UC-NRLF THE SUCCESSION OF SHAKSPERE'S WORKS AND THE USE OF METRICAL TESTS IN SETTLIJSFG IT, &c. BEING THE INTRODUCTION TO I PROFESSOR GERVINUS'S 'COMMENTARIES ON SHAKSPERE I TRANSLATED BY MISS BUNNETT j^^^^^B (Smith, Elder, & Co., 1874) BY FRED^- J. FURNIVALL, M.A. TRINITY HALL, CAMBRIDGE Founder and Director of the New Shakspere Society, the Chaucer Society, the Ballad Society, and the Early English Text Society,- Honorary Secretary of the Philological Society Editor of many MSS. and Old Books. LONDON SMITH, ELDEK, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1874 Pi'ice Sixpence. ()N : I'liiNi!!;;) itY tsroTTis'.vooiiK an;> co., :>k\v-.stueet square AND rAIlLlAJiiioT STUEKT THE SUCCESSION OF SHAKSPEEE'S WOEKS AND THE USE OF METEICAL TESTS IN SETTLING IT, &c. BEING THE INTKODUCTION TO PEOFESSOR GERVINUS'S 'COMMENTARIES ON SHAKSPERE TRANSLATED BY MISS BUNNETT (Smith, Elder, & Co., 1874) BY FEED^^- J. FUENIVALL, M.A. TIUXITY HALIi, CAMBRIDGE Founder and Dirrdor of the New Hhakspere Society, the Chaucer Society, the Ballad Society, and the Early English Text Society; Honorary Secretary of the Flulological Society Editor of many MSS. and Old Books. LONDON SMITH, ELDEE, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1874 sue INTEODUCTION/ ^ It IS a disgrace to England, that even now, 258 years after Sliak- spere's death, the study of him has been so narrow, and the criticism, however good, so devoted to the mere text and its illustration, and to studies of single plays, that no book by an Englishman exists which deals in any worthy manner with Shakspere as a whole, which tracks the rise and growth of his genius from the boyish romanticism or the sharp youngmanishness of his early plays, to the magnificence, the splendour, the divine intuition, which mark his ablest works. The profound and generous " Commentaries " of Gervinus — an honour to a German to have written, a pleasure to an Englishman to read — is still the only book known to me that comes near the true treatment and the dignity of its subject, or can be put into the hands of the student who wants to know the mind of Shakspere.' These words were written by me in the autumn of 1873, when I founded ' The New Shakspere Society,' and have appeard in that Society's Prospectus up to this day. Their truth has been confirmd by all the best judges to whom I have spoken about Gervinus's * Com- mentaries ' since. One of the ablest of these, my friend Professor J. E. Seeley — a student of Shakspere from his youth — said, on returning the book to me, * The play of Cymheline had always puzzld me ; and now, for the first time, Gervinus has explaind it. I could not have believd before, that any man could have taught me, at my time of life, so much about one of Shakspere's plays. It is all clear now.' In Germany Gervinus's book still holds its ground as the best aesthetic work on our great poet, and is respected by all thoughtful men. My strong conviction of its value leads me, however unworthy for the task, to say now a few words of recommendation of the book to my English fellow- students of Shakspere, and to note, for the use of be- ginners, a few points that may help them in their work : 1 . On Gervinus's book. 2. On the change in Shakspere's metre as he advanct in life, ' By F. J. Furnivall, Esq., M. A., Trin. Hall, Cambr., Founder and Director of the New Shakspere Society, the Chaucer Society, the Early English Text Society, &c. XX INTBOBUCTION.—l 1. Gervinus's View of SlaJcspcre. jmd on ' Metrical Tests.' 3. On the ppiiricus portions of plays calld Sliakspere'sj and the use of metrical tests in detecting them. 4. On noting the progressive changes in Shakspere's language, imagery, and thought. 5. On the succession of Shakspere's plays. 6. On the helps for studying them, I want just to tell a beginner now, what I wish another student had told me when I began to read Shakspere. § 1. Most Englishmen who read Shakspere are content to read his plays in any haphazard order, to enjoy and admire them — some greatly, some not much — without any thought of getting at the meaning of them, and at the man who lies beneath them ; without any notion of tracing the growth of his mind, from its first upshoot till the ripening of its latest fruits. Yet this is not the way in which the works of Shakspere, the chief glory of English literature, should be studid. Carefully and faithfully is every Englishman bound to follow the course of the most splendid imagination of his land, and to note its purpose in every mark it leaves of its march. Shakspere irtust be studied chronologically, and as a whole. In this task the student will get most real and welcome help from Professor Gervinus. The Professor starts with Shakspere's earliest poems, the Venus and Adonis., (full of passion and of Stratford country life), and Lncrece, (of which Chaucer's Troylus must surely have been the model) ; then reviews his life in London, — wild in its early days, — and the condition of the stage when Shakspere joind it ; next, his earliest dramatic attempts, his touchings of Titus Andronicvs (Pericles must be put later), and Henry VI., Part I., and his recast of 2 and 3 Henry VI. ; with his farces The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew. Then the works of his Second Period, in four divisions : 1. His erotic or love-pieces. 2. His historical plays. 3. His comedies of TJie Merry Wives, As You Like It, Much Ado, and Twelfth Night. 4. His Sonnets. Next, the Professor treats the great Third Period of Shakspere's Tragedies, headed by the tragi-comedy Measure for Mea- sure, and winding-up with the purposeful and peaceful comedies of later age, The Tempest and Winter's Tale, and Henry VIII., which (says Mr. Spedding) Shakspere plannd, but wrote less than half of (1,166 lines), Fletcher writing the rest (1,761 lines). Shakspere's course is thus shown to have run from the amorous- ness and fun of youth, through the strong patriotism of early manhood, to the wrestling with the dark problems that beset the man of middle age to the time of gloom which w^eighd on Shakspere (as on so many men) in later life, when, though outwardly successful, the world seemd all against him, and his mind dwelt with sympathy on scenes of faithlessness of friends, Ireachery of relations and subjects, ingratitude of children, scorn of his kind ; till at last, in his Stratford home again, peace came to him, Miranda and Perdita in their lovely fi-eshness and charm greeted him, and he was laid by his quiet Avon's side. mTRODUCTION.—% \. Charaderistics of Gervinus. xxi In his last section, * Shakespeare,' Gervinus sets before lis his view of the poet and his works as a whole, and rightly claims for him the highest honour as the greatest dramatic artist, the rarest judge of men and human affairs, the noblest moral teacher, that Literature has yet known. What strikes me most in Gervinus is his breadth of culture and view, his rightness and calmness of judgment, his fairness in looking at both sides of a question, his noble earnest purpose, his resolve to get at the deepest meaning of his author, and his reverence and love for Shakspere. No one can read his book without seeing evidence of a range of reading and study rare indeed among Englishmen. No one can fail to notice how his sound judgment at once puts the new ^ * Aftaire du Collier,' — the Perkins folio forgeries, &c., — in its true light ; how he rejects the ordinary biographer's temptation — to which so many English Shakspereans yield — of making his hero an angel ; how he takes the plain and natural meaning of the ' Sonnets' as their real one, and yet shows us Shakspere rising from his vices to the height of a great teacher of men. No one can fail to see how Gervinus, noble- natured and earnest himself, is able to catch and echo for us the 'still small voice' of Shakspere's hidden meaning even in the lightest of his plays. No Englishman can fail to feel pleasure in the heartfelt tribute of love and praise that the great Historian of German Literature gives to the English Shakspere. No doubt the book has shortcomings, if not faults. It is German, and occasionally cumbrous ; it has not the fervour and glow, or the delicacy and subtlety, of many of Mrs. Jameson's Studies ; it does not do justice to Shakspere's infinite humour and fun ; it makes, sometimes, little odd mistakes.^ But still it is a noble and generous * The old forgeries printed by Mr. Collier as genuine "were the documents from the EUesmere (or Bridgwater House) and Dulwich College Libraries, a State Paper, and the latter additions to the Dulwich Letters (see Dr. Ingleby's Complete View). I, in common with many other men, have examind the originals with his prints of them. Mr. Collier printed one more name to one document than was in it when produc'd. See Mr. A. E. Brae's opinion at p. 13 of 'Collier, Coleridge, and Shakespeare : a Eeview, by the Author of " Literary Cookery," * 1860. None of Mr. Collier's statements should be trusted till they have been verified. The entries of the actings of Shakspere's Plays in Mr. Peter Cunning- ham's ' Kevels at Court ' (Shakespeare Society, 1842), pp. 203-5, 210-11, are also printed from forgeries (which Sir T. Duffus Hardy has shown me), though Mr. Halliwell says he has a transcript of some of the entries, made before Mr. Cunningham was born. Thus the following usually relied-on dates are forgd: 1605, Moor of Venis, Merry Wives, Measure for Measure, Errors, Love's Labours Lost, Henry V., Merchant of Venice. 1612, Tempest, Winter's Tale. '^ Professor Seeley notices three : — 1. In the comment on 1 Henry IV. GeTvinns takes as literal and serious (p. 309) Hotspur's humourous exaggeration of Morti- mer's keeping him 7Wie hours listening to devils' names : I tell 3'ou what : He held me last Night at least nine howres In reckuing vp the seuerall Deuils Names That were hi? Lackacyes. (III. i. 155-8, Fo/?o, p. 61, col 1.^ xxii INTRODUCTION.— % 2. Metrical Tests. book, which no true lover of Shakspere can read without gratitude and respect. § 2. Though Gervinus's criticism is mainly eesthetic/ yet, in settling the dates and relations of Shakspere's plays, he always shows a keen appreciation of the value of external evidence, and likewise of the metrical evidence, the markt changes of metre in Shakspere's verse as he advanct in life. As getting the right succession of Shakspere's plays is 'a condition precedent' to following the growth of his mind, and as * metrical tests' are a great help to this end, though they have had, till lately, little attention given to them in England, ^ I wish to say a few words on them. Admitting (as I contend we must admit) that Love's Labours Lost is Shakspere's earliest wholly-genuine play, and contrasting it with his latest. The Temj^est, Cymheline, and Winter's Tale, we find that — (I.), while in Love's Labours Lost the 5-measure ryming lines are 1,028, and the blank verse only 579 ; in The Tempest such ryming lines are 2, and the blank verse 1,458, while in the Winter's Tale there are no 5-measure ryming lines to 1,825 blank verse ones. Again, (II.) Shakspere's early blank vers© was written on the model of ryming verse, nearly every line had a pause at the end ; but as he wrote on, he struggld out of these fetters into a freer and more natural line, which "When Hotspnr of course means ten or twelve minutes, or perhaps even five. Certainly poor evidence that Hotspur is patient when in repose, pliable and yield- ing like a lamb ! 