak. — ii. i. Have made them mutes, silenced their pleaders, And — Dispropertied their freedoms. — ii. I. Having determined of the Volsces, And — To send for Titus Lartius. — ii. 2. To gratify his noble service, that hath Thus — Stood for his country. — ii. 2. That valour is the chiefest virtue, And — Most dignifies the haver. — ii. 2. Pray you, go fit you to the custom ; And — Take to you, as your predecessors have. — ii. 2. I have seen and heard of; for 3 r our voices [voice. — ii. 3. Have — Done many things, some less, some more; your Endue you with the people's voice : Remains — That, in the official marks invested, You — Anon do meet the senate. — ii. 3. Would think upon you for your voices, And — Translate his malice towards you into love. — ii. 3. The apprehension of his present portance, Which — Mostgibingly, ungravely, he did fashion. — ii. 3. For the mutable, rank-scented many, Let them — Regard me as I do not flatter, And — Therein behold themselves. — iii. 1. That would depopulate the city, And — Be every man himself. — iii. 1. In all these instances the words which I have separated from those that followed them by a dash belong to the preceding line ; and, nearly every time that the first of the two lines is thus put out of joint, the rhythm of both is ruined. The Verse. 43 The modern editor who has shown the most dis- position to tamper with the old text in the matter of the versification is Steevens. The metrical arrange- ment of the First Folio is undoubtedly wrong in thousands of instances, and it is very evident that the conception which the persons by whom the printing was superintended had of verse was extremely im- perfect and confused. They would be just as likely to go wrong as right whenever any intricacy or indis- tinctness in the manuscript threw them upon their own resources of knowledge and critical sagacity. But Steevens set about the work of correction on false principles. Nothing else would satisfy him than to reduce the prosody of the natural dramatic blank verse of Shakespeare, the characteristic prod- uct of the sixteenth century, to the standard of the trim rhyming couplets into which Pope shaped his polished epigrams in the eighteenth. It is a mistake, however, to speak of Steevens as having no ear for verse. His ear was a practised and correct enough . only that it had been trained in a narrow school. Malone, on the other hand, had no notion whatever of verse beyond what he could obtain by counting the syllables on his fingers. Everything else but the mere number of the syllables went with him for nothing. This is demonstrated by all that he has written on the subject. And, curiously enough, Mr. Janus I!'. swell, the associate of his labors, appears to have been endowed with nearly an equal share of the same singular insensibility. 44 Prolegomena. VII. SHAKESPEARE'S JULIUS CAESAR. Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar was first printed, as far as is known, in the First Folio collection of his Plays, published in 1623 ; it stands there between Timon of Athens and Macbeth, filling, in the divis- ion of the volume which begins with Corlolamis and extends to the end, being that occupied with the Tragedies, — which is preceded by those contain- ing the Comedies and the Histories, — the double- columned pages from 109 to 130 inclusive.* Here, at the beginning and over each page, it is entitled " The Tragedie of Julius Cassar ; " but in the Cata- logue at the beginning of the volume it is entered as " The Life and Death of Julius Cassar ; " other en- tries in the list being, among the Histories, " The Life and Death of King John," " The Life and Death of Richard the Third," " The Life of King Henry the Eighth," and, among the Tragedies, " The Tragedy of Coriolanus," " The Tragedy of Mac- beth," "The Tragedy of Hamlet," "King Lear," " Othello, the Moore of Venice." In the Second Folio (1632), where this series of pages includes Trollus and Cresslda, " The Tragedy of Julius CaBsar," as it is entered both in the running title and in the Catalogue, extends from page 129 to 150 inclusive. In both editions the Play is divided into Acts, but not into Scenes ; although the First Act is headed in both " Actus Primus. Scoena Prima." There is no list in either edition of the Dramatis Personce, as there is with several others of the Plays. Malone, in his "Attempt to ascertain the Order in which the Plays of Shakespeare were written," * There is a break in the pagination from 101 to 108 in- clusive. The Julius Caesar. 