2. Gervinus (p. 310) misses the humour of Hotspurs speech to Kate his wife (II, iii. Folio, p. 65, col. 2) : Hot. Come, wilt thou see me ride ? And when I am a hnrsebacke, I will sweare I loue thee infinitely, ^ though he is right in saying Hotspur does love his wife, and that because he "ban- ters her. 3. He turns Desdemona's words into Othello's own (p. 517), ' She gave him a " world of sighs ; " and she swore (even in remembrance the Moor deemed it strange and wondrus pitiful) that she wished she had not heard his story.' Whereas Shakspere says, I. iii. 159-162, Folio, p. 314, col. 1 : She gaue me for my paines a world of [sighs] : She swore, in faith, 'twas strange, 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange, *Twas pittifull, 'twas wondrous pittifull : She wish'd she had not heard it. , . . Professor Dowden (who refers to the notice of Gervinus in vol. vi. of the Shakspere Jahrbuch) thinks that Gervinus often goes much astray, as in what he says of Mercutio ; and that his strong historical tendency imports meanings into the plays which are not there, as when he calls Hamlet a culturd man in an age of rude force, whereas it's an age of Osric, Polonius, universities, &c. The inconsistency, such as it is, seems to me in the facts, and not in Gervinus. * Mr. Halliwell complains of this word being stretcht to include 'psychological and philosophical.' ^ Malone in 1778 pointed out the value of the Ryme-Test in settling the priority of one early play over another. He also noticed the unstopt or run-on Hue test, which the late ]\Ir. Bathurst brought more markedly under the notice of modern folk by his little book (1857) on Shakspere's differences of versification. INTRODUCTION.— % 2. The Unstopt-Lme and Pause Tests. xxiii often ran-on into the next, took the pause from the end, and put it in or near the middle of the line. Contrast these three extracts : — LOVES LABOUES LOST, IL i. 13-34. {Folio, p. 126, revised.) Prin. Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean, Needs not the painted flourish of your praise. Beauty is bought by iudgement of the eye. Not vttred by base sale of chapmens tongues. I am lesse proud to heare you tell my worth, Then you much willing to be counted wise, In spending your wit in the praise of mine. But now to taske the tasker : good Boyet, You are not ignorant, all-telling fame Doth noyse abroad, Nauar hath made a vow. Till paineful studie shall outweare three yeares. No woman may approach his silent Court: Therefore, to's seemeth it a needfuU course. Before we enter his forbidden gates, To know his pleasure; and, in that behalfe, Bold of your worthinesse, we single you, As our best mouing faire soliciter. Tell him, the daughter of the King of France, On serious businesse crauing quicke dispatch, Importunes personall conference with his grace. Ilfiste ; signifie so much ; while we at- tend, Like humble visag'd suters, his high will. LEAR, IV. iii. 17-25. (From the Quarto of 1608, sig. L 7, ed. Steevens ; Byce, vii. 318, revised.) Ke7it. then it mou'd her, Ge?it, Not to a rage : patience and sor- row stroue Who should expresse her goodliest. You have seene Sun-shine and raine at once ; her smiles and teares Were like a better day : those happy smilets That plaid on her ripe lip, seem'd not to know What guests were in her eyes ; which parted thence As pearles from diamonds dropt. In briefe, sorrow Would be a rarity most belou'd, if all Could so become it. THE WINTERS TALE, III. ii. 232-243. Folio, p. 288, col. 1. Leo. Thou didst speake but well When most the truth : which I receyue much bet|ter Then to be pittied of thee. Prethee, bring me 234 To the dead bodies of my Queene, and Sonne ; One graue shall be for both. Vpon them shall [237 The causes of their death appears (vnto Our shame perpetuall). Once a day He vis jit The Chappell where they lye ; and teares shed there Shall be my recrea|tion. So long as Na|ture 240 Will beare vp with this exercise, so long I dayly vow to vse it. Come and leade I me 242 To these sorrowes. The dullest ear cannot fail to recognize the difference between the early Love's Labours Lost pause or dwelling on the end of each line, and the later Lear's and Winter's Tale disregard of it, with (III.) the following shift of the pause to or near the middle of the next line. In short, the proportion of run-on lines to end-pause ones in three of the earliest and three of the latest plays of Shakspere is as follows : — xxiv INTBOBUCTION.—% 2. The Extra-SyllaUe and Wealc-Endir.g Tests. Proportion of Earliest Plays unstopt lines to end-stopt ones Loues Labour's Lost . 1 in 18'14 The Comedy of Errours . 1 in 10-7 The Two G-entlemen of") Verona . . .J 1 in 10 Proportion of Latest Plays unstopt lines to end-stopt ones The Tempest . . . 1 in 3-02 Cymbeline King of Bri- ? , . ^..-q taine . . . . > The Winter's Tale . . 1 in 2-12 Again, note that all the above Love's Labours Lost Ihies have only five measures, or ten syllables, each ; and not one weak ending, that is, a final unemphatic word, or a word that clearly belongs to the next line, while in I'he Winter's Tale extract there are four lines with extra syllables (240 having one also before the central pause) and three with weak endings, 234, 237, 242. In these points contrast the Love's Labours Lost lines also with the two following passages, from The Winter's Tale, (Act ii., sc. i., 1. 158-170 ; Folio, p. 283), and Shak- spere's part of ITenry VIII. : — Lord. I had rather you did lacke then I (my Lord) Vpon this ground : and more it would content j me 159 To haue her Honor true, then your suspitjiou, Be blani'd fort how you might. Leo. Why, what neede we 161 Commune with you of this? but rather fol|low Our forceful! instigation? Our prerogjative Cals not your Counsailes, but our naturall goodjnesse Imparts this : which, if you, or stupified, Or seeming so, in skill, cannot or will | not Bellish a truth, like vs, informe your selues ; We neede no more of your aduice : the matjter, The losse, the gaine, the ord'ring on't, is all Properly ours. {Winters Tale, ii. i. 158-170.) Here (IV.) are seven lines with extra syllables,^ and (V.) two lines, 159, 161, with 'weak-endings,' the coming of which in any number is a sure sign of Shakspere's late work (see the Postscript). Again, take, for the weak Folio, p. 220, col. 2 ending, Henry VIII., Act iii., sc. ii., 1. 97-104 * Professor Hertzberg's table of the proportion of 11 -syllable lines to all the others (12-syllable and short lines too) in the following 17 plays is given in the Introduction to his German translation of Cymbeline, as follows : — Per cent. Per cent. Love's Labour's Lost 4 As You Like It . 18 Titus Andronicus 5 Troilus and Cressida . 20 King John 6 All's Well . 21 Richard IL 11-39 Othello . . 26 Errors .... •2 Winter's Tale . . 31-09 Merchant of Venice . 15 Cymbeline . . . 32 Two Gentlemen • 15 Tempest . . . . 33 Sa.-ew U Henry VIII. . . 44 Hichardlll. . 18 INTRODUCTION.— I 2. The WcaJc-Ending Test. XXV What though I know her ver[tuoiis And well deseruing ? Yet, I know her for 98 A spleeny Lutheran, and not wholsome to 99 Our cause, that she should lye i' th' bosome of 100 Our hard-rul'd King. Againe, there is sprung up An Heretique, an Arch-one ; Cranmer, one Hath crawl'd into the fauour of the King, And is his Oracle. Three weak endings in three consecutive lines, 98-100; only one end-stopt line in 7 ; one with an extra syllable. These are notes of Hhakspere's latest plays ; indeed, his share in Henry VIII. was almost certainly his last work. Or take Mr. Spedding's beautiful instance from Cymheline, Act iv., sc. ii., 1. 220-4 ; Folio, p. 389, col. 1 : — Thou shalt not lacke The Flower that's like thy face, Pale Primrose, nor 221 The azur'd Hare-bell, like thy Veines : no, nor 222 The leafe of Eglantine, whom not to slan|der Out-sweetned not thy breath. ' I doubt whether you will find a single case in any of Shakspere's undoubtedly early plays of a line of the same structure. Where you find a line of ten syllables ending with a word of one syllable — that word not admitting either of emphasis or pause, but belonging to the next line, and forming part of its first word-group — you have a metrical effect of which Shakespeare grew fonder as he grew older ; frequent in his latest period ; up to the end of his middle period, so far as I can remember, unknown.' (Mr. Spedding's letter to me on his 'Pause- Test.' *Ne\v Shakspere Soc.'s Trans.,' 1874, p. 31.) ' Professor W. A. Hertzberg counts seventy-two weak endings in the 2,407 (omitting the songs and other lyrical pieces) of Cumheline^ or 1 to 33-43, showing its very late date, 1611 (?) There are other metrical tests, of which (VI,) the abandonment of doggrel — used only in five plays, all early or earlyish — and (VII.) the use of 6-measure lines, are two. No one test can be trusted ; all must be combind and considerd, and us'd as helps for the higher esthetic criticism. Every student should work at these tests for himself.^ As material that may help him in using the ^ Don't turn your Shakspere into a mere arithmetic-book, and fancy you're a great critic because you add up a lot of rymes or end-stopt lines, and do a great many sums out of your poet. This is mere clerk's work ; but it is needed to im- press the facts of Shakspere's changes in metre on your mind, and to help others, as well as yourself, to data for settling the succession of the plays. Metrical tests are but one branch of the tree of criticism. Mr. Hales's seven tests for the growth of Shakspere's art and mind in his plays are : 1. External Evidence (entries in the Stationers' Eegisters, Diaries, &c.) 2. Historical Allusions in the Plays. S. Changes of Metre. 4. Change of Language and Style ; then. Development of Dramatic Art, as shown in 5. Power of Characterization, and 6. Dramatic Unity. 7. (the most important of all) Knowledge of Life (not only knowledge of its facts, but a growth of moral insight, and of belief in moral laws ruling men, and the course of world). See my report of his two Lectures ou Shakspere iu The Acadenii/y Jan. 17, 1874, p. 63 ; Jan. 31, p. 117. XXVI INTRODUCTION.— % 3. Metrical Table. ryme-test, I reprint from the 'New Sli. Soc.'s Trans,,' 1874, p. 16, Mr. Fleay's 'Metrical Table of Shakespeare's Plays,' though the order of the plays is not rightly given in it — has been since largely alter d by its compiler — and though it has not been verifi'd by any other counter : — METRICAL TABLE OF SHAKSPEKE'S PLATS. PLAT. !s a M fi si ^ sg 1 i i i a, i [3 i o 3 cw « n ri z g IS ^ ^ S lO OT 2904 1681 925 71 130 97 211 10 — 1 2 3 10 33 1 3018 2703 227 69 _ 19 32 [Pistol 39 1.] 3 ?, 2823 2106 643 40 18 16 129 22 — 1 — 2 7 15 4 10 46 62 13 8 28 43 a 8 15 31 18 20 53 55 11 19 66 71 13 J8 34 116 22 2440 16512241 34 369 _ _^ 14 31 'i'l 6 3392 829 1 2521 42 — — 708 3 33 76 19 .SQ64 255 j 2761 42 — 6 613 14 38 84 31 2068 458 1458 2 — 96 476 [541. inmasq.] 2 16 47 5 27581 84411825 — 57 639 [32 1. in chor.] 8 14 19 13 VIL PLAYS IN WHICH SHAKSPERE WAS NOT SOLE AUTHOR. Henry VIII. Two Noble K. Pericles. Timon of A. VIIL Horn, and Jul. Hamlet. Henry V. Merry Wives. T. of Shrew. Titus Andron. 1 Henry VI. 2 Henry VI. 3 Henry VI. Contention. True Tragedy. [46 1. in Prol. „ 2-96 2 129 77 „ 1-6 » 3-43 3 107 41 „ 2-6 . Shakspere „ 2-37 4 230 72 „ 31 j^ „ 2-13 III. 1 166 119 „ 1-3 Fletcher „ 4-83 ^^2 193 62 „ 3- Shakspere ,, 2- 3 257 152 „ 1-6 Fletcher „ 3-43 IV. 1 116 57 „ 2- „ 3- 2 80 51 „ 1-5 } „ 4-55 3 93 51 » 1-8 >> 1 176 68 „ 2-5 Shakspere „ 2-28 V. 2 217 115 „ 1-8 Fletcher „ 4-77 3 (almost all prose or i ough verse) j> „ 5-01 4 37 1 44 „ 1-6 „ 6-41 *•" To exit of the King. The rest of ii. is made iii. In short, the proportion of Shakspere's double endings, ^ was 1 to ' Mr. S. Hickson had arrivd before, privately and independently, at the same re:iulfc. See P/oJ. Ingram's confirmation on p. xlix, n. below. ' Calld also extra syllables, or feminine endings. Very rarely in Shakspere, xxviii INTBODUCTION.—^ 3. Metrical Tests for genuine Work. 3, of Fletcher's 1 to 1-7; of Shakspere's unstopt lines, 1 to 2*03, of Fletcher's 1 to 3*79, both tests making Shakspere's part of the play his latest work. Mr. Spedding's division o£ the play betAveen Shak- spere and Fletcher was confirmd independently by the late Mr. S. Hickson, in 'Notes and Queries,' ii. 198, Aug. 24, 1850; and by Mr. Fleay in * New Sh. See. Trans.,' 1874, Appendix, p. 23.* It may be lookt on as certain. Again, Mr. Tennyson us't in his under, graduate days to read the genuine parts of Pericles to his friend' in college. He read them to me in London last December (1873). He pickt them out by his ear and his knowledge of Shakspere's hand. Last April Mr. Fleay sent me, as genuine, the same parts of Pericles, got at mainly by working metrical tests. Sidney Walker, Gervinus (nearly), Delius and others, had before attaind the same result. Shakspere wrote the Marina story in Acts iii. iv. v., less the brothel scenes and the Gower choruses. These, Eowley wrote, says Mr. Fleay, while G. Wilkins wrote Acts i. and ii. and arrangd the play. (' New Sh. Soc. Trans.,' 1874, p. 195, &c.) Further, the late Mr. Samuel Hickson, in the 'Westminster and Foreign Quarterly' for April 1847, and working after Mr. Spalding and other critics,^ restord to Shakspere his portion of The Two Noble Kinsmen, which was not publisht till 1 634, as ' Written by the memorable worthies of the time : Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. William Shakspeare, Gent.' Mr. Hickson workt on esthetic grounds, and showd that Shakspere designd the under- plot as well as the main plot of the play, and wrote Acts I. ; II. i. ; III. i. ii.; IV. iii. (prose) ; V. all but scene ii. The rest Fletcher wrote, as is shown by its weakness when compard with Shakspere's part, and its more frequent use of the extra final syllable. Mr Hickson's division of the play has been confirmd by the double-ending test and the end-stopt line test, w^hich show that while in the 1,124 Shakspere-lines in the play there are 321 with extra final syllables or double endings, that is, 1 in 3'5, and only 1 line of 4-measures, in the 1,398 Fletcher-lines there are 771 with double endings, or 1 in 1*8, nearly twice as many as in Shakspere, and 14 lines of 4-measures. Also in Shakspere's lines the proportion of unstopt lines to end-stopt ones is 1 in 2*41, while in Fletcher's it is 1 in 5*53. See ' Appendix to New Sh. Soc. Trans.,' 1874, where Mr. Spedding's and Mr. Hickson's Papers are reprinted. Again, the spurious parts of Timon of Athens had been more or less completely pointed out by Charles Knight and others. By metrical tests, with some slight help on aesthetic grounds from me, Mr. Fleay has, as I believe, rightly separated the genuine part of the play more frequently in Fletcher, the last syllable is dwelt on :— ' Up with a course or two, and tack about, boys.' Two Nuble Kins^ncn, Fletcher, in., v. 10 (see also ii., ii., 63, 68, 71, 73). 1 Mr. Tennyson always held that Shakspere wrote much of The Two Noble Kinsmen. So did Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Do Quincey. Hee page 1, br-iow. INTRODUCTION.— I Z. Genuine and sjmrions Wor/c. xxix from the spurious, except in one instance, and printed it in the ' New Sh. Soc.'s Trans.,' 1874, p. 153-194. Once more. Farmer nearly 100 years ago s;.id that Shakspere wrote only the Petruchio scenes in the Taming of the Shrew. Mr. Collier hesitatingly adopted this view. Mr. Grant White developt it, and I (and Mr. Fleay afterwards) turnd it into figures, making the following parts Shakspere's, though in many places they are workt up by him from the old Taming of^i Shreiv : — Induction; Act XL, sc. i., L 168-326 (? touching 115-167); III. ii. 1-125, 151-240; IV. i. (and ii. Dyce) ; IV. iii. v. (IV. iv. vi. Dyce) ; V. ii., 1-180 ; in short, the parts of Katharine and Petruchio, and almost all Grumio, with the characters on the stage with them, and possible occasional touches elsewhere. (' New Sh. Soc. Trans.' 1874, 103-110.) The rest is by the alterer and adapter of the old A Shrew^ probably Marlowe, as there are deliberate copies or plagiarisms of him in ten passages (G. White). The Cambridge editors, Messrs. Clark and Wright, have lately opend an attack, in their Clarendon-Press edition, on the genuineness of certain parts of Macbeth, and the attack has been inconsiderately developt by Mr. Fleay ^ in the ' New Sh. Soc.'s Trans.,' 1874. So far as the assault is on the Porter's speech, it seems to me a complete failure; ^ and the notion that a fourth-rate writer like Middleton could have written the grim and pregnant humour of that Porter's speech, I look on as a mere idle fancy. Mr. Hales thinks that the change to the trochaic metre in Hecate's speeches, and their inferior quality, point to a differ- ent hand, perhaps Middleton's ; ^ but that is all of the play that he or I (who still hesitate"*) can yet surrender. The wonderful pace at which the play was plainly written — a feverish haste drives it on — will account for many weaknesses in detail. The (probably) after-inserted King's- evil lines are manifestly Shakspere's. Mr. Fleay's late attack on the ' See Mr. Hales's excellent Paper on ' The Porter in Macbeth ' in The New Sh. Soc. Trails., 1874. Also De Quincey on the Knocking, Works, xiii. 192-8; Furness's Macbeth, p, 437. 2 P.S. — Mr. Fleay's attack on the Porter's speech is now withdrawn. His attempt to make spurious the last three acts of The Two Gentlemen has also been wisely withdrawn. His theories, when not confirming former results, should be lookt on with the utmost suspicion. 3 Middleton is selected, because in his Witch (p. 401-2 Furness's Macbeth) is a song ' Come away, come away,' which Davenant (who professt to be Shakspere's son by an inn-keeper's wife) inserted in his version of Shakspere's Macbeth (p. 337, Furness) at the point (III. v. 33) where Shakspere or his editors put Come away, come away, in the Folio. Also at the Folio's ' Musicke and a Song. Blaclce Spirits! IV. i. 43, Davenant inserts Middleton's song ' Black spirits and white, red spirits and gray' (p. 404, p. 339, Furness), with variations. * Compare with the stilted Witch speeches Lucianus's charm-lines in Hamlet, III. ii. 266-271. (Consider whether Hamlet's speech for the players of a dozen or sixteen lines (II. ii. 566, III. ii. 1, 86) is III. ii. 197-223, or is never deliverd, as his own excited utterance (III. ii. 272-5), and the King's remorseful rising (276) bring on the crisis which the speech was perhaps intended (III. ii. ^&) to provoke. See Prof. Seeley and Mr. Malleson hereon, in N. Sh. Soc. Trans., Pt. 2 or 3. XXX INTRODUCTION.— % 3. Pdchard III.; Henry VI genuineness of parts of Julius Ccesar ('New Sh. See. Trans.,* 1874, Part 2.) is so groundless, weak and vague, as hardly to deserve mention. Richard III. has yet to be dealt with. The continuous strain of the women's speeches, and the monotonous 5 -measure end-stopt line, have been thought by some to point to a second hand in the play, probably Marlowe's. But Mr. Spedding is strongly opposd to this view. In 1 Henry VI. every reader, will, I apprehend, see, like Ger- vinus (p. 101), three hands, though all may not agree in the parts of the play they assign to those hands. Eeading it independently, though hastily, before I knew other folks' notions about it, I could not recog- nize Shakspere's hand till II. iv.,the Temple-Garden scene ^ (as Hallam notes). Whether Shakspere wrote more than II. iv., IV. ii. ; ^ perhaps IV. i. iv. 12—46 ; possibly IV. v., I have not had time to work out : but a new ryming man seems to me to begin in IV. vi. vii. ; and the first hand seems to write V. ii. iv.,^ if not all V. For the argument that Marlowe, Peele, and Greene, wrote The Con- tention and True Tragedy, — the foundations of the 2nd and 3rd Parts of Henry VI., — Malone's essay should be consulted. (Variorum ed. of 1821, vol. xviii., p. 555.) On the other side, for the fallacious argu- ment (from the unity of historical view, &c.) that Shakspere wrote all the Three Parts of Henry VI., as well as The Contention and True Tragedy, Charles Knight's essay in his ' Pictorial Shakspere ' (Histories, vol. ii., Library ed. vol. vii.) should be read. For the argument from style, that in lifting or altering 1,479 lines from The Contention for ' This scene has a very large proportion of extra-syllable lines ; 30 in 134, or 1 in 4-'46. It has 6 run-on lines, or 1 in 22-33. II. ii. 1-15 may have a touch of Shakspere, but are probably Marlowe. 2 Compare 1. 28, Folio, p. Ill, cob 2 :— * Ten thousand French haue tane the Sacrament To ryue their dangerous Artillerie Vpon no Christian soule but English Talbot.' with Bic. II, V. ii. 17, Folio, p. 42, col. 2 :— ' A dozen of them heere haue tane the Sacrament. . . . To kill the King at Oxford.' 3 Mr. Grant "White ' ventures to express the opinion that the greater part of the First Part of King Henry the Sixth was originally written by Greene, whose style of thought and versification may be detected throughout the play, beneath the thin embellishment with which it was disguised by Shakespere, and especially in the first and second Scenes of the first Act ; that traces of Marlowe's furious pen may be discovered in the second and third scenes of Act II. ; and I should be inclined to attribute the couplets of the fifth, sixth, and seventh Scenes of Act IV. to Peele (for their pathos is quite like his in motive, and it must be remembered that Shakespeare has retouched them), were it not that Peele could hardly have written so many di sticks without falling once into a peculiarity of rhyme which constantly occurs in his works, and which consists in making an accented syllable rhyme with one that is unaccented.' (Cp. royal, withal; ago, rainbow; way, Ida; deny, attorney, &c., in ' The Arraignment of Paris.') INTRODUCTION.— % 3. Hcnrij VL, Titus, Echo. HI. xxxi ITenrjj VI. y Part 2; and 1,931 lines from True Tragedij fox Henry F/., Part 3, Shakspere was but transferring (but with few exceptions) his own early work to his later recast o£ these plays, see Mr. E. Grant White's very able essay in his New York edition of Shakspere, vol. vii., p. 403, Sic.^ Mr. Grant White's view has just been confirmd by Mr. Rives's Essay on Henry VI. (Bell, 25.). But one can hardly believe that all the present 2 and 3 Henry VI. is Shakspere's, however early one may suppose him to have written it. To 2 Henry VI. he added 1,551 fresh lines, to 3 Henry VI. 973 fresh lines. The lifted lines are dis- tinguisht by the absence of inverted commas in the text of Malone, and in the editions printed from his, of which G. Bell and Sons' small-type 35. Qd. book in Bohn's series is one. The lines markt with 'a single in- verted comma ' were, as Malone thought, retoucht and greatly improvd by Shakspere ; while those markt by ' double inverted commas ' were his own original production. It is a very great pity that later editors have not followd this most instructive arrangement. To its want, when reading the play, my own indecision about the authorship is due. The New Shakspere Society will no doubt soon publish a parallel-text edition of 2 and 3 Henry VI., and The Contention and True Tragedy. Titus Andronicus one would only be too glad to turn out of Shakspere's plays, so repulsive are its subject and the treatment of it. But the external evidence is too strong for us.^ He no doubt retoucht it ; and Mr. H. B. Wheatley has collected in the ' New Sh. Soc.'s Trans.,' 1874, p. 126-9, the passages in which he thinks he sees Shakspere's hand. See, too, Gervinus, p. 102-6, below. Lastly, Mr. R. Simpson and myself feeling — as must often have been felt before — that Act II. of King Edivard III. (Tauchnitz 'Five Doubtful Plays of William Shakespeare, 1869,' I5. lOJ.), the King's making love to the Countess of Salisbury, was eHher Shakspere's, or worthy of him in his early manhood, askt Mr. Fleay to examine the ' Mr, R. Grant White's 'opinion is, that the First Part of The Contention, The True Tragedy, and probably an early form of the First Part of King Henry the Sixth, unknown to us, were written by Marlowe, Greene, and Shakespeare (and perhaps Peele) together .... soon after the arrival of Shakespeare in London ; and that he, in taking passages, and sometimes whole Scenes, from those plays for his King Henry the Sixth did little more than to reclaim his own' (vii. 407). 