45 assigning Hamlet to the year 1600, Othello to 1604, Lear to 1605, Macbeth to 1606, Antony and Cleo- patra to 1608, and Coriolamis to 1610, fixes upon the year 1607 as the date of the composition of Julius Casar. But nothing can be more inconclu- sive than the grounds upon which he comes to this conclusion. His reasoning is principally, or, indeed, we may say almost wholly, founded upon the fact of a rhyming play on the same subject by William Alexander, afterwards Earl of Sterline, or Stirling, having been first printed at London in that year (it had been originally printed in Scotland three years re), which he thinks may be presumed to have preceded Shakespeare's. " Shakespeare, we know," he observes, in his disquisition on the Chronological Order ( Variorum edition, II. 445-451), "formed at least twelve plays on fables that had been unsuccess- fullv managed by other poets; but no contemporary writer was daring enough to enter the lists with him in his lifetime, or to model into a drama a subject which had already employed his pen; and it is not likely that Lord Sterline, who was then a very young man. and had scarcely unlearned the Scotch idiom, should have been more hardy than any other poet of that Elsewhere (XII. 2) he says, " In the two Plays many parallel passages are found, \\ hich might perhaps have proceeded only from the two authors drawing from the same source. However, there are- some reasons for thinking the coincidence more than accidental." The only additional reason he that •■ a 1 in The Tempest (• 'I he cloud- capped towers,' etc.) Beems to have been copied from one in "Darius, another Play of Lord Sterline's, printed ;it Edinburgh in I pon the sul ol th( 1 all ed imitations by Shake peare Ol one 46 Prolegomena. of the most uninspired of his contemporaries, see Mr. Knight's article on this William Alexander in the " Biographical Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," Vol. II. pp. 4-7. They may safely be pronounced to be one and all purely imaginary. The passage in Darius (which Play is also in rhyme), it may be noted, was removed by Lord Stirling from his Play when he reprinted it in a revised form in 1637. This would have been a singularly self-denying course for the noble versifier to have taken if the notion that it had been cither plagiarized or imitated by the great English drama- tist had ever crossed his mind. The resemblance, in fact, is no greater than would be almost sure to occur in the case of any two writers in vei - se, how- ever widely remote in point of genius, taking up the same thought, which, like the one we have here, is in itself almost one of the commonplaces of poetical or rhetorical declamation, however pre-eminently it has been arrayed by Shakespeare in all the " pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious words." A Latin Play upon the subject of the death of Caesar — " Epilogus Caesaris Interfecti " — the pro- duction of a Dr. Richard Ecdes, whom Meres, in his Wifs Coninionwealth, published in 1598, men- tions as one of the best tragic writers of the time, appears to have been brought out at Christ's Church, Oxford, in 1582. And there is also an anonymous English Play of Shakespeare's age, entitled " The Tragedy of Caesar and Pompey, or Caesar's Re- venge," of which two editions have come down to us, one bearing the date of 1607 (the same year in which Alexander's jfulizis Ccesar was printed at London), the other without date, but apparently earlier. This Play is often confounded with another The Julius (Lesar. 47 of the same title by George Chapman, which, how- ever, was not printed till 1631. The anonymous Play appears to have been first produced in 1594. See Henslowe's Diary, by Collier, p. 44. Malone observes that " in the running title it is called The Tragedy of Julius Ccesar; perhaps the better to impose it on the public for the performance of Shakespeare." It is not pretended, however, that it and Shakespeare's Play have anything in common.* Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar is alluded to as one of the most popular of his Plays, by Leonard Digges (a younger brother of Sir Dudley, the pop- ular parliament man in the time of Charles I., and afterwards Master of the Rolls), in a copy of verses prefixed to the First Folio : — Nor shall I e'er believe or think thee dead, . . . . . . till I hear a scene more nobly take Than when thy half-sword partying Romans spake. In the Prologue, also, to Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedy entitled The False Oue.f the subject of which is the loves of Caesar and Cleopatra in Egypt, the authors vindicate themselves from the charge of * From a comedy called Every Woman in her Humour, printed in 1609, Malone quotes a | which he thai tl an ancient droll or puppet- how cm the subject of Julius Caesar: — "] have seen the City of Nineveh and Jwliu- i.':i ar acted by mammets." •■ 1 formerly sup- l," Malone adds, "thai this