'We find, then, that .... Shakespeare retained 2,299 lines of the old version in the new, that he wrote 2,524 lines especially for the new version, and that 1,111 lines of the new version are alterations or expansions of passages in the old. That is, more than three-fourths of the Second and Third Parts of King Henry the Sixth may be regarded — with slight allowance for unobliterated traces of his co-laborers — as Shakespeare's own in every sense of the word ; and to the re- mainder he probably has as good a claim as to many passages which he found in prose in various authors, and which were transmuted into poetry in their passage throughthe magical alembic of his brain.' — R. Grant White, ShaA-csiJeare's Works, vii. 462. - In the Preface to Titus in my big Folio edition you will find a new theory on this subject. — J. 0. (Halliwell) Phillipps. b xxxii iyTRODUCTIOK~% 3. Early and late Work in Tlays. play. He added to it the two pages from the entry of the King in Act I. sc. ii., and then said that in this King-Countess Episode the propor- tion of ryme-lines to verse-lines is 1 to 7 ; in the other parts of the play, 1 to 20 ; in the episode the proportion of lines with double endings (extra syllables or feminine endings) to regular 5-measure lines is 1 to 10 ; in the rest of the play it is 1 to 25. As the episode contains * expressions like hugy^ vasture, &c., which are either of frequent occur- rence in Shakspere, or have the true ring of his coinage in them'; as it introduces 'two new characters' (Derby and Audley) who 'are afterwards develojDt after a totally diiferent fashion,' and a third, ' Lo- dowick, the King's poet-secretary,' who is confind to the episode only, he concluded that Shakspere did write this episode (' Academy,' April 25, 1874, p. 462). The question of Shakspere's having taken any part in the other ' doubtful plays ' formerly asslgnd to him, needs further investigation. We must now hark back to point 1 (p. xxvii.), the help that metrical tests give in suggesting or confirming different dates for different periods of a play. This is a question to be approacht with very great caution, and one on which trust in one test may lead to ridiculous absurdities. We have as yet no comparative tables of the differences of metrical peculiarities in the different acts and scenes of Shakspere's plays, nor do we know whether any working test could be got from them if we had. But we do know that Shakspere retouclit and enlargd certain plays, and we are bound to see whether we can recognize in them his later work. Love's Labours Lost^ for instance, which we feel sure — from its excessive word-play, its prevalence of ryme and end-stopt lines, its large use of doggrel, its want of dramatic development (it is a play of conversation and situation), its faint characterisation, &c. — must have been written quite early, say before 1590, is stated by the Quarto of 1598 (the earliest known) to have been ' Newly corrected and augmented.' ^ So with AlVs Well — ^ I ■believe that Berowne's last speech in Act III., at least his lines 305-8 in IV. iii., and possibly V. ii. 315-334 (though more in the earlier style) are later insertions. Dyce says on IV. iii. 299-304 (Globe), 312-319 (as compard with 320, &c.), 'Nothing can be plainer than that in this speech we have two pas- sages, both in their original and in their altered shape, the compositor having confounded the new matter with the old.' Mr. Spedding wrote thus on Saturday, Feb. 2, 1839: 'Finished Love's Labour's Lost. Observe the inequality in the length of the Acts ; the first being half as long again, the fourth twice as long, the fifth three times as long, as the second and third. This is a hint where to look for the principal additions and alterations. In the first Act I suspect Biron's re- monstrance against the vow (to begin with) to be an insertion. In the fourth, nearly the whole of the close, from Biron's burst " Who sees the heavenly Eosaline " (IV. iii. 221). In the fifth, the whole of the first scene between Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel bears traces, to me, of the maturer hand, and may have been inserted bodily. The whole close of the fifth Act, from the entrance of Mercade (V. ii. 723), has been probably rewritten, and may bear the same relation to the original INTRODUCTION.— % 3. Early and late Worlc in Plays. xxxlii possibly^' the recast of Loiies Labours Wonne (Meres), — The ]\Ieichant of Venice (in which I agree Avith Mr. Hales that the casket scenes at least are earlier work), perhaps Midsummer Night's Dream, and other plays. And we are bound to search and see whether we can detect any of these augmentations — if not corrections — by their fuller thought and riper style. Study of the parallel-text Quartos will largely help in this. In the case of Troilus and Cressida, as Mr. Alexander J. Ellis (our great authority on Early English and Shaksperean Pronunciation and Metre) said to me, there are clearly three stories: 1. Of Troylus and Cressida. 2. Of Hector. 3. Of Ajax, Ulysses, and the Greek Carap2 — of which he car'd only to read the third, so far was it above the other two. The point must have been notict often before. To the parts of the play dealing with these three stories, Mr. Fleay has applied the ryme-test, with the following result ('New Sh. Soc. Trans.,' 1874, p. 2), pointing to three different dates for the different parts of the play. That there are two, an early, and a late, I do not doubt ; the three dates I do doubt : — Trojhis story Hector story Ajax story 72 50 16 Ehyme lines 607 798 873 Verse lines 1 :8-4 1 : 13-6 1 : 54-5 ratio Discussions of the Parliament Scene in Richard II., AlVs Well, The copy which Rosaline's speech " Oft have I heard of you, my Lord Biron," &c. (V. ii. 851-864) bears to the original speech of six lines (827-832), which has been allowed by mistake to stand. There are also a few lines (1-3) at the opening of the fourth Act which I have no doubt were introduced in the corrected copy. Prince. Was that the king, that spurr'd his horse so hard Against the steep uprising of the hill? Bogct. I know not ; but I think it was not he. It was thus that Shakspere learnt to shade off his scenes, to carry the action beyond the stage. Thus, in Borneo and Jidiet, I. ii., old Capulet and Paris enter talking : — But Montague is bound as well as I In penalty alike, &c. which was introduced in the amended copy.' ^ Professors Delius, Hertzberg (who has specially gone into the point), Ingram and Dowden hold that the style, verse, and plot all belong to one period. Craik's and Hertzberg's view that Love's Labours Wonne is The Taming of the Shrew cannot be supported in the face of the original Taming of {A) Shrew. 2 The Troylus story is in I. i. 1-107, ii. 1-321 ; II. i. 160, ii., iii. 1-33 ; IV. i., ii., iii., iv. 1-141, v. 12-53; *IV. v. 277-293; *V. i. 89-93, ii., iii. 97-115, iv. 20-24, V. 1-5, vi. 1-1 1. (*In all the Act V. scenes, and in IV. v. 277-293, Ulysses or Diomed comes in ; the stories overlap.) The Hector story is in I. i. 108-119, iii. 213-309; II. ii. ; III. i. 161-172; IV. iv. 142-150, v. 1-11, 64-276; *V. i., iii. 1-97, v., &c. to the end (except sc. vii. viii. ix., and epilogue, probably spurious). — Pleay. Dyce says, ' That some portions of it, particularly towards the end, are from the pen of a very inferior dramatist, is unquestionable ; and they belong . . . perhaps to the joint production of Dekker and Chettle,' mentioned in Henslowe's Diary, p. 147, &c., ed. Shakespeare Soc. b2 xxxiv INTRODUCTION.— % A.. Tests of Sha/cspere's Growth. Two Gentlemen (very feeble, as I think), and Twelfth Nighty are also contained in Mr. Fleay's paper. § 4. As Shakspere's change of metre was but one of the signs of the growth of his art and power, the student must watch for all further manifestations of that growth in the poet's work ; daring use of words, crowding new and fuller meanings into them, so as often to produce obscurity (specially in Macbeth and Lear^)\ change from fancy to imagination in figures of speech ; increase in power of making his characters live, so that they become real men and women to you ; deepening of purpose ; heightening of tone ; broadening of view.; the insight growing greater as the art became perfect. To this end, registers should be made of all peculiar phrases, happy uses of words, and striking metaphors in the plays, as successively read ; the parallel- texts of the first and second Quartos of Romeo and Juliet (now in the press for the New Sh. Soc, edited by Mr. P. A. Daniel), of Hamlet (edited by Josiah Allen, with preface by Samuel Timmins ; Sampson Low, 1860), and other plays, when publisht, should be compard. Shakspere's treatment of the same thought or subject at different periods of his life should also be compard ; take, for instance, the pretty impatience of Juliet to get news of Eomeo out of her nurse in Romeo and Juliet ; of Eosalind to get news of her lover, Orlando, out of Celia, in the later As You Like h\ and of Imogen to get tidings of her husband, Posthumus, out of Pisanio, in the still later Cymheline, III., ii. Again, the separation in storm and shipwreck of the family of ^geon, and the re-union of father, child, and mother in the early Comedy of Errors, should be compard with the nearly- like re-union, if not separation, in tlie much later Pericles, &c. For incidents, take Mr. Spedding's happy instance of Shakspere's treat- ment of the face of a beautiful woman just dead : 1. Romeo and Juliet, second edition (1599), not in the first edition, therefore presumably written between 1597 and 1599 : — Her blood is setded, and her joints are stiff. Life and these lips have long been separated. Death lies on her, like an untimely frost Upon the fairest flower of all the field. 2. 'Antony and Cleopatra' (1608, according to Delius, &c.) : — If they had sArallow'd poison, 'twould appear By external swelling ; hut she looks like sleep, As she woidd catch another Anthony In her strong toil of grace. o. ' Cynibeline ' (date disputed, but / say one of the latest [7 1611 plays) :— How found you him? [Imogen disguisd as a youth.] Stark, as you see, Thus smiling, as some fly had tickled slumber, Not as death's dart being laughed at. His right cheek Reposing on a cushion. ' Mr. Hales, in Academy, Jan. 17, 1874, p. 63, coh 3. INTRODUCTION.— % 4:. Tests of Shalcsperc's Growth. XXXV * The difference in the treatment in these three cases represents the progress of a great change in manner and taste : a change which could not be put on or off like the fashion, but was part of the man ' (' New Sh. Soc.'s Trans.,' 1874, p. 30). Beautiful as the tender pathos of the first image, Fancy-bred, is, we must yet feel that in the second and third the Imagination of the poet dwells no longer on the outside, but goes to the very heart of the matter. Cleopatra is shown in the deepest desire of her life ; Imogen in her purity smiling unconsciously at death. ^ Of stage situations and business, Shakspere started with a perfect mastery : his first two plays, Love's Labours Lost and Errors, prove * Compare, in Mr. Eiiskin's chapter " Of Imagination Penetrative," ' Modern Painters,' Vol. 11., Part II., § 2, Chap. III., p. 158, ed. 1848, his instance of lips described by Fancy, dwelling on the outside, and Imagination going to the heart and inner nature of everything. The bride's lips red (Sir John Suckling) ; fair Eosamond's, struck by Eleanor (Warner); the lamp of life, 'as the radiant clouds of morning through thin clouds ' (Shelley) ; and then the bare bones of Yoriek's skull {Hamlet V. i. 207) :— 'Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I know not how oft! Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar ? ' ' There is the essence of life, and the full power of imagination. ' Again compare Milton's flowers in lycidas with Perdita's (in the Winter's Tale). In Milton it happens, I think generally, and in the case before us most certainly, that the imagination is mixed and broken with fancy, and so the strength of the imagery is part of iron and part of clay: — ' Bring the rathe primrose, that forsaken dies, {Imagination) The tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine, {Nugatory} The white pink and the pansy freak'd with jet, {Fancy) The glowing violet, {Lnagination) The musk rose and the well-attir'd woodbine, {Fancy, vulgar) With cowslipsswan that hang the pensive head, {Imagination) And every flower that sad embroidery wears.' {Mixed) • Then hear Perdita : — ' 0, Proserpina, For the flowers now, that frighted thou let'st full From Dis's waggon, Dafibdils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty. Violets, dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, Or Cytherea's breath. Pale primroses That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Pho3bus in his strength, a malady Most incident to maids,' * Observe how the imagination in these last lines goes into the very inmost soul of every flower, after having toucht them all at first with that heavenly timidness, the shadow of Proserpine's, and gilded them with celestial gathering ; and never stops on their spots or bodily shapes ; while Milton sticks in the stains upon them, and puts us off with that unhappy freak of jet in the very flower that, without this bit of paper-staining, would have been the most precious to us of all. • There is pansies : that's for thoughts.' (Ophelia, in Ha^nkt.) XXXvi INTRODUCTION.— % 5. Shahpere's First Period. it, and his undoubtedly prior training as an actor, ^ render it probable ; but in characterization his growth from Loves Labours Lost to Henry IV. was wonderfully rapid and sure. Much higher than that he could not grow, though he could spread his branches over all the earth. In knowledge of life he increast to the end ; ^ in wisdom he ripend ; leaving his works to us, a joy and possession for ever. § 5. These works I would have the student read in the following order, setting aside Titus Andronicus (quite early) and Henry VI. (recast before Henry IV.), till he is able to judge of them for himself. Shakspere began his career with Love — its vagaries and its sorrows, — Fun, and Light Comedy, \Vemis and Adonis (full of youth- ful passion, and notes of his Stratford country life ^)h Love's Labour's Lost (full of brilliant word-play and wit) ; The Comedy of Ei rors (a farce full of bustle and fun, yet with a pathetic background, p. 135) ; Midsummer Night's Dream (a wedding-play, joining fairyland to Strat- ford clowndom, first revealing a genius to which any height must be within reach) ; The Two Gentlemen of Verona (showing, besides much comedy, the quick versatile Italian nature that so took Shakspere, and the evils of self-abandonment to love, p. 152). Then, in more serious vein, he coupld Love with Pathos and Tragedy, and in the Southern passion and despair of Borneo and Jidiet showd again a genius never equalld by any but himself. With this beautiful and pathetic play should be read Shakspere's/ earlier ^'Lucrece^ (in which he rivalld the tender pity of Chaucer's Troylus), and the king- and-countess episode in Edward III. (see p. xxxi. above), in which (if ' Though the earliest print of Shakspere's name as an actor is 1594 (found by Mr. Halliwell), yet Mr. R. Simpson's quotations about ' feathers ' in The Academy, April 4th, 1874, p. 368, col. 2, show that Greene, when calling Shak- spere an upstart crow ' beautified with our feathers' (G.'s posthumus Groatesworth of Wit, 1592) meant to speak of him as an actor, and evidently then a well-known one, as well as an author. In 1598 Shakspere acted in Ben Jonson's ' Every Man in his Humour: ' see p. 72 of this comedy in Jonson's Works, 1616. 2 Mr. Hales, in Academy, Jan. 17, 1874, p. 63, col. 3. 3 In the ' Venus ' it is not only the well-known descriptions of the horse (1. 260- 318), and the hare-hunt (1. 673-708), that show the Stratford man, but the touches of the overflowing Avon (72), the two silver doves (366), the milch doe and fawn in some brake in Charlecote Park (875-6), the red morn (453), of which the weatherwise say : — A red skj' at night 's a shepherd's delight ; A red sky at morning 's a shepherd's warning ; the hush of the wind before it rains (458), the many clouds consulting for foul weather (972), the night owl (531), the lark (853), &c. &c. ; just as the artist (289) and the shrill-tongued tapsters (849) show the taste of London life. — F. J. P., in The Academy, Aug. 15, 1874, p. 179, col. 1. * It must have been written some time after the Venus as its proportion of unstopt lines is 1 in 10-81 (174 such lines to the poem's 1,855) against the Vemis's I in 25-40 (47 run-on lines in 1,194). The tide through old London Bridge is in 1. 1,667 oi Lucrcce. INTRODUCTION.—^ 5. Shaksjjere's Second Period. XXXVll it be his) his first pure noble English woman-and-wife appears.^ This same Pathos and Tragedy he took with him when he began his first national and patriotic, or Historical Plays, with Richard II. without comedy, or prose, but with its noble Gaunt, and its weak and erring king meeting the death he deservd. The feeling heightend in Richard III. (a play in which everything is sacrifict to one charac- ter, — all is on the strain throughout (possibly with some of Marlowe's ' furious line,' — and) which is in intensity^ the precursor of Macbeth) ; it was continu'd through King John (a panorama of fine scenes almost unconnected, save by Faulconbridge, but picturing that passionate love and yearning of Constance for her boy, which no one who has lost a child can ever forget^) ; though lessend in his recast of Henry VI., — * I put this forward only as a question deserving the careful attention of students. Having read this episode three times, I cannot say positively that it is Shakspere's. I think it worthy of him in his younger days (the play was acted before 1596) ; and I do not think that Mr. Neifs point (p. 90) makes against this, that if Shakspere had been the author of Edward III. he would liardly have written thus of Lucrece : — Arise, true English lady ! whom our isle May better boast of, than e'er Koman might Of her, whose ransacKd treasury hath tasked The vain endeavour of so many pens. Tauchnitz ed. p. 30, at foot. This is just what the author of a Lucrece should have said of his own and others work. And, as Mr. Hales says, the two following passages look like the same man's work : — Out with the moon-line ! I will none of it! And let me have her liken'd to the sun ! Say, she hath thrice more splendour than the sun. That her perfection emulates the sun, That she breeds sweets as plenteous as the sun, That she doth thaw cold winter like the sun, That she doth cheer fresh summer like the sun. And, in this application to the sun, Bid her be free and general as the sun. Who smiles upon the basest weed that grows, As lovingl}'' as on the fragrant rose. Edw. III. ii. 1, Tauchnitz ed., p. 16. Bass. Sweet Portia, If you did know to whom I gave the ring. If 3'ou did know for whom I gave the ring. And would conceive for what I gave the ring. And hoAV unwillingly I left the ring, When nought would be accepted but the ring. You would abate the strength of your displeasure. For. If you had known the virtue of the ring, Or half her worthiness that gave the ring. Or your own honour to contain the ring, You would not then have parted with the ring. 3Ierchant of Venice, v. i. 193-202 : Globe, p. 203, col. 1. ^ I take Shylock to be Shakspere's intensest male character, Timon and Lear the next. Constance (in King John) the most intense female character. ^ If the date of King John is 1596 — which I doubt, — then those most touching speeches of Constance about her boy Arthur may be fairly linkt with Shakspere's feelings on the death of his own only boy Hamnet, who was buri'd on August 11, 1596, at Stratford. xixviii INTRODUCTION.— % 5. ShaJcsperds Second Period. if that comes here — (Part II. with its noble Gloster and the rich humour of Cade; Part III. with its fierce Margaret, its Warwick and York). Shakspere brightend again in The Merchant of Venice (with its Portia graceful, loving, witty, and wise, though the strain is still seen in Shjlock) ; and then perhaps re-wrote the amusing Petruchio-Ka- tharine-Grumio scenes in The Taming of the Shrew, with its most racy Induction (see p. xxix.). In his three comedies of FalstafF, or the First and Second Parts oi Henry IV. and the Merrij Wives, ^ he culminated in humour and comic power. ^ Never equalld has Fal- stafF been, and never will be, I believe. The drama of Shakspere's hero, Henry V. (in 1599),^ then closd the connected series of his historical plays,^ with its splendid bursts of i3atriotifcm — possibly against ' The Merry Wives was a piece hastily written to please Queen Elizabeth : so says tradition; and rightly, I believe. No doubt it was revis'd; but for intrinsic merit it cannot st?ind for a moment by Henry IV. 2 Henry IV., or at least the First Part of it, must have been written in or about 1597, the proudest year of Shakspere's early life, when, not quite thirty- three, he bought New Place, ' the great house ' of Stratford. * In 1599 also, Shakspere became a partner in some of the profits of the Globe. Sae the "Memorial of Cutbert Burl)age, and Winifred his brother's wife, and William his Sonne," in 1635, to the Lord Chamberlains, discovered by Mr. J. 0. Halliwell in 1870, made public by him in 1874, printed by me from the Record Office MS, in The Academy, March 7, and since issued privately by Mr. Halliwell. ' The father of us, Cutbert and Richard Burbage, was the first builder of playhowses, and was himselfe in his younger yeeres a player. "The theater" hee built with many hundred poundes taken up at interest. The players that lived in those first times had only the profttts arising from the dores ; but now the players receave all the commings in at the dores to themselves, and halfe the galleries from the houskepers [the owners or lessees of the theatre]. Hee built this house upon leased ground, by which meanes the landlord and hee had a great suite in law, and, by his death, the like troubles fell on us his sonnes : wee then bethought us of altering from thence, and at like expence built the Globe [a.d. 1599: Mr. Halliwell says] with more summes of money taken i;p at interest, which lay heavy on us many yeares ; and to ourselves wee joyned those deserveing men, Shakspere, Hcmings, Condall, Philips, and others, partners in the profittes of that they call the House. . . ' Thus, Right Honorable, as concerning the Globe, where wee ourselves are but lessees. Now for the Blackfriers: that is our inheritance ; our father purchased it at extreame rates, and made it into a playhouse with great charge and trouble : which after was leased out to one Evans that first sett up the boyes commonly called the Queenes Majesties Children of the Chappell. In processe of time, the boyes growing up to bee men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler, and were taken to strengthen the King's service ; and the more to strengthen the service, the boyes dayly wearing out, it was considered that house would bee as fitt for ourselves, and soe [we] purchased the lease remaining from Evans, with our money, and placed men players, which were Hcmings, Condall, Shakspcare' ^-c. This could not have been till, or after the year 1603, when James succeeded Elizabeth, and there was a ' King's service.' Besides, the Warrant of King James making Shakspere's company the King's Company, and which bears date May 17th, 1603, mentions only the Globe, as this Company's ' now usuall house.' * Henry VIII., not part of the series, was added at the end of Shakspere's life. See Mr. Richard Simpson's able Paper on the 'Politics of Shakspere's Historical INTRODUCTION.