droll was formed on the play before u : but have lately observed thatit is mentioned with other motion* (Jonas, Ninevie, and the Destruction of Jen: Dutili 1 ourtt intunded to be ho designate 48 Prolegomena. having taken up the same ground with Shakespeare in the present Play : — Sure to tell Of Caesar's amorous heats, and how he fell I' the Capitol, can never be the same To the judicious. But in what year The False One was brought out is not known. It certainly was not before 1608 or 1609. Finally, it has been remarked that the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius, in Shakespeare's Play, has evidently formed the model for a similar one between the two friends Melantius and Amintor, in the Third Act of Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's 'Tragedy. All that is known, however, of the date of that Play is, that it was probably brought out before 161 1, in which year another Play, entitled The Second Maiden's Tragedy, was licensed. But even this is doubtful ; for there is no resemblance, or connection of any kind, except that of die names, between the two Plays.* * " This tragedy," says Malone " (as I learn from a MS. of Mr. Oldys), was formerly in the possession of John War- burton, Esq., Somerset Herald, and since in the library of the Marquis of Lansdown." (Chronological Order, 450.) It is one of the three Plays which escaped destruction by Mr. Warburton's cook. It has now been printed "from the original MS., 1611, in the Lansdown Collection " (British Museum), in the First No. of The Old English Drama, Lon. 1824-25, the eight Nos. of which, making two vols., are commonly regarded as making a supplement to the last, or 12 volume edition of Dodslcy. The title of The Second Maideife Tragedy appears to have been given to the present Play fcy Sir George Buc, the master of the Revels. The MS., he states, had no name inscribed on it. On the back of the M.S. the Plav is attributed to William Goughe. After- wards William has been altered to Thomas. Then this name has been obliterated, and George Chapman substituted. Finally, this too has been scored through, and the author- ship assigned to William Shakspcar. The Julius CLesar. 49 On the whole, it ma} - be inferred, from these slight evidences, that the present Play can hardly be as- signed to a later date than the year 1607 ; but there is nothing to prove that it may not be of considerably earlier date. It is evident that the character and history of Julius Caesar had taken a strong hold of Shakespeare's im- agination. There is perhaps no other historical char- acter who is so repeatedly alluded to throughout his Plays. •• There was never anything so sudden," says the disguised Rosalind in As You Like It (v. 2) to Orlando, speaking of the manner in which his brother Oliver and her cousin (or sister, as she calls her) Cclia had fallen in love with one another, " but the fight of two rams, and Caesar's thrasonical brag of I came, saw, and overcame : for your brother and my sister no sooner met, but they looked ; no sooner looked, but they loved; no sooner loved, but they Bighed ; " etc. "Ol Buch a day," exclaims Lord Bai'dolph in the 1 / Part of hi >',i!,~ Henry ///<• Fourth (i. 1) to old Northumberland, in his misannouncement of the of the Held of Shrewsbury, — So fought, so followed, and so fairly won, ie not till now to dignify the ii ! Slip And afterwards (in iv. 3) we have Falstaff's mag- nify lade : •■ I have speeded hither with the tremesl inch [?] of possibility : I have foun- ■ I nin< core and odd posts; and lure, travel- tainted .1- I am, have, in my pure and immaculate valour, taken Sir John Colevile of the Dale, a most fill ion s [ fan ions? ) knight, and \ aloioiis | m my. But what of thai ? I h ay* me, and j ielded ; thai I may 5° Prolegomena. justly say, with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome, I came, saw, and overcame." " But now behold," says the Chorus in the Fifth Act of King Henry the Fifth, describing the tri- umphant return of the English monarch from the conquest of France, — In the quick forge and working-house of thought, How London doth pour out her citizens. The mayor, and all his brethren, in best sort, Like to the senators of th' antique Rome, With the plebeians swarming at their heels, Go forth, and fetch their conquering Caesar in. In the three Parts of King Henry the Sixth, which are so thickly sprinkled with classical allusions of all kinds, there are several to the great Roman Dic- tator. "Henry the Fifth! thy ghost I invocate ; " the Duke of Bedford apostrophizes his deceased brother in the First Part (i. i) : — Prosper this realm, keep it from civil broils ! Combat with adverse planets in the heavens! A far more glorious star thy soul will make Than Julius C;esar, or bright . In the next Scene the Maid, setting out to raise the siege of Orleans, and deliver her king and country, compares herself to that proud insulting ship Which Caesar and his fortunes bare at once. In the Second Part (iv. i) we have Suffolk, when hurried away to execution by the seamen who had captured him, consoling himself with — Great men oft die by vile bezonians : A Roman sworder and banditto slave Murdered sweet Tully; Brutus' bastard hand Stabbed Julius Caesar; 6avage islanders Pompey the great; and Suffolk dies by pirates. And afterwards (iv. 7) we have Lord Say, in some- The Julius CLesar. 