— % 5. Sliakspere's Third Teriod. xxxix the contemporary glorification of the great Henri Quatre of France — though they cannot save the play from its weakness as a drama, neces- sitated by a battle (Agincourt) standing for its plot. It was succeeded by a brilliant set of comedies, possibly for the newly-opend Globe theatre: — - Much Ado about Nothing (glittering with stars of wit and richest humour: — what do not t!ie names Benedick and Beatrice, Dogberry and Verges mean to a Shakspere-reader's ear? ); As You Like It with its moral, ' Sweet are the uses of adversity,' its freshness of greenwood life, wherein men ' fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world ' ; and yet with its melancholy Jaques, who will not be com- forted or glad, a prelude to the sadder time so close at hand. Twelfth Alight (with its pompous goose of a Malvolio, its sharp Maria, its Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek, its cross-purposes in love). AW a Well (possibly the recast of Love's Labours Wonne, with its unpleasant plot of a willing wife hunting and catching her unwilling husband, but with its inimitable braggart Parolles). Here Shakspere's 'Sonnets' should be read, and the tender sensi- tive nature that producd them commund with. Over and over again must they be read, till at least their main outlines are clear. The key to them is No. cxliv. on ' the man right fair,' who is the poet's ' better angel,' and ' the worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.' That Gervinus's interpretation of them (p. 461—463) — from Armitage Brown — is right, I have no doubt. The later ' Sonnets ' are the best preparation ibr IIa?nlet. Undoubtedly at this time a shadow of darkness fell upon Shak- spere. What causes brought it, we cannot certainly tell. Private reasons the ' Sonnets ' show. He was deserted by his mistress— wrongly but madly lovd by him, in spite of the struggles of his better nature — for his dearest friend ; and this for a time severd their friend- ship, never to be restord again as it first was. Public reasons there were : his great patron and friend Southampton ' was declard traitor and imprisond in 1601 ; was threatend with death, and in almost Plays ' in The New ShaJcspere Soc.'s Trans., 1874 or -5. He argues ' that Shakspere was of the Essex party, against Burghley and Cecil ; thsitm Henri/ VI. and Eichard 11. he showd Elizabeth misled by Leicester, and then by Burghley(she herself said she was Eichard II.) ; that John was aimd at the many callers for foreign inter- vention in her time, his wars were hers of 1585 ; Henry IV. showd how she us'd and cast oiF helpers, and picturd the Northern Eebellion in her reign (1569); Henry V. told her how foreign war united a nation, and brought about religious toleration at home (this was Essex's policy) ; Henry VIII. brought out the end of the constantly felling state of the old nobility, (which Shakspere, in common with so many Elizabethans, lamented,) and the consummation of the full power of the Crown, two threads running through English history and Shakspere's Historical Plays. Shakspere's changes of the Chronicles were not only for dramatic effect, but to show the lessons he wisht them to teach on the political circumstances of his time.' ' This is Mr. Hales's suggestion. In the dedication to Lucrece, Shakspere says to Southampton, ' The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end.' xl INTEODUCTION.—l 5. Shakspere's Fourth Period of Cahn. daily danger of it till Elizabeth's own death in 1603 set him free through King James : the rebellion and execution of Essex, South- ampton's friend and the cause of his ruin, to whom Shakspere had two years before alluded with pride in his Prologue to Henry V., Act v. L 30. At any rate, the times were out of joint. Shakspere was stirrd to his inmost depths, and gave forth the grandest series of Tragedies that the world has ever seen : ^amlet (folio wd by the tragi-comedy Measure for Measure), [Julius Ccesar,} Othello, Machethj Lear, Troilus and Cressida (see p. xxxiii.), Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon ; showing what subjects were then kin to his frame of mind ; how he felt, and struggld with, the stern realities of life ; how he dwelt on the weakness and baseness of men, their treachery as friends and subjects, their lawless lust and ungovernd jealousy as lovers, their serpent-like ingratitude as children, their fickleness and disgustfulness as the many-headed mob, fit only to be spit upon and curst : over all he held the terrors of conscience and the avenging sword of fate. But Shakspere could not end thus. After the darkness came light ; after the storm, calm ; and in the closing series of his plays — three tragedies, two comedies, and one history — inspird, I believe, by his renewd family-life at Stratford^ — he speaks of reconciliation and peace. His Tragedies now, for the first time, end happily ; his Comedies have a quite new fulness of meaning and love; his History (though partly by Fletcher's mouth) speaks an injurd wife's forgiveness of deepest wrongs, and prophesies blessings. All the plays turn on broken family ties united, or their breach forgiven unavengd. With wife and daughters again around him, the faultful past was rememberd only that the jDresent union might be closer. In Pericles (see p. xxviii.) the be- roavd king finds once more his lost daughter, whose supposd death had made him dumb ; and then both are united to the wife-and-mother whose seeming corpse had been committed to the waves. In The Two Noble Kinsmen (see p. xxviii.), in which Shakspere again went back to Chaucer, his early teacher (p. xxxvi.) and delight, the forsworn brother (Arcite) dies repentant, recommending his brother (Palamon) to Emelye, his first love. In Cynibeliiie the true wife Imogen — ' the most j^er- fect ' Imogen — wrongly and hastily mistrusted, rises from desertion and seeming death, to forgive and clasp to her ever- loving heart the husband who had doubted her : no Desdemona end for her.^ ^ Unless Thomas Greene, the Town Clerk of Stratford, was living at New Place -with his ' cosen Shakspere' or his family, Shakspere cannot well Jiave retired thither till after September 1609, as Greene then said a G. Brown might stay longer in his house, "the rather because I perceyred I might stay another yere at New Place." By June 21, 1611, Thomas Greene is probably in his new house, as an order was made that the town is ' to repare the churchyard wall at Mr. Greene's dwelling place.' — Halliwell's Hist, of New Place. ^ Note, too, how, in Cymbeliyie, Shakspere contrasts the evils of court life with the eimplicity and innocence of country life, life then around him, as I contend. INTRODUCTION.— % 5. Shakspere's Fourth Period. xli In The Tempest — wherein Shakspere ' treads on the confines of other worlds' — wherein his new type of Stratford maiden isidealizd into Miranda, ' so delicately refind, all but ethereal, in her virgin inno- cence ' (Mrs. Jameson), — his lesson is still of the breaking of family ties — brother and brother — repented of and forgiven : — The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance : they, being penitent, The sole drift of ray purpose doth extend Not a froune further,— V. i. 27-30 ; Fvl. p. 16, col 2. If with this play he really meant to end his poetic life,^ to break the staff of his enchantment, ' bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and, deeper than did ever plummet sound,' drown his book (v. i. 54-7,) he changd his mind, and in the Winter's Tale gave us again the noble wife, Hermione, calm in her dignity, saintlike in her patience, forgiving her basely jealous and vindictive husband, while he united them again — as in Pericles — with their lost daughter Perdita, sweet with the fragrance of her Stratford flowers of spring, artless and beautiful, tender and noble -naturd, as Shakspere alone could make her. In Henry VIII. he returns again to the deserted wife. Katharine the divorced, pious, affectionate, simple, magnanimous, — in one sense, ' the triumph o£ Shakespeare's genius and his wisdom ' (Mrs. Jameson, pp. 379, 384) — forgives her ruffian husband ' all, and prays God to do so likewise ' : — tell him, in death I blest him, For so I will. Mine eyes grow dimme : Farewell. Fol. p. 226. ' Prof. Karl Elze's attempt, in 1872, to prove that the Tempest was written in 1604, seems to me a failure. It maybe thus stated : Because Ben Jonson in 1614 (Introduction to Bartholomew Fair) plainly sneerd at Shakspere's Tempest and Winter's Tale [which must therefore, surely, have been two of his latest plays, and freshest in the &,udience's mind], therefore his allusion in Volpone 1607 (acted 1605), when speaking of Guarini — * All our English writers, I mean such as are happy in the Italian, Will deign to steal out of this author, mainly, Almost as much as from Montagnie . . .' was a cut at Shakspere's borrowing from Montaigne in The Tempest, II, i. 147, &c., — although he never borrowd from Gruarini ; — and therefore The Tempest was written in 1604. That the poorer original of Shakspere's 'gorgeous palaces' vanishing, is in the Earl of Sterline's Darius {\%^V)\ that Lord Southampton joind in fitting out a ship to sail to Virginia in 1605 (so that Caliban can be turnd into a native American, and Prospero into Lord Southampton!), and that a pam- phlet in 1604 describd ' a monstrous Fish that appeard in the form of a Woman from her waist upwards,' cannot strengthen the knees of Prof Elze's weak hypothesis, is but too plain. All the metrical and aesthetic evidence is in favour of the late date of the Tempest (? 1610) which Jonson's allusion in Bartholomew Fair confixms. Prof. Elze's date of 1603 for Htiiry VIII. must also be given up. xlii INTRODUCTION.- % 5. Shal'spere's Fourth Pcrioa. And thus, forgiven and forgiving,^ full of the highest wisdom and of peace, at one with family, and friends, and foes, in harmony with Avon's flow and Stratford's level meads, Shakspere closd his life on earth. ^ ' It is certain, I think, that in his latest plays, of the Fourth Period, Shak- spere was also teaching himself the lesson of forgiveness for the wrongs and disappointments he had suflferd, and which were reflected in the Tragedies of his Third Period. See on this my friend Prof. Dowden's forthcoming ' Mind and Art of Shakspere' (H. S. King & Co.), with its fine and right likening of Shakspere to a ship, beaten and storm-tost, but yet entering harbour with sails full-set, to anchor in peace. I quote it from the MS. of his Lectures : — ' There are lovers of Shakspere so jealous of his honour that they are unable to suppose that any grave moral flaw could have impaired the perfection of his life and manhood. To me Shakspere appears to have been a man who, by strenuous effort and with the aid of the good powers of the world, saved himself, — so as by fire. Before Shakspere zealots demand our attention to ingenious theories to establish the immaculateness of Shakspere's life, let them show that his writings never offend. When they have shown that Shakspere's poetry possesses the proud virginity of Milton's poetry, they may then go on to show that Shakspere's youth was devoted to an ideal of moral purity and elevation like the youth of Milton. I certainly should not infer from Shakspere's writings that he held himself with virginal strength and pride remote from the blameful pleasures of the world. "What I do not find anywhere in the plays of Shakspere is a single cold-blooded, hard or selfish line — all is warm, sensitive, vital, radiant with delight, or a-thrill with pain. And what I dare to affirm of Shakspere's life is, that whatever its sins may have been, they were not hard, selfish, deliberate, cold-blooded sins. The errors of his heart originated in his sensitiveness, in his imagination (not at first strictly trained to fidelity to the fact), in his quick sense of existence, and in the self-abandoning devotion of his heart. There are some noble lines by Chapman in which he pictures to himself the life of great energy, enthusiasms and passions, which for ever stands upon the edge of aitmost danger, and yet for ever remains in absolute securit}- : — Give me a spirit that on life's rough sea Loves to have his sails tilled with a lusty wind Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack, And his rapt ship runs on her side so low That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air ; There is no danger to the man that knows What life and death is ; there's not any law Exceeds his knowledge ; neither is it lawful That he should stoop to any other law. tench a master-spirit pressing forward under strained canvas was Shakspere. If the ship dipped and drank water, she rose again ; and at length we see her within view of her haven, sailing under a large, calm wind, not without tokens of stress of weather, but if battered, yet unbroken, by the waves. It is to diJ.1 lethargic lives that a moral