51 what similar circumstances, thus appealing to Cade and his mob of men of Kent : — Hear me but speak, and bear me where you will. Kent, in the Commentaries Caesar writ, Is termed the civil'st place of all this isle; Sweet is the country, because full of riches; The people liberal, valiant, active, worthy; Which makes me hope you are not void of pity. " O traitors ! murderers ! " Queen Margaret in the Third Part (v. 5) shrieks out in her agony and rage, when the Prince her son is butchered before her eyes : — They that stabbed Cresar shed no blood at all, Did not offend, nor were not worthy blame, If this foul deed were by to equal it: He was a man; this, in respect, a child; 1 men ne'er spend their fury on a child. In King Richard the Third (iii. 1) is a passage of great pregnancy. "Did Julius Caesar build that place, my lord?" the young Prince asks Bucking- ham, when it is proposed that he shall retire for a day or two to the Tower before his coronation. And, when informed in reply that the mighty Ro- man at least began the building, he further in- quires, — I it upon record, <>r eUe repoi Su< \y from age i" ■> built if ? » It i, upon record, my gracious lord," answers I; kingham. On which the wise royal boy re- joins. — lint .I-. . mj lord, it were no1 regi tered, truth should live from agi t" A 'twere retailed to al ' y, I to ( neral all-ending day. And then, after a •• What say you, uncle?" he ex- plains the 'j.i' n though! that was working in his mind in these strikii >rds: — 52 Prolegomena. That Julius Caesar was a famous man : With what his valour did enrich his wit His wit set down to make his valour live. Death makes no conquest of this conqueror,* For now he lives in fame, though not in life. Far away from anything Roman as the fable and locality of Hamlet arc, various passages testify how much Caesar was in the mind of Shakespeare while writing that Play. First, we have the famous pas- sage (i. i) so closely resembling one in the Second Scene o,f the Second Act of y?dhis Ccesar : — In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets; As t stars with trains of fire, and dews of blood, Disasters in the sun ; and the moist star, Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands, Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse. J Then there is (iii. 2) the conversation between Hamlet and Polonius, touching the histrionic ex- ploits of the latter in his university days : "I did enact Julius Caesar: I was killed i' the Capitol; Brutus killed me." " It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there " (surely, by the by, to be spoken aside, though not so marked). Lastly, there is the Prince's rhyming moralization (v. i) : — Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Jit stop a hole to keep the wind away. * " His conqueror" is the reading of all the Folios. " This" was restored by Theobald from the Quarto of 1597, and ha- been adopted bj Malone and most modern editors. i Something is evidently wrong here; but even Mr. Col- annotator gives us no help. I Thi . however, is found only in the Quartos, and ill Polios. Nor, although retained by Mr. Collier in h ulated " text, is it stated to be re- stored by his MS. annotator. The Julius CL-esar. 53 O. that that earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw ! Many notices of Caesar occur, as might be expected, in Cymbeline. Such are the boast of Posthumus to his friend Philario (ii. 4) of the valor of the Brit- ons : — Our countrymen Are men more ordered than when Julius Cresar Smiled at their lack of skill, but found their courage Worthy his frowning at ; Various passages in the First Scene of the Third Act: — When Julius Caesar (whose remembrance yet Lives in men's eyes, and will to ears and tongues Be theme and hearing ever) was in this Britain, And conquered it, Cassibelan, thine uncle (Famous in Caesar's praises no whit less Than in his feats deserving it), etc.; There be many Caesars, Ere such another Julius ; A kind of conquest Ca?sar made here ; but made not here his brag Of came, and saw, and overcame: with shame (The firsl thai ever touched him) he was carried 1 1 .,m off our coa6t t\\ ice beaten : and his shipping or ignorant baubles! > <>n our terrible - Li!.. moved upon th • racked A ! .1 ily 'gainst our rod , For joy whereof The famed 1 Ian, who i» e al point 1 1 1 ortune I | to ma iter ( word, Made Lud's town with rejoicing fires bright, And Britons strut with courage; Our kingdom is stronger than it was at thai timej and, .,|.|;; I 1 1 ; oilier ol llielll lliaV have crooked noses ; buttoowe uch traight arms, none j :n' ambition (Whi( h rwelled so much thai it did almo 1 stretch o' the world 1 again 1 all colour, 1 Di.l put tiff yoke upon US j wliieh to shake off 54 Prolegomena. Becomes a warlike people, whom we reckon Ourselves to be. Lastly, we have a few references in Antony and Cleo* patra; such as, — Broad-fronted Caesar, When thou wast here above the ground, I was A morsel for a monarch (i. 5) ; Julius Caesar, Who at Philippi the good Brutus ghosted (ii. 6) ; What was it That moved pale Cassius to conspire? And what Made the all-honoured, honest, Roman Brutus, With the armed rest, courtiers of beauteous freedom, To drench the Capitol, but that they would Have one man but a man ? (ii. 6) ; Your fine Egyptian cookery Shall have the fame. I have heard that Julius Crcsar Grew fat with feasting there (ii. 6) ; When Antony found Julius Caesar dead, He cried almost to roaring; and he wept When at Philippi he found Brutus slain (in. 2) ; Thyreus. — Give me grace to lay My duty on your hand. Cleopatra. — Your Cresar's father oft, When he hath mused of taking kingdoms in, Bestowed his lips on that unworthy place, As it rained kisses (iii. 11). These passages, taken all together, and some of them more particularly, will probably be thought to afford a considerably more comprehensive represen- tation of "the mighty Julius" than the Play which bears his name. We cannot be sure that that Play was so entitled by Shakespeare. "The Tragedy of Julius Caesar," or "The Life and Death of Julius Caesar," would describe no more than the half of it. Caesar's part in it terminates with the opening of the The Julius Caesar. 55 Third Act ; after that, on to the end, we have noth- ing more of him but his dead body, his ghost, and his memory. The Play might more fitly be called after Brutus than after Caesar. And still more re- markable is the partial delineation that we have of the man. We have a distinct exhibition of little else bevond his vanity and arrogance, relieved and set off by his good-nature or affability. He is brought before us only as " the spoilt child of victory." All the grandeur and predominance of his character is kept in the background, or in the shade — to be in- ferred, at most, from what is said by the other dramatis personce — by Cassius on the one hand and by Antony on the other in the expression of their own diametrically opposite natures and aims, and in a very few words by the calmer, milder, and juster Brutus — nowhere manifested by himself. It might almost be suspected that the complete and full-length Caesar had been carefully reserved for another drama. Even Antony is only half delin- . to be brought forward again on another : C: needed such reproduction much more, and was as well entitled to a stage which he should I d without an equal. He is only a subordinate character in the presenl Play; his death is but an incident in the progress of the plot. The first figure** standing conspicuously out from all the rest, arc Brutus and C lassius. Some of the passages thai have been collected are further curious and interesting as being other render- nceptions thai are also found in the presenl Play, and as consequently furnishing data both for the problem of the chronological arrangement of the Plays, and for the general historj of the mind and artistic genitrt of the writer. After all the commen- 56 Prolegomena. tatorship and criticism of which the works of Shake- speare haye been the subject, they still remain to be studied in their totality with a special reference to himself. The man Shakespeare, as read in his works — Shakespeare as there revealed, not only in his genius and intellectual powers, but in his char- acter, disposition, temper, opinions, tastes, prejudices, — is a book yet to be written. It is remarkable, that not only in the present Play, but also in Hamlet, and in Antony and Cleopatra, the assassination of Cassar should be represented as having taken place in the Capitol. From the Pro- logue, quoted above, to Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedy of The False One, too, it would appear as if this had become the established popular belief; but the notion may, very probably, be older than Shakespeare. Another deviation from