accident is fatal, because they are tending no whither, and lack energy and momentum to right themselves again. To say anything against decent lethargic vices and timid virtues, anything to the advantage of the strenuous life of bold action and eager emotion which necessarily incurs risks and sometimes suffers, is, I am aware, "dangerous." Well, then, be it so ; it is dangerous.' ' In his History of New TJace, Mr. Halliwell has suggested a more probaljle cause for Shakspere's death than the no doubt groundless traditional one (after 1662) of the drinking bout with Drayton and Ben Jonson, namely, that the INTBODUCTIOK—% 5. Shahspere to he read ChronologicaVij. xliii Now all that I have written on the succession of Sliakspere's works in relation to the man Shakspere is liable to the objector's ' Pooh ! all stuff ! Shakspere wrote comedies and tragedies for his company just as the Burbages told him to. His comedies were produced for some leading comic actor, and his tragedies for his friend and partner Eichard Burbage, the great tragedian. Neither reflected his own feelings, except professionally, any more than Macbeth's or Othello's did Burbage's when he acted them.' Take it so, if you will ; but still, I say. Do follow the course of Shakspere's mind ; still do commune with the creations of his brain as they flowd from it ; still note his wondrous growth in that sensibility and intensity, far beyond all other men's, that enabld him to throw himself into all the varid figures of his plays with ever-increasing power and skill ; still watch his greatening of wisdom and knowledge of life, his dazzling wit and ever-flowing humour ; still gaze at, and glory in, his dream of, nay, his breathing and living Fair Women, who enchant even Taine, and win the reverence of Gervinus and all true-sould men — beside whom Dante's Beatrice alone is fit to stand : — and then ask yourself whether the choice of Shakspere's series of subjects was fixt by others' orders, or chance, or by his own frame of mind, his own mood ; whether his young plays of love and fun, of patriotism and war,^ of humour and wit, showd his own early manhood or not, his time of successful struggle, and happy enjoyment of its fruits ; whether the dark questionings of ' Hamlet,' the mingling with lawlessness, treachery, hatred, revenge, had nothing to do with his own later inner life ; whether the reconciliation and peace of his latest plays were independent of his new quiet home-life at Stratford with its peace. I am content to abide by your answer. De- pend on it that what our greatest Victorian poetess, Mrs. Barrett Browning, though a lyrist, said of her own poetry, is true, to a great extent, of Shakspere in his dramas, ' They have my heart and life in them ; they are not empty shells.' The feelings were in his soul ; he put them into words ; and that is why the world is at his feet. pigsties and nuisances which the Corporation books show to have existed in Chapel Lane, which ran the whole length of New Place, bred the fever of which Shakspere is said to have died. Mr. Halliwell gives several extracts from the books, as '1605: the Chamber- laines shall_gyve warning to Henry Smyth to plucke downe his pigges cote which is built nere the chappie wall, and the house of office (= privy ) there.' — New riace, p. 29. ' They had, and naturally, their leaven of pathos and tragedy, as I have shown above. xliv introduction: -I 5. Order of Shalspere's Plays. Trial Table of the Order of Shakspere's Plays. [This, like all other tables, must be lookt on as merely tentative, and open to modification for any good reasons. But if only it comes near the truth, then reading the plays in its order will the sooner enable the student to find out its mistakes. (M. stands for ' mentioned by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, 1598.') In his introductory Essays to Slialces'peari s Dramatische Werke (Ger- man Shakespeare Society) Prof. Hertzberg dates Titns 1587-9, Love's Labours Lost 1592, Comedy of Errors about New Year's Day 1591, Two Gentlemen 1592, AlVs Well 1603, Troilus and Cressida 1603, and Cy?nbclvie 1611. Mr. Grant White dates Richard II. 1595, Richard III. 1593-4.] Supposd Date Earliest Allusion Date of Publica- tion First Period. f 2 3 vX^nus and Adonis .... 15*.^7 1593* i Titus Andronicus toucht up . (?) 1588 1594 M [(?) 1594] 1600 ! Love's Labours Lost 1588-9 1598 M 1598 (amended) , [Loves Labours Wonne . ] 1598 M \ Comedy of Errors .... 1589-91 1594 M 1623 Midsummer Night's Dream (? 2 dates) 1590-1 1598 M 1600 Two Gentlemen of Verona 1590-2 1598 M 1623 (?) 1 Henry VI. toucht -up (?) 1590-2 1623 r?) Troilus and Cressida, begun ■T?) Lucrece 1594 1594 Eomeo and Juliet .... (?) 1591-3 1595 M 1597 (?) A Lover's Complaint . Eichard II (?) 1593-4 ?1595M 1597 Eichardlll 1594 ?1595M 1597 2 & 3 Henry VI. recast . (?) 1594-5 1623 (John . . . . 1595 1598 M 1623 1 Second Period. Merchant of Venice (?) 1596 1598 M 1600t Taming of the Shrew, part (?) 1596-7 1623*' 1 Henry IV 1596-71 1598 M 1598 2 Henry IV. . 1597-8+ 1598 M 1600 Merry Wives . 1598-9 1602 1602 Henry V. 1599 + 1599 1600 Much Ado .... 1599-16001 1600 1600 As you Like it 1600J 1600 1623§ Twelfth Niaht 1601;: 1602 1623 All's Well (> L's. L. Wonne recast) 1601-2 1623 Sonnets . . , . . (?) 1592-1602 1598 M 1609 ^ Third Period. ,/Hamlet 1602-3J (?) 1603* [Measure for Measure (?) 1603 1623 Vjulius Caesar ^1601^:^ (?) 1623 Othello (?) :604 1610 1622 * Enterd 1 year before at Stationers' Hall. t Enterd 2 years before at Stationers' Hall. X May be lookt-on as fairly certain. § Enterd in the Stationers' Eegisters in 1600. ' ' The Taming of « Shrew ' was publisht in 1604. INTRODUCTION.— % 6. Helps to reading SkaJcspere. xlv Trial Table of the Order of ShaJcspere's PIot/s — continii'd. Supposd Date Earliest Allusion Date of Publica- tion Macbeth 1605-6t 1610 1623 Lear ...... 1605-6} 1606 1608^ Troilus and Cressida (?) completed . 1606-7 1609 1609 Antony and Cleopatra 1606-7 1608 (?) 1623 Coriolanus (?) 1607^8 1623 Timon, part ..... 1607-8 1623 FoTJETH Period. Pericles, part 16081 1608 1609* f- _^wo Noble Kinsmen, part 1609-12 1634 \ Tempest (?) 1610 ?16U 1623 \ Cymbeline ..... 1610-12 1623 \ ^.Winter's Tale , . . . . (?) 1611 1611 1623 Henry VIII., part .... 1613 + 1613 (?) 1623 * Enterd 1 year before at Stationers' Hall. I May be lookt-on as fairly certain. § 6. Now of a few helps to reading Shakspere. 1. As to Text : have the ' Globe ' edition (Macmillan, 35. 6cL) because its lines are num- berd, and for sound text ; but do not ruin your eyes by reading it. For reading, get a small 8vo. clear-type edition like Singer's, with notes — a cheap re-issue, in half-crown volumes, is just coming out (G. Bell and Sons). Get (if you can aiFord it) Mr. Furness's admirable Variorum edition of Borneo and Juliet and Macbeth {16s. each, A. E. Smith) ; Hamlet is preparing ; (the other plays will slowly follow) ; and, for their notes, Messrs. Clark and Wright's little Clarendon -Press edition of plays at 2s. or 2s. M. each (their 8vo. Cambridge edition with most valuable full collations, is out of print); and Craik's Julius Ccesar. 2. Glossaries, &c. : Mrs. Cowden's Clarke's * Concordance ' to the Plays (25s.), and Mrs. H. H. Furness's to the Minor Poems (15s.); Dr. Schmidt's most useful ' Shakespeare-Lexicon' (vol. i., a to L, 13s. M. Williams and Norgate), which well arranges the passages under their senses, and the parts of speech of the head-word; Dyce's ' Glossary ' (last vol. of his Shakspere), and Nares's 'Glossary' (2 vols., 24s., A. R. Smith). 3. Grammar and Metre : Dr. Abbott's ' Shakespearian Grammar ' (Macmillan, Q,s.) indispensable ; but with some misscansions that will ' absolutely sear ' you, as Mr. Ellis says, and over some of which you will groan, as we did in concert at the Philological Society when Professor Mayor read them (see his Paper in ' Phil. Soc. Trans.,' 1874, now in the press. Dr. Abbott, I need not say, ridicules our scannings). W. Sidney Walker's three volumes of Shakspere Text-criticism (15s., A. R. Smith) are excellent.^ C. Bathurst's capital little half-crown volume ' Dr. Ingleby describes his just piiblisht Still Lion as ' indications of a xlvi IKTEODUCTlON.—l 6. Helps to rcadmg STiaJcspcre. on the end-stopt and unstopt line, — ' Clianfres in Shakespeare's Versifi- cation at different Periods of his Life ' (J. W. Parker and Son) — is unluckily out of print. 4. Pronunciation : Mr. A. J. Ellis's ' Early- English Pronunciation with Special Reference to Chaucer and Shake- speare ' (three Parts, 30s., Asher and Co. ; or Part iii. only, the Shake- speare Part [p. 917-96], lOs. 5. Commentaries: First, Gervinus's 'Commentaries' (14s., Smith and Elder) ^ ; second, Mrs. Jameson's ' Characteristics of Women,' that is, Shakspere's Women — an enthu- siastic and beautiful book (5s., Eoutledge) ; third, S. T. Coleridge's ' Shakespeare Lectures,' &c., from vol. ii. of his ' Biographia Literaria ' (3s. 6cZ. : Howell, Liverpool). Then, if you wish for more books, Hud- son's ' Shakespeare, his Life, Art, and Characters ' (of his twenty-five greatest plays) (2 vols., 12s., Ginn, Boston, U.S ; Sampson Low, &c.) ; T. P. Courtenay's matter-of-fact ' Commentaries on the Historical Plays' (2 vols., Colburn, 1840) ; Prof. Dowden's forthcoming, 'Mind and Art of Shakspere ' (H. S.King and Co.); Schlegel's 'Dramatic Art' (3s. 6c7.), and Hazlitt's thin 'Characters of Shakespeare's Plays' (2s., G. Bell and Sons) ; Mr. John R. Wise's charming little book on ' Shakespeare : his Birthplace and its Neighbourhood (3s. Qd., Smith and Elder) ; Mr. Roach Smith's ' Rural Life of Shakespeare ' (? 2s. 6rZ., George Bell and Sons). And certainly buy a copy of Booth's admirable Reprint of the First Folio of 1623 (12s. M., Glaisher, 265, High Hol- born; with the Quarto of 'Much Adoe,' for Is.) For the facts of Shakspere's Life, chronologically arrangd, Mr. S. Neil's cheap little 'Shakespeare: a Critical Biography' (Houlston and Wright) is the best book. On the ' Sonnets,' get the best book, Armitage Brown's (? Qs.^ A. R. Smith) ; for the allegorical view of them, Mr. R. Simpson's ' Philosophy of Shakespeare's Sonnets ' (3s. 6c?., Trlibner) ; for useful information and a mistaken theory, Mr. Gerald Massey's book — the edition sold off at 5s. Qd. (Reeves and Turner). — Of course, subscribe a guinea a year to the New Shakspere Society (Hon. Sec. A. G. Snel- grove, Esq., London Hospital, E.), read its Papers, and work its Texts, specially the parallel ones. Get one or two likely friends to join you in your Shakspere work, if you can, and fight out all your and their difficulties in common : worry every line ; eschew the vice of wholesale emendation. Get up a party of ten or twelve men and four or six women to read the plays in succession at one another's houses, or elsewhere, once a fortnight, and discuss each for half an hour after each reading. Do all you can to further the study of Shakspere, chronologically and as a whoic, throughout the nation. systematic Hermeneiitic [science of interpretation] of Shakspere's text.' It is strongly against plausible emendations, and is well worth careful study. ' Prof. Dowden, who has been- through all the German commentators, thinks Kreyssig's Vorlesungen uher Shakespeare (a big book), and Shakespeare-Fragen (a little book), the best popular introduction in German to Shakspere. INTRODUCTION.