the literalities of history which we find in the Play, is making the Trium- virs, in the opening scene of the Fourth Act, hold their meeting in Rome. But this may have been done deliberately, and neither from ignorance nor forgetfulness. I have had no hesitation in discarding, with all the modern editors, such absurd perversions as Antonio, Flavio, Lucio, which never can have proceeded from Shakespeare, wherever they occur in the old copies ; and in adopting Theobald's rectification of Murellus for Marullus, which also cannot be supposed to be anything else than a mistake made in the printing or transcription. But it seems hardly worth while to change our familiar Portia into Porcia (although -n, without being followed, has adopted that perhaps more correct spelling in his edition). The peculiarity of the form given to the name of The Julius CLesar. $>j Caesar's wife in this Play does not seem to have been noticed. The only form of the name known to antiquity is Calpurnia. And that is also the name even in North's English translation of Plutarch, Shakespeare's great authority. [This is an error, into which White also, who changes the name to Calpurnia, has fallen. In the first (1579) edition of North's Plutarch — the edition which Shake- speare must have used — the name is Calphuriiia (see p. 769); but in some of the later editions — that of 1676, for instance — I find it changed to Cal- pur>iia.~\ I have not, however, ventured to rectify it, in the possibility that, although a corrupt form, it may be one which Shakespeare found established in the language, and in possession of the public ear. In that c.isc. it is to be classed with Anthony, Prot 'he us, ami Bosphorus, the common modern cor- ruption of the classic Bosporus, which even Gibbon does not hesitate to use. The name of the person called Decius Brutus throughout the play was Dcciiuus Brutus. Decius is not, like Decimus, a praenomen, hut a gentilitial name. The error, however, is as old as (he edition of Plutarch's Greek text produced bj Henry Stephens in 1^72;' and ii occurs likewise in the accompa- nying Latin translation, ;ind both in Aimol's ami DacieVs French, as well as in North's English. It is also found in Philemon Holland's translation of tontUS, published in [606. Lord Stirling, in his Julius Ccesar, probably mi-led in like manner by ih, has fallen into the -anic mistake with Shake- speare. Thai Decius is no error of the press is shown by its occurrence Bometimes in the verse in plat 1 1 v. In re Decimus could not stand. • 'Ef St toOt<# Mkio. TiaobTOf IniKlqn,. I','. CcU. |>. 1864. c;S Prolegomena. Finally, it may be noticed that it was really this Decimus Brutus who had been the special friend and favorite of Caesar, not Marcus Junius Brutus the conspirator, as represented in the Play. In his mis- conception upon this point our English dramatist has been followed by Voltaire in his tragedy of La Mort de Cesar, which is written avowedly in imitation of the Julius Ccesar of Shakespeare. NOTE. At the end of the Prolegomena, in Craik's third edition, is the following note : "I have not thought it necessary, in the present revision, to make the numerous typographical rectifications which would have been required in the margin of every page, and also in many of the references, to remove the traces of an unimportant error of one in the numbering of the speeches from 249, which ought to be 248, onwards to the end of the play." In this American edition I determined to make these "numerous typographical rectifications," and did not hap- pen to notice, until the book was almost ready to go to press, that Craik's error was not where he supposed it to be (from 249 onwards), but merely in numbering 246 and 247, which he makes, as I have done, 245 and 246. It is rather provoking to find that I have thus been at con- siderable trouble to correct {more Hibernico) the imaginary error, while I have retained the real one; but it cannot now be helped, and luckily both errors are " unimportant." I shall be pardoned, of course, for not distrusting the author's statement in regard to his own mistakes. W. J. R. JULIUS CJESAR. PERSONS REPRESENTED. JULIUS CJ3SAR. Ol I WHS r.ESAK, ") Triumvirs, MAR< I - AHTONIUS, \ after the death m. .i:mii.. LEPIDUS, J ofJutiust CICEBO, PUBLIUS, POPILIUS LENA; Setiators. M AK< I > BRUTUS, 5IU8, 'I REBONIU8, J.H. \j:i i -. r rrs, METELLU8 CXMBEB, \. II. UIIS anil MABULLU8, TrVmnes. aki BMIDORUS, « Sophist of Outdo*. Consj)ir Brutus. 1'IXOARUS, Servant to Cassius. CALI'IIURXI \. Wife to Ciesar. PORTIA, Wife to Jii-utus. ' ms, Citizens, Guards, Atteni>- AJSTfc, during a great fart of the Play, at Iiotne ; after- wards at Sardis ; and near Philiffi. ACT I. SCENE L—Rome. A Street. Enter I'i.wii S, MARULXUS, and ,t Rabble of CITIZENS. i. Flav. Hence I hi you home. I this a holiday ? What I know you not, B ng mechanic ought nol walk, i ii a labouring < I .- 1 >■ . without the I I '.our profession ? — Speak, what trade art thou? i ( it. \\\\\ , Sir, a carpenter. Mar. Wh I •. leather apron, and/ thy rule? \\ 'ii.it do t thou with thy be i apparel on? — i, Sir; what trade are m 60 Julius CLesak. [act i. 2 Cit. Truly, Sir, in respect of a fine workman, I am but, as von would say, a cobbler. Afar. But what trade art thou? Answer me directly. 6. 2 Cit. A trade. Sir, that, I hope, I may use with a safe conscience; which is, indeed. Sir, a mender of bad soles. 7. Mar. What trade, thou knave? thou naughty knave, what trade? 8. 2 Cit. Nay, I beseech you, Sir, be not out with me : j'et if j'ou be out, Sir, I can mend you. 9. Mar. What mean'st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow? 2 Cit. Why, Sir, cobble you. Flav. Thou art a cobbler, art thou ? 12. 2 Cit. Truly, Sir, all that I live by is with the awl. I meddle with no tradesman's matters, nor women's mat- ters, but with awl. I am, indeed, Sir, a surgeon to old shoes ; when they are in great danger, I recover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neat's leather have gone upon my handiwork. Flav. But wherefore art not in thy shop to-day? Why dost thou lead these men about the streets? 2 Cit. Truly, Sir, to wear out their shoes, to get my- self into more work. But, indeed, Sir, we make holiday to see Ca;-sar, and to rejoice in his triumph. 15. Mar. Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home ? What tributaries follow him to Rome, To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels? You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things I O, you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome, Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft Have you climbed up to walls and battlements, To tower-, and windows, yea, to chimney-tops, Your infants in your arms, and there have sat The live-long day, with patient expectation, To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome: And, when you saw his chariot but appear, Have you not made an universal shout, That Tiber trembled underneath her banks, To hear the replication of your sounds Made in her concave shores? sc. ii.] Julius CLesar. 6\ And do you now put on your best attire? And do you now cull out a holiday? And do you now strew flowers in his way, That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood? ? Be gone ! Run to your houses, fall upon your knees, Pray to thcfgocls to intermit the plague That need-; must light on this ingratitude. 1 6 Flav. Go, go, good countrymen, and, for this fault, Assemble all the poor men of your sort; Draw them to Tiber banks, and weep your tears Into the channel, till the lowest stream Do kiss the most exalted shores of all. [Exeunt Citizens. See, whe'r their basest metal be not moved ! They vanish tongue-tied in their guiltiness. Go you down that way towards the Capitol ; way wiU I. Disrobe thejmages^. It" you do lind them decked with ceremonies. 17. Mar. .May we do so? You know it is the feast of Lupercal. 18. Flav. It is no matter ; let no images Be hung with Csesai tries. I'll about, And drive away the vulgar from the streets; So do you too, where you perceive them thick. These growing 1 plucked from Csesar'6 wing Will make him fly an ordinary pitch ; \\ i iar above the \ iew of men, Ami keep ui all in servile fearfulne {Exeunti S( i:\l. II. — The sum,-. A Public Place. Enter, in Proa tston with Musi,. < ' esah : Antony, for the , DE( [US, ClCl R.O, I'.ki 1 1 / following, among tin in ,1 S001 us \yi 1;. 1 lalphurnia, — : > iks. [ Musi, r, aset. 1 I thurnia, — Cal H . my lord. 23. ( >n. Stand von directly in Antonius' way, Winn be tlotli run hi , course. — Antonius. 62 Julius CLesar. [act i Ant. Caesar, my lord. 25. Cces. Forget not, in your speed, Antonius, To touch Calphurnia ; for our elders say, The barren, touched in this holy chase, Shake olY their sterile curse. Ant. I shall remember: When Caesar says, Do this, it is performed. Cczs. Set on ; and leave no ceremony out. [Music. Sooth. Caesar. Cars. Ha! who calls? Casca. Bid every noise be still. — Peace yet again. [Music ceases. Cces. Who is it in the press that calls on me? I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music, Cry, Caesar. Speak ; Ciesar is turned to hear. 32. Sooth. Beware the ides of March. Cces. What man is that? 34. Bru. A soothsayer, bids you beware the ides of March. Cces. Set him before me ; let me see his face. Cas. Fellow, come from the throng : look upon Ca?sar. Cces. What say'st thou to me now? Speak once again. Sooth. Beware the ides of March. 39. C