^-^ 6. A Visit to Siratford-upon-Amn, xlvii Lastly, go to Stratford-upon-Avon, and see the town where Shakspere was born, and bred, and died ; the country over which he wanderd and playd when a boy, whose beauties and whose lore, as a man, he put into his plays. Go either in spring, in April, * when the greatest poet was born in Nature's sweetest time,' and let Mr. Wise ('Shakespeare: his Birthplace and its Neighbourhood,' p. 44, 58, &c,) tell you how * everything is full of beauty ' that you'll see ; or go in full summer, as I did one afternoon in July this year. See first the little low room where tradition says Shakspere was born, though his father did not buy the house till eleven years after his birth ; ^ look at the foun- dations of * New Place,' walk on the site of Shakspere's house, in the garden whose soil he must often have trod, thinking of his boyhood and hasty marriage, of London, with its trials and triumphs, and the wonders he had created for its delight ; follow his body, past the school where he learnt, to its grave in the Avon-side church ringd with elms ; see the worn slab that covers his bones, with wife's and daughter's beside ; look up at the bust which figures the case of the brain and heart that have so enricht the world, which shows you more truly than anything else what Shakspere was like in the flesh ; try to see in those hazel eyes, those death-drawn lips,^ those ruddy cheeks, the light, the mer- riment, the tenderness, the wisdom, and love that once were theirs ; walk by the full and quiet Avon's side, where the swan sails gently, by which the cattle feed ; ask yourself what word sums up your feelings on these scenes: and answer, with me, 'Peace' ! Next morning, walk up the Welcombe road, across the old common lands whose enclosing Shakspere said ' he was not able to be^ir : ' when up Rowley Bank, turn round ; see the town nestle under its cir- cling hills, shut in on the left by its green wall of trees. The com is golden beside you. Meon Hill meets the sky in your front; its shoulder slants sharply to the spire of the church where Shakespeare's dust lies : away on the right is Broadway, lit with the sun ; below it the ridge oJ ' He may have rented it before; but I expect that the former house, in Hcnloy Street, in which John Shakspere dwelt, would have a better claim to be ' the biilli- place,' if it were now known. 2 ' We may mention — on the authority of Mr. Butcher, the very courteous clerk of Stratford Church, who saw the examination made — that two years ago Mr. Story, the great American sculptor, when at Stratford, made a very careful examination of Shakspere's bust from a raised scaffolding, and came to the con- clusion that the face of the bust was modelled from a death-mask. The lower part of the face was very death-like ; the upper lip was elongated and drawn up from the lower one by the shrinking of the nostrils, the first part of the face to ' go ' after death ; the eyebrows were neither of the same length nor on the same level ; the depth from the eye to the ear was extraordinary ; the cheeks were of different shapes, the left one being the more prominent at top. On the whole, Mr. Story felt certain of the bust being made from a death-mask.' — F. J. F., lu The Academy, Aug. 22, 187i, p. 205, col. 3. The Academy, our 'leading literary paper,' should be read for Shakspere news. xlviii INTRODUCTION.— % 6. A Visit to Stratford-upon-Avon. Eoomer Hill, yellow for harvest on tlie right, passing leftwards into a dark belt of trees to the church, their hollows filled with blue haze. In this nest is Shakspere's town. After gazing your fill on the fair scene before you, walk to the boat-place, paddle out for the best view of the elm-framd church, then by its river-borderd side to the stream below ; get a beautiful view of the tower through a vista of trees beyond the low waterfall ; then pass by cattle half-knee deep in the shallows, sluggishly whisking their tails, happily chewing the cud ; go under Wire-Brake bank, whose trees droop down to the river, whose wood-pigeons greet you with coos ; past many groups of grey willows, with showers of wild roses between ; feathery reeds rise beside you, birds twitter about, the sky is blue overhead, your boat glides smoothly down stream : you feel the sweet content with which Shakspere must have lookt on the scene. Later, you wander to Shottery, to Ann Hathaway's cottage, where perchance in hot youth the poet made love. Then you ride through Charlecote's tall-elmd park, and see the deer whose ancestors he may have stolen ; on to Warwick, with its castle rising grandly from Avon bank ; back to Stratford, with a glorious view from the hill, on your left in your homeward ride.^ Evening comes : you stroll again by the riverside, through groups of townsfolk pleasant to see, in well-to- do Sunday dress. From Cross-o'-th'-Hill you look at the fine view of church and town, backt by the Welcombe Hills ; through Wire Brake ^ and ripe corn, you walk to the bridge that brings you to the opposite level bank of the stream. Then you lie down, chatting of Shakspere to your friend, while lovers in pairs pass lingering by, and the twilight comes. Then again you say that the peace of the place was fit for Shakspere's end, and that the memory of its quiet beauty will never away from your mind. Yes, Stratford will help you to understand Shakspere. These pages aim at giving, shortly, to beginners, such parts of the result of my last year's work at Shakspere — in scanty leisure — as I wish some one had given me on my first start at him. Of their im- maturity, beside the ripeness of Gervinus, and of their unworthiness to appear before his book, I am only too painfully conscious. But as I have gone among working-men and private friends, I have been askt to put some of these things in print ; and for my haste in thus doing it I willingly risk the blame of those who know far more than I do, being * If you can, get on to mind Kenilworth, where Shakspere may hare seen Leicester's pageants before Elizabeth, in 1575 (see my edition of Captain Cox, Ballad Socibty), to use in Midsummer Nighfs Bream. Heaven forbid that he should have turnd the great mason Captain into Bottom ! - The young Stratford folk call their Sunday-evening stroll through this ■wooded bank, ' Going to Chapel.' That their devotions interested the attendants, I can say. INTRODUCTION. xlix assurd that what I have written will be of use to others who know somewhat less than myself. Work at Shakspere, serious intelligent work, is what I want, from thousands of men and women who have hitherto neglected him. If they will give me that, they may abuse as they like, the mistakes they may find in these hints. My thanks are due to my friends Professors Hertzberg, Wagner, Seeley, and Dowden, Mr. Spedding, Mr. Hales, Dr. Abbott, Mr. Halli- well. Dr. Ingleby, Mr. Aldis Wright, Mr. Wheatley, Mr. Malleson, &c. for their hints on this Introduction. F. J. FURNIVALL. 3 St. George's Square, N.W. Sept. 16, 1874. P.S. — Prof. Ingram, of Trin. CoU,, Dublin, has just (Nov. 8) sent me his Paper on the weak- and light-endings in Shakspere. The 16 weak-endings are ' and, but (=L. sed, SLnd=except), by, for, from, ifV on, nor, or, than, that, to, with.' The 54 light-endings are ' am, are art, be, been, but (=only), can, could, did 2, do^, does^, dost 2, ere, had^ has 2, hast^, have 2, he, how 3, I, into, is, like, may, might, shall, shalt, she, should, since, so'*, such'*, they, thou, though, through, till, upon, was, we, were, what^, when^, where '^j which, while, whilst, who^, whom^ why^, will, would, yet ( = ta?nen), you.' Here is an extract from his * Except in the combination as if. 2 Only when ns'd as auxiliaries. ^ When not directly interrogative. * When followd immediately by as. Such also, when followd by a substan- tive with an indefinite article, as ' Such a man.' 5 When not directly interrogative. Prof. Ingram's Paper will appear in The New Shakspere Society's Transactions, Part 2. He says : — - ' The weak-endings do not come in by slow degrees, but the poet seems to have thrown himself at once into this new structure of verse ; 28 examples occurring in Antony and ClcoTpatra, whilst there are not more than two in any earlier play. . . . ' As long as the light-endings remain very few, no conclusion with respect to the order of the plays can be based on them. 'But the very marked increase of their number in Macheth, showing a strong development of the same tendency which, further on, produced the large number of weak-endings, seems to show that it was the latest of the plays preceding the weak-ending period. . . . 'An examination of the weak-endings in Henry VIII. strikingly confirms the conclusions of Mr. Spedding respecting the two different systems of verse which co-exist in that play. In the Shaksperian portion, as marked off by him, there are 45 light-endings against 6 in Fletcher's part, and 37 weak-endings against 1 in Fletcher's part. And these weak-endings occur in every Shaksperian scene. The one weak-ending in Fletcher's portion occurs in a scene (iv. 1) which has not been uniformly assigned to Fletcher, and which, it is curious to observe, of all the Shaksperian scenes in the play approaches, in the matter of the feminine ending, nearest to Fletcher. . . . The date, also, which has been assigned by Mr. Spedding 1 INTRODUCTION. table of these endings in the late plays, whose order alone they help to settle : — Macbeth. .... Tiinon ..... Antony and Cleopatra Coriolanus . , . . Pericles (Shakspere part) Tempest Cymbeline Winter s Tale .... Two Noble Kinsmen (non-Fletcher part) . Henry VIII. (Sh's. part) No. of No. of light I weak endings endings 21 15 71 60 20 42 78 57 50 45 2 ? 28 44 10 25 52 45 34 37 No. of Verse lines in play . 1112 2803 2563 719 1460 ■ 2692 1825 1378 1146 Percentage of liglit endings 1-35 2-53 2-34 2-78 2-88 2-90 312 3-63 3-93 Percentage of weak endings ? 1-00 1-71 1-39 1-71 1-93 2-47 2-47 3-23 Percentage of both together 9 3-53 4-05 4-17 4-59 4-83 5-59 6-10 7-16 to Shakspere's portion of Henry VIIL is confirmed by the Table, in opposition to the views of Elze and others. It appears to be without donbt his latest -work ; a conclusion which quite falls in with what is known from an external sotirce as to the production in 1613 of a play which there is every reason to believe was the same. 'With respect to The Two Noble Kinsmen, the weak-ending test confirms what has been otherwise shown by Mr. Hickson and others, namely, that here again there are two different systems of verse. In Fletcher's part there are 3 light end- ings to 50 in the other portion, and 1 weak-ending to 34, The weak-endings are found in every non-Fletcher i an scene but two. One is i. 4, in which there are, exclusive of a song, but six lines in all. The other is iii. 3, which, curiously enough, as Mr. Furnivall remarks, the stopt-line test would give to Fletcher. The scene is one about which, notwithstanding what has been said by Mr, Hickson, there is not much to mark the authorship. 'The answer to the question — W^ho was the author of the non-Fletcherian portion of this play ? — does not force itself on my mind with the same clear evidence as the conviction that the non-Shaksperian part of Henry VIII is by Fletcher, The choice of the story, in which the passion is, after all, of an artificial kind, the toleration of the "trash" which abounds in the underplot, the faintness (as I must persist in calling it) of the characterization, and, in general, the absence, except in occasional flashes, of the splendid genius which shows itself all through the last period of Shakspere, I have always found very perplexing. In reading the (so-called) Shaksperian part of the play, I do not often feel myself in contact with a mind of the first order. Still, it is certain that there is much in it that is lil:e Shakspere, and some things that are worthy of him at his best ; that the manner, in general, is more that of Shakspere than of any other contemporary dramatist ; and that the system of verse is one which we do not find in any other, whilst it is, in all essentials, that of Shakspere's last period. I cannot name any one else who could have written this portion of the play. The weak-ending affords a ready test of the correctness of Knight's notion that Chapman was the writer. I have examined the play of Bussy cVAmhois, and do not find in it a single instance of the weak-ending, and, turning rapidly over Chapman's whole works, I see no evidence that he was ever at all given to it. If Shakspere be — as we seem forced to believe — the author of the part of The Two Noble Kinsmen now usually at- tribiited to him, this will take its place in the series of his works between the Winter's Tale and Henry VIIV Syracuse, N. Y. 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